The Voynich Ninja

Goeffrey, my main goal is to gather enough proof that the corrections of the alphabet that I proposed are valid. Otherwise, I will have to start again. 
I like to search in ancient Greek because several languages, starting with Latin, have adopted the Greek words. 
Regarding the translation of whole pages, I'm not there yet, because there is no proof that a page containing the Greek words is written in Greek. If I succeed in reading and understanding the Greek word ikea in a leaflet written in Swedish, I do not claim that the whole leaflet is written in Greek?

I do not lose hope of finding the meaning of a few words, but if you outrun me, I wish you good luck!

This post is to answer a question Linda asked me in the "From decryption to translation" thread, which David asked me to move to a new thread.

I had provided my quasi-Judaeo-Greek readings and interpretations of the likely "Europe" and "Africa" parts of the three-part T-O map (medieval map of the known world) on folio page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 3:

Europe: [opcholdg]

my reading: "Apheonus"

interpretation: "Japhe-(g)onous"

meaning: "Japheth-born" or "the descendants of Japheth"


Africa: [otodol]

my reading: "AkhAbon"

Here I must extend the interpretation of [d] to include the other labial sound "m",
to allow the interpretation "Kham-(g)on",
an abbreviation of "the descendants of Ham"

=====

Now the Asia part is more complicated, because it is not just one word like the other two parts; rather it is three whole lines of text.

At this stage I can give a provisional reading and interpretation for the first line of this text:

ms text: [d?oar  ykeol  [SPACE]  darol  daly]

reading: "poal  stheAm  [SPACE]  paron  pans"

interpr.: "pol[i]  S(t)hem  [SPACE]  paron pan[to]s"

meaning: "city/nation [of] Shem  [SPACE]  present everywhere"

Comments on the Greek interpretation: 

"poli" is the modern Greek form of the well-known Greek word "polis" meaning "city", "state", "nation", "country", "community", etc. This word is familiar to everyone.

As I discussed in the other thread, I cannot fully explain the presence of the letter "t" in the word I interpret as "Shem" here. Perhaps the author, knowing Hebrew, knew the actual name began with the sound "sh", which Hebrew has as a phoneme distinct from "s", but Greek does not. Perhaps he did not have a natural way to express "sh" in his script for Greek, and resorted here to [yk] as a way to do so for this Hebrew proper name.

There is a large space in the middle of the line.

Then the other side of the line I read as "paron pans".

"paron" is the Greek word meaning "present", "located in the vicinity".

"pans" I must read as if the final glyph [-y] is an abbreviation of the suffix of the word at the end of the line.
Thus it may be "pan[to]s", genitive case of "pan", so meaning "of the universe, of everything".

For example, a related idiomatic Greek phrase is "pantakhou paron", meaning "omnipresent, ubiquitous".

It seems to me that this "paron pan[to]s", whatever the full suffix is, may well be an idiomatic phrase very similar in meaning to "pantakhou paron".

Thus I read the entire line as meaning more or less "Nation of Shem, present everywhere".

Geoffrey

The illustration of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has been compared with the cosmic representation of BNF Fr. 565 fol 23. The circle in the center of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is generally interpreted as an inverted T-O image, since the upper half of the circle appears to be divided in two rather than the lower half.

Generally it seems that standard T-O maps are geographic, while inverted T-O representations seem to show something else - not necessarily the expected continents.

(15-03-2019, 08:59 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm sorry to say, but this proposal shows all the classical signs of an incorrect solution:

- the translation table from Voynich text to plain text is vague and inconsistent
- the resulting plain text still has to be adapted in order to obtain real words
- the then resulting text is not grammatically sensible.
- the word patterns / low entropy are not explained.

One of the typical problems is that the 'translation' concentrates on the decryption part rather than on the encryption part. It is completely natural to map certain Voynich characters to different plain text characters  in order to get some meaningful words out of it. However, this means that the person doing the encryption would have mapped several different plain text characters onto the same code character, which is not at all a natural thing to do.

There is yet another, very clear sign that one is working on the basis of an incorrect assumption.
This is that one needs more and more "degrees of freedom" as one tries to translate more text.

The "rules" that were defined to translate 10 words cannot be used to translate the next ten words, and more changes, and expansions of choices are needed. A single Voynich character needs to be mapped to ever more plaintext characters.

