The Voynich Ninja

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Earlier today I could read the article (right now I get an error) . It stated that a one-page translation had been accomplished and that it would take two years to translate the rest.

No details, but it (the VM) seemed to be Turkish.

Even though I think this attempt won't hold water, it will be interesting to see some details.

The link works for me. Interesting, thanks lelle!
EDIT: Just watched the video, which gives great details.
This actually sounds better than most of the theories out there, and seems to account for some of the features of Voynichese by taking into account character placement within a vord, rhythm within the text, and combined characters, among other things...


Also, I notice the article mentions interest for this theory from Lisa Fagin Davis, director of the Medieval Academy of America, who has already spoken about other theories.
Off topic: LFD would be an awesome person to interview for the Voynich ninja series...

Any version of the first line out there? Has she made recommendation to the priest or whatever?

Very interesting. The first theory in a long time that I would like to know more about. It certainly pushes a lot of buttons for me, especially in the identified language.

Though I'm concerned on a couple of points. The first is the way the decipherment progressed. They said that they assigned the values to the first seven glyphs by comparing them to ancient scripts. This is very worrying as it relies on subjective judgement. If they are wrong then everything is wrong.

Secondly, some of the assignments are curious. For example, the glyph [m], which is strongly line final, is given the value /k/. Why would /k/ be line final? And [q] has the value /d/, but why is /d/ only word initial?

Here's a full list of glyph/value assignments that I can glean from the video:

[o] = /o/
[o] = /uç/ (This [o] is a variant with an open top.)
[y] = /u/
[a] = /ə/
[a] = /v/ (This [a] is a variant with an open bottom.)
[e] = /c/
[c] = /j/
[ch] = /ç/
[sh] = /çye/, /çyedi/, /çyedi/
[k] = /t/ (This [k] appears to have a flourish on the right foot.)
[k] = /l/
[t] = /b/ (It's unclear which glyph exactly this is meant to be.)
[d] = /s/
[l] = /p/
[l] = /x/
[r] = /r/
[i] = /i/
[ii] = /ii/ (also /gh/?)
[n] = /ng/
[in] = /in/
[iin] = /iin/, /m/
[m] = /k/ (Unclear is this is [m] or [g].)
[q] = /d/

Looking at this, I think it's obvious they're wrong.

Emma,
I finally stuck my neck out a few days ago, after.. what.. nearly ten years and decided to go on record as thinking the threads all came together during the Mongol century when (as I've repeated often over the years), the common language of that northern 'silk road' was Cuman.

Since I have also just updated the same folio (33v) that they translated, I don't know now whether to finish updating the third part of that folio's discussion, or to write the 'grand historical essay' to publish formally, or whether just to do a blogpost comparing my reading of the imagery with theirs of the written text.  They do mesh rather well.

Naturally I'm happy to think the Turkish - more exactly Turkic - seems to work. 

Since I took voynichimagery off the blogosphere during the overhaul needed by the re-formatting, new posts haven't been appearing for members.  Sorry about that.

Here's the link to my 'Cuman post'  - with postscript referring to Nick's blogpost and embedding that video.   It includes lots of my earlier posts on the subject, and of course the all-important historical contextualisation.  Not for the Franciscan studies, though.  They're still off-limits to the public.  But there's plenty on why I came to conclude that Cuman and the period mid-thirteenth century to c.1340  is right, in my opinion, for transmission of the material into the west. Enjoy.

PS - does this mean the long-enforced tacit ban on mentioning my name - rather than just adopting my research - be lifted at last?


You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I wonder why they say it might take two years to translate.

It's the one thing about this announcement that concerns me. If it would take that long, how much subjective interpretation is occurring between the transliteration and the "translation"?


I hope more details will be released so we can follow the story rather than having to wait two or more years for the final result.

JKP, I find it much more comforting that it would take them two years than if they would birth a complete traslation of a 500 year old text in a matter of weeks

(01-03-2018, 04:01 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you for the heads-up.

Since Turkic/Persian is one of the few language groups that has really caught my interest in terms of structure, I will be following this story with interest.

Well, Turkic and Persian are two totally different language groups. Persian is actually rather like English (and not so hard to learn once you get past the defective script), but unlikely to be the underlying language of the Voynich manuscript. Turkic is more likely. As Diane points out, one of the most widely used Turkic languages of the time was Cuman, spoken in the area roughly north of the Black Sea. Genoa had trading colonies there around 1400, giving a perfect environment in which to create a European-looking document in a Turkic language. We know from other surviving manuscripts that Europeans were interested in the Cuman language.

Well, I watched the video and they are proposing a fairly simple substitution code, which is the most common form of VMS "solution".


Yes, sorry, Emma, I worded that really badly. I should have said that agglutinative languages interest me the most in terms of structure (vis-a-vis the VMS). The languages that particularly intrigue me are the Turkic, Berber, and Persian language groups (for a variety of reasons).



But regardless of the language, I still think there are fundamental problems with substitution codes. I tried copying the characters from the video (I got most of them), but there are some gaps and, of course, I need to follow the logic through to see if there's anything in their idea that's different from the many other substitution-code attempts and also to see how many leaps they made to get from repetitive word clusters that comprise so much of the VMS to the "translation" they showed on the screen.