The Voynich Ninja

(24-09-2020, 05:51 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(24-09-2020, 10:32 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(24-09-2020, 02:03 AM)Voynichgibberish Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote: doesn't matter, it could be a reference label, an abbreviation, or an adjective rather than a noun

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• Where can one find the thing to which it refers? It might be a location on a page. In the middle ages, they did use location markers (section a, b, c, or d referring to a quadrant of the same page or of another page). They also used several different (and cryptic-looking) systems to refer to Biblical passages. Everyone knew what they meant. In Greek manuscripts numeric labels were quite common.
  
• Brief abbreviations are only useless if you are not familiar with them. I see brief abbreviations in thousands of manuscripts. They are very common. Maps often have them also. Words are very frequently truncated or chopped into pieces.
  
• It's very easy for different adjectives to apply to different drawings. Words like hot and cold, wet and dry were applied to everything in the middle ages. Verbs, also. Words like grind, powder, mix, and soak.
  

Of course dissimilar items can in priniciple have the same label. However in think in practice this falls down when one looks at labels in the Voynich.

(1) There are a variety of possibilities for references. They could be on the same page, they could be in some index, they could be on some unknown and separate text. If one of these is the case we have to ask how this could work in practice. Some pages do not contain accompanying passages of text within which to refer to, so what could the position refer to? If there is some kind of index page then it should have a completely different structure to other pages. If there is a separate document referred to, then where is that document and why don't we have any evidence of it and it would have to be quite long and large to accommodate all the references.

(2) Brief abbreviations become a problem in this instance given the very different nature and specificity of the drawings with the same abbreviation. Take for example if a plant has the label which means "Ar" and this is shared with a star, a pipe and a naked lady then how should one work out what the label is an abbreviation of. An abbreviation is of no use unless one can work out what it is an abbreviation of. Brief abbreviations include lots of ambiguity.

(3) Again one has to consider what different adjectives could be in practice given the very different drawings. I don't see how words like hot and cold, wet and dry could apply to multiple of the kind of drawings that we see in the Voynich in a meaningful way and verbs like [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]grind, powder, mix, and soak even less so. Words like good and bad are so simple that they seem relatively useless in these contexts.[/font]

But for me the real clincher is that the repeated labels tend to have very similar spellings to other repeated labels. So for example if "otol" is a repeated label and "okol" is also a repeated label and so on. This does not fit well with either scenarios (2) or (3). And it creates a lot of limitations when it comes to (1)

I don't think these problems can be brushed under the carpet.

(24-09-2020, 10:32 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(3) Again one has to consider what different adjectives could be in practice given the very different drawings. I don't see how words like hot and cold, wet and dry could apply to multiple of the kind of drawings that we see in the Voynich in a meaningful way and verbs like [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]grind, powder, mix, and soak even less so. Words like good and bad are so simple that they seem relatively useless in these contexts.[/font]
...

There are numerous medieval plant books in which every single plant is identified as being wet or dry, hot or cold, and sometimes the degree to which this is true is also included. In others, the wet/dry/hot/cold descriptions are not mentioned for every plant, they are applied sporadically. wet/dry/hot/cold were sometimes applied to other things besides plants (one sometimes sees it in cosmology books, as well).

In medieval thinking, everything was thought to have more-or-less of each of these properties.

I don't remember mentioning anything about good and bad, but one also sees those in medieval manuscripts, as well, but usually not as labels, they are generally in the descriptive text or in columnar charts. "Good" and "bad" are especially common in books about astrology or astro-medicine.

(24-09-2020, 07:56 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are numerous medieval plant books in which every single plant is identified as being wet or dry, hot or cold, and sometimes the degree to which this is true is also included. In others, the wet/dry/hot/cold descriptions are not mentioned for every plant, they are applied sporadically. wet/dry/hot/cold were sometimes applied to other things besides plants (one sometimes sees it in cosmology books, as well).

It seems a stretch for a number of very different and disparate things to be meaningfully and usefully described as "wet", "dry", "hot" and "cold".

