The Voynich Ninja

That link might just cause some further discussion here :-)

Haven't read it yet. But I see from the title page that at least Alisa is an academic linguist.

I was a bit concerned when I saw her list contained four of Cheshire's papers and for example not a single reference to Voynich.nu. But it appears that Cheshire is mostly there to be criticized 

Quote:According  to  my  own  research  of  the  Voynich  manuscript,  it  is  an absolutely nonsense (Gladyseva, 2019).

(22-09-2020, 03:46 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Haven't read it yet. But I see from the title page that at least Alisa is an academic linguist.

I think she filled in Vilnius University because she is/was studying Spanish there, but she is an "independent researcher" and all her publications are about the VM.

(22-09-2020, 01:47 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(22-09-2020, 12:58 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.She is talking about Petra in Constantinople and not Petra in Jordan, right? The Jordan Petra was in ruins by the Middle Ages.

If she's talking about the Petra that was part of Constantinople, I would be interested in her list of references 

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Yes, l was wondering that on your behalf as well - as bothersome as constant seeking of attribution can be, l also understand how research like this is necessarily built on others work and the system really breaks down when contributions are not acknowledged.

In my experience I have found that academic researchers in Russia / former USSR / Eastern Europe can be much more casual about citing or not citing their sources than any serious or established Western academic researcher would ever dare to be. Apparently a credible accusation of plagiarism is not necessarily the academic career-killer there that it is in the West. As one such example, I recall a famous elite-level Russian chess instructor once published a large book of chess positions as instructional exercises, and in the preface he casually noted in a sweeping statement that he had collected the positions over the course of many decades from a large variety of sources, and he could not possibly cite the exact sources of any of the positions now. No one seemed to bat an eye at such a statement, and I do not recall any adverse career consequences coming to him as a result of this frank admission of his failure / inability to cite his sources. Of course chess instruction is a slightly different field than institutional academics per se, but I have observed similar attitudes from academic researchers as well.

Indeed, I can't find Ms Gladyseva amongst the Department's staff: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Well, at least she's a linguist by education then.

I would like to make another possibly relevant observation here: Prior academic history and reputation does not necessarily directly correlate with the credibility or reliability of a researcher's work on a new subject, especially one as fraught with difficulty as the Voynich manuscript. For example, the late linguist Joseph Greenberg was rightly ridiculed for many of his theories about far-flung genetic language relationships that he proposed and even wrote whole books about later in his career--the most outrageous was probably his suggestion that all indigenous languages of North, Central, and South America except for the Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene languages are all genetically related in one gigantic macro-family he called "Amerind". As if the Cree language of north-central Canada, the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego in southernmost Argentina and Chile, and almost everything in between could be related in a single language family. It defies credibility, and indeed it received none. 

But Greenberg actually had a legitimate and rather successful career both as a serious historical linguist researching African languages, and as a pioneer in the field of linguistic typology that has boomed in recent decades and is now quite popular among academic linguists. So Greenberg continues to enjoy a sterling academic reputation in certain fields of linguistics, while his work has been totally discredited in his more speculative and dubious linguistic endeavors. 

I'm not saying Gladyseva is anything like Greenberg. But I'm saying such situations can and do occur in professional academic circles, and we cannot necessarily judge the credibility of an academic researcher's work on one subject by reference to their work and reputation in another field, even a related one.

Certainly true, but ceteris paribus to be a linguist is better than nothing.

(22-09-2020, 11:53 AM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(21-09-2020, 09:49 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now she is writing that she is leaning toward Torsten Timm's autocopying idea.

I find that very astonishing. Do you have a link to this statement ?

I'm sorry, bi3, my mistake, I had five tabs open and I confused info on Wladimir's blog with the ones written by Gladyseva. So I guess she is still claiming she has deciphered it.

She hasn't given a single concrete example yet, even after more than a year of teasers. I'm a bit tired of waiting for "the great reveal".

Gladyseva Wrote:"The  most important  thing  is  to  determine  the  language  that  was  used  in  the marginalia, but scholars to this day cannot even read the uncoded text."

She is referring to the month labels, and this statement is nonsense. The month names are in standard Latin script with abbreviations and are not hard to read. Numerous researchers have blogged about them, including me, years ago.

Also, since blogging about them, I spent years researching the spellings in medieval manuscripts to try to find hard evidence for where they originated. The origin of the spellings is no longer an educated guess, I found examples, so now there is evidence. I'll post them when I have time.


Her claim that LJS 419 includes "corrupted" plant names is also nonsense. This blog explains why:

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It's very clear from her "translations" of the month labels that she does not know how to read medieval scribal abbreviations. She interpreted "mars" (with Greek sigma-shaped final-ess) as "março". She interpreted "aberil" (abbreviated in a standard way) as "april". She turned "augst" (very clearly written) into "ag (o)st(o)". "Augst" is commonly found in manuscripts, so there is nothing unusual about the spelling, but Gladyseva assumed it was abbreviated because she didn't recognize the spelling.

She transliterated the month of October as "'Octubro', 'Outubre' or 'Oitubro'". This is wrong. It is clearly written as "oct[font=arial, sans-serif]ēbre" (Octembre) with a straight macron for the missing "m". I think she is basing her interpretations on her Galician/Portuguese theory rather than actually reading what is written.[/font]

It takes time to learn medieval scribal abbreviations, but it is necessary to learn them in order to read medieval manuscripts and notes. Most scribes used abbreviations. She hasn't learned them yet.