The Voynich Ninja

A relatively new ( November 22, 2022 ) theory about the VMS. To me, this seems quite constructed, but everyone can make up his own mind.

The Voynich Manuscript: Decoded
Fletcher Crowe
Published: November 22, 2022


Abstract
The Voynich Manuscript (VM) is an illustrated codex hand-written in a unique writing
system whose pages have been carbon-dated to 1404-1438 CE.1 The document has
been studied by numerous cryptographers, but until this time no one has demonstrably
deciphered the text. The Voynich Manuscript has been called “The World’s Most Mysterious
Manuscript” and “The Book Nobody Can Read.” Sections of the manuscript appear to
deal with strange plants and flowers, naked women lounging in pools of water, celestial
bodies such as stars, the moon and the Sun, and kitchen spices and herbs. This research
shows that the strange Voynich symbols code for Arabic. An equivalency table between
Arabic letters and the Voynich characters is developed, and large sections of the Voynich
text are translated, including pages picturing flowers, stars, spices and women. A 600-word
dictionary of Arabic-Voynich-English was developed. Translation reveals that the text deals
exclusively with the Cathars, a religious heresy prominent in the south of France in the
12th – 13th centuries. A hypothesis is developed that the patron funding production of the
Voynich Manuscript may have been Alfonso V, king of Aragon/Catalonia and, King of
Naples.

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So now that we can read the Voynich, we've moved straight onto theories about who funded it? Sorry, but did I slip into a coma and miss 20 years of research?
Still, thanks for posting the link.

If anyone decides to peruse the paper to the end, which I don't recommend anyway, can they confirm my confusion -- on page 126, figure 39, the author claims the VMS "features the illustration of a tube, conduit, hollow column or canon barrel labeled “Alphonsina”" and shows an image very unlike anything in the style of the Voynich, and certainly I've never seen such an image contained in the VMS. He cites no folio number or location for the image. Are my eyes deceiving me or did he genuinely include an image clearly not from the VMS and claim it to be?

I was wondering how another journal could make the same mistake as Romance Studies.  But a quick You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. gives You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Medcrave is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  That explains a lot.

Onto the theory...one good thing is that he does try to "test" his initial alphabet against the zodiac names and have a commentary section that acknowledges where the hit misses, although his confidence in the overall conclusion seems quite misplaced.

But apart from that, we see the same basic problems that we see in almost every solution:

• lack of accounting for degrees of freedom.  The Voynichese has been tortured to "match" Arabic but there seems no attempt to categorize the distortions that are made to the word, let alone explain them with the aim of demonstrating consistent patterns of change.  Moreover, for some, I couldn't even see how the identifications in the correspondence table gave rise to the word, e.g. he could have explained better how otolyyty becomes al alyah or otal becomes (al) suhayl.
  
• seemingly no attempt to explain how Arabic - or the way Arabic is used in the manuscript - correlates with the structure of glyphs in Voynichese words and the line patterns.  Nor anything to explain the scribal differences or Currier variants.  
  
• word salads.  To his credit, he did attempt translation of sentences, and even some pages.  That's more effort than 90% of solvers.  But the translations show the same issues we've seen in the few other solutions that attempted a translation.  We see a word salad, and the author makes no attempt to compare it with Arabic syntax.  
  

We go from:  

Quote:Word salad:  1 die, live, stay, be buried | 2 death | 3 and | 4a agree | 4b what, which/any | 5 join | 6a fly off | 6b souls waiting for release | 7a accept | 7b mercy | 8 Cathars | 

to

Quote:Grammatical-but-strange-English:  "Although buried and [facing] death, the Cathar (souls) are joined [by the Quadi and agree to accept any mercy, and the waiting souls fly off to live again." 

That's quite the leap!  And nothing about whether the first makes any kind of grammatical sense in Arabic.  In the acknowledgements at the end, the author references "Dr Esam Alhadi, originally from Sudan, who guided my Arabic translations"  but there is a conspicuous lack of any proof, or even statement, that the word salad is not a word salad in Arabic too.  The other translated sentences are all of a similar style. 

(07-02-2023, 10:11 PM)cabeswater Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are my eyes deceiving me or did he genuinely include an image clearly not from the VMS and claim it to be?

You are not wrong!!  He even further annotates it as "Figure 39 VM Object Showing Name “Alfonsina.”  

It took me ages to track it down, since nothing turned up in google reverse image search.  I've eventually found it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  It is a sketch of a cannon by Antonio Pisanello, previously thought to be da Vinci's.

That is a huge error to have got through any proofreading, although his publisher has accepted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

(08-02-2023, 02:59 AM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-02-2023, 10:11 PM)cabeswater Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are my eyes deceiving me or did he genuinely include an image clearly not from the VMS and claim it to be?

