(19-02-2024, 10:10 AM)Rustandi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes i understand your worry. But that is the reason keywords are very important. Sometimes they are easy to find, I will give one example : From the picture below one of the keywords is the first word Balaustiis ( pomegranate flower). So the plant is pomegranate.
But your system does not produce "balaustiis". The EVA is kchsy, and your system produces
blsts. It's then your brain that turns it into a recognizable word by adding in vowels at your discretion. You have free rein to add whatever vowel you like, including dipthongs, at any part of the word, including at the beginning and the end until it produces a word you are happy with. It looks like you can also double consonants if you choose.
This means you could have chosen
- "balistas" (and a whole host of different inflections),
- "abluistis";
- "bulliistis", and
- "ebulliistis".
You've gone for "balaustiis" because a pomegranate flower makes more sense in a herbal manuscript than the others and you want your solution to be correct. But this is confirmation bias. Someone who is using your system but is not personally invested in it being true would not necessarily settle for "balaustiis" being the word.
The problem is worse for words like chor and chol as Marco showed. The vowel wild cards - and indeed the ability to insert any vowel into any place of the word, including the start and end of the word - show that there are far many more possibilities than the selection Marco chose. This gives your confirmation bias free rein to pick the word you think is most suitable. Your system is not producing the translations: it is your brain that is doing the heavy lifting by going through all the possibilities and picking one. Different users of the system would pick different words.
You can see the same issue in any of the rival solution threads I linked to. The Turkish thread in particular focuses on "keywords" that they argue would be too much of a coincidence to have randomly popped up, given the expected content of the folio in question. In fact, they say it is "mathematically impossible". But all things are possible when you have so much freedom in the system.
The biggest problem for your system, however, is that even with all these degrees of freedom, the output is nowhere near being viable Latin.
My advice to you is similar to before: have a read of at least some of the discussions on rival solutions; see what reasons people bring up in their criticisms; and consider how those apply to your own system and methodology, and what you can do differently. My biggest piece of advice would be not to focus on solving the Voynich but instead on adding to the information we know about how it works.
I am really appreciate all of everyone suggestion and input on my finding. I just want to make it clear that my ciphers have rules to follow. The rules come from my finding in the manuscript, so I did not make the rules as I like. For example :
The word Balaustiis can not be translated as abluistis or ebulliistis as tavie suggested, because the word do not start with vowel symbol. ( as I mentioned in my previous post about ciphers rules )
If i just use my ciphers alone ( without the rules) the translation would be BLSTS not Balaustiis.
As I mentioned in my previous post, if we browse the manuscript we will find stand alone symbol, for example we can find some of letter ST symbol. This one symbol should have meaning, that is to form a word. So, if i use my ciphers alone the translation would be ST. It does not have any meaning, for that reason this symbol should have vowel that follows eventhough no vowel symbol written.
As I always explain that I am not latin language expert, so I am hoping anyone in this forum who knows better could work together to make much better translation. Looking forwards on the good news.
Since the Slovenian theory was mention to be based on false methodology, I feel necessary to explain a few things that have been mentioned in this post. But before that, I have to emphasize that the Slovenian transliteration/transcription alphabet was not based on any key-word, but on the shapes of the Latin letters: a,c,d,e,h,i,l,m,n,o,r,s,u,v,w,z,y, found in the 15th century manuscripts. Because of those letter-shapes, I was able to find enough Slovenian words with 1:1 mapping without any adjustments for the phonetic writing or for different uses of Latin letters for Slovenian sounds. Based on the words before and after the readable words, as well as prefixes and suffixes, I was able to figure out the unknown letter-shapes. Also, the VM unique letter-shapes are not used in other European manuscripts (I had compared five different manuscripts in different languages - Latin, Czeck, Slovenian, German), just as the Latin letters (b,k,p,t, sv, zv) I assigned to them are not used in the VM.
Once you get the proper transcription alphabet (or at least the majority of letters), you can covert Voynich words into Latin spelling. With a proper alphabet, you should be able to find some medieval Latin, German, Slavic and other words, because some words, like char (charm), are spelled the same in many different languages. And there are some words that are spelled the same, but they have different meanings in different languages. The more words you find in a single language, the more likely it is that that the VM is written in that language.
Because of the medieval writing and linguistic changes being implemented in the 15th century, it would be difficult to get many Latin words with 1:1 match, even if the language were Latin.
The next stage would be to look at the languages that would be more suitable for the VM writing, considering some known properties, like prefixes, suffixes, the EVA daiin, dy frequencies. That alone indicates that the VM language conforms to some grammatical rules.
