The Voynich Ninja

Actually I can't judge Friedman's opinion (even as an amateur), because I'm not acquainted with the original reports, only with the description in the book by D'Imperio.

If Friedman's reports were serious documents (which is the thing we should expect) then they should have described:

1) the initial assumptions
2) the limitations
3) the methodology
4) the results
5) the conclusions

I don't think one can judge item 5) without having been acquainted with items 1)-4). What I would normally expect is that Friedman came to a conclusion that the VMS does not belong to such and such families of ciphers. (But that is my speculation).

Actually I have a strong impression that many results in the VMS field are too much relied upon without due attention to the methodology under which they were obtained. E.g. I would very much like to read the Bennett's analysis in original.

Luckily I recently got an email from Shipito stating that I was selected for a free promo of their package aggregation service. I will use this opportunity and order a whole bunch of books from the US, Bennett included. (Native overseas shipment of books from Amazon is regrettably expensive).

As a general comment, of course nobody is infallible.

It is also quite normal for experts in any field to have their own particular opinions, which may well differ from other experts.
These usually don't concern the basics. In the 1990's, when Jim Reeds reported on the feedback that Sergio Toresella gave about the Voynich MS, he also referred to two other top specialists, namely his wife Karen, and John Riddle. He indicated that they all have a different take on some subjects.

Now it is one thing to imagine that a personal preference causes one expert or the other to be wrong on some aspect. Or that he may have missed some new information.
It is quite another thing to imagine that they are completely wrong on something completely basic (for them).

For outsiders (e.g. amateurs) it is often not even possible to comprehend which vast amount of information they are lacking, compared to the experts. It's not just that they went to college for 4-5 years. They usually took a PhD and have years of additional professional experience.

Taking the case of Dr Ewa S-S. When she says that Taurus eating from a manger is very unusual, it could be conceivable that in the mean time some MSs have been found with precisely such illustrations, that she was not aware of. It is not conceivable that she is mistaken about the fundamental observation that the general cycle fits in a European tradition.

Now going back to Friedman, one should probably distinguish between three cases.
There is the work from the various study groups, and this has been described by Jim Reeds in a Cryptologia paper, which should answer quite a number of the questions of Anton.

There is also his own analysis, and also that of his wife Elizebeth, who was essentially as gifted as he was.
I would not be surprised if these two analyses were done in quite a different way, and without any formal reports.
But maybe such reports still exist. I don't have them.

I haven't read his thoughts on the Voynich manuscript, but I am familiar with Friedman (it's hard not to be if you have even half a foot in the technology field).

He was a very smart man and also rather humble (a trait I've noticed in quite a few very smart people), always acknowledging other people with special talents.


Some things are hard to explain. You can teach a person to play the piano, but how do you explain how to play it like Horowitz or Glenn Gould? You can't. A certain element is talent. No description of methodology or theory can put into words that special insight or skill that might unlock the mystery.


Some people approach the VMS with academic ambitions and there's a certain tradition and obligation to provide rationales, theories, and methodologies to make it through the peer-review gauntlet.

Others pursue it as a hobby. I don't think we can impose the same academic requirements on those who are working on it for fun unless they claim a solution that is not verifiable by others.

Well, I just read the Tiltman's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and I failed to find any statement of the kind "it was not written in cipher". Tiltman simply said nothing of the kind, at least in this paper.

Let's see what Tiltman writes (the pagination is as it appears in the paper, not in the PDF file).

Actually all essential judgements in this paper are taken from Tiltman's report to Friedman, of the year 1951. As he quotes his report to Friedman on p.7:

Quote:I would like to say that there is no statement of opinion below to which I cannot myself find plenty of contradiction.

This is an honest statement of an expert, and it reveals that the expert generally regards the matter as indefinite.

Further (p.9):

Quote:My analysis, I believe, shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural order.

This statement, in the first place, means that Tiltman believes it impossible that the text is a simple substitution cipher - an opinion which, I think, is not presently disputed by anyone.

But in the second place, this statement (just by way of definition of a simple substitution cipher) means that Tiltman believes it impossible that the text is a natural flow of a plain text in any language. He adds immediately:

Quote:Languages simply do not behave in this way

On the same page 9, Tiltman notes:

Quote:If the single words attached to stars in the astronomical drawings, for instance, are really, as they appear to be, captions expressing the names or qualities of those stars, there can hardly be any form of transposition system involved.

I am not able to understand if Tiltman means that the text is not a transposition cipher, but looks like that.

