The Voynich Ninja

Think he's just hawking the same one from last month.  Apparently it's been "peer-reviewed" now.  Presumably as well as the original paper was.

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I would be curious as to how the "Academia Letters" process of peer-review works in practice. This is not a normal journal, but rather a spin-off of the academia.edu website. So it may be misleading to present it as being in a peer-reviewed journal.

Whatever one might say about Gerard Cheshire he certainly has been successful at marketing. I still think that he must have sent his original paper to lots and lots of journals until he found a small minor journal that would publish it. And I wonder how much it was him promoting his theory behind the scenes to the media or how much it was just luck that it blew up the way it did. He seems to have made quite a bit of effort to hawk his theory wherever he can.

Below is my commentary on Gerard Cheshire's recent paper that I emailed to him.

You say: "The first detail is that no effort was invested in researching previous attempts by other scholars, working on the simple logic that they must already have covered all possible combinations of potential letter symbols and languages, given that so many had tried over so many years."

Then by this logic they must have covered the possibility that you go on to expound. You seem to have completely ignored the possibility that the manuscript is written in cipher and it seems very likely that you are completely ignorant of the ciphers of the period and so very poorly placed to judge if the Voynich is enciphered or not.

You say: "It was therefore possible to reason that the solution required an intuitive approach."

How do you conclude that others have not applied an "intuitive approach" before you? (Personally I think an "intuitive approach" is a bad idea as I think it better to rely on conscious reasoning rather than some kind of instinctive approach. )

You say: "So, the starting point was to consider the manuscript afresh, with an open mind, unpolluted by the ideas of others or any prior linguistic rules."

If you mean uninfluenced by the statistical data compiled by others then that seems a very bad idea.

"The metaphorical canvas was left entirely blank to allow complete freedom and flux in ideas and thought experimentation."

And in your first paper you date the manuscript to the 17th century, I believe, as you were blissfully unaware of the carbon dating. In fact if the carbon dating hadn't been pointed out to you then I daresay you would still be claiming the manuscript is 17th century. This is an example of the problem with ignoring all other research into the Voynich manuscript. In the end you still date the manuscript to 1444, I believe, outside the range of the carbon dating.

You say: "All manuscript symbols were recorded, by examining every page, until no new symbols could be found."

There are many rare symbols in the manuscript that you don't seem to have recorded at all.

You say: "Relative counts of the symbols were then made, by using a couple of pages, in order to get an idea of their likely correspondence with letters in the Italic alphabet,"

The default assumption of any researcher is that the underlying alphabet is the Latin alphabet. And applying frequency counts is the most standard technique to use to identify symbols. So you seem to have opted for applying the most obvious approach that has been tried 100 times before, but I guess you wouldn't know that as you have ignored all previous research. The problem as many people have ascertained before you is that this approach does not work. The frequencies of symbols based on all the pages of the manuscript, not merely two, are not at all consistent with the latin alphabet.

You say: "based on the notion that the manuscript was probably southern European, given the visual information provided by the manuscript illustrations, such as the human figures, their clothing and their material culture."

I thought you were ignoring all existing research, so on what basis do you conclude that the manuscript is Southern European and not Central European?

You say: "The methodology was to run many experiments with short manuscript words and to cross reference those possible words with Latin to see whether there was a feasible match."

This is rather vague. What do you mean by "experiments"?

You say: "Their symbols were also researched in order to find clues as to their cultural points of origin, which predated the Roman and the Greek."

How? It would be interesting if you could describe the specifics.

You say: "it was noticed that if words were not found in Latin, they were often found instead in other languages descended from Latin: i.e. Romance languages."

This is one example of where significant degrees of freedom in interpretation are introduced making it much easier to make any theory fit.

You say: "So, the logical deduction was a manuscript language somewhere between Latin and Romance, which is often described as proto-Romance or Vulgar Latin, as it was the spoken Latin of the lay population (vulgus)."

You are certainly not the first to suggest that the Voynich is written in "Vulgar Latin". (My opinion is that it is most likely written in enciphered Latin.)

