The trouble is that the further you delve into the text, the fewer "real" words you get.
IE, in one paragraph selected at random:
pan ysar choldam yainam cheedy dar ar ainar pody chedy
ainal osos yain qodoaiin ar osor qotal cheeedy sol so
qosoar syainam ytol ol air osy dal al arody alydy dyar
ar kan aimar dol qosoain osar alaim
(bold never appears in the corpus)
tchar kis ckheed pan ar alolol ainol char oshd shar oshd
ochar ar yshd charoshd char dan chol oshdar ain shol shs
shal dain ain octhd char oshd daiin cholchol char oshd
shaldain yshal ochd chy ochar yshd dain cholshol chal an
shaldair yeear chol shol chardan qoshd yshdchar okain an
sholdain char am
From which we see 2 things - longer words in the TT generation tend to looser, and the algorithm used tends to pick up on words and run with them in a way the original scribe didn't (ie shaldain in the second paragraph)
David, thank you for pointing out that text is indeed changing from state A to state B.
BTW: Please note the explanation in Timm & Schinner 2019: "However note that any algorithmic description of the VMS must be seen as just one of many possible realizations.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] ... [/font][/font]The scope of this work is not the 'elemental deconstruction' of the VMS to an exact (and complete) set of rules. We rather demonstrate the feasibility to algorithmically create a text as rich and complex as the VMS, using the strikingly simple self-citation method." (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 11) and the[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] answer given You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font].
(29-08-2019, 05:50 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The autocopying theory is a very good example for what i call ahistorical, like the hoax or the fake theory. It has nothing to do with a 15th c. ms., it is a concept of the 21st c. projected onto the 15th c.
(20-10-2019, 05:51 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To come back to T.T. and his theory J. Hermes: Like many other theories, Talbot, Tucker, Rugg, andd so on it is simply ahistorical, it ignores the simple, undisputable fact that we have in B. 408 a document of the first half of the 15th c. and it projects 20th c. concepts into the Late Middle Ages.
To which concept of the 21st century do you refer?
The "self-citation" process is "easily executable without additional tools even by a medieval scribe" (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 2019, Abstract). Moreover, to copy text manually was the only possible way to duplicate text before the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg!
It is reasonable to assume that with some training it is very efficient to copy a text using the text itself as a source. For doing so it is not necessary to switch between an external source and the text being written. Nor is it necessary to check or to correct copy errors if the generated text has no meaning (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 40). Therefore, the "self-citation" method is the most effective way to generate some meaningless filler text manually.
A text generated by "self-citation" would change over time. Moreover it is expected for the "self-citation" method that not only the frequency and similarity of word tokens would be correlated, but also similarity and relative position (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 13ff). This is exactly what we see for the text in the Voynich manuscript (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 2ff). With other words it is possible to use the "self-citation" process to describe the text in the Voynich manuscript.
From a Semitic translation. Even the Bible as we know it has multiple interpretations based on letters and word usage. You can get 3 Jewish scholars together and not one will agree on the interpretation of the words. You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. I have spent the last 3 weeks on nothing but the different interpretations of the Lords Prayer vs The Mourners Kaddish. Based on a working translation of 87r, which I am still looking into.
The point is, even if you thing the text is Italian, Latin, Mayan, or German... you will always have multiple interpretations, since the glyphs and language are over 600 years old
Taking Jürgen Hermes' comment from another thread:
Quote:I didn't write that (but I apologize if I expressed it misleadingly). What I wrote was that A) I'm still surprised that the autocopist theory has received relatively little attention (with Cheshire / Gibbs etc. in mind). Also I wrote that B) I still cannot find any real arguments in the relevant forums to suggest that an alternative theory would be preferable to that of the autocopist. Witch doesn't mean it wasn't discussed. But I'm glad I gave you an impulse to re-read the papers ;-)
Indeed, it has not made the press, but I think that this may be a 'good thing'. Perhaps it was a bit too complicated for that type of publication, or it didn't have the spectacular element that the modern press likes.
