The Voynich Ninja

(13-09-2020, 04:10 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A sequence of multiple Voynich vords could possibly represent a single word in the language as we know it in its standard written form.

That certainly seems to be what the recently referenced D'Imperio paper suggests
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Or have I misread that source?

(13-09-2020, 02:09 AM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Gavin Güldenpfennig
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Yes, but:

Gavin Güldenpfennig Wrote:But I have also found out, that it is not Basque, as I wrote some months ago. My old phonetic substitution wasn' t accurate.

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(13-09-2020, 05:19 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't accept the idea that the linguistic properties of a text in a completely unknown writing system and unknown language can necessarily be analyzed in the manner and especially in such depth as you suggest, without any accompanying hypothesis at all about a candidate language, at least for the purpose of checking and testing one's hypotheses about these linguistic properties. The Linear B researchers had a lot of additional information to guide them when they developed hypotheses about such linguistic properties -- drawings of items and people and numbers that accompanied the text. They didn't analyze the text in a vacuum isolated from its context, and fortunately in the case of Linear B the context was practical, not fanciful. We enjoy no such advantages with the Voynich ms. We have the Pleiades, a Zodiac chart, and beyond that we are mostly guessing.


Is there any example in history of taking a text with no outside context whatsoever, and successfully analyzing its phonological or grammatical properties in the way that you suggest? I am sincerely asking this question, I would be very interested to know if it has ever been successfully done before with another text.

Geoffrey, your example of Linear B is apt. The evidence from pictograms, people, and numbers was all internal to the documents they were studying. Advances such as the Kober triplets were based on observations of patterns in the text and not from outside information. Guesses about how the script worked were based on general principles rather than drawing from specific scripts. Ventris's guesses of town names was the last step before the script unraveled (into a language he didn't expect!). So much work by Kober, Ventris, and others, went into getting to that last stage.

The Voynich manuscript contains vast numbers of patterns we should draw on to give us a solid understanding of the text, the script, and the potential underlying language before we make guesses. I'm happy for people to use hypothetical languages to explore ideas (I do this too), but presenting them as a fully-formed theory is deleterious. It erodes trust among researchers because it promotes the idea that research on the Voynich is nothing more than flying kites and watching others shoot them down. I have read dozens of theories like yours from which i have learnt nothing. Not one thing. I beg you - really truly beg you - please take research on the Voynich seriously.

(13-09-2020, 06:03 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Geoffrey, your example of Linear B is apt. The evidence from pictograms, people, and numbers was all internal to the documents they were studying. Advances such as the Kober triplets were based on observations of patterns in the text and not from outside information. Guesses about how the script worked were based on general principles rather than drawing from specific scripts. Ventris's guesses of town names was the last step before the script unraveled (into a language he didn't expect!). So much work by Kober, Ventris, and others, went into getting to that last stage.

The Voynich manuscript contains vast numbers of patterns we should draw on to give us a solid understanding of the text, the script, and the potential underlying language before we make guesses. I'm happy for people to use hypothetical languages to explore ideas (I do this too), but presenting them as a fully-formed theory is deleterious. It erodes trust among researchers because it promotes the idea that research on the Voynich is nothing more than flying kites and watching others shoot them down. I have read dozens of theories like yours from which i have learnt nothing. Not one thing. I beg you - really truly beg you - please take research on the Voynich seriously.

Emma, allow me to ask you the same question I asked Koen: Does any of the linguistic statistical analysis of the text that you, Rene, and many others have done, give you any confidence or reason to reject the depressing but frankly plausible "hoax" hypothesis of Gordon Rugg, Andreas Schinner, et al., as presented for example You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.? (Again, I don't like the use of the term "hoax" here, but what they mean is that the text is meaningless.) Does any linguistic statistical analysis whatsoever provide concrete evidence that the text is meaningful rather than meaningless?

Geoffrey, I'm not the one you asked, but allow me to interest you in a bit of light reading:
Discussion of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Both of the researchers you did address your question to were vibrant participants in this debate, and gave some well-formulated arguments against the VMs being the product of stochastic pseudo-language generation. You may want to digest and address the specific points they and others make in that thread.

Reading the aforementioned thread felt a bit like watching the movie Rashomon — both sides have their merits, but they can't both be true, and the jury is still out on which one is on the right track. At this point in time, yes, a number of qualified professionals have publicly indicated that they deem Torsten Timm's argument convincing, and the counterarguments against it unsatisfying (and likely the product of wishful thinking). But at least an equal number feel much the opposite. In the end (as in Rashomon life, it's really up to you the beholder to weigh the evidence on both sides, and decide which side you find more convincing.

