The Voynich Ninja

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No, it does not.
You simply ignore the instructions.
You can decide. Yes, they are all the same, or no, they are different. That alone changes a lot.
Since it is not the only example where there is a clue and you don't take it into account, you stand still.
It also doesn't help to quote the same thing that someone wrote 50 years ago. Sometimes you just have to think for yourself and do something.
Those who solve puzzles are curious, those who are curious will learn.
What are your insights into the text?

Since you are so fond of Latin you'll be delighted to know that your first argument is a "non sequitur" and your second argument an "ad personam".

(10-12-2023, 12:54 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No, it does not.
You simply ignore the instructions.
You can decide. Yes, they are all the same, or no, they are different. That alone changes a lot.

The fact that there are uncertainties in transliteration is well known.

E.g. "How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes?" Lisa Fagin Davis, Manuscript Studies, 2020:

Quote:It is important to at least acknowledge the question underlying the distinction between EVA, v101, and other transcription systems: How many distinct characters are there in Voynichese? It is not entirely obvious.

"Transliteration of the Voynich MS text", Rene Zandbergen, Malta conference, 2022:

Quote:there is a significant amount of variation in the character shapes. It is often difficult to decide if two similar, yet different shapes are different characters or just handwriting variations.

From this known fact it does not follow (non sequitur) that Latin is a better explanation for the fragment you posted than any other language.

Quote:What are your insights into the text?

This is also 100% irrelevant. Questioning people's personal contributions (ad personam) has nothing to do with proving that Latin is better than any other language. It's the same argument that Rene mentioned above: "I should not be 'preaching' because I have not solved it, so I don't know. ... It is a good conversation stopper.".

I suppose the identification of the VM glyphs is the most important starting point, whether one regards the writing as a code or as a natural language. Comparing the glyphs with the letters-forms in different manuscripts and different languages is the second step. When I did that, I got the confirmation for EVA a, c, d, e, i, l, o, r. s, ch, y. There are plenty of words that can be composed from these letters alone, not only in Slovenian, but in other languages as well. The changes to the EVA alphabet enabled me to find more similarly spelled words without relying on the Google translator that makes its own assumptions and does not recognize Slovenian medieval language. 
While I was searching for the medieval spelling of Slovenian words, I had to use the dictionaries that list Latin in/or German words first. This enabled me to see similarly spelled words in Latin, German, Italian, Croatian and Slovenian. If I was able to notice over 100 Slovenian words spelled exactly the same (letter-to-letter substitution), I would have noticed Latin or German as well. I cannot say that there were none, but there was far less of them.
While the Latin 9-shape letter was used in the manuscript abbreviations either at the beginning or the end of the words, the similar shape was also used for the letter g which in Czech was pronounced as j /y.  Therefore the assumption that the language is some kind of Latin abbreviation needs to be supported by other undisputable facts.

1 I don't love Latin. It's the many similarities that point to it.
2 Lisa has nothing to do with the example mentioned. I specifically made sure that the differences occur on the same line. The differences are immediately obvious.
Are you trying to tell me that the different writers alternated word for word and that this is how the differences came about? There are no longer different hands if all scribes do the same thing.
3. why can the glyphs be arranged in different configurations, but always make sense in Latin? Even if it is not pure Latin, it has nothing to do with coincidence.
4 I only published my work after the conference. I also explained why transliteration cannot work in this way. There is a difference between writing tolerance and intention.

Pictures will not help, they only support. This is about encoding and not about the possible meaning of images. No slogans in Latin that only aim to make you understand Latin better than others will help. Now you actually have to use what you don't learn at school. It's called innovation.
And if you talk about other languages in the future, then bring examples. I did it for Latin. Otherwise, your opinions have no value. They are just opinions. And there are thousands of them.

(10-12-2023, 10:27 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.g.
3. why can the glyphs be arranged in different configurations, but always make sense in Latin? Even if it is not pure Latin, it has nothing to do with coincidence.

What have you shared that made sense in Latin?

What percentage of Northern Italian texts were written in Latin?
What percentage of texts written in cipher from Northern Italy were written in Latin?
Of course that is far from from proof, but good enough for to suggest that Latin ought go be the default language.

I don't think this is the most logical reason. Let's put it this way: How many books in Northern Italy were written in Voynichees?  I believe it would be more reasonable to assume that the default language should be the one in which the least books were written. 
It is just as illogical as if five hundred years from now somebody would find my book in Slovenian in Toronto library and would conclude that it must be in English, because most books were written in English.
Of course, the starting point is to examine the languages spoken in the region first and try to confirm or exclude one by one, until only one is left.

We don't know the region with any accuracy, and we don't know that it is a cipher.

Given that the person(s) who created it, knew what scientific/philosophical books looked like, it is quite possible that they had regular access to some library. This means that their inspiration may well have been from well outside whatever unknown region they were in.

(11-12-2023, 04:19 AM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is just as illogical as if five hundred years from now somebody would find my book in Slovenian in Toronto library and would conclude that it must be in English, because most books were written in English.

A better analogy would be that if someone found a website in 500 years and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It's the language most closely associated with the medium. I believe this is what Helmut meant, and in that regard I certainly follow him: if you had to write down a blind guess of which language underlies Voynichese (if any), Latin would be statistically the best guess. (Where I don't follow Helmut is that abbreviations solve any of our problems, but that's a different story). That doesn't mean that I do or do not think it's Latin: my whole point is that we need to better understand the system before we can say anything about the underlying language.


Tell me, Cvetka. How can it be explained that the Ardıç family is as convinced of Turkic as you are of Slovenian? Ruby has been writing for years about how it's Greek. Dr. Michael Hoffmann tells us that he decoded it completely, and it's Latin. A couple of years ago the media went nuts over Cheshire discovering that it's proto-Romance, which doesn't even exist as a medieval language. The list goes on and on and on. How can all these people be equally convinced that their mutually exclusive theories are correct?

I think he interpretation of linguisttic and cryptanalytic results as everything from Kisuahili to Mandarin indicates that something is fundamentally wrong, but I am neither a l. nor a c. but a philologist and historian (Middle Ages)