The Voynich Ninja

Weiler thinks he has found a new approach to deciphering the VMS, by expanding the 9 as an abbreviation symbol, the same way they do in Latin (except he made a couple of mistakes in interpreting the Latin way of doing it):

Quote:To summarise, there are three meanings for the abbreviation character 9, which depend on the respective position in the text.

 

but this has been tried by countless researchers who have a better knowledge of medieval Latin than Weiler.

Quote:[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]These three meanings enable us to completely decode the first character of the Voynich code and we can now commence with creating a »translation guide«.

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So Weiler is saying the 9 character is to be interpreted the same way it was used in medieval Latin manuscripts (except he didn't quite get it right, but he got the concept right). And for some reason, even though this is clearly new to him, he thinks he can read it better than trained Latin palaeographers and historians.


[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]That's where the preview ends. The actual decipherment is in the next (not-yet-posted) chapter.[/font]

The real problem is that y is the second most frequent character in the Voynich MS text, with approximately 17,850 occurences out of a total of approximately 160,000 characters. This second figure is much less accurate.

In any case, it is more than 1 out of 10.

Anyone show me a Latin text that has so many occurrences of 'us', or 'con', or the two combined.

This is a specific example of the more general statement that translating the Voynich MS by expansion of the existing text cannot work.

I can't really tune you up like that.
In the sense of 89 an independent word is formed, which has nothing to do with an ending.
The question is there is a dependence of 9 to another character which changes its meaning.

Oh my. Among other things, he's totally wrong about the [9] abbreviation and how and when it's used in Latin manuscripts. Also wrong about the binding...we have no idea what the original binding looked like, and the current binding is almost certainly later than Rudolf's time, whether he actually owned it or not.

I haven't read it yet, I just found the link, but here is Part 2:

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Edit (addition):

And so the parts can be kept in one post, here is Part 1:

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Well, here we go again. I can't even get through a couple of paragraphs...


Weiler has misunderstood two common abbreviation symbols from Latin and is explaining them wrong.

The reverse-c character that means con/com is NOT (I repeat NOT NOT) the same character as a c-shape with a tail (s).

Weiler hasn't seen these in context, he is going only by Cappelli, so he doesn't understand that the reverse-c (with a big loop and sometimes a small one at the bottom and sometimes not) is the older version of y and is NOT the same as the abbreviation s (which sometimes represents c with tail (s) and sometimes represents e with tail—they often look the same, but can be distinguished by context).


I really don't want to sound unkind, but this is like someone scanning a book on how to play the guitar, and then (without having any practical experience with playing the guitar) thinks he can teach it to people who already know how to play the guitar. (or who don't, but either way, it's wrong).


It's cool that he's taking the time to to learn this stuff, many people offering "solutions" don't even get this far, but the saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," immediately comes to mind. He knows just enough to get himself into trouble and not enough to get it right. It's all incorrect.

He is spreading misinformation in virtually every paragraph and it really concerns me how quickly this kind of wrong information can spread through the Internet if no one steps up and points out that is it wrong.

Weiler also hasn't noticed that there is a subtle, but discernible, different between most "et" symbols and the s symbol. A few scribes write it almost like s, but the majority of scribes make it a little more angular (or add a crossbar) precisely so it is not confused with s.

Unfortunately, Weiler's entire reasoning for Part 2 is based on two fundamental misunderstandings of Latin abbreviations.

He doesn't know enough about them (hasn't trained his eye to see them in manuscripts) to tell them apart, and so his confused explanation mushes them all together.


It's entirely possible that one of the VMS characters that sometimes stands alone (there are several of them) might mean "et" (et or and), but not for any of the reasons that Weiler has suggested.

On Reddit (I have no plans to sign up for Reddit), Weiler wrote this in his defense:

"The parts of the solution presented so far and also the further resolutions are not based on the fact that the Voynich Code follows the system of abbreviations used in the Middle Ages and its usual rules of application. Rather, a completely independent secret code was constructed based on these basic principles, which is subject to its own new set of rules. Statements such as "This does not correspond to the usual use in medieval manuscripts" are therefore absolutely correct, as in my opinion this was exactly the aim of the author of the Voynich manuscript."

But his defense misses the point...

I want to make it clear to everyone who reads my comments, I am NOT criticizing Weiler's statement that the concepts may have been applied to Voynichese (many of us have already said this is possible, including me, in countless blogs)...


I am concerned that the "facts" he specifically wrote about Latin abbreviations (the "teaching" parts) are wrong. Completely wrong. This means he hasn't done his research, he hasn't looked at real manuscripts enough to understand what Cappelli wrote. His misconception of the facts is also problematic because you can't start from a poor understanding of Latin and then extrapolate that to a correct understanding of how those concepts could be applied to Voynichese.


What Weiler is proposing isn't new. Many people with knowledge of Latin have tried this application of abbreviation concepts to Voynichese. So have people who don't know Latin... Paul Patrick Lockerby tried to do the same thing as Weiler several years ago (with insufficient knowledge of Latin and Latin abbreviations)... and it didn't work.

Paul Weiler Wrote: 
Why should I, of all people, have been able to see what countless linguists and cryptologists had overlooked? However, this is what actually happened.

This is nonsense.

The application of Latin scribal concepts not only hasn't been overlooked, the possibility was suggested by the 1940s Study Group and by many people since.

This self-aggrandizement is no different from Gerard Cheshire insisting that he solved the VMS in two weeks.

Sounds like just a scam to sell some books.