Also, I think that you know this already. If I may quote from your very first post:

Quote:It is not enough to propose deciphering of individual isolated words and names and labels. It is not difficult to do that with a handful of isolated words and letter values for the characters in them. The problem is, if you then continue with the rest of the characters, and the letters in the alphabet of the target language, you will quickly run out of characters, and many consonants in your target language will go entirely unrepresented in the Voynich ms character text.

As a test, try expressing *one whole paragraph* in the text - any paragraph you like! - with your deciphering system. You will likely find that it comes out far too repetitive, with far too few letters repeated far too frequently, and far too many other letters missing entirely. It will not look like actual writing in an actual language at all.

Hi Geoffrey

We have a custom on this forum to keep the number of threads on the same theory limited. So feel free to keep posting your Judeao-Greek readings, but please add them to this thread in the future. Thanks!

(24-03-2019, 07:44 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(15-03-2019, 08:59 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm sorry to say, but this proposal shows all the classical signs of an incorrect solution:

- the translation table from Voynich text to plain text is vague and inconsistent
- the resulting plain text still has to be adapted in order to obtain real words
- the then resulting text is not grammatically sensible.
- the word patterns / low entropy are not explained.

One of the typical problems is that the 'translation' concentrates on the decryption part rather than on the encryption part. It is completely natural to map certain Voynich characters to different plain text characters  in order to get some meaningful words out of it. However, this means that the person doing the encryption would have mapped several different plain text characters onto the same code character, which is not at all a natural thing to do.

There is yet another, very clear sign that one is working on the basis of an incorrect assumption.
This is that one needs more and more "degrees of freedom" as one tries to translate more text.

The "rules" that were defined to translate 10 words cannot be used to translate the next ten words, and more changes, and expansions of choices are needed. A single Voynich character needs to be mapped to ever more plaintext characters.

Also, I think that you know this already. If I may quote from your very first post:

Quote:It is not enough to propose deciphering of individual isolated words and names and labels. It is not difficult to do that with a handful of isolated words and letter values for the characters in them. The problem is, if you then continue with the rest of the characters, and the letters in the alphabet of the target language, you will quickly run out of characters, and many consonants in your target language will go entirely unrepresented in the Voynich ms character text.

As a test, try expressing *one whole paragraph* in the text - any paragraph you like! - with your deciphering system. You will likely find that it comes out far too repetitive, with far too few letters repeated far too frequently, and far too many other letters missing entirely. It will not look like actual writing in an actual language at all.

Rene,

The whole reason I think I'm onto something, is that I do *not* see the need for "more and more degrees of freedom" as I translate more text. I am able to stick to the same rules and keep interpreting more text. The one time I made a significant change, in the interpretation of the Voynich character [l] as Greek "m/n" rather than Greek "s", I went back and identified every place in my previous interpretations where the change would affect them, and provided an analysis and explanation of each one.

Yes, the one letter in "Ham" is wrong, as far as I can tell so far. One letter. That is the *only* "expansion" of the degrees of freedom, if you like, of my original set of correspondences. I would rather simply say that this one letter appears to be wrong. This is not at all the same thing as "more changes, and expansions of choices are needed. A single Voynich character needs to be mapped to ever more plaintext characters". This is exactly what I have *not* had to do as I proceed from one excerpt to another.

And yes, I believe the 4-line poem qualifies as "one whole paragraph" of text, and I believe it is actually not so repetitive, does not have too few letters repeated too frequently, and does not have too many letters missing entirely. And I believe it does look like actual writing in an actual language. I would not be posting my interpretations if I did not believe they met these standards.

Yes, there are inherent ambiguities in the system, in the vowel qualities and in the voiced/voiceless pairs, r/l, m/n. It is just like Koen said in another thread: "One of the very few ways I can imagine the VM text containing meaning is if a language were somehow made phonetically poorer, the phoneme inventory flattened. Similar sounds merged." This is *exactly* what my quasi-Judaeo-Greek correspondence system does. Exactly! It is a very precise and accurate summary of my system, in fact.

But I have kept this whole set of merged similar sounds *consistent* throughout all of my readings and translations and interpretations. Except for the one letter "m" in "Ham". That is it. I could propose some sort of explanation for this one letter, but for now I think it makes more sense to simply say, "I have read and interpreted a 4-line poem on one page, a majority of a set of 12 related red labels on another page, a plausible interpretation of the daily labels in the individual Zodiac month/day charts, and the set of labels on the T-O map on another page. Out of all of that, the only true 'inconsistency' in the system is the one letter 'm' in 'Ham'." So I will just leave this letter as an unresolved issue for now, without throwing out the whole system that has worked for everything else so far.