On p. 8 Tiltman says that:

Quote:It might be, for instance, that the manuscript is intended to demonstrate some very primitive universal language

On p.9 he informs us that after Friedman read his report he shared with Tiltman his view (it is not clear whether he formed it independently or on the basis of Tiltman's report) that:

Quote:the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language such as was developed in the form of a philosophical
classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later.

Tiltman concludes:

Quote:My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution

It is not clear whether Tiltman means a complex substitution cipher here or some other thing, but further he discusses the development of a universal language by Cave Beck in XVII c. which was basically built on a nomenclator (the priority in this development, I guess, is not with Cave Beck).

Bottomline:

1) Tiltman did not assert that the VMS is not a cipher.
2) Tiltman believed it impossible for the VMS to be a simple substitution cipher and (if I am not mistaken) a transposition cipher.
3) As follows from 2), Tiltman believed it impossible for the VMS to represent a natural flow of text in a natural language ("languages simply do not behave in this way")
4) As a possibility, Tiltman suggested that the script might be a synthetic language; but he was not confident in this, using expression like "it might be, for instance..."
5) Tiltman acknowledged that none of his statements of opinion is free from contradictions.

Might we not conclude from this that expert opinions, in particular about the Voynich, are often:

1) uncertain
2) open to interpretation by the reader

...and that it is improper to stop a discussion just by referring to "expert opinion" without providing something like a quote or context? Expert opinion can enhance one's argument, especially if the expert provides clear arguments himself, but it alone is not the most convincing argument.

Tiltman's investigation conduct and the investigation itself are the most valuable in my view.

Not what he writes about the text is interesting, but the different angles, the energy he put in to actually meet people and to write a report of his findings.


For me personally the most valuable in his paper was the link to the pasigraphy possibilities.

Blimey, if I had a dollar for each time someone takes a snidey pot-shot at me in online forums, I'd surely have been able to buy my own Flaming Cross of Goa by now, right? *sigh*

Anyway... of late, some people have taken to falsely asserting that both William Friedman and John Tiltman didn't think Voynichese was written in cipher. However, Anton above accurately summarised the real situation: they while they both (and indeed Elizebeth Friedman too) were sure that Voynichese was not written using a simple substitution cipher, it remained unclear to them exactly what kind of cipher or code it was.

Yet the direct and unmistakeable corollary of what all three agreed is that Voynichese cannot itself be a natural language - as noted, "Languages simply do not behave in this way". This is not an optional part of what they concluded, it's a central plank of their shared view of the Voynich Manuscript.

And perhaps because the position I've maintained for the last decade (that Voynichese is an elegant and visually deceptive mixture of verbose cipher, scribal shorthand, and even transposition cipher) is essentially a more nuanced version of Tiltman's position from 40+ years ago, I can see why some people are so quick to disrespect me: because I too agree with that same corollary - that whatever Voynichese is, it most certainly isn't a natural language.

At the same time, I would heartily agree that it would be nice if Stephen Bax's hypothesis could be made to fit more than eight words (badly) out of a text that is many thousands of words long: but the problem is that it can't. Nor will anyone else's obscure-or-warped-natural-language hypothesis fare any better by that same measure: because they can't either.

In fact, you can find around ten English words in the EVA dictionary (purely by chance): and indeed around the same number of French words. Which would surely seem to suggest that there's more chance that the Voynich Manuscript was written in plaintext English in EVA than in whatever fractionally-reconstructed polyglot Ur-language that Bax continues to try to propose.

At the same time, what for me has devalued the discourse most is that Stephen Bax's ongoing defence (of what by any objective standard makes no statistical or practical sense) has encouraged others to put forward their own multitude of equally fragmented and broken pro-linguistic theories. And Bax's public attacks on me have encouraged others to attack me in broadly the same way.

Only in the hall-of-mirrors world of post-Baxian Voynich research would anyone dream of making ad hominem attacks on me to try to undermine what Tiltman and both Friedmans concluded half a century ago. Yet that is exactly what continues to happen, both here and elsewhere.

(19-08-2016, 03:56 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Blimey, if I had a dollar for each time someone takes a snidey pot-shot at me in online forums, I'd surely have been able to buy my own Flaming Cross of Goa by now, right? *sigh*

It wasn't intended to be a potshot at you, and I'm sorry that I did not make that clearer.  What I was objecting to was Rene's rather selective criteria for determining who is and who is not an authority in a given field.

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(17-08-2016, 09:54 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:My analysis, I believe, shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural order.

This statement, in the first place, means that Tiltman believes it impossible that the text is a simple substitution cipher - an opinion which, I think, is not presently disputed by anyone.

