(26-06-2019, 06:34 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would also suggest in passing Nick's description of an entire field of linguistic methodology as Baxian is entirely unjust upon Profs Bax and Currier.
I used "Baxian" as a shorthand for linguistic approaches that start from a presumption that Voynichese is entirely flat and regular, a thing Prescott Currier certainly did not believe, as can be seen from his comments.
The paper does not give proper dues or respect to Prescott Currier, whose observations and opinion should have been cited in its entirety.
Quote:I used "Baxian" as a shorthand for linguistic approaches that start from a presumption that Voynichese is entirely flat and regular, a thing Prescott Currier certainly did not believe, as can be seen from his comments
You could have easily used any of the people who believed in such a thing over the past century ; Stojko or even Manly, if memory serves me. But let's not argue the point.
(26-06-2019, 09:13 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You could have easily used any of the people who believed in such a thing over the past century ; Stojko or even Manly, if memory serves me. But let's not argue the point.
If anyone has access to articles written by John Matthews Manly about the Voynich I'd be very interested to see them. I suspect that he had a different opinion again, but it would be nice to know either way for sure.
(26-06-2019, 03:28 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Currier was one of the pioneers, but his work is 40 years old now. We have much more complete data, much better data and infinitely better tools than he did.
Even if he was the first to publicly show some effects in the MS to the world, some of his conclusions are very questionable.
If Currier's conclusions on the specific phenomenon the paper focused on were relevant (and I think they most certainly are), they should have been acknowledged and reviewed: if they proved to be lacking or wrong, the paper would be the correct and best place to make that clear.
As you know, the point of an academic paper is to review, build upon (and indeed sometimes supplant) previous literature on the subject: the reader should always have the reassurance that the peer reviewers were sufficiently well-versed in the subject matter that they were able to hold the writers to account against the previous literature. That's how it works, that's the deal: and we've seen this last month (with Cheshire) the stupendous pushback that can happen when this process fails to do this.
In the preprint here, footnote #1 says "
The authors would like to thank René Zandbergen for his comments and advice on this paper", so in this instance you are defending something that you yourself directly contributed to. You may not like my comments, but I'm struggling to see why you think the basic standards that any other paper writer would expect to be held to don't apply here.
I was always very naive, but now I understand that publication is priority number 1, defending he contents has priority 2
and the contents has priority 3 (lowest). I am still learning every day.
(26-06-2019, 07:10 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Emma, a couple of quick and probably unimportant questions upon the transcription preparations:
I am assuming that labels were stripped out of the transcriptions?
What about the "paragraph initials" standalone glyphs, such as appear on ie, f66r?
Hi David,
thank you for your comments.
Most of the analysis was performed on Takahashi's transcription. All word-pairs that appear consecutively on the same line of the transcription file were considered. Labels appear in individual lines, so they were mostly ignored, with the exception of those that include more than one word.
The glyphs in You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. are also transcribed separately, one per line, so they were ignored too.
(26-06-2019, 08:04 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was wondering what results you would get if you repeated the experiment against the labels, putting them into their natural order and assuming the "space" exists between them.
One possible angle to check: Assuming the labels were written down in sequence, one would assume that under the auto-copying hypothesis, you would see similar stats to the main text, as the scribe would use the same procedure to generate them.
Alternatively, if the labels have different stats than the main text, then it suggests that there are two separate text generation methods at work.
As discussed You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view., simple repetition cannot be the reason for the "biased" word-break combinations in the VMS. Also, the fact that q- is almost absent in labels suggests that labels and paragraph-text are not identical (even if they share "morphology" and almost half of the labels appear in paragraph-text, as discussed You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.).
Edit: see also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I have tried to follow your suggestion. I concatenated all labels, generating a single line for each page. I used the Zandbergen-Landini transcription, excluding all paragraphs and circular / radial text. Uncertain spaces were ignored.
These are the results for the ten most expected combinations, with the corresponding actual counts.
[
attachment=3059]
This histogram shows the deviations from the expected values and can be compared with Chart 1 in the pre-print. Obviously, we are speaking of small numbers: deviations might not always be significant.
The high values for -y.o- could be due to the You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.. Anyway, the deviation from the expected count is not large (113%).
[
attachment=3058]
Yo yo yo (90 90 90) Emma! Congrats on the article! It was well-expressed so that even someone like myself could understand it! I had just embarked on something similar for one page You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. that I believe illustrates the Ovidian tale of Hermaphroditus. The nature of the likely alchemical tale highlights the rebis, the “two things”, usually conflicting substances, in one form, that constitutes the philosopher’s stone.
After reading as much about the VMS text as possible, and limitations on line and word endings, I wondered if the authors might have continued the alchemical pattern by combining the last letter of one word with the first letter of the next. Thus the spaces between would contain a binary of 2 characters. From there, I wondered if a new “alphabet” could be derived, one more amenable to decryption, perhaps even simple substitution.
I decided to try it on You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. because I would quite possibly have some key words, either from Ovid or from alchemy. It didn’t take me long, however, to realize this was a tedious process, and very likely someone had already done it! So I asked Rene, who graciously directed me to your article.
Which brings me to my question:did you and Marco P ever consider whether the new dataset you derived might be amenable to decryption and did you give it a try?