Quote:I just noticed this video has a harder time attracting an audience than my previous ones.
Let me share some thoughts.
"Is Voynich fake" seems to be a big, important question to most people even slightly interested in it.
"Swallowtail merlons" on the other hand may at first seem to be some tiny, unimportant detail.
I'll tell you something about myself. When about 3-4 years ago I got interested in Voynich Manuscript I really couldn't understand why everyone is so "obsessed" with those merlons. I have seen a lot of talk about them here and at Nick's Pelling site and couldn't really get it.
My impression was that people should really work harder on the text to break it. All these merlons, zodial signs, Italian masters, Quattrocento and so on is beating around the bush. It's easier so people go for it instead of dealing with the hard cryptology.
Now I am much more humble
Voynich Manuscript is just very hard to decrypt so any attack from any angle on it may turn out valuable.
And one more thought. A modern man has seen a lot of castles in his life. These would be castles from all around the world and these would be fantasy castles from Disney movies. And these would be his local castles which were rebuilt many times and are a mix of architectural styles, often foreign ones to his count ry. So if a modern man would have to draw a castle, it would probably didn't tell much about him. He could be from Spain, Germany, Norway or United States and you would be unable to tell it from his style.
In the past it was different. There wasn't any global culture so if someone was drawing these Ghibelin merlons then he had to be somehow linked to Italy. Maybe the video should stress it more because it's not that obvious.
But it was a great video by the way. I really appreciate amount of work put into it.
(29-12-2024, 10:24 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-12-2024, 11:36 PM)Barbrey Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Great, painstaking work Koen et al. I know others have had some success with narrowing down zodiac figures to geographic locations, though I’ve not seen anything as systematic as this research. Did you see any possible correspondences?
Saying anything about that would be somewhat controversial and unsubstantiated right now. The location of the Zodiac figures' source probably depends on the elements you focus on. I do believe that it should be possible to pinpoint it, but more work needs to be done.
Just as a quick reference, here is JKP's map of the Sagittarii he found relevant in 2015. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I'm sure it can be improved and expanded a lot. It also contains a number of examples I find irrelevant. But it kind of shows the tendency:
I'd personally go a bit more west still, but it's all quite complicated.
Augsburg is an interesting outlier. It’s come up before for me in context of water mills I think.
Any guesses as to what city or area? Won’t hold you to it but you’ve got great instincts!
(29-12-2024, 06:42 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:I just noticed this video has a harder time attracting an audience than my previous ones.
Let me share some thoughts.
"Is Voynich fake" seems to be a big, important question to most people even slightly interested in it.
"Swallowtail merlons" on the other hand may at first seem to be some tiny, unimportant detail.
For some people the swallow-tail merlons detail is very important. And the reason it is important has to do with geography. For some people the rosettes folio is important as they believe it to be a map and knowing where it is a map of can tell one a lot about the area of origin of the Voynich manuscript. For me it is even more important as I interpret it as providing a very precise geographical location of origin of the manuscript and so much so that in my opinion it points to authorship. And knowing who the author(s) of the manuscript were should be a useful stepping stone towards decipherment. Certainly my Ideas of authorship point clearly towards it being a cipher related to early 15th century Milanese diplomatic ciphers. And whilst, due to the 1447 fire in the chancellery in Milan, almost no evidence of Milanese ciphers survive in Milan, a little evidence survives in other archives from intercepted Milanese ciphers with some historical gaps which I would like to fill if there is surviving material(such as known Milanese intercepted enciphered letters from 1431 which may survive in the Vatican archives). In addition, knowing authorship may help in locating sources on which the author relied in producing the manuscript which could help in finding an elusive block-paradigm, as Nick Pelling calls it. I think it extremely difficult for statistical analysis of the text, without a crib and a clear knowledge of the structure of the cipher, to decipher the Voynich manuscript. This is why I have concentrated my efforts on tracking down related ciphers and trying to trace the sources that the author(s) used in producing the manuscript. My forthcoming trip to Milan is particularly related to looking for such sources and trying to locating what evidence that survives which could support or go against my authorship hypothesis.
