(21-06-2019, 11:54 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Nick, Prescott Currier's qualifications and background are not the issue in contention, his statements are. I stand by what I said, "I don't consider his conclusions to be useful: he gives no solid reasons for his conclusions against linguistic arguments and doesn't expand on his suggestions enough to let others explore them." Currier's total statement on possible causes of this phenomenon is no more that 58 words long.
Any response to Currier's conclusions would either be:
- The reasons why Currier came to his conclusions are not stated, and therefore it is not possible to evaluate them.
- We assume the reasons he came to his conclusions and argue against our assumptions, even though the assumptions could be wrong.
Neither of these would have been useful.
I would be happy, were you to expand on Currier's conclusions, to respond specifically to your interpretations. I have no fear of discussing any valid point, but it is impossible to discuss something which simply isn't there. I assume, by you dismissal of point 4 as an explanation, you have a clear idea of what Currier was thinking.
You've misunderstood my point (and, I believe, Currier's original analysis and argument) completely, and I think this emerges as a significant weakness in the way you did your statistics and then presented your paper.
Currier started by saying (1) that Bio B showed very strong final-initial patterning, (2) that other B pages showed some (but significantly less) final-initial patterning, while (3) A showed very little patterning at all ("Language A texts are fairly close to expected in this respect"). That is, Currier explicitly starts with a
statistical argument for inhomogeneity - that Voynichese is not the same in all sections.
A is not the same as non-Bio-B is not the same as Bio-B.
This inhomogeneity is a basic statistical fact that your paper discusses briefly on page 5, BUT THEN IMMEDIATELY IGNORES FOR THE REST OF THE PAPER. That is, despite this issue, you seem to want to paint a picture (presumably based on your presuppositions and biases) where Voynichese is inherently homogenous, even though Currier's foundational work on the specific phenomenon discussed in your paper
argues directly against it. I can only conclude that this is both poor statistics and poor research on your part.
Currier, having built up his specific argument for inhomogeneity, then continues: "I can think of no interpretation of this phenomenon, linguistic or otherwise. Inflexional endings would certainly not have this effect nor would any other grammatical feature that I know of if we assume that we are dealing with words." That is, Currier - who as you now know was trained in both linguistics and philology - specifically rejected exactly the kind of conclusion you come to at the end of your paper, where you say "
We would like to suggest that the existence of word break combinations provides some support for the possibility that the Voynich text is written phonetically in a language." I don't believe you propose any idea or mechanism Currier would not have trivially considered back in the 1970s: and so I believe that by writing what he did,
he specifically rejected what you propose.
Currier's concluding sentence is: "If, however, these word-appearing elements are something else,
syllables, letters, even digits, restrictions of this sort might well occur." As a codebreaker (as well as a linguist), Currier without any doubt knew full well that the absence of any kind of numbering system within the text was a major cause for cryptological concern. My interpretation is simply that these three entirely non-linguistic explanations made more sense to him in the 1970s than any of your proposed explanations: and as such their absence from your paper (not only as a missing literature review, but also as a strongly-informed dissenting voice) makes your paper look both superficial and predecided. They do not fall under your category 4, sorry, because you are trying by that description to engineer an homogenous underlying mechanism which Currier already argued against 40+ years ago.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you just aren't giving Prescott Currier any respect whatsoever (not academic, not linguistic, nothing), and he basically invented the whole field you've picked up on to write your paper. The big difference is that Currier had the good sense to realise that there was a basic underlying problem with the kind of Baxian simple-minded linguistic turn so often applied to Voynichese, and that this wasn't something that could be hand-waved away.