The imagined vowels: Voynich Manuscript uses no diacritic markers for different vowels. The short vowels and semi-vowels are often dropped in dialectal speech, and since VM is written in phonetic, those vowels are missing. I don't know about other languages, but this was the serious problem that was causing a lot of confusion in the first Slovenian writing. To make the words more readable and less ambiguous, the vowels were re-inserted (after being dropped when Latin had no equivalent letters for semi-vowels) : In Slovenian language, just about any of the five vowels (a,e,i,o,u), or diphthongs could be added. Even the same author could spell the same word several different ways, even in the same sentence.
How, then, can I prove that the vowel of diphthong was not inserted according to my desire to find a proper spelling for a desired word? The answer is in the old Grammar books and also in contemporary Slovenian dialects: like three different words for English word 'day': dan, den, din (Google will only find contemporary literary spelling DAN).
The strings of vowels: In the VM, there are strings of three or four vowels. This was, and is still the case in Slovenian pronunciation, therefore to make sense of the words, the consonants need to be inserted. To somebody who is not familiar with Slovenian language, this might again like choosing the consonant at will to 'make out' the desired word. This is actually not the case, because there are rules developed by the linguists, and there are the written words to support the proper choice of consonant. In Slovenian language, the vowels w,y, l and r were used either as consonant or as vowels. Considering also the sound changes as different suffixes are added, there could be a lot of variety in spelling, however, it has to be explainable and demonstrated by examples. I suppose this is why some cling to the idea of coded or abbreviated language, because they can make their own rules that most likely do not work for the entire text.
Test based on most/least frequent words: It has been suggested that most frequent words in the target language should correspond with the most frequent words in the VM. I had seen the list of Goodle-generated list of 100 most frequent words in Slovenian language, and I could not find any of those words in the VM. The reason for this is that Google is useless for medieval Slovenian. Not only the spelling, but the vocabulary had changed. I imagine this is to some degree true for other languages.
However, the most frequent words are written most clearly and unambiguously. They also indicate various grammatical patterns, and to some degree the subject matter and the style of writing. The English words 'am', 'was' and 'will' indicate different tenses. For example: the EVA char is used several times in the Aquileian missal to mean 'a song', while in Slovenian language it means 'charm' or 'magic spell'. The connection here is the pagan word 'spell' which could be parsed into Slovenian 's pell' (si pel) - you sang.
I am amazed to see that those who claim to translate the entire page of text, or the names of the most exotic plant, cannot translate 100 most frequent words in the VM.
Out of approximately 30.000 total words, 10.600 seem to be unique (spelled differently). Out of these 10.600, about 8000 words are used only once, while about 30 words are occurring more than 100 times.
What information does this convey? Since the unique words often differ only by a letter or two from the corresponding frequently used words, we can conclude that the language is highly inflective (the words can differ due to the prefix or to the suffix, or both). There could also be a variation of spelling, some spelling mistakes and ambiguous spelling, even ambiguous transliteration, as pointed out by several VM researchers.
In my research, I only found a few genuine unique words that occur only once, therefore I am skeptical of all those solutions that are based on a unique names of flowers, months, or stars.
My suggestion would be to go back to the basic assumption that the VM is based on Latin alphabet and find the proper transcription alphabet, so that the transcription into Latin letters can be compared. Using such alphabet, different language proposals could then explain how the Latin letters correspond to that particular language. And those who believe the language is coded, can explain how the alphabet is used for a code.
I would like to share another translation I have made on VM. Because this forum is the place to discuss everything about VM, I would not mind your criticism and put that as my encouragement to do better.
This page explain about gilding, one of the ancient art technique. I had done only the first paragraph and writing on the drawing, because it took a lot time to understand it. If i have to do full page translation, it would take months or even a year.
Ugh it just ate my very long reply.
I will try to reconstruct it and hope that doesn't make it even longer or less coherent...(spoiler: it did)
(19-02-2024, 06:52 PM)Rustandi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The word Balaustiis can not be translated as abluistis or ebulliistis as tavie suggested, because the word do not start with vowel symbol. ( as I mentioned in my previous post about ciphers rules )
Sorry! I missed that. I saw that some words like axos, exemeristi, auxeras had a vowel added to their start, but I somehow missed that they all had x in common. Apologies!
Quote:If i just use my ciphers alone ( without the rules) the translation would be BLSTS not Balaustiis.
As I mentioned in my previous post, if we browse the manuscript we will find stand alone symbol, for example we can find some of letter ST symbol. This one symbol should have meaning, that is to form a word. So, if i use my ciphers alone the translation would be ST. It does not have any meaning, for that reason this symbol should have vowel that follows even though no vowel symbol written.
