Greetings all, my name is Don and I am new here.
I am a retired medical scientist with a background in chemistry and interest in things statistical, though not in the context of language.
There is little I can bring to the table other than an analytical mind.
Anyway I have spent a few weeks reading through most of the threads on this site and perhaps can bring a fresh perspective.
I was impressed with the Torsten auotocopy suggestion which has the potential to account for many of the observed features of the VMS including the low entropy by a plausible method available in the 15th C.
To the point though, as somebody else observed, this does not exclude the possibility of actual real content buried in the manuscript. As an analogy I am thinking of the WW2 radio practice of sending coded message phrases buried among a whole bunch of similar nonsense phrases.
As an aside, there was a famous instance in the battle of Leyte Gulf where the message sent was "Where is 5th Fleet?"
and instead the message received by the admiral was "Where is 5th Fleet? The world wonders!"
The accidentally added nonsense phrase amounted to gross insubordination in the context!
I do not know the technical term for this procedure but it strikes me that something similar could easily be going on in the VMS.
It seems also that there are many instances where sections seem to have been inserted in the text as a second pass.
We could ring the changes on the corrollaries of this, such as what upper limit on real content is placed by the entropy stats? Is the message spread throughout the text in small pieces or in less frequent larger chunks? If so such chunks may still be amenable to a statistical approach and in any case Torsten's software could be used to model some scenarios.
Apologies if all this has been suggested before, I am sure it has but maybe not recently in the context given.
I am only an egg compared to most of you.
Since you are a doctor, will your opinion on the content / sense of the Quire 13 (75r-84v) pictures be valuable?
Welcome!
Steganography is certainly possible, though it would be wasteful: the plaintext to VMs text ratio would be very low. This seems unlikely, when the standard practice was to use abbreviations in order to save space. The rule for extracting the meaningful part of the text could be arbitrarily hard, could depend on graphical placement or small irregularities in the writing, making it unlikely that it will ever be found. It could also be something very simple like an acrostic, or a bit more complex like taking the nth glyph (modulo the length of the word) of the nth word, who knows...
It seems to me that the gap between a simple substitution cipher (or no cipher at all, or substitution ciphers with homophones and nulls) and more secure but unwieldy, anachronistic or wasteful techniques such as nomenclators, codes, and stenography needs to be investigated more.
A nice article by Nick Pelling about cryptography in the 15th century:
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(22-04-2018, 04:41 AM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Since you are a doctor, will your opinion on the content / sense of the Quire 13 (75r-84v) pictures be valuable?
Scientist not doctor, sorry to disappoint. Even if I were that would be argument from authority, which is a logical fallacy!
Thanks for the reply though, I respect your work.
(22-04-2018, 10:23 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Welcome!
Steganography is certainly possible, though it would be wasteful: the plaintext to VMs text ratio would be very low. This seems unlikely, when the standard practice was to use abbreviations in order to save space. The rule for extracting the meaningful part of the text could be arbitrarily hard, could depend on graphical placement or small irregularities in the writing, making it unlikely that it will ever be found. It could also be something very simple like an acrostic, or a bit more complex like taking the nth glyph (modulo the length of the word) of the nth word, who knows...
It seems to me that the gap between a simple substitution cipher (or no cipher at all, or substitution ciphers with homophones and nulls) and more secure but unwieldy, anachronistic or wasteful techniques such as nomenclators, codes, and stenography needs to be investigated more.
A nice article by Nick Pelling about cryptography in the 15th century:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Steganography! That is the word I was searching for! Thanks for the link too, I read it all (including all the comments).
You talk about extracting the meaningful part of the text being hard - there was a thread I think by Anton where there was a highly suspicious chunk of text marked out by pilcrows and with the same word along the diagonal - I would start there or somewhere similar.
I agree that more investigation is needed in the gap between the very simple and the very hard (anachronistic) code/cipher methods.
But then again, I don't know - people acknowledge that pinyun could explain the low entropy of the VMS but has anybody fluent in Mandarin actually given that a serious go?