As for the second point, there is no working solution for any aspect of the Voynich MS text, so I think one can only analyse all proposed solutions by themselves and see if they 'work'.
My question remains what the autocopist theory really explains. It focusses on one aspect (similar words appearing near each other) but does not explain some more conspicuous ones, even if in the most recent paper it argues that it does.
Earlier in this thread it was already shown that it is quite possible to encode a meaningful text in such a way that similar words appear near each other.
I need to do a bit more reading before I go further.
To which concept of the 21st century do you refer?
I refer to the self-copying process Torsten Timm invented and applies to a 15th c. object. It is nothing you find in the 15th. c.
(22-10-2019, 08:02 AM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
To which concept of the 21st century do you refer?
I refer to the self-copying process Torsten Timm invented and applies to a 15th c. object. It is nothing you find in the 15th. c.
The self citation method is the result of my attempt to reverse engineer the way the text of the VMS was written (see Timm 2014). Therefore you need to take the time to reason through the argumentation. For instance we have presented evidence "that not only frequency and similarity of tokens are correlated, but also similarity and relative position" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 5). This means "the scribe was writing similarly spelled glyph groups near to each other because they depend in some way on each other" (see Timm 2014, p. 14).
Moreover, since the text in the VMS is unique it is only logical that the text is also unique for the 15th century. With other words since the text is unique also the text generation method must be unique.
One of my main problems with the method is that it is not very well formulated, and this does not allow testing / verifying it. Just an example: If a recipe for a cake gives a list of ingredients (eggs, flour, etc) and then says: "put all ingredients together and apply heat", then the recipe is too unspecific.
What I tried to get from re-reading is how specific the 'prescription' of the auto-copying is. In the most recent paper, there are suggestions about the type of changes applied, but so far I could not get anything on 'how far back' the author/scribe was looking. I have not looked into the code of the application, but there must clearly be some assumptions in there.
What also seems to be missing is the initialisation. How was it started? This may seem a trivial detail, but again there must be something in the code for that.
It is not written down specifically (and it is again something that I wanted to double-check) but it seems to be implied that every word in the MS (after the initialisation) is the result of auto-copying. That is, there are no words that are 'new seeds' or incidental re-initialisations.
(I have asked earlier in this thread about this, but I think that this question was understood in a different way).
In any case, these points clarify that the initialisation procedure is too important just not to mention.
Then, if this assumption (no new seeds) is true, one could verify the auto-copying hypothesis by checking for each word in the MS if there is a recent (how far back?) similar word (which max. edit distance?) from which it could be derived.
This seems to be the most basic test of the method, but I remember no evidence that this was even attempted. Again, something I would still need to check in the earlier papers. They are very long....
Timm. I view your self-citation hypothesis as valid for the “B” language. But I am worried about the prohibition of the sequential spelling of certain characters. Why does this prohibition work when changing words by one character? I think that reducing the number of such prohibitions will simplify the method of forming a new word (increasing the speed of writing and diversity), and makes the meaningless text more similar to meaningful text.
After this new round of asking for specifics, with the explicit or implicit criticism of the theory that would be deemed "not very well formulated" if it does not include all the details of how to generate perfect Voynichese from scratch, I would like to express my support for Torsten Timm's theory even though I don't think it is the only one that can account for (a part of) the facts, and I also believe that the facts should be better characterized before one attempts to explain them.
In my understanding and opinion, it is not necessary to have specific instructions for the initialization of an auto-copying process: it was not and needs not be performed by a computer. The lines and paragraphs may have been written in any order anyway, so there is no need to start a page on the first line and use only vords written on the same page as a reference for initialization.
The theory of evolution in Darwin's time did not specify the mechanisms of evolution, either. They were later discovered by geneticists and molecular biologists. Torsten Timm's theory does not specify exactly how vords evolve and what the (changing) constraints are, exactly. Only general guidelines and examples are given, to demonstrate the feasibility. The principle is the same for vords and for genes passed to the next generation: copy with some (non-random or semi-random) modification and selection. Timm is the Darwin of Voynichology!