14-06-2025, 08:59 AM
(13-06-2025, 09:20 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it looks extremely weird that the Author concentrated on recording the sounds of incomprehensible speech instead of trying to figure out the meaning by discussing it with the Reader and translating or at least annotating it on the go.
One of the weirdest things I did in my life was sitting for a couple of hours in a dusky library room in Prague, while outside the sun shone on countless touristic opportunities, copying by hand the biography of Jacobus Sinapius/Horcicki/Tepenecz from a hefty History of the Jesuits in Bohemia. It was in Latin, and even though I recognized most of the words, I could not make sense of the text, because I know nothing about Latin cases and verb inflections. My plan was to type my transcription, after I got back home, and post it to the VMS list, counting that someone else would translate it.
The situation was not quite the same as that of the VMs Author in the Chinese theory, because I knew the script and was copying the text, instead of taking dictation. But it must have been just as unfeasible for him to ask for a translation on the spot as it had been for me. And his plan would have been similar to mine: "after I get back home..."
Quote:The Reader was probably an educated person, being able to read in the XV century.
I don't know about other countries, but in China at the time every civil servant (mandarin) had to pass a hard examination, which of course required the ability to read and write. (The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, in the late 1500s, managed to befriend and convert a somewhat high-ranking mandarin in Macao, who helped him immensely in his quest to become a respectable Chinese literate.) The point here is that the ability to read may not have been as scarce as it was in Europe.
On the other hand, that was before the Portuguese opened up the sea route to Asia, and thus before the Christian missionaries got there. The Author most likely was not a missionary or scholar, but a merchant like Marco Polo, or of some trade-related profession, with only an utilitarian education. And the Reader may not have had time or disposition to explain the contents of those books to that curious but utterly ignorant gringo. Doing so would easily have taken 10 times longer than just reading the books aloud.
Quote: [There should be,] For example, a single word written in the original Oriental script, a sample of Oriental characters, a few numbers in the original number system. [...] I remember from a while ago, that the red weirdos are supposed to look like some Chinese characters, but personally I don't see a lot of similarity between the red weirdos and properly written 兀 or 几, if that's the proposed reading.
I believe that on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the Author tried to do precisely what you say he should do: provide a sample of the original script. So he too the book from the Reader, naturally turned it so that the binding was on the left, and copied the two large red characters which were written vertically next to the right edge, which he assumed (probably correctly) to be the title of that book.
He tried to copy the characters to his notes, but he focused on the fYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., namely the "serifs" and variable width of strokes. He paid less attention to the tilt and length of the strokes and how they touched or crossed. And of course the characters were actually upside-down. Later in Europe, the Scribe -- who had never seen actuall Chinese writing -- tried to copy the characters from the Author's draft.
So that is what I think those red weirdos are: copies of copies of upside-down Chinese characters, mangled almost but not quite beyond recognition. I have not seen any other explanation that is more likely than this.
However, it is hard to tell what were the originals. I have You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but not much confidence on them.
Quote:an unambiguously Oriental fruit
There may be several of those in the Pharma and Herbal sections. How can we say there aren't?
Quote:an unambiguously Oriental object, utensil
Those would appear on books about subjects like surgery or metalworking; but in the books that the Author chose -- about astronomy, astrology, medicine, herbs -- there should be no such things.
Quote:if the folios are supposed to be read upside down
That is not what I meant at all! Only the big red weirdos would be upside-down, because they are the only characters that the author copied and could not tell that they were upside-down. The Voynichese text is definitely to be read as we read it, and all the figures that had an obvious orientation are correctly oriented.
Quote: As far as I remember, there are quite a few repeated labels, including relatively long ones, and absolutely none of them make any obvious sense. If my greps are correct, these are the repeating labels of 7+ characters:
2x otcheody [...]
If we include 6 character labels, there are some that repeat 5 times. If each label meant the same thing each time it appeared, there would have been very plausible explanations by now. I don't know, maybe the labels are not words but references ("fig. 1").
I stand corrected. Still, it is remarkable that there are so few repetitions, and each occurs only twice. Hopefully someone has already investigated this question in more detail...
Quote:I took the first label in the list above and tried to find it in the transcription:
[code]
<f68r1.10,@Ls> otcheody
<f68r3.22,@Cc> <!09:30>otcheody.chokchy.okol.cheol.dar.cho.keol.dolaiin.okeol.oly
<f72v3.6,&Lz> <!00:30>otcheody
<f114v.31,+P0> olaiin.cheo.otcheody.lkchedy.okol.okaiin.otaiin.otal.qotar[/code]
It appears fairly close once in a circular inscription and once more in a completely different part of the manuscript.
More precisely, the first occurrence is as the label of a star. The second is in a circular text on another similar diagram on the same fold-out folio. The third occurrence is as the label of a nymph/star in the Zodiac page for "Leo". So these three are consistent with otcheody being the name of a star.
The last occurrence is in the "starred parags" section. We do not know whether it is inappropriate, or a coincidence, or another reference to that star.
IIRC this case is typical of most labels: their occurrences are consistent with them being names of the things next to them in the figures. The exceptions may be non-specific labels, such as numbers or qualifiers ("main", "big", "upper", "hot", ...)
Quote:As far as I know, there have been a few language agnostic manual and computational attempts, trying to ascribe meaning to various sequences of characters based on context. Some of them looked a bit naïve, some more sophisticated. I didn't study them in depth, but I know that so far they failed to produce anything convincing for the public.
I can't imagine how a "language agnostic" decipherment attempt could produce more than a few isolated hints about the contents of the VMs. For instance, from the above otcheody example we may guess that the labels in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. diagrams and in the Zodiac pages are indeed the names of specific astronomical stars. But what can we get beyond that?
Many Arabic star names were usually words from the language, like Algol = Ras Al-Gul "The Head of the Demon", Ad-dabaran = "The Follower" (of the Pleiades), Etanin = At-tinnin = "The Serpent", etc. If that is the case also in the VMs, then any occurrence of a star label in the text (such as the otcheody in f114v) may or may not be a reference to the star.
