The Voynich Ninja

And the daily mail:

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Well, it seems that the time has come to close all the fora.

doranchak, wow.
 
News Release "Provided by University of Bristol"

I'm really beginning to wonder what academic credentials they are actually seeking. Is hype more important to them than substance?


There's a saying, "The bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it."

But there's also a saying, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall."


How can anyone seriously believe that a "lost" "extinct" language from around the 6th century or earlier would simply pop up in the 15th century in one document?

It's like the author is expecting us to believe that the VMS creator zoomed back nine centuries in a time machine (probably with naked nymphs at the control panel) to find an extinct languages AND an undocumented proto-Italic script, rather than just inventing a set of characters like everybody else did (ciphers were pretty popular in the Middle Ages).

As I said earlier, G. Cheshire should be in advertising.

Has anyone read the new paper? I want to be able to complain accurately if (when?) this appears in Flemish media

Many people have. It is now available freely.

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I'm reading the introduction right now. So he changed his views again? 

Quote:More specifically, the manuscript was compiled by a Dominican nun as a source of reference for the female royal court to which her monastery was affiliated [..] The manuscript originates from Castello Aragonese, an island castle and citadel off Ischia, and was compiled for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, (1401–58) who led the rescue mission as regent during the absence of her husband, King Alfonso V of Aragon (1396–1458)

(15-05-2019, 08:53 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Many people have. It is now available freely.

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Gems like this are rare:

Gerard Cheshire Wrote:Figure 60 shows a detail from an official letter by Alfonso V, for comparison with De Rosa. It reads: Alfonsus dei gracia Rex Aragome (Alfonzo of the gracious, King of Aragon: Italian, Spanish, Old Portuguese)

Of course the fragment reads "Alfonsus dei gratia Rex Aragonum" and the translation is Alfonse, King of the Aragonese, by the grace of God. It is not "Italian, Spanish, Old Portuguese" but plain and simple Latin.
The fact that the guy cannot read the final -um, where the macron appears as a curl-like ligature, is not surprising: he also fails to correctly interpret the macrons in the VMS month names. 

That he interprets the obvious Latin "dei" (of God) as the Italian "dei" (of the) is pure genius  

I agree with everything Marco wrote. Thanks for posting the example.

Quote:For that reason it is known as proto-Romance (prototype-Romance)

No, no, no. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- 
word-forming element meaning "first, source, parent, preceding, earliest form, original, basic," from Greek proto-, from protos "first,"

proto-language and proto-type are formed with the same element, but proto-language does not stand for prototype-language.

Who peer reviewed this???

Edit: I can't read two sentences without coming across unforgivable terminology mistakes
The alphabet of manuscript MS408 runs from a to z, just as our modern Italic alphabet does

Edit2: LITERALLY 2 SENTENCES after the last one, he uses "diphthongs" where he means "digraphs". That's right, he absolutely has no clue that diphthongs and digraphs are different things!!!

(15-05-2019, 09:30 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That he interprets the obvious Latin "dei" (of God) as the Italian "dei" (of the) is pure genius  

Google translate language auto-detect.

G. Cheshire claims in his April 2019 paper that VMS Pisces



"are most likely to be the Mediterranean seabass (Dicentrarchus labrax)":



His reasoning for his choice is that "it has the scaly body with a smooth head and slightly upturned lip".

First of all, don't most fish have scaly bodies?
Secondly, do you see an upturned lip? Do you see any lip? Do you see a long nose?

I think pikes and pike-perches are a better match than sea bass. They have long noses and long bodies (which are undulating when you lift them up), but it could just as easily be an invented fish, or one copied from another source. Marco pointed out a very similar drawing in the Saxon Mirror and I found a similar fish in a Greek fresco. Both sources are much more similar to the VMS than Cheshire's Dicentrarchus labrax.