There are a bazillion ethnic minorities in China, not to mention Mongolia - I recall there was a horde of those in Europe at one point!
I would love it if there was an Easter Egg somewhere like
NI HAO ROGER BACON APRIL FIRST 1260 XIE XIE HA HA
- which would make the VMS a copy of course.
Quote: NI HAO ROGER BACON APRIL FIRST 1260 XIE XIE HA HA
Good one Don and welcome to the forum!
Pinyan of course was only invented in the mid-20th century, although ways of writing Mandarin in the Roman alphabet have been around since the 17th century - the Jesuits being the driving force here, of course.
I would warn against trying to map our own linguistic conceptions upon the past. The truth of the matter is that past generations simply didn't have the same understanding of language that we do. Any explanation that uses modern semantic theory to explain the
why of the Voynich is, IMHO, based upon false foundations.
I always think thatYou are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. (Johnson-Laird, 1987) goes some way towards exploding arty-farty linguistic theories about the Voynich. If we "moderns" can't think "logically" (according to modern theory) about language, what chance did some person in the mid 15th century have?
(23-04-2018, 05:29 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote: NI HAO ROGER BACON APRIL FIRST 1260 XIE XIE HA HA
Good one Don and welcome to the forum!
Pinyan of course was only invented in the mid-20th century, although ways of writing Mandarin in the Roman alphabet have been around since the 17th century - the Jesuits being the driving force here, of course.
I would warn against trying to map our own linguistic conceptions upon the past. The truth of the matter is that past generations simply didn't have the same understanding of language that we do. Any explanation that uses modern semantic theory to explain the why of the Voynich is, IMHO, based upon false foundations.
I always think thatYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Johnson-Laird, 1987) goes some way towards exploding arty-farty linguistic theories about the Voynich. If we "moderns" can't think "logically" (according to modern theory) about language, what chance did some person in the mid 15th century have?
Thank you for your welcome David and may I pay my respects to you and the others on this forum.
I will read your linked text ASAP.
I wish to read and understand rather than talk, mainly, except to ask questions sometimes.
I have no arty farty linguistiic theory. However in view of what I have read about low entropy in the VMS, vs low entropy in Mandarin, it seems that it would be a matter of due diligence to use Mandarin as a basis for an attempt at translation of the VMS as a 1:1 substitution of a natural language. Ditto Hindi, ditto Mongolian given the historical context. I mean, we know of course that Roger Bacon was in indirect contact with Mongolia via a Papal ambassador (the Pope was his former patron) and that is how he knew about the recipe for gunpowder. This is all Wikipedia stuff.
None of which is to say that Bacon was the author of the VMS but rather that elements of the language could well have made their way to Europe by 1400 or so. Also, it seems that 90% of the 20-21C effort has gone into Latin or European languages as the basis of translation attempts.
On the contrary, I am with Dianne, to a large extent, that many indications seem to point East.
Has anybody made an attempt at translation based on Mandarin? Are there native mainland Chinese Voynichero linguists for instance? I would not be surprised if there were many, but maybe not in contact with us!
(24-04-2018, 07:42 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (23-04-2018, 05:29 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote: NI HAO ROGER BACON APRIL FIRST 1260 XIE XIE HA HA
Good one Don and welcome to the forum!
Pinyan of course was only invented in the mid-20th century, although ways of writing Mandarin in the Roman alphabet have been around since the 17th century - the Jesuits being the driving force here, of course.
I would warn against trying to map our own linguistic conceptions upon the past. The truth of the matter is that past generations simply didn't have the same understanding of language that we do. Any explanation that uses modern semantic theory to explain the why of the Voynich is, IMHO, based upon false foundations.
I always think thatYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Johnson-Laird, 1987) goes some way towards exploding arty-farty linguistic theories about the Voynich. If we "moderns" can't think "logically" (according to modern theory) about language, what chance did some person in the mid 15th century have?
Thank you for your welcome David and may I pay my respects to you and the others on this forum.
I will read your linked text ASAP.
I wish to read and understand rather than talk, mainly, except to ask questions sometimes.
