The Voynich Ninja

Nothing wrong. Anyway, if these are hieroglyphs, the author redrew them purely for decoration. He didn’t know what they meant.
The decorative nature is evident from the fact that they are inverted (i.e., the author didn’t attach much importance to their position) and from the fact that they are very much simplified (the largest bird glyph is too simple to be a specific hieroglyph).
These may also be not specific characters, but parodies of them, which the author reproduced from memory. Something like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

(9 hours ago)chenxiang Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In science, this is called "constantly patching a theory in order to save it"

But that is in fact how most scientific theories are developed!  

They are not conceived from the start in the clean form that you read in textbooks and scientific journals.

Consider someone trying to decipher a medieval encrypted document.  He may first guess the letters that correspond to 20 Latin letters..  From a few phrases that he can read he guesses that "$" means "King" and from that he guesses that "%" means "Queen".  But after working for a while he realizes that the symbol that he thought meant "s" actually means "z", and there are two different symbols for "s", and there seems to be no pattern for where each is used, and the symbols "#" and "&" are nulls.  And then he discovers that the writer often misspelled "there" with "their" and "its" with "it's", and used two different symbols for the "th" or "this" and the "th" of "think", but on the other hand he wrote both the "ch" or "chair" and the "sh" of "show" with the same symbol.  And then he finds also that "%" was not "Queen" but "Prince", and that the sign that he thought was "x" was actually an abbreviation for "-ing".  And he never finds what the symbol "@" meant.

That is in fact how most medieval encrypted documents are normally deciphered: by constantly patching and re-patching an initial key guess. And that is how the solutions often look like: a very complicated, messy, and inconsistent process, with mappings that are not one-to-one and not even algorithmic.   Check the Rohonc Codex, for example.

That is the case even when the author tried to be consistent and avoid errors.  Check the recent decipherment of the Zodiac Killer letters.  

Quote:When the spellings were inconsistent, you added "daiin/kaiin/laiin are scribal errors."

Or variant pronunciations.  If you speak Mandarin, you must be familiar with tone sandhi, yes?

Quote:When the sentence structure was incomprehensible, you added "qo is 'and.'"

The idea that qo was a non-phonetic symbol meaning "and" (like our &), and that it had been added by the Author because he found the Chinese way of listing things too confusing, occurred to me when I noticed this recipe 

    青石赤石黄石白石黑石脂等味甘平主黄疸泄利肠澼脓血阴蚀下血赤白邪气痈肿疽痔恶疮头疡
     疥瘙久服补髓益气肥健不饥轻身延年五石脂各随五色补五脏生山谷

and a paragraph that seemed to match it seemed to have a title with five similar parts, with four qo between them.  That structure is exactly how the "and" syntax works in Arabic or Hebrew.  

That theory explained many puzzling facts that had been known about qo, including why it is so common.  And, as a side effect, it seems to reduce some gap errors in my matches by a few EVA letters.

Quote:When the spellings of high-frequency words were chaotic, you added "it may be a dialect or Vietnamese."

I first concluded that the language was an East Asian monosyllabic one when trying to prove the opposite. 

I had just plotted the number of different Voynichese word types with a given length k, and got a nice symmetric curve that coincided almost perfectly with the graph of comb(n,k), the number of ways to choose k elements from a set of n elements, for n = 9.  At that point I thought that I had found a hard proof that Voynichese could not be a natural language in the plain -- because no natural language could have such a perfectly symmetrical plot of anything.  

To show this point, I created the same plot for several other languages, and indeed they all come out asymmetric, some even with multiple humps.  Just for completeness, I did that also with a text in Vietnamese, and ...

... You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that coincided with the graph of comb(n,k).

And that turned out to be the case also of Mandarin in pinyin (after rewriting "wu" and "yi" as "u" and "i", to match their pronunciations).  

And that is when I came up with the Chinese Theory and the Dictation Scenario.  At that point I pretty much lost interest in the VMS -- because I thought that, in order to make any progress, one would have to guess the language and then know how the language was pronounced in the 1400s. 

I came back after 25 years only because I saw on YouTube Koen claim that the language could not be Chinese, no way.  (Thanks Koen   ) 

I don't recall when I first thought that the Starred Parags section could be the Shennong Bencao.
The idea came because I read that it had 365 recipes and the SPS seemed to have had about that number of parags initially.   I was just a wild hunch then.  But after I came back I got the CTP file of the Shennong, learned how to process Chinese text in Unicode, and plotted the number of SBJ entries with k hanzi and of and SPS parags with k words.  The shapes of the two plots matched surprisingly well.  

Then I compared the longest entries in each file, and noticed that the spacings of four of the seven 主 in it (the CTP file was missing the 8th) matched the spacings of four daiin in the SPS recipe.  

And the rest is history -- I mean, a huge pile of python code, still evolving, that tries to automate the matching of the other recipes to other parags. 

