(16-05-2019, 11:07 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The trouble is that journalists see a universities name, the Dr preface to Gerald and rush to file copy. As far as they care, the university is carrying out all the research into whether or not this is accurate.
And once the big names have picked up on it, it snowballs across all the outlets.
The real problem lies with the corruption in academic circles that allows the publication of this sort of nonsense in the first place.
Gerald doesn't care - he's now famous and this will no doubt be a good stepping stone in his career.
I agree that this happens. Fame seems to create its own coat-of-many-colors regardless of whether the wearer is worthy.
Spot the three mistakes. Well there are more but spot the three I'm thinking of :p
“The word beneath the virgin, written in conventional italics, reads ‘septemb-’, which means the month of ‘September’ and survives in Latin as ‘septembre’. Note the accent < over the letter m to indicate lower pitch, which was a Medieval device.”
In the Guardian he claims that it's been peer reviewed and verified by other scholars.
Quote:Asked for his response to those who were unconvinced by his interpretation, Cheshire was bullish. “The journal paper has been blind peer-reviewed and verified by other scholars – that is standard confirmation in the scientific arena. There is no need to persuade anyone, as the solution will be used to study the manuscript by linguists and historians in due course.
What I like is that, not content with deciphering the manuscript, he's also invented a whole new language that he assumed was spoken by Europeans between the collapse of Latin and the emergence of modern languages. A language he admits 'for which there is no documented evidence'.
In the next paragraph he jumps forwards a thousand years, to the Catholic kings of Spain, and suggests they were familiar with the language... Despite the obvious fact that they were speaking well documented early modern versions of our own languages.
Ps- Koen, do you normally put stress on the consonant in romance languages?
As I understood from somewhat messy reports in Russian media, Cheshire discovered a hitherto unknown "protoromance" language and is going to compose a dictionary thereof.
The best of luck!
If I understand correctly, everything "protoromance" is dated somewhat 1000 years before the Voynich. So how would there be protoromance in 15th century?
By the way, the Russian wikipedia states that Cheshire is professor at Bristol's. Is that true?
Protoromamce, by definition, would be vulgar Latin
It seems that there is a theory stating that a missing link developed between Latin and modern European languages. Not a theory taken very seriously today I think.
I understand that Cheshire is a research associate at Bristol uni, whatever that is. I shall have to pop in and see him next time I'm in the UK, I'm from the next big town over.
I sent a mail to the editor in which I addressed this issue (among others):
Quote:Thus far, Cheshire has defended his strange linguistic claims by proposing that the whole thing took place on an island, where such wondrous events are known to happen. But then on p32 he writes:
“So, we have proto-Romance words surviving in the Mediterranean from Portugal, in the west, to Turkey, in the east. Clearly, it was a cosmopolitan lingua franca until the late Medieval period”.
To paraphrase, Cheshire claims that the manuscript was written in proto-Romance, one cosmopolitan language which coexisted with Middle French and Dante’s Italian, but despite its cosmopolitan status it is only attested in one book written by a nun on an island. I will not withhold the following gem: “manuscript MS408 is immensely important, because it is the only documentation of a language that was once ubiquitous over the Mediterranean and subsequently became the foundation for southern European linguistics in the present day.”
Cheshire’s ubiquitous yet unattested language became the foundation for southern European linguistics.
Even German Qualitätsjournalismus got hold of it
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but they have an interesting link
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