You say: "Aside from the Latin and Greek inclusions, all manuscript words can now be found scattered among the various Iberian Romance languages: Aragonese, Asturian, Balear, Catalan (Valencian), Galician, Leonese, Mirandese, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish (Castillian)."

Again this provides huge degrees of freedom in interpretation. Any number of theory could fit with that level of degrees of freedom in interpretation.

You say: "The Graeco-Iberian linguistic marriage was explained by close examination of a narrative map among the pages of the manuscript(Cheshire, 2018)."

I remember giving you a test on the text of the page to which when presented with the test you said you could only tell me what the text said if you knew the context, that is not much of a way to translate anything. This is a general problem of your approach.

You say: "At that time Ischia and its citadel, Castello Aragonese, were in the possession of the Crown of Aragon, under Alfonso V, thereby explaining the Galician-Portuguese language (Bisson, 1986)"

I assume that you are referring to "The Medieval Crown of Aragon : A Short History", by Thomas N. Bisson published by Oxford University Press. Do you have a quote explaining why the presence of the crown of Aragon had any bearing on the "Galician-Portuguese language"?

You say: "For example, there are no double consonants, and all letters are in lowercase. There is also an absence of any punctuation marks, and the words of set phrases are often conjoined with no indication of division points."

This again provides you with more degrees of freedom.

You say: "many consonants are omitted, because they were not voiced, thus requiring the translator to insert them where appropriate and to choose the correct consonants."

This is just another example of a degrees of freedom problem.

You say: "a presumption of the mundane"

This is probably the only place where I heartily agree with your methodology.

You say: "Avoidance of both confirmation bias and negation bias is part of the scientific discipline, so that results can be considered impartial."

I must confess I think there is a large amount of "confirmation bias" in your approach to your Voynich theory.

You say: "many thousands of experiments and associated cross-reference"

Examples of this would be interesting.

You say: "consistently produces reasonable translations"

You must be the only one that thinks so, most people do not find your translations reasonable at all.

You say: "There is no reason to suppose the manuscript codex was devised as a deliberate cipher or code, as the main contents address only the workaday observations and knowledge of its author, regarding her duties as general practitioner and midwife to the court. It may have been serendipitous though, that only she and her fellow nuns were able to read it, as it addresses all manner of gynaecological and medical matters where etiquette might have required discretion."

You argue that it is not enciphered on the basis of what you claim are the contents of the manuscript based on your theory that the manuscript is not enciphered. This is circular reasoning. You do not know that it is not enciphered as you do not know what the contents of the manuscript are.

You say: "It is worth mentioning too, that computational methods could not have arrived at the solution for this writing system and language, because such methods merely accelerate and scaleup the very same processes of trial and error attempted on paper. The thinking behind the solution was more dynamic than that, and therefore required a freeform approach to problem solving that was developmental in its momentum. That is why it required a certain kind of human brain as, in computer terminology, the solution came with an ability to alternate and meander between various application programs to make progressive connections. A computer could only solve a writing system by already knowing the language, or vice versa, so it was the ability to solve both simultaneously that designated it a human task."

It is very clear that you are woefully ignorant of what computational methods actually are. Likewise you appear completely ignorant of statistical methods and certainly the statistical studies already done on the manuscript. The crudest form of frequency analysis is the closest you get to applying statistical analysis on the manuscript.

(23-01-2022, 11:37 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Below is my commentary on Gerard Cheshire's recent paper that I emailed to him.

You put quite a bit of effort into giving feedback to Cheshire's paper. I suspect, however, that the response, if any, will be very poor.

Yeah I don't expect him to interact with your arguments in any meaningful way...

I've given up sending him constructive criticism of his methods. It's not worth the emotional effort - his response is always some version of "You just don't understand what I'm doing."

As he says in that paper, it takes "a certain type of brain" to understand... we just don't have it! 

(23-01-2022, 03:39 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As he says in that paper, it takes "a certain type of brain" to understand... we just don't have it! 

And I, for one, am quite grateful for that.