I don't have any issue with the idea of an abjad. Linguists have taken that possibility seriously. The problem is that - unless there are further rules I've missed - you have the flexibility of adding any vowel, including dipthongs,
almost whenever you like...and it still does not result in viable Latin. I don't mean that it produces sloppy Latin that an expert could refine with a few tweaks. The output of your system is not Latin. Radically changing the output so that it resembles viable Latin would be yet a further distortion of the system, adding more degrees of freedom, and make your results even less repeatable. I'll explain what I mean with a few mock scenarios to draw out the distinction between different types of decipherment:
Let's imagine I've discovered that the manuscript is actually written in enciphered English. I have used my system to translate part of folio 2r as follows:
Totally Fictitious Translation Wrote:This herb is Centaurea. There are small blue flowers. The leaves are grey and green and shaped like a lance. Commonly found in fields of corn. To be gathered when Saturn is in Aries. For healing wounds and against poison.
How did I arrive at this translation? Let's consider the output of three systems, which I'll put in quote boxes.
Quote: Scenario A: my system produces the above text. The output matches the Voynichese words exactly to the above. There is no ambiguity, or other options for word matches. When Marco uses my system on 2r, he produces the exact same output.
This would receive interest! It wouldn't be accepted (yet). But it would be a startling coincidence for several words associated with Centaurea to feature in a folio suspected to be about Centaurea, when my system gave me no choice about those words and spat them out in fairly grammatical, coherent English. Startling coincidences do happen, but this system would be deemed worthy of further analysis.
Quote:Scenario B: by itself, my system does not produce the exact words of the above translation. I have to step in and help. I usually have to add extra letters. A lot of them. There are little to no rules about which letter is added and when, or when not. I chose some of the words above out of a range of 3-5 choices. For others, I had around 20 options. For some, I had far more than 20. With this flexibility, I arrive at the above translation. But when Marco uses my system on 2r, he either chooses completely different words to mine, or he feel unable to choose.
I've produced the same results in both Scenario A and Scenario B. But the Scenario B results are much less impressive because they were produced more by my mind than by my system. Those startling words like "centaurea" and "blue" no longer look so startling when you consider that I gave myself over 35 options for each word through my ability to add letters. The more flexibility I give myself with letters, the more candidates for word matches I have to choose from. I am casting a very wide net, and so I am likely to find the fish I want. My mind is primed to select a word that has something to do with centaurea. Marco's is not, and so he has an entirely different output. My solution is not repeatable by other people. Unless I can find new rules to reduce the degrees of freedom and produce strong results in other folios, it is almost certainly wrong.
Quote:Scenario C: the same as B except it does not produce the coherent translation above. Under this scenario, my output does not make grammatical sense; some of the words are not actually English; some are English but are given meanings that are not correct but fit the theme. It is a "word salad".
This scenario suffers from the same problems as Scenario B...and more: even with all that flexibility, I have failed to produce a coherent translation. The output is not close to being recognizable English sentences. If I tried to rewrite it into sensible English, this is again my mind producing the output, not my system. My system is undoubtedly wrong.
We have never seen a Scenario A for the Voynich. To the best of my knowledge, there has not even been a Scenario B. There have only been Scenario Cs, and solutions that don't even make it up to Scenario C because there are no translations of full paragraphs or even sentences.
Thank you tavie for providing different scenario of the system. But in my personal opinion, I don't think there will be a system alone that could solve it with the way VM was written. So, I think we still need to use our brain to solve it.
Tavie put it very well. In addition to that, we have seen this many times before. Always different systems, different languages, different translations, but they do essentially the same thing you are doing now.
There is probably a good reason why we keep seeing this style of solution over and over. My guess is that it hits a perfect spot where, statistically speaking, the translation is no longer viable, but we still feel like it is.
You, and people who have come up with similar systems, still feel like you are working with the manuscript's text: you start from the text, and part of the system is rigid and consistent.
But at the same time, the degree of freedom required results in a situation where the number of possible translations for a single page is greater than the number of stars in the universe. What this system is essentially doing is using the MS text as a prompt for creative writing. But it makes you feel like you are solving it.
A large amount of text in the MS is without images. How would you translate such a page? And would someone else ever get a similar translation? Does your system actually provide a solution if everyone's result for a text-only page would be wildly different?
We are all trying to have a contructive discussion with Rustandi, but the answer (post 26) to Tavie's post (#25) shows that this is not going anywhere.
This is a typical solution attempt, which is certainly not correct.
My interest is why so many independent approaches all work (read: fail) in the same way.
Anyway, I am happy that the discussion is civil and hope it stays that way.
