The Voynich Ninja

@ Koen and who else may be interested

You have to get rid of some of the axioms of V. research, mainly that the text is a ciphre and that it is an unknown script and accept it as a medieval ms., weitten in a medieval script and language. Then you can look around what it could be and the amount of medieval abbr.is  obvious.You then have the advantage of a readable text (you don't have to invent one) you can start  to interpret and translate it. Not that I would try to pretend I can read or understand everything.

Just to give you a few examples: There is qo abbr. for quaestio, 9 for cum and an ending, ct for contra (which points to a Scholatic text), the dicit Avicenna (Canon) I mentioned before and dictum alberti (likely Magni, de vegetabilibus). There are more

(11-12-2023, 09:39 AM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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)

Well maybe not fundamentally wrong, except maybe in our thinking.
What it says to me, at least, is that what we see is in the manuscript not a language, but a result of an encoding/transformation method of sorts, and we are just looking properties of the results of it, not the language/information it is concealing and properties and results we see, seem to indicate that the encoding method/process is quite generic and could encode anything with it, any language that is, wheter invented or real one.

What I find interesting iin the method is that the quite strict positionality possibly seems to indicate some kind of encoder grammar with/in it.

If only substitution cipher theorists who are convinced that it is some specific language would take a page of a real 15th century manuscript and encipher it to Voynichese... They never do, because it would be obvious that they failed to generate good-looking Voynichese with all its well-known (and some less well-known) properties.

Hunting for nearly-matching words in old dictionaries lets them ignore a large percentage of words, including common words that have nearly zero chance of never appearing in a large text.

I would like to see a collective focus on a very limited selection of specific VMs text examples. Collective ninja knowledge might be enough to get some answers to what is going on, if it can be determined where the better possibilities are located. I vote for the circular text bands containing Stilfi's markers, the patterned boxes.

I freely admit that I lack the knowledge and ability to undertake such a task. Even if I were to build some self-selected, ivory tower of interpretation, surely it would fall to the same fate as all others before. A consensus needs to be built up from its foundation. And if it can't, we can all hang it up.

The illustrations reveal a level of connection to medieval art and history, but the recognition has been slow in developing and dependent on collective discoveries. Trying the same thing on the language focused on specific texts looks like the best shot.