In theory everything is falsifiable. In practice, most VM theories are presented in such a way that they are not falsifiable. One of the culprits is the infamous "interpretative step" most translators need at some point in their process.
(13-06-2024, 12:13 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the culprits is the infamous "interpretative step" most translators need at some point in their process.
Step or steps. More than one is not unusual.
My own authorship suggestion is falsifiable. Here's one way to falsify it->
Abbot Antonio Barbavara became Abbot in 1428(Some sources say 1426)
The previous Abbot is barely mentioned in the historical record.
Antonio Barbavara had interests which fit with the contents of the Voynich manuscript. He had close family connections to the world of Cryptography.
So it makes very little sense to me that the Abbey would have been drawn in the bottom right hand corner of the rosettes folio prior to 1426.
The Council of Basel was announced in 1430. It makes so much sense in explaining the reason for the "journey" that I claim. That it would be very surprising to me if the rosettes folio was drawn prior to 1430.
I don't know how long vellum was likely to be stored before being used. However more than 5 years seems like a long time.
Therefore if in the future the rosettes folio can be dated by improved carbon dating or other rigourous scientific methods to before 1421 then I would accept that as a falsification of my theory.
This is not the only way it could be falsified, but a pretty certain way. Obviously a successful decipherment that points to a different author or different interpretation of the page would be a falsification. In fact anyway that demonstrates conclusively other authorship would be a falsification. Similarly anyway that demonstrates conclusively that core aspects of my map interpretation are wrong would seem to be a falsification; I exclude minor details being wrong as a falsification(By minor details I mean something like the incorrect identification of a specific tiny building.)
First let's separate the vords from the villistrations. What do the vords have to say? Nothing so far.
So back to the illustrations. You have presented the Rosettes as map according to your historical interpretation.
Theoretically, then... what falsifies the interpretation of one VMs illustration is an alternate interpretation of that or another VMs illustration, when the latter is held to be valid. The alternate illustrations to be considered initially are the VMs cosmos and the VMs mermaid and their relationships with BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334.
Does this alternative investigation have any relation to your proposal?
(13-06-2024, 06:12 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.First let's separate the vords from the villistrations. What do the vords have to say? Nothing so far.
So back to the illustrations. You have presented the Rosettes as map according to your historical interpretation.
Theoretically, then... what falsifies the interpretation of one VMs illustration is an alternate interpretation of that or another VMs illustration, when the latter is held to be valid.
That sounds logical to me.
(13-06-2024, 06:12 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The alternate illustrations to be considered initially are the VMs cosmos and the VMs mermaid and their relationships with BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334.
Does this alternative investigation have any relation to your proposal?
Can you clarify exactly what you are referring to by the VMs cosmos and the VMs mermaid? If you can link to or upload the images from BNF Fr. 565 and Harley 334 that you think relevant that would be great. And state what you think the relationship is. I am sorry for asking this, but I want to be sure as to exactly what you are saying.
Then I should be able to give you my opinion as to how they impact my proposal.
The history on this goes back a decade to the discoveries of E. Velinska and is somewhat detailed. Basically, it suggests that there is a common structure to the cosmic diagrams found in the VMs, BNF, and Harley and that this structure is distinctive and has provenance to Paris in the first half of the 15th Century, at least for the two historical mss.
BNF 565, dated c. 1410, belonged to Jean de Berry, and Harley 334 [2nd qtr.] both have simplified, pictorial cosmic diagrams of three parts [Earth, stars, cosmic boundary]. They lack the standard multi-layered spheres of elements, *planets*, and heavens generally used. This uncommon structure is shared by the VMs cosmic diagram. However, regarding appearance, the VMs version of the inverted T-O Earth is referenced linguistically rather than depicted pictorially. This presents a maximum visual discrepancy, which also plays out in the stars, the cosmic boundary and beyond.
The mermaid is relevant because Harley 334 also contains a mermaid along with several other creatures, same as the VMs. A mermaid with fish, and a mermaid with sea monsters can be found in Lauber's illustrations. In these historical illustrations, it is a *generic* mermaid. In the VMs, it is not a mermaid. It is another being. Mermaids do not have thighs. It is Melusine of Luxembourg. She was considered ancestral to the Valois rulers of this era through Bonne of Luxembourg. In addition, Jean de Berry fostered several connections to the dragon-like version of Melusine of Lusignan.
There are additional Valois and Burgundian connections in the "Golden Fleece" investigation.
All of this tells me that the VMs artist possessed certain information that found its way into the illustrations in somewhat altered form and sometimes intentionally obfuscated (e.g. White Aries).
Would your artist have had that information?
(13-06-2024, 07:58 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would your artist have had that information?
I am only vaguely familiar with the specific aspect of the manuscript you refer to, so I don't want to state an opinion on that.
