To be fair to Gerard he has not as yet made much effort to publicise this paper and I feel that sometimes his writings draw more attention here than they actually merit. It seems that sometimes there is nothing more attractive to some people than having a new theory to trash.
The translation doesn’t make sense, AT ALL. I do speak Portuguese and he had to twist as much as he could to make any sense out of this meaningless piece of text.
The line is gibberish. Not that I was expecting anything else.
I believe this passes the point of “creativity” and I believe he knows this is nonsense.
"Even with instruction, the palaeographic process is necessarily protracted and requires a good deal of self-education, intuition and patience to master.
...
[font=TimesNewRomanPSMT]Figure 1 shows the entire page, whilst Figure 3 shows only the first line to be palaeographized. The species of plant is the Small-Flowered Lupin (Lupinus micranthus), which has characteristic radially symmetrical palmate leaves and relatively small and hairy inflorescence cones, with blue flowers that emerge in sequence from the bottom upwards, so that the cones initially appear blue around the edges and green at their centres, as shown."[/font]
[font=TimesNewRomanPSMT]I doubt that this is a drawing of Small-Flowered Lupin. They knew how to draw lupin in the Middle Ages and the VMS drawings are actually better than many from the same time period. Lupin has a very distinctive feature, the finger-like up-facing pods. The VMS drawing has nothing like this.[/font]
[font=TimesNewRomanPSMT]Cheshire is interpreting seed pod shapes as badly-drawn flowers, and there are other plants for which the leaves match more closely (plants commonly found in medieval plant books).[/font]
- He's still referring to the transliterated text in a basic san serif font as "modern Italics". He is clearly ignorant of basic typography terms.
- He's using the word "enclitic" incorrectly.
- [font=TimesNewRomanPSMT]He's still using a basic substitution system ([/font]ch[font=TimesNewRomanPSMT] = é, [/font]y = a, r = s), BUT since this doesn't work for VMS text... he inserts letters to suit his purposes any time his transliteration doesn't make linguistic sense.
- He breaks the tokens in whatever way he chooses to turn it into words.
- If the word doesn't make sense in his chosen language, he looks for a similar word in another language. In doing so, he's claiming that it's semi-random polyglot
- He is still ignoring letter frequency and position for the languages he claims to be represented by VMS text.
If someone else followed his exact 'method', they would come up with different results since there are so many degrees of freedom and subjective choice points. Choose the word breaks, choose a language, choose a version of the word used in any period of history (not those in use at a specific time). Even with all those degrees of freedom, it's still highly questionable in terms of vocabulary and grammar.
(18-12-2020, 09:57 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To be fair to Gerard he has not as yet made much effort to publicise this paper and I feel that sometimes his writings draw more attention here than they actually merit. It seems that sometimes there is nothing more attractive to some people than having a new theory to trash.
When a paper is posted on Researchgate or Academia.edu, as this one was, it is available to millions of viewers and receives significant hits on search engines.
We must admit that our author has the art of transforming a small paragraph of text that could make a blog of a few lines into a 7 page article.
(18-12-2020, 09:57 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To be fair to Gerard he has not as yet made much effort to publicise this paper and I feel that sometimes his writings draw more attention here than they actually merit. It seems that sometimes there is nothing more attractive to some people than having a new theory to trash.
JKP ably points out the technical problems. I'm still struck by his mildly obfuscatory avoidance of the term "Voynich" in refering to the manuscript. It is almost like he does not want VM researchers to read it. And yet he publishes in places like Lingbuzz where linguists are. Perhaps he's looking for readers he thinks would not be biased against him, but I don't think bias is really the problem he's having.
From my early correspondence with the author, I remember that one of his strategies to get his fantasies published was to put away any critic as a deranged Voynich nutcase. So from the beginning he cultivated a divide between himself and the "Voynich world". Maybe the avoidance of the V-word must be seen in that context.
Or maybe it's just a random quirk, like calling the pages "portfolios" even though early on I told him folios and portfolios are different things.
(19-12-2020, 08:37 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (18-12-2020, 09:57 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To be fair to Gerard he has not as yet made much effort to publicise this paper and I feel that sometimes his writings draw more attention here than they actually merit. It seems that sometimes there is nothing more attractive to some people than having a new theory to trash.
When a paper is posted on Researchgate or Academia.edu, as this one was, it is available to millions of viewers and receives significant hits on search engines.
How many people have read this article on Researchgate or Academia.edu or Lingbuzz?
Gerard Cheshire's theory is very much yesterday's news. His theory got a lot of attention when it was published in the newspapers due to him somehow getting it published in an academic journal, but since the newspapers somewhat retracted the theory his ideas have had very little traction I think.
Unsurprisingly, the newspapers, especially the tabloids don't do their homework with these kinds of stories and are happy to turn out a tale of a fascinating mystery solved to tantalise their readers. I saw an article recently in a tabloid newspaper about the Voynich which seemed to be a rehash the carbon dating results as if they were something new.
I don’t see why this chap doesn’t just write fiction, and be upfront that that’s what it is. I get that the popular fiction industry is competitive and audiences are fickle. But certainly someone with years in academe would at least know people connected to the industry.
I don’t say this lightly, but I’m a bit concerned for Prof Cheshire’s mental health. A willingness to violate the boundary between one’s inner subjective world and the external objective world is typical of severe social isolation and loneliness. (Think Tom Hanks’ character in “Castaway” naming a volleyball ‘Wilson’, and talking to it like a friend.)
Gerry, if you’re reading this, methinks you need to get your vaccine and start getting out more.
Cheshire has posted the paper (or about the paper) on researchgate.net, academia.edu, reddit.com, LingBuzz, H-net.org, and FaceBook, so far.
I don't know if he is using "Ischia" to isolate it for searches, to more specifically connect it to his own theories, or for some other reason.