Geoffrey

Just a heads up "sneak preview" of the next stage of my work:

In the very first paragraph of the Voynich ms on folio page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , I have come across multiple terms that may be related to Dionysus, the Cult of Dionysus, the Dionysian Mysteries, etc.

In particular, I read the final word of the paragraph, set off to the side by itself and right-justified on the last line, as "Sparagmos".

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Further, I read the word "thursos", plural "thursoi", in both of the first two lines.

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"thursos" is the name for the wand carried by the devotees of Dionysus, and also a name for the devotees of Dionysus themselves.

I do not find the name "Dionysus" itself in the first paragraph. For the skeptics, this shows you that I cannot just twist my method to produce any reading or interpretation that I like. Yes, there are ambiguities in the letter values, but not to the extent that I can just read the word "Dionysus" when it is not there.

Geoffrey

For those who may be interested in the cultural context of the Judaeo-Greek community:

Today I visited the only Romaniote (Greek Jewish) synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, on Broome Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I tried to attach a small photo of the synagogue, but file uploading doesn't seem to be working right now.

I also saw and took a picture of a page of a book with parallel Judaeo-Greek and Hebrew text, with the Hebrew text on the right and the Judaeo-Greek text on the left. If you could see the page, if you look closely, you would notice, interestingly, that the Hebrew text has vowel diacritic dots beneath the letters, but the Judaeo-Greek text does not have any vowel diacritic dots! 

If you know a little about the Hebrew script and about Greek, you might recognize the common Greek word "kai" ("and") written several times in the Judaeo-Greek text with the Hebrew letters qoph ("q", a hard uvular "k" sound) + yod (like Greek iota). Semitic scripts such as Hebrew and Syriac typically use "q" rather than "k" to transliterate the Greek "k" sound, because Semitic "q" never undergoes lenition or softening, but Semitic "k" does.

This means that Greek "kai" is represented in this text as simply "qy" in the Judaeo-Greek text in the Hebrew script. There is no representation of the "a" vowel sound in the middle of "kai" whatsoever.

Geoffrey

Well, a couple comments about my reading and interpretation of the first 12 words of the Voynich ms:

(1) If it continues like this, it is going to be quite an interesting read, to say the least!

(2) It looks like I could easily start a Dionysian cult based on this interpretation of the Voynich ms, but what I want is simply an academically sound interpretation of it!

In any case, here is my reading and interpretation of the first 12 words of the Voynich ms:

text:
[ [f]achys  ykal  ar  ytaiin  sh2ol  sh1ory  cthres  ykor  sh2oldy
sory  ckhar  ory ]

Note: 
[sh1] is my notation for [sh] with an open loop on top, like an [s], thus Greek "t"/"th"
[sh2] is my notation for [sh] with a closed loop on top, like an [l], thus Greek "m"/"n"

my reading:
" [pilcrow]  Aist  stAm  Ar  skAm  mon  tors  khiret  stor  monus
tors  thAl  Ars "

Note: I have not added *any* degrees of freedom here compared with my previous interpretations of other text in the ms. I note in particular that the clear distinction in the two [sh] shapes *reduces* the degrees of freedom rather than increasing them: I do not allow myself to interpret an "m" where the shape indicates a "t", or vice versa.

interpretation:
" [pilcrow]  est(i)  stom[a]  ar[a]  skhem[a]  mon[o]  ;  thors[os]  khairet[ai]  stor[yi] ,  monos
thors[os]  thel[ei]  eros "

Note: It is clear that in general, Greek final vowels are routinely not represented in this script. This is in keeping with the Judaeo-Greek interpretation of the script as akin to the Hebrew script with no vowel diacritic dots written.

translation:
"Is the mouth a form only? A thursos enjoys affection, a solitary
thursos wants love ... "

Notes: As I explained in a previous post in this thread, a "thursos" is a devotee of Dionysus.

In the first five words, the placement of the verb "esti" at the beginning of the sentence combined with the yes/no question particle "ara" clearly indicate that this first clause is intended as a question.

In the next seven words, I note the consistent parallel structure of the two clauses: "thursos [verbs] [love]", with the clear contrast between two classically distinct Greek words for "love" with contrasting connotations: storge (pronounced "storyi" in modern Greek) and eros. 

Once again, I emphasize that I did not have to adjust or amend the interpretation of a single consonant in this text from the system of correspondences that I have been using for all of my interpretations of other passages of text in the ms.

Geoffrey

---

Had you considered θάρσος, courage,  as an alternative to θύρσος?