You are not wrong!!  He even further annotates it as "Figure 39 VM Object Showing Name “Alfonsina.”  



It took me ages to track it down, since nothing turned up in google reverse image search.  I've eventually found it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  It is a sketch of a cannon by Antonio Pisanello, previously thought to be da Vinci's.



That is a huge error to have got through any proofreading, although his publisher has accepted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

I'd just like to add that comparison of Voynich containers (if not actual "containers") to ornate cannons is a long tradition, that I personally saw first by Ellie Velinska in the thread linked below in 2016 (I believe the cannon discussion was originally on her blog, but it is sadly no longer available -- but luckily some parts she re-posted on the forum):

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but this visual connection could well have been made earlier.  This is possibly where the error was made.

(08-02-2023, 02:59 AM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Are my eyes deceiving me or did he genuinely include an image clearly not from the VMS and claim it to be?

You are not wrong!!  He even further annotates it as "Figure 39 VM Object Showing Name “Alfonsina.”  

At the same time as voynechese I'm learning English and I had understood the sentence
"These indications may explain why the VM features the
illustration of a tube, conduit, hollow column or canon barrel labeled
“Alphonsina” (Figure 39)" 
that VM presents in its images an object presented elsewhere under the name of Alphonsina. 
I regretted when reading that the author did not quote a reference. 
However, I don't think that the author claims that the image of Alphonsina comes from VM.

(08-02-2023, 02:53 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, I don't think that the author claims that the image of Alphonsina comes from VM.

This is pretty clear:  "Figure 39 VM Object Showing Name “Alfonsina.” 

I only hope he accidentally pasted in the wrong image and somehow never noticed, as opposed to the possibility that he thought it was from the Voynich.

I guess he could mean "look I found a Voynich object elsewhere, it says Alfonsina, this is a clue!"

*shudder*

I have always been quite intrigued both about the possibility of Arabic language or script behind the Voynich MS writing, and about star names in the MS. So when I first saw this paper, I made quite an effort to see if I could reconstruct his name matches from the information in the paper, and see how consistent it all is.
After all, consistency is one of the weak points in almost all proposed solutions.

This effort led me to quite a number of sobering insights.

1. He is extremely vague precisely about how to match the Voynich writing to Arabic. This should be a critical element of the paper

2. The main tables for this topic: Figures 5 and Figures 7: do not match.

3. His main key is the star name Alrischa. This name appears in the paper in 8 different ways (or even more?). Figure 2 already has one in the box and one in the caption. In the text we have "Al Rescha" and "Al Resha". Caption of Figure 3: "Alresha" pronounced "Arrisha". Figure 4 has two more. It turns out that the one matching Voynichese is the caption of Figure 2, which is completely different from all the other ones. The apostrophe matters.

4. It was very hard to understand from all his writing, that the correspondence between Arabic and Voynichese he is proposing is a phonetic one. This of course contradicts the match in Figure 2, which is not phonetic at all.

5. I have not been able to find a convincining match (at all!) for the vast majority of star names in Figure 4 or Figure 5.

Short summary: this is not working at all.

Now on the question of the mysterious Alphonsine barrel in Figure 39, here I need to be more critical of the collected voynich.ninja readership than of Fletcher Crowe. At least he has done his basic reading .

If we wished to assess Arabic as a possible precursor language of the Voynich manuscript, we could start with Abu Yusuf Al-Kindi's frequency table, which dates from the ninth century; or alternatively the letter frequencies from Abulfida' Ibn Kathir's The Beginning and the End, written in the 14th century. A further alternative would be to use Ibn Kathir's frequencies but to combine the variants of alef (ﺍ ﺃ ﺇ ﺁ), as Al-Kindi evidently did.

The frequencies of the glyphs in the v101 transliteration, in descending order, and the frequencies of the letters in Al-Kindi's frequency table, have a correlation of 97.2 percent. That in itself is not remarkable: with two short sequences in descending order, it's easy to obtain a correlation of over 90 percent. Many European languages yield a similar correlation with the v101 transliteration.

However, it seems to me that the juxtaposition of these frequency tables opens the possibility of a provisional transliteration of any Voynich page to Arabic. Having done so, it would probably be necessary to reverse the order of the letters in each transliterated word (for which there exist online tools such as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

If the resulting text contained any recognisable Arabic words, we might be on the right track. If not, it might be necessary to modify the v101 transliteration, for example by combining visually similar glyphs such as 6, 7, 8 and &; or by disaggregating glyphs that look like strings (e.g. m => iN, n =>iN); or by making distinctions between initial, interior and final glyphs. That would change the v101 frequency table and consequently change the mapping from glyphs to Arabic.

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