The Voynich Ninja

On your Middle English theory.
What is a bagpipe doing in a Swiss chronicle?
I always thought it was a purely Scottish musical instrument.
And in the text you can see that he writes the town of Glarus once with "us" and once with "9".


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(06-05-2021, 01:29 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On your Middle English theory.
What is a bagpipe doing in a Swiss chronicle?
I always thought it was a purely Scottish musical instrument.
And in the text you can see that he writes the town of Glarus once with "us" and once with "9".


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Bagpipes are traditional in many areas. They made them out of animal pelts. They are popular in Bulgaria.

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13th century Galician-Portuguese manuscript Cantigas de Santa Maria :

Whilst I would love to dwell on bagpipes, Scottish, Swiss, Bulgarian, Galician-Portuguese or otherwise--thank you so much JKP!--I must proceed with the difficult work of reading and interpreting more lines of Middle English text near the bottom of folio page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . (You know you're on the right track when the work stops being enjoyable, because you're not just making up whatever you would like the text to read, but rather you must attempt to figure out the meaning that the original author was actually intending to convey.) 

It has been a while since I posted the preceding lines, so I will refresh readers' memories with the interpretation and translation of the two lines preceding the new lines to follow below:

" Spur soueth hotər : theiris son risəth o bimoueth "
" al-to siteth yong, hoting acme gatteething riteth "

" Spur ["Hotspur"] sows/begets hotter : their son rises, ever mocks [Bolingbroke] "
" He absolutely reigns young, promising at maturity he stabs the gap-toothed [Bolingbroke] "

Again, these are the 7th and 6th lines of text up from the bottom of folio page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Now here I will present below the 5th, 4th, and 3rd lines up from the bottom of this page.

And so forsooth the following three lines forthwith:

EVA transliteration:
[ opolkeor  olchocfhy  cphol  chypaldy  cholols  chkaiin  olfcham ]
[ sysheos  okaly  cheos  otey  ykar  ls  aiin  okaiin  ytolkal ]
[ dtshol  dytal  okar  olol  sheol  qockhy  qokaly  salol  dalam ]

Yorkist cipher letter values:
" fOsteOR  OsYOnK  mch  YKpissK  Ychchl  YtO  chtYiB "
" lKtheOl  disK  YeOl  feK  Ktir  sl  O  OtO  Kpctis "
" spthOs  sKpis  Otir  OsOs  theOs  hOnK  hOtisK  lisc  sisiB "

My interpretation of these lines:
" foster, os-yong macch ek-gossip, lacche oute BiYtch "
" alacke-loueth dising, louey feng riting, als o out o capacites "
" spathest scapes, outir-usest theus hong, hout-isynge schil/lich, si-sib "

Modern English translation:
" Child, as a young companion and pal, take the life of the bitch"
" Alack, [the bitch/Bolingbroke] loves dice-playing, loves cutting a catch, as/also [cutting] one out of legal rights "
" You spat out misdeeds, shamelessly you use decrees to hang [people], surpassing legal right, distant relative "

In the last line above the addressee is now clearly Bolingbroke, rather than the young Percy, heir of the deceased "Hotspur". This transition has been set up by the previous line, which begins the description of Bolingbroke's offenses. I also note that the last line above uses the familiar or "disrespectful" singular "thou" forms of the verbs "spathest" and "usest". 

Please keep in mind that Bolingbroke was Henry IV, the king of England at the time when these lines were written. With this in mind, you may understand the need for absolute secrecy and obscurity on the part of the author(s) in the composition of this manuscript. I too would use Spanish-trained rather than English or French scribes, writing in a Spanish-style script, and use German rather than English or French to make notes in the marginalia, if I were the Duke of York and I were writing such things about the king! I would also use an extremely obscure cipher as well. I would make any illustrations ambiguous enough to be plausibly deniable as Yorkist imagery if necessary, just in case the manuscript fell into the wrong hands of Henry IV or an official in his court. 

Geoffrey

I may now present the reading and interpretation of the final two lines of folio page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , which immediately follow the five lines presented in the post above:

EVA transliteration:
[ yroleeey  arairaly  pchody  tshaly  alols  ykaly  kar  aram ]
[ dchol  chokal  saiin  dal  okalsalchey ]

Yorkist cipher letter values:
" KrcheeeK  irOrisK  pYcK  pthisK  isOsl  KtisK  tir  iriB "
" sYOs  Ydis  lO  sis  dislisYeK "

My interpretation of these lines:
" kirche-eek -- irour-isynge, picchynge, path-isynge -- is also accitynge tir-biri "
" siest side, lo! sis dis-lisynge "

Modern English translation:
" The Church also -- seeing wrath, equipping with weapons, seeing the path -- is also summoning the three regions "
" You fall down sideways, lo! [your] good fortune being ruined "

The last line, like the 3rd to last line presented in the post above, is addressed to Bolingbroke (Henry IV), again using the familiar or "disrespectful" singular "thou" form of the verb "siest". 

The penultimate line is most interesting from a historical perspective. First of all, the mention of "The Church" may be a reference to the participation of the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, in the rebellion against Henry IV in 1405. This episode is immortalised in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2. 

Moreover, the description of "summoning the three regions" may be a reference to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which I have described previously in this thread as part of my theory. This was the agreement made in February 1405 by Owain Glyndwr (Glendower) of Wales; Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the Yorkists' favoured claimant to the English throne, Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March; and Henry Percy, 1st Earl of Northumberland, father of "Hotspur" Henry Percy who was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, and who along with his son is the subject of the 7th, 6th, and 5th to last lines on this page presented above. These three parties agreed to unite in an alliance against Henry IV and upon victory to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., with Mortimer ruling southern England, Percy (Northumberland) ruling northern England, and Glyndwr ruling Wales and a part of western England. 

