The Voynich Ninja

I also think that the explanation of the Nostradamus hypothesis in the report is a little too long, given the brevity of the report. The time could have been better filled.

(19-01-2020, 08:21 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- The VMS does not contain a secret writing, but a phonetic transcription of sounds instead of letters

Wonderful. Let's have 100 more years of people claiming to be able to read Voynichese directly off the page, because it is obviously proto-Urdu with Turkic loan-words, and totally disregard the continuous drift and weird jumps in statistical features.

Furthermore on sounds vs writing, there is still the glyph ordering problem either way. I suppose there are some sounds that don't fit well together but generally there are sounds attached to letters as well...?

(19-01-2020, 09:27 PM)Linda Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- The VMS does not contain a secret writing, but a phonetic transcription of sounds instead of letters

Linda and nablator, I agree that this statement is problematic, but not necessarily for the same reasons you do. I think it's just poorly worded. "Secret writing" is an imprecise term that begs for clarification. "A phonetic transcription of sounds instead of letters" comes off as semantic wheel-spinning that doesn't say anything new or meaningful. All letters in phonographic writing systems (alphabets, abjads, and syllabaries) are phonetic transcriptions of sounds, after all.

I have a hunch that what Ms. Davis is trying to say, is that the VMs' text is the result of a scribe simply echoing a speaker's speech in written form, with little to no consideration for what the speaker might have meant to say. In other words, the scribe was merely a scribe, not an editor or an interpreter. Think of a court stenographer or a medical interpreter, both of whom aim to simply echo what another person said, with as little of their effort evident in the finished product as possible. In the setting of a medieval manuscript, one possible scenario which would fit this model is that of a scribe attempting to record a spoken language (s)he didn't understand, especially a spoken language that had no tradition of being written.

As an exercise, go on YouTube and find a short video of one of the last speakers of a dying unwritten language, without subtitles. Try your hand at transcribing in Roman letters what you hear the speaker say. Then look up an official transcript of the same video, using either IPA or some systematic Romanization system that researchers of that language have devised. I bet you'll find that your transcription deviates markedly. Specifically, I think you'll find that your transcription misses important phonological distinctions that you're not used to hearing in your native language. A native speaker of the language you transcribed would probably have a lot of difficulty making sense of your transcription read aloud by you, let alone anyone else. Important sounds that make a big difference in meaning would be leveled or omitted. Your prosody in reading your transcript aloud would be odd enough to make even familiar words sound unfamiliar to a native speaker.

Testing this transcription-of-an-unfamiliar-unwritten-language theory would require having a firm grasp of where it was composed, and what cultural tradition its imagery fits into. If the candidate languages for the original text (or speech) could be narrowed down, there might be some hope of figuring out what was intended to be written. Otherwise, the logical endpoint of this theory, unfortunately, is probably a one-way cipher.

Well i already ignored the poor wording and jumped to the phonetic spelling idea, ie so someone else not knowing the language, but able to read the phonetic writing, could read it out loud, and others who do know the language would understand them.

Like this



But it is dictation taken of speech in a language not understood, with a special character set for the purpose?

That is even worse than the phonetic dictation system i initially understood it to be, where the scribe could understand the speech, but not necessarily write it as we would expect, i had envisioned a native x speaking person inventing their own phonetic spelling alphabet. Today we have the IPA but you can also do it with native English equivalents, if it is English speakers you expect to be reading it.

Again, how can one say this is the case with any confidence without showing it in action, ie deconstructing the process.
 (ie here we have someone writing "see voo play" (showing how the glyphs work phonetically) which we believe was meant to be written graphically as "s'il vous plait", and therefore it is french speech as written by an english speaking person in a custom glyph set ), (except much worse because you are implying that no one has ever read the language that is being spoken therefore only speakers of this language would have any hope of recognizing the similarities and hence the one way cipher eventuality) 

Without showing how it works, it seems no better an explanation than any guess made about what it is, especially in that one cannot prove it is not so without figuring it out for real, since there is nothing offered to accept or refute except the premise itself.

I guess i am looking for at least some reason this idea is thought to be correct. I just seems so out of the blue...

OK Linda, that example helps me understand what you're talking about. I don't think I had a clear idea of the practical use of phonetic transcription. Much appreciated.

You have a good point I hadn't considered: why the need for a unique writing system, if the scribe didn't speak the dictator's language? It doesn't make sense.

On the other hand, a novel unique script does fit comfortably with a scenario where the scribe did understand what he was writing. Perhaps the scribe was literate in what was a second language for him (Latin or German or some language that used the Roman alphabet), but took on the task of writing a book in his native language, which at that time was unwritten. If he had no literary register or corpus of written works in his native tongue to compare himself to, it would likely never dawn on him to do anything but write the way his people talk. I could be wrong of course — if a dude is motivated enough to invent a new writing system for his language, might he also be equally as motivated to invent a literary register for it too?

Ockham's Razor can now also shave away the illiterate wisdom figure giving dictation to the scribe. In this scenario I just described, it would make no difference whether the scribe was coming up with a way to record his own speech or someone else's.

The idea of phonetic spelling might well be the case, my problem was with the statement  made so matter of fact-ly without indication of further explanation behind it or to come. I havent seen the video so don't know if there was more.

I could see someone writing what they heard from a class in greek, let's say, into his own system. Maybe he knew greek to hear it but not to write it, or simply preferred his own method so that no one knew what he was writing. In this way he could surruptitiously copy greek books read aloud in his vicinity. 

Given the apparent lack of haste in the vms writing, he probably did this in another medium, then copied or had it copied onto vellum at a later time?

Question:
Assuming there was more than one person involved in the VM.
Were all of them now listening to Greek but not writing?
Seems to have been a course.

It is hard to judge if Nostradamus was only mentioned at the end in order to make the transition to Nostradamus.
After all, the date of the MS was clearly said to be the first half of the 15th century.

Good question:
Was it just a bad transition?
Well, I'll just take another look at it, I've got it in memory.