Quote:A truly correct theory should be one that "maps the letters of the VMS to specific sounds, reads out complete sentences, and is immediately understood by Sinologists around the world," rather than relying on a programmer's "badness scoring."

Well, I can read out the entire Starred Parags section (even the missing pages!) -- in Chinese characters.

I still don't know what are the sound values of the Voynichese glyphs, and therefore I still don't know which pronunciation of the SBJ it is recording.  All 50+ East Asian monosyllabic languages (not just the Chinese "dialects") are still candidates.  Since I don't speak any of those languages, much less how they were spoken 600 years ago, I will not even try to solve that part of the puzzle.

Unfortunately the recipes were all scrambled when the book was bound, and probably also when the Author tuned his dictation notes into a draft for the Scribe.  There is no reason to think that they were in some sort of "alphabetic order".  (Indeed, the three digital SBJ files I got list the recipes in three different orders.)  

So I cannot yet tell which recipe matched which parag.   That is where the program comes in.

Quote:This is my perhaps somewhat immature view; I am just guessing, because I am only 16 years old, and my perspective may not be as far-sighted as that of you scholars or professors. I have been trying hard to improve.

Well, congratulations -- you are already sounding like certain 70-year-olds who were in the Voynich mailing list when I first learned about the manuscript, in the 1990s, and still cannot give up their religious belief that the language is European.  

All the best, --stolfi

(7 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But that is in fact how most theories scientific theories are developed!  

Scientific theories have something to rely on. I would even say that it’s not assumptions that are made, but interpretations in favor of the theory.

One could say that absolutely everything is tailored to fit the theory. This may create the impression that the theory is capable of explaining all the features, but in reality, it’s just trying to force a square peg into a round hole.
By the way, the Chinese theory doesn’t explain why this book was written. For whom? If the author made so many mistakes and perhaps didn’t even understand what he was writing, why did he write this book?

Please don't think I'm just being emotional! I'm just very mad at myself for missing the word '冬天' (Winter). But thinking about it calmly now, I feel deeply ashamed. My knowledge, foresight, and ability to connect ideas are far inferior to yours, Professor.

Even if I had thought of 'Winter', I probably wouldn't have thought of its homophones, nor could I have connected it to the historical timeline. My foresight was only limited to visual deduction and reverse-engineering Chinese characters from the drawings.

However, I realize that even if I had guessed '冬天', I would have hit the same dead end you did in 2002. The fact that 'dong4' means '洞穴' (cave) and the historical timeline (Ming Dynasty vs. Marco Polo's era) completely destroys the 'Winter' theory. The visual skeleton (my '大' and '令') and the phonetic meaning (your '冬天') are like two parallel lines that refuse to meet.

Thank you so much. I registered on this website just yesterday and learned about this centuries-old unsolved manuscript. But today, on my second day, I have already comprehended so much. Thank you all for making me clearly realize the huge academic gap between us on my second day here. Honestly, the gap is indeed very large, but I will work hard to catch up!

So, Professor, since you ruled out '冬天' 20 years ago, what is the current direction of your 'Chinese theory'? Are you still looking at this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. symbol, or are you looking at other parts of the manuscript? I am very eager to know what you are exploring right now!"

We all make mistakes, especially at the beginning—that's completely normal, and it's no big deal. It has nothing to do with being stupid; it's just that there's a lot, a lot of material to take in all at once....

[attachment=17690][attachment=17691][attachment=17692][attachment=17693][attachment=17694]

These aren’t characters either, but symbols. One is definitely a plough and has something to do with farming, as can also be seen in Quire 13.
The other is an ancient symbol of medicine and pharmacies. You can still see it today.
I don’t need to say any more about the plants; they’re authentic. We’ve been over that before.

(7 hours ago)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(7 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But that is in fact how most theories scientific theories are developed!  

Scientific theories have something to rely on. I would even say that it’s not assumptions that are made, but interpretations in favor of the theory.

No, check again how theories, especially decipherments, are arrived at.   

IIRC, when Newton came up with the gravitation theory, there were multiple different estimates for the radius of the Earth and the distance to the Moon.  He chose the two that made his formula work for both the apple and the Moon.

Quote: One could say that absolutely everything is tailored to fit the theory.

"Absolutely everything?" Aren't you exaggerating just a tiny little bit here?

Unlike most other theories, SPS=SBJ has practically no choice about the text.  It says that every parag of the SPS is the phonetic transcription of some SBJ recipe, as quoted in the white-on-black text of the ZHB.  It says that certain fields, that made no sense outside TCM, were systematically omitted from all recipes; and that other occasional comments that also made no sense outside China (or even within it) were omitted; but the rest of the text of each SBJ recipe (medical indications and benefits) occured in the matching SPS parag in the same order, almost one token for each hanzi.  