However again the coup de grâce for me is: why are the spellings of "wet", "dry", "hot" and "cold" so similar? (otol, okol, okal, [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]otor etc.)[/font]

!!! Please quote responsably !!!

(24-09-2020, 01:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Dear all,

Let me take the opportuniity to once again encourage you to shorten quotes. While on the desktop it looks so-so, on mobiles lengthy quotes take ages to scroll down, and it's hard to distinguish who wrote what.

Here are two useful hints:

1) While preparing your post, you can edit the quoted text within the quote, deleting everything that's not directly relevant
2) There's the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. functionality.

!!! Please quote responsably !!!

Mark, on my phone your post is a few lines, while the quote is over 25.

(24-09-2020, 08:59 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...It seems a stretch for a number of very different and disparate things to be meaningfully and usefully described as "wet", "dry", "hot" and "cold".
...

Maybe to modern thinking, but wet/dry hot/cold was absolutely integral to medieval thinking. EVERYTHING was classified this way. And not just wet/dry hot/cold, but sometimes also c 3, w 2 (cold to the 3rd degree, wet to the 2nd degree). Galen and Aristotle had enormous influence over medieval ways of perceiving the properties of things.

The same is true for good and bad. Every day of the year was classified as good or bad, according to their interpretation of the influence of the stars, and manuscripts have lists and lists of good and bad days.

Say F is a function which transforms a word meaning in English to the equivalent Voynichese word. I am not suggesting that the original language is English, but if it another language then that just requires a function which translates that language from English to that language incorporated into F.

So taking an example where:

F("wet") = EVA-okol
F("dry") = EVA-otol

Of course if we are dealing with abbreviations we are potentially saying that:

For some A and B            F(A) = F(B)          A != B

If we start to apply this logic to labels then for some labels it is straightforward as they are unique or rarely repeated.

The problem comes with labels that are repeated and in many different visual contexts.

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(24-09-2020, 10:54 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe to modern thinking, but wet/dry hot/cold was absolutely integral to medieval thinking. EVERYTHING was classified this way. And not just wet/dry hot/cold, but sometimes also c 3, w 2 (cold to the 3rd degree, wet to the 2nd degree). Galen and Aristotle had enormous influence over medieval ways of perceiving the properties of things.

The same is true for good and bad. Every day of the year was classified as good or bad, according to the stars and manuscripts have lists and lists of good and bad days.

If you can point me to a manuscript which exhibits this kind of phenomena and where the repeated labels are all spelled rather similarly then I will be impressed.

The point is that of course almost anything is possible in theory to the conceive a realistic scenario that satisfies of the behaviour that we see with repeated labels seems pretty implausible. If you suggest otherwise then the only way I can see you supporting that assertion is with real world examples that are remotely similar.

Take the words cat, rat, mat, hat. These are all spelled very similarly and could be repeated as labels against many different drawings, but then you end up with something that is possible, but ultimately nonsensical. If the choice is only between meaningless gibberish and meaningful gibberish I am not sure what is better.

Then when you combine this serious label issue with other related issues it really stretches credulity that they can all be explained away.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that there is some nullity there I.e. there is at least some meaningless text. That could mean all the text is meaningless or alternatively some is meaningful and some not meaningful.

I have reasons why I don't believe all the text is meaningless, so I arrived at the position that some is meaningless and some is not, which essentially means that there is filler text or what I term null words.

(25-09-2020, 12:38 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mark, I'm not talking "in theory". I am describing things I have frequently seen in manuscripts. I've looked at literally thousands of them.

Then it should be easy for you to provide one good example of what you are talking about.

I've posted examples of labels that have been distilled down to three characters.

I've posted examples of labels that have been broken into small pieces that cross across illustrations.

I've posted examples on my blog of hot/cold wet/dry distilled down to 2 characters.

And way back somewhere on the forum I posted a link to a manuscript that has all the good days bad days info.

I've also made numerous references to Llullian-style diagrams where there are cryptic-seeming short labels (they are mnemonics), but if you know what the diagram is about, you can interpret them.

I've also made references to Greek labels that consist of two characters throughout the book.

I've posted examples on my blog of cryptic-looking but very logical two- and three-character indexing systems.