I could be wrong about this (please correct me if I'm wrong, folks!), but my understanding is that "The Voynich Manuscript is meaningless" is the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis of a scientific inquiry does not call for any proof; it is tentatively as good as true until disproven. The burden of proof is on the person who wishes to negate the null hypothesis. I have seen some confusion and conflation of the claim "The VMs is meaningless" with "The VMs was stochastically generated by X method". The latter statement is not the null hypothesis (and does bear a burden of proof), but it does rest on it. Technically speaking, Torsten Timm doesn't need to prove the VMs is meaningless. He just needs to show that meaningless generation fits with all the features of the VMs text, and leaves no features unexplained. I say this in order to point out that even if Torsten's stochastic method is ruled implausible, that doesn't nearly disprove that the VMs is meaningless.

Also Geoffrey, I'm looking today for that proto-Basque phonology to Voynichese correspondence chart, and will post it as soon as I can find and scan it.

(14-09-2020, 11:51 AM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Geoffrey, I'm not the one you asked, but allow me to interest you in a bit of light reading:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Both of the researchers you did address your question to were vibrant participants in this debate, and gave some well-formulated arguments against the VMs being the product of stochastic pseudo-language generation. You may want to digest and address the specific points they and others make in that thread.
[...]
Also Geoffrey, I'm looking today for that proto-Basque phonology to Voynichese correspondence chart, and will post it as soon as I can find and scan it.

I appreciate this, Renegade! Unfortunately, when I clicked on the link to the discussion that you provided, I got a server error message that the requested URL was not found.

(14-09-2020, 02:02 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Unfortunately, when I clicked on the link to the discussion that you provided, I got a server error message that the requested URL was not found.

Sorry, just fixed that.

Geoffrey, you can increase your chance of success if you analyze something without any preconceptions. If you analyze an object with the idea in mind that you already know what the object is, you already interpret what you see and this way the patterns that you are able to find. This way it becomes incredible difficult to detect anything new and unexpected. It is much easier to detect new patterns if you start with the idea that you don't know anything.

This is also true for undeciphered scripts and it is especially true for the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich text looks like an ordinary text written in an ordinary script. But the text behaves differently than any other text we know. Moreover, there are more than 6,500 known languages with all types of different characteristics. Consequently, it is possible to find examples that even share some of the strange statistical features with the VMS text, like, e.g., the low entropy values or even languages that use many similar word types, and therefore also possess an almost binomial word-length distribution. If you start with the assumption that the text behaves like a specific language you will probably only discuss how to interpret a single word or a single pattern under this assumption. It is much more productive to discuss what the most typical patterns can mean. But before you can start to discuss the most typical patterns you have to find them. Therefore it is necessary to find what all words, what all lines, what all paragraphs and what all folios in the VMS have in common.

Most interestingly, there appears to exist an inherent relation between word similarity and context: when we look at the three most frequent words on each page, for more than half of the pages two of three will differ in only one detail (Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 3). There is no doubt that this relation exists. René Zandbergen has tried to deny this observation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. times. But every time René tries to find a counter example he only provides additional You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that words in the VMS are indeed related to similar ones.

(14-09-2020, 04:27 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Therefore it is necessary to find what all words, what all lines, what all paragraphs and what all folios in the VMS have in common. 

Most interestingly, there appears to exist an inherent relation between word similarity and context: when we look at the three most frequent words on each page, for more than half of the pages two of three will differ in only one detail (Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 3). There is no doubt that this relation exists. René Zandbergen has tried to deny this observation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. times. But every time René tries to find a counter example he only provides additional You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that words in the VMS are indeed related to similar ones.

I know that at some stage of earlier research into the Voynich ms, perhaps decades ago, a researcher raised the idea that possibly only certain parts, perhaps small parts, of the ms have actual meaningful content, and the remaining pages of the ms comprise meaningless repetition of some of the words that are found in the meaningful parts. This could have happened if a person who did not know the meaning of the script/language began by copying the meaningful parts from some other original source, and then in a flight of fancy added his own meaningless parts using the same script and some of the words that he had seen, but without understanding their meaning or grammar. I would suggest the Herbal section except for the first introductory page as a strong candidate for a possibly meaningless part of the ms in this scenario, and perhaps the Pharmaceutical section as well. The writing would have served simply as a kind of decoration to accompany the illustrations.

If this is the case, then in our statistical analysis we would have to consider the possibility that the ms is a combination of meaningful and meaningless parts, and we may not know which ones are which. For example, perhaps those "more than half of the pages" where two of the three most frequent words differ in only one detail, are primarily among the meaningless parts of the ms. But the remaining pages, which do not possess this property you identify, may include the meaningful parts of the ms. This is only a general hypothesis, but I submit that such possibilities must be considered and taken into account. We cannot simply presume that the whole entire ms is a monolith and a unitary composition. Of course we know about Dialect A and Dialect B, but each of these "Dialects" could include both meaningful and meaningless parts, with the copier repeating some of the words from the meaningful Dialect A pages in his writing of the meaningless Dialect A pages, and likewise repeating some of the words from the meaningful Dialect B pages in his writing of the meaningless Dialect B pages.

Torsten, could you post a list of exactly which pages of the ms do and do not possess the "two of the three most frequent words differ in only one detail" property?

Interesting, I had a quick go at this and besides raising some methodological issues, i could only find 82/225.
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