However on the basis of my understanding of what you have said I see no reason why, if what you have said is the case, my author should not have had access to such knowledge along with a number of other people, I would guess. The Barbavara brothers were known for their large collection of manuscripts. According to my theory the author(s) travelled extensively in Switzerland, including Geneva in French Switzerland, and spent a significant amount of time Basel. I have no reason to believe that my author(s) were ever in Paris; it is possible, but it does not fit in neatly with my theory.
That does sum it up. There is a discrepancy present. For any collector of manuscripts relevant to cosmic diagrams, there would be the work of Sacrobosco, where the representations of the cosmic diagram all follow the onion paradigm with all the planetary spheres. That was the standard knowledge for the era, and the very minimal, [Parisian], simplification of the cosmic diagram was something of a rather limited abnormality. Yet the VMs somehow follows this simplified, 'planetless', cosmic structure, though the artist is clearly playing other games - abandoning the pictorial format for the Earth, altering the stars, playing hide and seek with the 43 undulations vs BNF Fr. 565, and going beyond the nebuly line as a cosmic boundary to represent Shirakatsi's wheel with eight curved spokes. And, on the other side of the cosmic boundary, there are potentially significant bands of written text.
It is a diverse and dissonant pairing that has allowed the VMs cosmos to elude historical interpretation.
I make no claim to either discovery.
(12-06-2024, 07:02 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten's theory. Pelling's Averlino theory. Stephen Bax' theory. The Turkish theory. My theory that the rosettes contain heavenly Jerusalem. Your theory about the rosettes. Anyone else's theory about the rosettes. Good luck falsifying any of those in a convincing way. And even if you do, I'm sure goalposts will be moved and arguments will be made to make it unfalsified again.
(12-06-2024, 09:05 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If we ever reach a sufficient solution, a lot will be falsified, including possibly Torsten's. (Unless he's right, of course).
(13-06-2024, 12:13 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In theory everything is falsifiable. In practice, most VM theories are presented in such a way that they are not falsifiable. One of the culprits is the infamous "interpretative step" most translators need at some point in their process.
Dear Koen,
in my opinion, this is just an excuse for not considering a hypothesis you obviously didn't like. First, every hypothesis stands on it own. Secondly, even if you believe that a hypothesis is wrong, you should search for both evidence supporting and evidence against it instead of just trying to convince yourself that this hypothesis must be wrong. Only this way you can detect mistakes and avoid them if you come up with your own hypothesis.
The self-citation hypothesis is, in fact, based on detailed observations of the Voynich text. Therefore, it should be possible to falsify if my description of the Voynich text is indeed correct. Do the "pages do have in common that pairs of frequently used words with high mutual similarity appear"? Does the word types result in a whole network of similar words? Is it valid to argue that words in the text in general occur near similar words [see You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.]? Is there a gradual evolution of a single system from Currier A to Currier B? Do high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar word types, and are tokens with only a few similar word types indeed always rare? Are there indeed no frequent word types distributed equally over the entire text?... If you think my description of the Voynich text is wrong, it would be interesting to know why?
Based on this analysis we present a concrete text generator algorithm (the "self-citation" process), easily executable without additional tools even by a medieval scribe. Since there is a concrete algorithm, it is possible to falsify it. It is for instance possible to check if a text generated with this algorithm wold reproduce the statistical key properties of the Voynich text. It is for instance possible to ask questions like is the algorithm able to reproduce the presence of long-range correlations, the shift from Currier A to Currier B, the "binomial-like" word length distribution and also both of Zipf’s laws? [see You are not allowed to view links.
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(Please note that any algorithmic description of the VMS must be seen as just one of many possible realizations. After all, the original Voynich text was not created by a computer program; the scribe had complete freedom to implement random personal aesthetic preferences, spontaneous impulses, or even idiosyncrasies.)
We also argue "that any scribe creating language mimicking gibberish will sooner or later replace the tedious task of inventing more and more words by the much easier reduplication of existing text (and stick with this strategy)." [You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.]. It is therefore possible to recruit some volunteers to write short "gibberish" documents, as a basis for a statistical comparison with the VMS and linguistically meaningful texts. Such an experiment was done by Gaskell and Bowern. As Gaskell and Bowern write: "Informal interviews and class discussions confirmed that many participants did indeed adopt this type of approach ..." [You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.]. If you disagree with the experiment Gaskell and Bowern you could easily repeat there experiment yourself. Just write some pages full of gibberish or ask some volunteers to do so.
I think the issue here is that we are thinking about falsification at different "levels". I certainly agree that specific claims based on your model can be double-checked by people with the necessary skills. If your claim is that you created a system that mimics what a human could do and results in something close to Voynichese text, then both of those can be checked. And certainly the claim about the statistics could be falsified; if someone were to find significant differences, those could be pointed out.
However, if you were to claim "they did actually use a technique similar to this to make the VMS", there is no way that can be falsified or confirmed. The merit of your system is that it shows that it is humanly possible to use a form of "self-citation" to get Voynichese-like text. But I don't see how we could ever come to the conclusion that the MS was indeed created this way.
In short, your algorithm itself can be falsified. But as a Voynich solution, it can't.