If Rustandi is interested in good advice, then there is already a lot of it in this thread.
Importantly:
- the translation from Voynichese to 'Latin' is not valid because lots of arbitrary additions are made. Example: the four-character word kchsy is converted to a 10-character word, meaning that more than half is arbitrary.
- the proposed Latin text is NOT Latin.
(20-02-2024, 03:25 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My interest is why so many independent approaches all work (read: fail) in the same way.
Yours and Koen's similar question is really quite thought-provoking. It would probably make an interesting thesis to examine all the factors behind this, and it would also be interesting to see what the gender balance of solvers is. Ultimately, though, I think the reason that all wrong solutions are wrong in the same way (to misquote Tolstoy) is because all "solvers" are caught by the exact same trap at the very start.
At the very basic level, I think the two biggest factors are:
- a) not knowing how easy it is to "see" words of any language in the Voynich. If you don't have experience with statistics or comparative linguistic, it's hard to accept that even one single word is just a coincidence. Intuitively, it feels that it can't be a coincidence.
- b) wanting to be the person who deciphers the undecipherable manuscript. This combines badly with a). Thirty minutes' worth of reading failed theories on this forum is enough to fix the lack of knowledge above. All those people with different solutions claiming their findings "cannot be a coincidence" is an unbeatable demonstration of how common coincidences are. But solvers are so keen to crack open the mystery that they dive straight into developing a system without doing their reading. And once they've come up with their solution, it's too late because they are now personally attached to it. Confirmation bias waves away and minimizes the problems.
Imagine you didn't know how common these coincidences are, and you've just heard about the Voynich, and you think
"Hmm, I bet no one's ever looked into it being Gaelic", and so you crack it open, spend a few hours toying around possible letter matches for the glyphs...and then you look up an online Gaelic dictionary and one of the first meanings you see is "plant"...it must feel like you've struck gold or won the lottery. It can't be a coincidence.
And so you try out those letter matches on other words, and with a bit of trial and error you find words that also could belong in the Voynich, e.g "heal", "find", "ladle", and you build your 1:1 alphabet. It wasn't as easy as your first match. Sometimes you have to scroll to maybe the sixth alternative definition of a word, and you may have to alter the word slightly. But it was there in the dictionary, and you already found "plant", so this is solid proof that you have found the right system.
Oddly, after finalizing your system, it gets harder rather than easier to read more words. You find yourself having to alter the words a lot, and people point out this gives you too much freedom, that it doesn't work with Voynichese properties you've never heard of, that it doen't make sense in Gaelic. But you know your earlier results were not coincidences, and so whatever these problems are, if they exist at all, they must be only minor issues that can be explained somehow.
Basically, I think that initial moment of discovery is doing
a lot of heavy lifting, and people won't change their minds after it's happened, no matter what. If solvers could evade this giant trap at the start, we might see wrong solutions of a different type, but they don't. The same phenomenon was seen for Linear B, and we just see more of it because the VM is so accessible. Short of adding in a "Coincidences happen!" warning before anyone can access a folio, wrong solutions will keep being wrong in exactly the same wrong way. Which is quite depressing, when you think about all that lost potential contribution.
My apology to everyone here, especially tavie, for my previous reply took you the wrong way of understanding, I did not mean that. As ReneZ had asked me before about most frequent "words", which I missunderstood, there are plenty of other words similar to that. So, if those words must have the same meaning then it would be very very difficult to create a system that can solve it. Please do not take it the wrong way, i do not mean to discourage everyone who try to create the system. On the contrary, I would be happy if there is someone who can make it.
I am just proposing to use both the system, eventhough not perfect, and our ability to analyze. So, the combination of the two could support each other. Whatever the system might be and whoever creates the system. Maybe this could be a better way to say it. Again my apology for that.
For the constructive discussion here, I would like to ask everyone help. Maybe this could also answer koenG question about image and text. The image, especially botanical, surely help a lot in creating translation. Eventhough some of them not really identical with the real plant. Another type of images are unsure, we could have different kind of interpretation. So, this is what i would like to ask for help from everyone here.
The image below, I am sure most of us would say it has correlation with astronomy. But I have different opinion about it, of course my opinion could be wrong. Please let me elaborate my opinion, as we can see in the image I have underlined the word that could be one of the keywords : Amomi ( amomum or balm that contain the spice).
I have also found that the radial writings in the image are the steps to make the amomum ( maybe cardamom) balm.
So I would like to ask everyone here, especially who knows Latin language better, whether this two sentences can be made into viable Latin language. Please feel free to give your answer if this can or can not be done. I would love to know it, as reference to do better. Thank you very much for your effort.