I have no arty farty linguistiic theory. However in view of what I have read about low entropy in the VMS, vs low entropy in Mandarin, it seems that it would be a matter of due diligence to use Mandarin as a basis for an attempt at translation of the VMS as a 1:1 substitution of a natural language. Ditto Hindi, ditto Mongolian given the historical context. I mean, we know of course that Roger Bacon was in indirect contact with Mongolia via a Papal ambassador (the Pope was his former patron) and that is how he knew about the recipe for gunpowder. This is all Wikipedia stuff.
None of which is to say that Bacon was the author of the VMS but rather that elements of the language could well have made their way to Europe by 1400 or so. Also, it seems that 90% of the 20-21C effort has gone into Latin or European languages as the basis of translation attempts.
On the contrary, I am with Dianne, to a large extent, that many indications seem to point East.
Has anybody made an attempt at translation based on Mandarin? Are there native mainland Chinese Voynichero linguists for instance? I would not be surprised if there were many, but maybe not in contact with us!
Hello DONJCH,
with the search function, you may find some posts in this forum related to Mandarin, e.g. You are not allowed to view links.
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Asian languages have been discussed ("thrown around") a lot, before this forum existed, in the old mailing list.
(24-04-2018, 01:08 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Asian languages have been discussed ("thrown around") a lot, before this forum existed, in the old mailing list.
Not just thrown around... I wasn't aware of the old mailing list (or the VMS) before 2007, but I learned Korean before I knew about the VMS. At one point, I knew it well enough that I could read news articles as long as they weren't too technical and I could catch a fair percentage of the conversation in KDrama (if it wasn't too technical) and so one of the first languages I tried on the VMS (and have revisited many times), was Korean. I know a little bit of Japanese (spoken and written) and a little bit of Chinese (not spoken, but I can puzzle out the words on packages with help from dictionaries). After I encountered the VMS, I also took the time to learn many Asian and African alphabets and a number of Asian/Indian writing systems, enough to work out simple words with help from dictionaries.
I've always been interested in Asian languages. I will never have sufficient time to become really good at any of them, but the almost-syllabic nature of the VMS was part of the reason it attracted my attention in the first place, but it's not jumping out and waving any obvious flags about what it might be for the same reasons it's not mapping well to western languages, it is too positionally rigid and repetitive.
(24-04-2018, 01:20 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (24-04-2018, 01:08 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Asian languages have been discussed ("thrown around") a lot, before this forum existed, in the old mailing list.
Not just thrown around... I wasn't aware of the old mailing list (or the VMS) before 2007, but I learned Korean before I knew about the VMS. At one point, I knew it well enough that I could read news articles as long as they weren't too technical and I could catch a fair percentage of the conversation in KDrama (if it wasn't too technical) and so one of the first languages I tried on the VMS (and have revisited many times), was Korean. I know a little bit of Japanese (spoken and written) and a little bit of Chinese (not spoken, but I can puzzle out the words on packages with help from dictionaries). After I encountered the VMS, I also took the time to learn many Asian and African alphabets and a number of Asian/Indian writing systems, enough to work out simple words with help from dictionaries.
I've always been interested in Asian languages. I will never have sufficient time to become really good at any of them, but the almost-syllabic nature of the VMS was part of the reason it attracted my attention in the first place, but it's not jumping out and waving any obvious flags about what it might be for the same reasons it's not mapping well to western languages, it is too positionally rigid and repetitive.
Yeah but, no but....with the greatestl respect..
Has any native Chinese expert linguist (if that's the word - I am new to the jargon) looked at it systematically?
If not then the question is still up in the air. I mean, this problem taxes even experts in mediieval Latin and I'm well aware you need to go 15C Latin -> 21C Latin ->maybe 21C English or Italian or French or German or Russian -> EVA OR 15C Mandarin-> 21C Mandarin -> Pinyun ->(modern languages) -> EVA before you can even start. That would do your head in even for the best of the best!
So I ask again, are there any Chinese Voynicheros? If not, maybe someone should open a Weibo account!
Also, again, what about Mongolian???