The following is from an email I wrote back in 2015:
Quote: I'm starting to realise that any eventual "solution" of this book is likely to be philosophical, not analytical.
I've argued in the past that the transcriptions are worthless for the sort of mathematical decryption being looked at by the uninformed net. But without them, we're lost, so it's a catch 22 problem. What comes out is only as good as what went in....
The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are too analytical. We are used to reading that everything can be broken down to quantifiable molecules and processed via mathematical models to produce an answer.
The Voynich is becoming the exception that proves that rule!
But it's not an alien object - we do have access to the mentality of the era that produced it. We just have to "unlearn" our modern preconceptions.
There are clues in the imagery that show a certain mentality, but they're not obvious until you start learning about late medieval / early Renaissance mentality and knowledge. Hence the constant "wild theories" when people try to project their own preconceptions onto the book.
Notwithstanding that, a re-examination of the core concepts, bearing in mind the historic epistemology, is, I hope, capable of producing some interesting new nuggets of information.
It strikes me that it's as true as ever.and in fact the last few 'theories' are doing this They're abandoning the analytical to try to translate what 'feels right'.
So, how do we strike a middle path and translate this document?
If we assume this is a late middle ages Latin document with lots of shorthand, what's the next step?
No matter which approach you take, the task is difficult.
Something similar that I've been thinking is that the VM was not written for us to crack. There's no neat, clean solution to be found, it's no puzzle designed for us to have some fun.
Anyway, it helps to try a different angle sometimes. I'm not sure if I understand the angle you're going for though. Do you mean Latin as the language or the culture or the script?
I don't think the problem is with people being too analytical, rather most aren't analytical enough. There are plenty of 'solutions' which turn out to be no such thing and nowhere near enough observations of the individual pieces. I know from looking at the text that there are many patterns which have barely been explored. Breaking down all the patterns and sifting through them to gain a thorough understanding is key to a future solution.
Many people have suggested it's Latin and some of them come up with similar letter-correspondence, and then they subjectively interpret it and none of those interpretations have anything in common other than medieval themes that one might expect to find (which people would guess even if they had no text to work from).
Derek Vogt's approach of using starter words (proper nouns) to get phonetic values of characters seemed to be the best theory on the whole, but that tedious work leading to nowhere is depressing, especially since his theory predicted the name of the dragon of the eclipse correctly.
Or maybe the writing system is flawed in such a way that you only understand what's written with some subjective interpretation from someone who knew all the caveats of the system (like some letters having multiple phonetic values, some having unidentifiable ones, omitted initial consonants, implied letters with no charachter to mark them,etc), as well as an idea about the underlying language, and the chance of us getting that right is infinitesimaly small
I thought of translating according to his phonetic values, but that lead to things like a four letter word having 72 possible results (6 each for the EVA a charachters, and 2 for EVA y) and then I stopped
(09-07-2018, 03:20 AM)Common_Man Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I thought of translating according to his phonetic values, but that lead to things like a four letter word having 72 possible results (6 each for the EVA a charachters, and 2 for EVA y) and then I stopped
Why? 72 possibilities is not too many for starting point. Maybe most of them will be removed later when additional principles will be found.
At least, if the theory is able to count number of possibilities, it's already in top 50% of theories
All these strokes, anagramming, musical notations, ufos, torsion fields, modern forgeries, scribing errors (yes, 70+ times ocurring c*hh, you may be a scribing error!) are absolute
мракобесие (rus: obscurantism)
It's clear that the right theory must be analitical and able to explain all the statistical properties of the text. And moreover there still is a good possibility that almost deterministic "neat clean soluition" ©
Koen does exist.
Quote:I don't think the problem is with people being too analytical, rather most aren't analytical enough.
Emma: the problem is that these guys (and they are almost always men
) are taking a middle path. They are translating "what feels right" and justifying it with a smattering of analysis but then refusing to engage with scientific analysis upon their results.
What I'm saying is: try to think like a medieval 15th century layman philosopher, who probably lives in north western Europe. How would you write the VM?
@davidjackson: That's a very important point. On the one hand, you can analyze what you see in the book. One do not need a "solution" for this. The analysis of a possible method of the late Middle Ages is something different. There are always two questions: is the assumed method generally applicable and was it theoretically available to the scribe? In either case, every approach must face critical analysis. The prerequisite, of course, is that the solution is comprehensible. "I found it, now make something out of it" is simply not enough.
I agree with David that the solution of the Voynich is first philosophical and then analytical. The artificial intelligence can't be decipher this book because the computers are unable to understand the mindset of people 600 years ago. We can do it because we are humans like them. I totally reject Astrology. It is a pseudoscience but I would lie saying that never I've seen my horoscope. I'm sure that it is the same for you. These remains of magical belief allows us to connect with the mankind from XV century.
I'm lucky of being spaniard. I can read in old spanish the works of king Alfonso X the wise. Of course your languages are as good as the mine, but as you know it is not the same to read a translation. Reading in old spanish is difficult but I can breathe the air of the time, the indescribable fragance of the medieval astronomy and astrology. That's why I think, it is better to say I feel that the Voynich text is a astronomical code.
When we know the meaning of the glyphs, then computers can help us to understand the structure.
The goal for the VMS is to learn something about an unknown script and an unknown language. If we assume the language and how the script works we literally start with the assumption that we already know half of the solution.Even if the document would indeed use Latin and shorthands we would need to find some features typically for such a document as starting point. Therefore it would be no problem if we start by searching for the most characteristic features in the first place.
An important question for the VMS is if relations between different word types exists. Such relations did indeed exist. See for instance similar word types like chol and Shol. The word type chol occurs 396 times and the word type Shol 186 times. With other words chol is round about twice as frequent as Shol. If we check other similar word pairs like chor/Shor, chal/Shal and char/Shar we get similar results. In all this cases the word type starting with Sh instead of ch is less frequent:
chol (396) chor (219) chal ( 48) char ( 72)
shol (186) shor ( 97) shal ( 15) shar ( 34)
cheol (172) cheor (100) cheal ( 30) chear ( 51)
sheol (114) sheor ( 51) sheal ( 19) shear ( 21)
I don't see any problem if we research such patterns further. This is the only way we can learn something about the VMS.
There is nothing wrong if we would ask questions like did exceptions for this pattern exists? (Yes, some exceptions exists. See for instance cheedy vs. Sheedy.)
What is the general rule behind this pattern?
(As more similar a word type is to one of the three most frequent words in the VMS - daiin, ol, chedy - as more frequent this word type is.)
You can't be too analytical if you wan't to research something new. The only danger is to interpret something into the unknown script.