Geoffrey

(29-04-2021, 09:43 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Geoffrey, allow me to make a suggestion. Your hypothesis is that the VMs is enciphered Middle English and has to do with Edward, Second Duke of York. Your null hypothesis, therefore, is that the VMs is not enciphered Middle English, and has nothing to do with Edward, Second Duke of York. Falsify this null hypothesis. If it’s not true that the VMs is not enciphered Middle English and has nothing to do with Edward, Second Duke of York, what might one expect to find? I strongly recommend inviting other researchers to help you with making a list of findable things in the VMs that one should expect to find, if your null hypothesis is wrong. Then go looking for those things. If you and/or other researchers readily find examples in the VMs of most of the items you listed, then reject the null hypothesis, and proceed from the assumption that against any appearances to the contrary, the VMs is enciphered Middle English, and has to do with Edward, Second Duke of York.

On the other hand, if your scavenger hunt doesn’t turn up much, that doesn’t mean your hypothesis isn’t true. But it does mean it’s probably too far-fetched to be worth pursuing further, barring you finding a multitude of things that resist any other plausible explanation.

But this is only a suggestion. It’s your project. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. ?

I think that this was already done.

I remember a post, but I have been unable to find it again, in which the top ten most frequent words in a Middle English text were listed. At least some of these words should appear with some higher frequency in any solution that suggests that this is the language of the source text.

This has not been achieved.

I am also reminded of a piece of knowledge that Voynich researchers of 15-20 years ago would all have known, but which now may be largely unknown. This is about a piece of proposed plaintext from Leonell Strong, in supposed Middle English, that was emphatically rejected by Mary D'Imperio. It said:

Quote:When skuge of tun'e-bag rip. seo uogon kum sli of se mosure-issue ped-stans skubent, stokked kimbo-elbow crawknot

Translating it to modern English may be left as an exercise to the reader, but could be looked up in D'Imperio's Elegant Enigma.

Geoffrey wrote elsewhere

Quote:I mean that I take the Takahashi transliteration as my starting point, rather than saying, "Oh, here I dispute Takahashi's transliteration," and changing the EVA transliteration value before proceeding. I accept the Takahashi transliteration as it is for now, then apply my EVA/Currier : Yorkist cipher letter value correspondence table.

The freedom you are taking when converting any Voynich transliteration to (supposed) Middle English, and then from that to (supposed) meaningful English are at least two orders of magnitude worse than any transliteration errors that may exist.

(07-05-2021, 02:28 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I remember a post, but I have been unable to find it again, in which the top ten most frequent words in a Middle English text were listed. At least some of these words should appear with some higher frequency in any solution that suggests that this is the language of the source text.

This has not been achieved.

There are many perfectly logical and plausible reasons why the Voynich MS text (or more precisely the Language A sections) may be written in Middle English in a very strange cipher, and yet the most frequent words in the Voynich MS text may still not correspond very closely with the most frequent words in a more typical Middle English text. Here are just a small number of the many possible reasons for such a discrepancy:

1. The cipher text omits the English articles "a, an, the", etc., entirely.

2. The small function words, which are the most frequent words, are particularly susceptible to an added level of homonymy due to the particular unusual cipher rules of the "Yorkist cipher" that I propose was employed. This will scramble the very concept of "word frequency". At the very least, it would be necessary to recalculate all of the standard word frequency lists for standard Middle English texts, applying the "Yorkist cipher" rules to all of the words in them, and see how those frequency lists compare with the Voynich MS text word frequency statistics.

3. In the lines of text at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (all of the last 7 lines now) that I have interpreted so far, the style and structure of the text appears to be that of a series of one-line epigram type statements. The content of each line is related to the lines that precede and follow it, but for the most part each line is a distinct grammatical entity. At most the grammatical connections may extend to two lines of consecutive text. Naturally such observations are provisional after just 7 lines of text. But that is the pattern that is emerging, and indeed it is consistent with what we know of the Voynich MS text and its well-known "line-based structural features".

A series of hundreds or thousands of one-line epigram style statements is not necessarily going to have word frequency statistics that are similar to more standard types of texts in the same language. It is easier to avoid the extremely frequent use of common function words in a stylized one-line epigram. If one writes each such epigram separately, hundreds or thousands of times, certain words that even Chaucer or Wycliffe cannot avoid using very frequently can possibly be used with much less frequency. 

Regarding the comparison of my work to Leonell Strong's claimed Middle English interpretation, I can document each word form and affix I use by reference to the University of Michigan's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I highly doubt that Strong's Middle English plaintext achieved such a high standard. 

Geoffrey

For those who may be interested, I have posted a draft paper presenting my Yorkist English Voynich MS theory on the Academia.edu website (the first time I have ever written publicly about the Voynich MS outside of the Voynich Ninja forum). I have opened a discussion session so that any scholar may read the draft paper and make comments in the discussion session. Since I first posted this draft paper there several days ago, I have updated my work with my own comments in the discussion session, in line with the material that I have posted in recent days in this thread.

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Geoffrey

(07-05-2021, 02:28 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that this was already done.

Agreed. I'm just trying to help anyone who might not get it, understand a bit better why Geoffrey's Yorkist theory isn't gaining more traction.

(07-05-2021, 07:04 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-05-2021, 02:28 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that this was already done.

Agreed. I'm just trying to help anyone who might not get it, understand a bit better why Geoffrey's Yorkist theory isn't gaining more traction.

I have already written and posted a very thorough reply to Rene's post, demonstrating why the criterion that Rene demands is in fact not a reasonable one to insist on as a necessary criterion for a valid solution.

Geoffrey