I find it very difficult to read the faded smudged and often faint text. How can we possibly decipher the text of the Voynich when it is so hard to read in the first place?
Now in an ideal world we would have access to even higher resolution scans of the manuscript which might make it easier to determine what is written. However it seems very unlikely that there will be significantly higher resolution scans available any time soon. Frankly scans going down to a molecular level of resolution would not seem completely ridiculous.
Determining the precise pen motion corresponding to the blotchy characters is hard at the moment.
I don't think fading and resolution are the worst problems regarding legibility. There are many pages where the text is crisp and easy to see. Of course fading is a problem if one's crib happens to be faded, but only a small percentage of words is faded to the extent that they become difficult to read.
A much greater problem in my opinion is that certain characters exist on a continuum, notably a-o, s-r. This impacts both the reading of individual words as with fading, but also broader statistical analises.
(06-07-2021, 01:37 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I find it very difficult to read the faded smudged and often faint text. How can we possibly decipher the text of the Voynich when it is so hard to read in the first place?
Now in an ideal world we would have access to even higher resolution scans of the manuscript which might make it easier to determine what is written. However it seems very unlikely that there will be significantly higher resolution scans available any time soon. Frankly scans going down to a molecular level of resolution would not seem completely ridiculous.
Determining the precise pen motion corresponding to the blotchy characters is hard at the moment.
we seem to manage with other texts.
so i dont think we need microscopic level (let alone molecular) scans to read the text.
not to say it wont give extra information, perhaps it might.
I don't know if it's useful to look at the original size of the book.
I think every scratch has already been documented in detail. It doesn't get any clearer, rather more complicated.
(06-07-2021, 06:24 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A much greater problem in my opinion is that certain characters exist on a continuum, notably a-o, s-r.
This is certainly a problem. In the example I referred to on the Rosettes folio with EVA-asal or EVA-osal or maybe even EVA-aral/EVA-oral possibly representing the word "Asia". If that word association is correct then one still ends up with a poor crib word as we do not have a clear correspondence between word and specific well-defined Voynichese characters. With illegible words like this, one needs a much larger crib than with legible words to hope to make any progress deciphering Voynichese as one has to take into account many different possible Voynichese mappings in one's crib.
(06-07-2021, 06:24 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't think fading and resolution are the worst problems regarding legibility.
It seems to me that what we are really most interested in is the invisible pen paths of the scribe, not the patterns we see in the ink. These pen paths through the touch of ink have left a mark on the vellum. Sometimes two quite different pen paths can leave a very similar ink impression on the vellum. If I write the letter "o", I can do so with a variety of different pen paths; I can go clockwise around the circle or anti-clockwise around the circle and I can start at different positions of the circle.
So it seems to me that we are really trying to deduce is which pen paths produced a given Voynichese word from the marks left in the ink on the vellum. If we know the pen paths then we have a much better basis for reading the Voynichese text.
On the question of resolution this can help distinguish between dirt or other discoloration and ink. Even just a small dot of ink can give an insight into the pen path that produced that text.
I wonder whether, even if we could hypothetically understand the inner logic of Voynichese, it would be that easy to read. Even knowing and understanding the language/cipher of Voynichese one would still be left with the same questions as to whether a character is an "a" or an "o". It is certainly true that if one understood the underlying "language" it should, I would think, make it much easier to work out what the intended characters were in a given instance. Nevertheless it might still be difficult to read even one knew the fundamental system of Voynichese.
Looking at this, previously mentioned, example of text zoomed in from the current high resolution scan it is clear that the scan isn't high resolution enough to be able to confidently transcribe the text.
Is that dot, ink or dirt? The scan isn't simply clear enough to say. A higher resolution scan could make it easier to tell what is ink and what is not.
In an ideal world I would like to be able to highlight every molecule of ink and wipe everything else such as imperfections in the vellum, creases, stains etc. Now obviously that not going to happen, but it does say to me that despite the amazingly good quality scans of the Voynich that we have access to, they are far from perfect.
At the moment it is often unclear what is ink and what is not. Distinguishing between the two would help unravel the pen path that produced the writing on the vellum.
I wonder what scope there is for the use of software to transcribe the Voynich. Maybe a machine would be better at distinguishing the characters. Obviously handwriting recognition software exists, though is limited, for the latin alphabet. A machine could do things that people can't like cross compare all instances of a character as an aid to identification. Possibly a human could assist the algorithm by doing things like identifying where the text is, though I think Voynichese.com already does this.
If the highlighted dot is ink or dirt it has an impact on whether one thinks the first letter is EVA-a or EVA-o If it is ink then it seems more likely that we have an EVA-a If it is dirt then that makes it more probable that the character is an EVA-o