But in the second place, this statement (just by way of definition of a simple substitution cipher) means that Tiltman believes it impossible that the text is a natural flow of a plain text in any language. He adds immediately:

Quote:Languages simply do not behave in this way

Removed from context, it's easy to see this as a blanket statement that the VMS could not be a "plaintext" in any language.  But from context it's pretty clear that he was mainly trying to make a point that it could not a be a simple substitution cipher presumably of a European language.  The idea that the VMS could be written in some kind of very unusual (from the European point of view) natural language is not a possibility that he addressed one way or the other in this paper.

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(17-08-2016, 09:54 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Tiltman concludes:

Quote:My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution

It is not clear whether Tiltman means a complex substitution cipher here or some other thing,

It's clear that his primary point was that the substitution would have to act not on individual letters, but on whole words or parts of words.  This is the "code book" or "artificial language" idea, and this is precisely what he goes on to describe following these remarks.

This happens when one is too brief in expressing his opinions  

Quote:I am fully convinced that the conclusions from Friedman and Tiltman (that it's not a cipher) are not to be challenged.
The key point is, though, what they mean precisely with 'cipher'.
Nowadays, Nick Pelling is clearly in the 'cipher' camp. However, he may have a wider definition of cipher than what Friedman and Tiltman intended.

Tiltman's opinion has been quoted by now. While he allows for the possibility that it could be some more complicated combination of ciphers, he also expresses his uncertainty about his opinions.

What matters most to me is that both failed to solve it. Friedman specifically writes on several occasions that he admits defeat. I'll see if I can find an example over the weekend.

Furthermore, when the person who is regarded by many as the top expert in the history of this field (i.e. W.Friedman) says, that he thinks it is like a constructed language, this is equivalent with saying that he thinks it is not a cipher.
We are uncertain about what he (or, in fact, his wife) has tried exactly.
We might not even fully understand it because, as JKP suggests correctly, he was probably one of these people whose minds don't work only according to set procedures.
But that's speculation.

Now since

1) I know that Nick is very familiar with the work of Friedman (both of them) and Tiltman, and
2) I don't believe for a second that he would simply disregard their opinions and
3) he is one of the world's most knowledgeable people about the Voynich MS

if he strongly believes that there is a cipher at work, this must be according to a wider definition of cipher.

I don't know if the 'stroke encoding' method once proposed by Elmar Vogt would count as a cipher, for example.
If it were something like that, at the end people might even be arguing whether it was a cipher or not even when it is solved.

About language: cipher and language are not mutually exclusive. If it is a cipher, there is a language behind it. Depending on the method of the cipher, the various properties of the language may have been preserved, altered, or utterly destroyed.
For me, the opposite of language is 'meaningless'.

When Tiltman writes, "Languages simply do not behave in this way",  he is not speaking as an expert in linguistics.

The prefix/suffix rule he present in his paper (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) is basically exactly how Mandarin Chinese works. 
(Of course, his table is simplified and works only for a fraction of the Voynich words - for Mandarin, a complete table can be set up - plenty of examples in the net).

I'm sure this is still too brief...

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Quote: Wrote:But how do we possibly reconcile a 100% medieval Western European origin for the VMS with the fact that it is written in an otherwise unknown language?

It's an unreadable text, not necessarily an unknown language.

The problem is not that there is no way to reconcile an unreadable text with a medieval Western European origin.
There are many possible ways, but we just haven't found the right one.

(19-08-2016, 07:38 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

if he strongly believes that there is a cipher at work, this must be according to a wider definition of cipher.

Okay.  Well, on that subject then, what I question is whether there is really a valid concept in the "wider definition of cipher" that is not already included in some other category.  It seems to me that you have two basic options that are compatible with the properties of the VMS text:

1) Essentially unencrypted language of some kind, whether of the "code book"/artificial language variety, or the unknown natural language variety.

2) Extremely verbose cipher with some kind of scrambling/transposition applied, or complete gibberish with a message hidden using steganography.  In these two cases the plaintext would have to be much shorter than the VMS text, and the labels would have to be meaningless.

I don't think there's anything else that can be concretely described that can't be ruled out.

Quote:I don't know if the 'stroke encoding' method once proposed by Elmar Vogt would count as a cipher, for example.
If it were something like that, at the end people might even be arguing whether it was a cipher or not even when it is solved.

It has been a while since I looked at it, but as I recall it was simply a variant of the verbose cipher idea, where the verbose encodings are determined by the strokes used to compose the plaintext letters.  It has the same problems with the verbose cipher idea generally (short words, no repeated sequences, one-word labels).