(07-08-2026, 08:42 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We do [recognize some words], the clear ones: multos, portas, abiat, maria = Latin
Poxleber, pinen, six, vix, palsen, so nim, mich = german
Except that
- your "multos" requires assuming that the initial squiggles are "mu" rather than "um" or "nin" etc; and the last letter is too tall to be an "s", so it must have been a "d"; and the "o" has a bowtie below (not even Unicode...).
- your "portas", by the same argument, was more likely "portad".
- your "abiat" is "abia" (with a weird "i") followed by a cross; and "abia" is not a valid Latin word.
- your "vix" would be a German word in the middle of a "Latin" charm.
- your "palsen", by the same argument above, was more likely "palden"; and the "e" is rather dubious, may as well have been "c".
So, again, those words can be recognized only by first
assuming that they must be German or Latin, and then picking the readings of the letters so as to make them such.
Quote:not clear or with to many assumptions: mchiton, aladabas, tc, cxx, marix, morix, the two Voynich Token, vbren
Meaning: even with all the "cheating", at most half of the words can be read as almost-German or almost-Latin words. The rest cannot be identified at all.
Quote:But he certainly would have looked at the other pages that in order to restore it better. Anyone would do that.
That may sound plausible to you, because you have spent years studying the Voynich script and you know the Voynich alphabet by heart, backwards and upside-down.
But imagine you borrowed a book in Arabic from your scholar friend, intending to do an in-depth scholarly study of the bathing houris depicted therein. But before you start you research, you spill a glass of beer on the last page, and by wiping that off you also wipe off a paragraph of text that was written there. Only a few wisps of ink remain here and there.
Would you leaf through the rest of the book to try to learn the Arabic alphabet?
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Do you think that, if you tried to imitate that script, your reconstruction would make more sense than if you didn't?
Quote:The idea that he didn’t do that, or that he hasn't other folios is far too implausible to me! In short: The crosses clearly contradict your theory
On the contrary, if the writing was original, the crosses would not not make sense. They
do make sense under the Big Wipe theory: namely, the Repairman saw a couple of smudges that looked like crosses (like the remains of gallows); and since there is no letter in that Latin script that looks like a cross, he guessed that the line must have been a Christian charm, like one found on many books at the time.
(IIUC, those charms were meant to reassure casual onlookers that a book in unreadable language and/or script was not some pagan treatise or diabolical witchcraft manual; and/or to remind the owner to recite that charm for protection before or after perusing a book that
could be such a thing.)
Quote:In other Book of the time, there are some marginalia where you wonder what the point is. Even down to sexual innuendos, where you wonder what the monks were doing all day. And some don’t even relate to the book. That’s actually pretty typical for marginalia.
But those marginalia were usually added by later owners or library patrons. Not by the original scribes who created the copy. Much less by the Author of the book.
Quote:What you're writing is based on far too many assumptions for my taste.
The
number of assumptions does not matter; what matters is how likely they are on the whole.
- Theory A: Assumptions (A1) 15th century scholar assembles a new Herbal. (A2) He also assembles a personal treatise of astronomy and astrology. (A3) He also writes a short treatise on human anatomy. (A4) He collects ~350 medical recipes. (A5) He devises an encryption method that not even the spooks at the NSA and Bletchley Park could crack. (A6) he devises a new nice script to write the encrypted text, that does not look at all like any script ever seen anywhere, anytime. (A7) He teaches five Scribes that alphabet and has them write all those books on a bunch of vellum sheets. (A8) He writes on the last page a mysterious note with some German-souding words, some Latin-sounding words, and a lot of unreadable words, in case his original script was not confusing enough.
- Theory B: The Chinese Origin theory.
- Theory C: The VMS is some alien's idea of a joke, that was dropped from a passing UFO.
You seem to prefer Theory A, even though it has a lot more assumptions than Theory C...
All the best, --stolfi
Sorry.