Well, good luck with your mission Mark! I suppose we are all curious here what it brings.
I believe that it was shown on this forums that all symbols that appear in VM like "qo", "walking legs" and so on also appear in the old Italian ciphers. It can be some trail to follow.
Trying to raise your stats - I watched it twice.
Connecting the castle with the artist's place of birth is very speculative. All that can really be said is that the artist clearly knew about swallowtail merlons - and anyone travelling through the passes would surely have seen them.
Seeking correspondence is complicated. The castles are physical places. The zodiac inhabitants don't have that sort of reality.
The Sagittarius investigation does a great job of identifying a limited geographical area. The new Taurus investigation has some overlap. The #1 bull is from Augsburg. That is at least a hint of correspondence. Similar investigations of the other zodiac signs might show similar results.
(29-12-2024, 02:29 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This always reminds me of the time I was on a train in Scotland.
Same experience in Switzerland
In no way did it resemble any germanic language (but it was).
(29-12-2024, 02:29 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I might try changing the thumbnail as an experiment.
A dangerous area... Obvious click-bait may scare off people, or leave them disappointed.
How does it compare to other earlier videos? That might be more indicative.
The thing with the thumbnail is that it needs to show something clearly with just a few pixels. So if you want to get the attention of people who might be interested in Castle architecture, you need a clearly contrasting item in there. So I think of it more in those terms: potentially interested people should be able to read the thumbnail at a glance.
There's also the thing that many people just look at the thumbnails rather than the titles. That's why most channels place some compelling text on the thumbnail, something that plays to people's curiosity.
There's an Indian video posted around the same time as mine about witches in the VM. It's got hundreds of thousands of views. The Turkish video has well over a million views. It's not that my aim is to reach similar numbers. But at least I want to stand out to people who are looking for some counterweight.
(29-12-2024, 11:12 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, good luck with your mission Mark! I suppose we are all curious here what it brings.
Unfortunately, it will not be easy as so much is lost to history. The material that survives is a tiny fraction of the original material that existed as we can see with the Milanese cipher records. And of course there is the issue that some materials originally in the Milan region could easily have been transferred or dispersed to other locations at some stage. And there is no way to predict what survives in its origin location and what doesn't. In addition, I believe that some source material was likely seen whilst the author(s) were in Basel at the Papal Council, probably the astrological material, and so the Basel area would be an appropriate area to look for such material.
(30-12-2024, 09:45 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The thing with the thumbnail is that it needs to show something clearly with just a few pixels. So if you want to get the attention of people who might be interested in Castle architecture, you need a clearly contrasting item in there. So I think of it more in those terms: potentially interested people should be able to read the thumbnail at a glance.
There's also the thing that many people just look at the thumbnails rather than the titles. That's why most channels place some compelling text on the thumbnail, something that plays to people's curiosity.
There's an Indian video posted around the same time as mine about witches in the VM. It's got hundreds of thousands of views. The Turkish video has well over a million views. It's not that my aim is to reach similar numbers. But at least I want to stand out to people who are looking for some counterweight.
Do you have a link to the one with witches?
In all seriousness, anything occult themed in the title will garner more attention. Something like “The Devil’s in the Details: Closing in on the Voynich Manuscript’s origins” ? Or maybe fanciful:” Castles in the Sky- Earthbound”.
People like”plots” and you’ve plotted a lot on your map: “The Plotting Thickens” New Voynich Research!” (I like puns, this is my fave. Your thumbnail would show thick clustering as well as an image - perhaps your man with a magnifying glass and deerstalker hat).
People aren’t particularly interested in castle architecture when it comes to the Voynich. No point in emphasizing that. Even “swallowtail” sounds like ornithology, a bore to many. For myself, if it weren’t you posting the video, I’d have skipped it as I’ve read about swallowtail merlons ad nauseum. The merlons are just a detail: the real point is that plotting them out has led you, and us, closer to the manuscript’s origins. That’s exciting!
But rather not:
"Seven new discoveries in the Voynich MS that science can't explain. The sixth will blow your mind."