The mapping from hanzi to EVA is not one-to-one, but it is not arbitrary: the observed variants of daiin and other keys are explained by similarity of shapes (which explains why daiin can become kaiin but almost never taiin).  The equivalence of "ir" to iin" has the same explanation, but was suspected earlier from analysis of the word structure and the frequencies of the "coda" elements "iin" etc. 

Quote:By the way, the Chinese theory doesn’t explain why this book was written.

Quite the contrary.  The Chinese Theory is the only one I have seen in all these ~30 years that offers a plausible explanation for why this book looks like it does and why it was written.

Theories that assume it is an encrypted European language cannot explain why one would encrypt the entire 200+ page book with a method so sophisticated that not even the NSA and Bletchley spooks could figure out anything about it.  If the goal was to hide some "dangerous" stuff, why did the Author then add bizarre illustrations that would have attracted attention and suspicions?  ("Those naked women must be witches celebrating a black sabbath.  Off to the stake with him!")

Why would the Author invent a completely new alphabet, with fewer letters than the Latin one (instead of more letters, like most cipher schemes did)?  If he reused more Latin letter shapes in his alphabet (besides a, o, e), but with different values, the cipher would not be easier to crack.

Theories that assume that the plants are European cannot explain why the Author would create a new herbal without copying a single plant from other contemporary herbals.  Would he really have original knowledge about all those plants? If so, why are the plants so hard to identify, and why they have so many improbable botanical structures?

And then we are also to believe that the same Author also had a completely original view of astronomy and astrology, with signs of exactly 30 (or 15) "things" each.  

Most VMS tokens fit a rather constrained structural model.  But a rather large fraction of them violate this model in ways that seem quite random.  The obvious interpretation is that the text has a rather large frequency of "spelling errors".  But encryption methods are usually fragile in that regard, since a single letter error will usually completely change a word with no warning.  Thus encryption theories cannot explain those apparently "random" deviations from the word models.

The Chinese Theory explains all of those puzzlin VMS features with no strain. What point of it do you think is implausible? The hypothetical situation has historical precedents.  The new alphabet and its letter shapes are natural decisions given the situation and the goal. 

Quote:For whom?

Baresch himself had an answer for that:

• From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. After all, this thing cannot be for the masses as may be judged from the precautions the author took in order to keep the uneducated ignorant of it. In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value). He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany.
  

Quote:If the author made so many mistakes and perhaps didn’t even understand what he was writing, why did he write this book?

A large proportion of "spelling errors" are expected when taking dictation in a language with many unfamiliar words and whose spelling one does know.   

Even with those errors, that was the only option that the Author had to accomplish his goal of bringing some Chinese knowledge to Europe.

All the best, --stolfi

Scribe's mistakes, lunar month, phonetic... These are the assumptions! Because they seem to be proving the theory, but at the same time, they don’t say anything.

And the fact that you call the theory “the only one of its kind” is not true—it’s fundamentally wrong. I can easily explain why this book was written, and the explanation is as simple as it gets and raises no questions: it’s a medical reference book. That’s it.

If you didn’t understand me, I’ll explain it to you clearly. You think that daiin-kaiin-laiin-dain are equivalent spellings of the same word, and the foolish scribe (where did the author even find him?) simply recorded these words incorrectly. This is an assumption, because you made this explanation in order to fit the required recipe into the context. We cannot know why these errors were made (I have already asked this question), whether such results are applicable to other parts of the manuscript, etc.

One more time. An assumption is something you cannot prove, but you take it as truth. You take a lot of things as truth, but you haven’t been able to prove anything yet (the fact that one recipe works doesn’t say anything. Absolutely nothing.)

(5 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:By the way, the Chinese theory doesn’t explain why this book was written.

Quite the contrary.  The Chinese Theory is the only one I have seen in all these ~30 years that offers a plausible explanation for why this book looks like it does and why it was written.

We have corresponded at this at length specifically about what purpose the book could have served and I remain at a loss to give a fair, consistent explanation of the impetus for creating it. At a high level, I understand that it is supposed to be a workaround to writing the Chinese characters, and to record a dictation session or their phonetic value some other way. It is still not clear to me whether or not you think The Author understood the dictation, and you certainly think it is full of errors that you have supposed were due to the difficulties the author would have had telling words apart. Why create that kind of record? Why write that? Pivoting to explanations of specific features, regardless of whether you and your critics agree about those, is not responsive here!

(5 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Theories that assume it is an encrypted European language cannot explain why one would encrypt the entire 200+ page book with a method so sophisticated that not even the NSA and Bletchley spooks could figure out anything about it. If the goal was to hide some "dangerous" stuff, why did the Author then add bizarre illustrations that would have attracted attention and suspicions? ("Those naked women must be witches celebrating a black sabbath. Off to the stake with him!")

Why did the author have to show his encrypted book to someone?
This rhetorical question actually carries no weight. If it’s encrypted, then there was something to encrypt.

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(5 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Chinese Theory explains all of those puzzlin VMS features with no strain.

Really?