Hi Everyone,
Apologies in advance for the length of what follows. If you prefer you can just read it gradually, rather than in one sitting.
I considered the possibility of writing a separate article and providing you with a link. But it is not possible for me, since the amount of information I would then have to share would be book-length or more and that certainly does not fit your interest in an exchange format for this forum, it will take a much longer time to write. I don’t have any interest in writing anything for separate publication, whatever the length, on this topic.
All I wanted and still wish to do is to help you all solve it. I have no interest in making “me-first” claims, since I find it absurd for me or anyone to claim they could have solved it without the efforts everyone has put into it over many decades, right or wrong, in unriddling this puzzle.
But I also wish to share a note regarding the issue of length, or wall, of a post, that has been raised. I must say that I have been puzzled by that reaction at the length of my two posts, or its content, which I thought were written accessibly.
What puzzles me is that the VM has been for decades and centuries, page after page, offering “walls” of texts that no one has claimed to have translated even a word of it. Yet you and all have spent months, years, or even decades, perhaps even a lifetime, trying to read and decipher it. Even if admitted frankly, or sarcastically, do you really think you can solve the VM riddle with short attention spans? Or, was that just a way of greeting a newcomer to your forum for the fun of it?
I am puzzled by how two posts of readable texts could be so problematic when I can show even many other posts on this forum have been longer, whether as text or programing codes, and not yet sent to your “prison.”
The “prison” language is another issue I have wondered about on this forum, in terms of the use of language for treating folks who have just tried to make sense of the VM, as you all have done.
Is the language of “prison” really necessary? Are you claiming that some of your own work, such as the transcriptions made over the years, have not contributed to many others’ failing at using AI in conducting their statistical research?
All you can do is just create a special thread called “AI assisted statistical research” for example and the moderators or contributors can just ignore them, or limit further posts to it after a certain limit. Perhaps somebody sometime may find some value in it, without feeling threatened for sharing their contributions, even if mistakenly made. Why “prison”?
I completely understand that the amount of work and time moderators and other contributors have to put when receiving a flood of AI generated responses. So, it makes sense to give them as much or little attention they need, by limiting their threads, if judged to be not helpful. But, why “prison”? Why are you "criminalizing" efforts people are making to make sense of this puzzle?
AI can do as much or as best as it is fed. A slop response can be a result of slop questions asked, or slop transcriptions fed to it, the hallucinations of itself, or the hallucinations of the human asking the questions. AI can make mistakes, as you all can as well. Are our own responses, as supposedly non-artificial beings, not hallucinations sometimes?
How many times have you made a claim that has proven to be an illusion and wrong? Nowadays, you cannot do a search in google without its AI immediately responding. Does that then disqualify most of your research, given that you used google? Are you claiming that you just ignore that response AI makes write on top of your page browser?
I see AI as a librarian that can provide good or bad advice, good or irrelevant resource links. It is a fact of our age, and we have to learn how to deal with this technology, learning how to use it better, and effectively, if at all possible, rather than sending people to prison for using it and just trying.
AI admits its mistakes “wholeheartedly” when proven, something I do not find often in ourselves. I have yet to see it mock me, or make a fuss about the length of my question, or contribution I make to the exchange. I have caught its errors many times, more than it has mine. Yes, it tries to please you and tries to help you build on what it thinks are the strengths of your ideas, but this is why you have to learn to be skeptical about the responses, even when dealing with our own supposedly non-artificial intelligence. Do we also not habits of thinking, often unconsciously done, that can be as problematic?
This forum would not be possible with some sort of programing and software that has certainly benefitted from AI, even in its hardware design. All those nice background effects Koen G uses so creatively in his clips or panels are made possible by software, no? Do you really think any google search you are doing nowadays is not benefiting from AI?
In any case, I think what I have already shared in my two posts based on my prior published research, which serve the need for opening a thread focused on matters of method, can serve as just a framework that explains my method of going about solving this puzzle. And it can be done now by just exploring specific concrete clues in the manuscript itself.
In other words, the whether, what, why, and how questions can also be applied to specific clue-entries into the VM. In each concrete case we can ask “does it exist?” “what is it?” “why is it” and “how it came about”? And that is what I will try to do in this thread from now, a clue at a time.
I now begin with the “word” beside the seven-star image on f68r3. As you know it is transcribed wrongly on the VM browser, the last letter looking like a ‘9’ not an ‘o’. I render it in my preferred symbols that retain a sense of their visual appearance, 8oa29. It seems there has been a consensus that the image beside it represents Pleiades (the seven stars).
Stephen Bax had considered the word to be (in my view, wrongly) Taurus, and others have either followed his lead, or rejected it. In my reading it is not Taurus, but Botrus. But please let me explain at the cost of a lengthier post before thinking of that 'a' problem.
Botrus in Latin (and Greek) means cluster (of grapes, specifically). The 9-looking letter at the end as you know was a standard Latin abbreviation for -us (and alike). So the 8-looking letter is just B, the ‘o’ is just an ‘o’, and the letter looking like 2 is just an ‘r’ in the word, ending with ‘9’ for -us.
If this is what was meant by the “author” we have a clear indication of both a Latin writing present in abbreviations prevalent at that time. But such a reading, that perfectly matches the image, also hints at a ciphering effort. Pleiades has often been referred to as a cluster of grapes, and Aldebaran as a “follower” stem for it, and they both belong to the Taurus month in Zodiac, usually 20 degrees apart.
Now, what about that ‘a’. The letter ‘a’ obviously is not a ‘t’. But it is possible to consider a cipher rule, for now just for this word, that any time an ‘a’ is preceded or followed by a vowel (in whole letter or abbreviation of adjacent letters), that signals the ‘a’ being a wildcard for a substitution; otherwise, it can be read as jus an 'a'. It can even be still an 'a' with that rule, but only as just one possibility, triggering a question about what it is contraction for. In this case, it is a ‘t’ because of the image context. In others, it may be another letter, a word, or even an image reference, depending on the context of the broader passage in which the word is found or other images it is associated with.
I am just hypothesizing about the cipher rule, just as observed in this concrete case. Many of you are superb experts in matter of linguistics, and ciphering. So, that is why I am sharing this on this forum, so you can help me and all to understand what is going on with that word. Of the five letters, four perfectly correspond to Botrus, and the image is a perfect match. In my view, that word is meant to stand for Botrus, and can serve as a key to deciphering a lot in the manuscript, in text and in images. Perhaps it is the first word we can safely claim to have translated in the VM. Is it?
I am not yet claiming anything about any other texts in the VM. I am focusing just on this word for now, and it hints at several findings. It is in Latin, uses standard abbreviations of its time, some letters are visually readable in a standard way (B and o). ‘9’ is the most widely used abbreviation in Medieval Latin, and 2 is a standard abbreviation for ‘r’ or phonetic ‘ur” according to Cappelli (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). And there is a hint at a ciphering effort as well (re. the ‘a’).
Had we studied the VM Browser transcription (8oa2o), with the mistaken ‘o’ ending we could not have arrived at the above. While the error is generally accepted, this provides a good example that a deciphering of “8oa2o” would not have been effective, since such a word, as such, “did not exist” on that page of the VM.
It is by questioning “does it exist?” that we can proceed to understanding a “word” that actually exists on the VM page, and it is only then that we can proceed to the questions “what is it?” “why is it?” and “how it came to be?”
Since this post is already too long, I will await any feedbacks for hopefully a productive conversation.
