It’s a comedy paper, I’m sure.
Please, someone tell me he is making a joke.
He can’t even get the word definition right!
btw, he still uses portfolio instead of folio
Acomedemia noun researchers whose output is consumed only for the comedy value.
or
academonic, adjective,
belligerent defense to academic review, often peppered with ad hominem backlashes instead of rational arguments using factual evidence
Example: His irate and obsessive arguments for his aliens-ate-Venus theory were academonic.
Saw on You are not allowed to view links.
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uploaded published six days ago, I'd like to think it was a rapid response to Mark's You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. on categorizing wrong Voynich solutions and creating a "Cheshire category". But it seems from the pdf that it was a submission to Academic Letters in November.
The paper explains his "methodology" , and so unsurprisingly it's a short note. The method basically consisted of:
- deliberately avoiding researching previous attempts because "the solution required an intuitive approach" and "an open mind unpolluted by the ideas of others or any prior linguistic rules"
- identifying the vowels by their higher frequency
- identifying the consonants by "many experiments with short manuscript words" and cross-referencing those with Latin
- finding any missing consonants that were not in Latin in Romance languages instead. This led him to conclude that the language is a hybrid of Galician-Portuguese with Greek and Latin. The Greek is because the manuscript describes a rescue mission from Ischia which had a Greek population.
- noting that many consonants omitted because it reflects the spoken language and not usual spellings.
Some other points:
- Cheshire notes "the lack of formal grammar results in some ambiguity in exact transliteration and interpretation of the text" You don't say...
- Oddly he notes that avoidance of confirmation bias is part of the scientific discipline but gives zero evidence of how he tried to avoid it. Polluting his brain with other theories and why they failed might have been a good start!
- A conclusion that computational methods could never solve the Voynich: "it required a certain kind of human brain."
- He's also compiling a lexicon, meaning there's more to come...
Well it's not like 2021 has been a great year so far, might as well add in another Cheshire paper.
(12-12-2021, 01:46 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Saw on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.that Cheshire has a new You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. out. Since it was only uploaded published six days ago, I'd like to think it was a rapid response to Mark's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on categorizing wrong Voynich solutions and creating a "Cheshire category".
Yes, I saw his paper and I have nearly completed a long response to it. I did rather feel like his paper was a response to my thread, but maybe I am wrong. I was on the one hand disappointed, as I rather hoped we had seen the last of Gerard Cheshire's contributions to Voynich research, on the other hand I was quite pleased that he was illuminating his method which is a subject I was trying to explore in my thread.
Gerard suggests that others have not applied an intuitive approach, but given that he hasn't studied their theories how he knows this is unclear. Personally, I question whether applying an intuitive approach is a good idea. The definition of intuition is "the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning." In this context I think conscious reasoning is definitely preferable.
Gerard starts with the assumption that the Voynich is Southern European, which may not be correct, although the Italian peninsula is not an unreasonable assumption, though there is some scope for it to be from another part of central Europe.
On that basis he arrives at the Latin language being the language of the Voynich which is very plausible though not certain as there are local non-romance dialects which may be used such as Lombardo. The author could be someone from outside Italy, but who moved to Italy and so not writing in an romance language. There are Germanic features as well as Italian features within the manuscript. It is my personal opinion that it is Italian in origin, but I don't think one can automatically jump to that conclusion.
Gerard then lists the symbols in the manuscript seemingly missing or ignoring the rarer symbols. He then applies frequency analysis to those more common symbols in the manuscript. He then seeks to assign latin letters to the symbols on the basis of that frequency, presumably in order of the most frequent rather than by percentage. This of course is an incredibly standard elementary approach as this is the first idea that would occur to anyone which explains why Gerard thought he deciphered it in two weeks. Others have tried very similar things before, so it is in no way methodologically innovative in the Voynich context.
However this frequency does not work as others have discovered before him. The statistical properties of the text, something Gerard should have studied even if for understandable reasons he did not want to be biased by other theories. These properties preclude the possibility of a simple substitution especially in the context of latin.
So what does Gerard do once he decides that this must be the solution, well he has to try to make it fit? Clearly it isn't just latin as that doesn't fit, so he has to greatly increase his possible word hoard to make it fit. In addition he needs to decide where spaces are not on the basis of where they appear to be, but rather on the basis of where best fits his attempt at translation. Similarly he has to reject all grammar and allow for a complete word salad of text. Of the hoard of words he has created he selects the word that seems to best fit the context of the images and the other words in his word salad. In fact a construction of a sentence is about trying to somehow find the best word fit to the image context. These new words in his proto-romance language he adds to his new created proto-romance dictionary. Of course when the same "word" spelling occurs elsewhere then it is one of the numerous different meaning words with the same spellings. Of course this process of "discovering" the vocabulary of proto-romance can continue indefinitely. It is a degrees of freedom problem. Anyone can apply this method and arrive at a distinct and different solution, but essentially the same kind of solution.
By allowing for great flexibility in potential vocabulary there are a large number of options for a word for the author to consider then with flexibility in spacing and flexibility in grammar and flexibility in meaning there is a lot of flexibility for someone trying to construct a theory.
Others have applied this approach vulgar latin, but each translation is of course unique.
Remember initially his approach lead him to date the manuscript to the 16th century and he only modified his theory when the carbon dating was pointed out to him. A fundamental fact he should have made himself aware of even before he began his research, so much for ignoring the work of others.
(12-12-2021, 02:12 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, I saw his paper and I have nearly completed a long response to it
It's not gonna be Newton vs Leibnitz, Mark, not worth the effort!
(12-12-2021, 04:10 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (12-12-2021, 02:12 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, I saw his paper and I have nearly completed a long response to it
It's not gonna be Newton vs Leibnitz, Mark, not worth the effort!
My interest in Cheshire's theory fits with my theory and thread about classifying false solutions. The mistakes and flaws in constructing his theory are I think common to many other false solutions. So in analysing Cheshire's theory I can identity the standard errors that are shared with a set of other theories whether Turkic or related vulgar latin theories. So I am more interested in his theory as a means to an end not as in an end in itself(see my thread about classifying false solutions).
I mean it's perfectly useful to investigate drawbacks of his approach, but a public dispute with him is another thing, he really seems deaf to critique. Not unwilling to receive it, just deaf to it, I'm afraid.