The Voynich Ninja

...it often sounds like a political arena here. 
I really would like to discuss real information and not discuss about discussions that discuss old issues and going around in circles.

I think we all agree on the text being "something special". Whatever it is, or not. How can we solve it, together. How do we get a rocket to the moon?
I disagree, that this must be a solo action.

(19-08-2016, 10:47 AM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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.

It has already been pointed out that 1) ("unencrypted language of some kind") is exactly what Tiltman and the Friedmans didn't think much of. To try to get around all the statistical objections, William Friedman ended up proposing that Voynichese would have to be an artificial language of some sort... though with the dating evidence we now have, this would be a couple of centuries before the first completely artificial language of any real sort was devised and discussed, which makes the possibility highly unlikely.

As far as 2) goes, if your starting position is that Voynichese is too predictable on a character level to be anything but some kind of verbose cipher (look at ol, or, al, ar, qo, aiin, aiir, etc), I'd agree that you're seeing it clearly. If your secondary step in your argument is to point out that Voynichese words are generally too short to be compatible with verbose cipher, I'd agree that this is also correct.

However, the explanation I proposed a decade ago is that Voynichese combines verbose cipher with scribal abbreviation - truncation, contraction, and so forth. By this scheme, a Voynichese 'word' would be made longer (through verbose cipher) as well as shorter (through abbreviation) at the same time, thus leaving Voynichese words about the same net length as their plaintext equivalents.

For example, EVA 'd' might well be 'contractio' (say, a token denoting that a syllable has been removed), and EVA 'y' 'truncatio' (say, a token denoting that the word has been shortened).

For what it's worth, I don't think that even this explanation gets us all the way to the finishing line, but I don't believe you've yet ruled it out.

Cheers, Nick

Anton (and others)
Thank you for these comments; it was a pleasure to read them.

From my point of view it is absolutely true what Anton says about every professional working within certain limits - which means their opinion always has its  limitations.

In my own area, there usually comes a point where the comparative reach which is a benefit overall, needs additional advice from someone who works within a more limited framework of period and/or geography.  At other times, the same comparative reach means that one has to  contradict the ideas of someone working with more  limited horizons.  For example, a specialist in medieval Christian art might attribute the figure of St.Michael to Celtic and/or Byzantine origin, whereas in fact we have imagery of that Great Angel from as early as the 7thC BC.  It simply became Christianised. 

That is why a specialist in western Christian art, presented with a figure of that sort, might consider the range of forms known to them within their own field of specialization, and identify the figure as "St.Michael" because they know nothing else that is similar in medieval Christian art.  And they would be mistaken; the piece might be Lucanian Greek of the 5thC BC, a precursor of Michael, but no Christian saint.

The reason that I place such weight on the first, unforced opinion given by Irwin Panofsky to Nill, is  precisely because he was that rare person who is both a specialist in comparative study (within European art) and also a particular specialist in German medieval art, and he had mastered all the necessary texts which underpin that range of imagery  - the classical works, their languages, the religious texts, theologians' writings, poetry and more.

The single greatest error, I find, in amateurs who try to "match the picture" on a purely superficial level is that they seem to have no conception of the fact that a picture is a form of encoding, and speaks the visual and even the verbal language of its makers and their intended audience.   To appreciate the content in an image, you can't just "look" or look for something which seems  "look-alike" from the point of view of your own native culture: you have to learn to read ~ effectively to decode the imagery, to recognise the language in which it was first enunciated.  I say 'first' because imagery evolves - also like language - and if you're lucky still carries the evidence of its evolution.

So when an expert of Panofsky's calibre says,  in effect, that the imagery is not Latin Christian nor German, but southern and Jewish -  then I pay attention.


One definition of an expert, it is said, is that they can recognise another expert.

Quote: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.

Tiltman does not say about any particular language. He says about "languages" in general. But, as Rene already pointed above, Tiltman was not an expert in linguistics, so actually his opinion here may be not that authoritative, so, hypothetically, there might be languages that behave "this way".

Quote:I think we all agree on the text being "something special". Whatever it is, or not. How can we solve it, together. How do we get a rocket to the moon?

My idea is that the approach should be "theory-independent" as far as possible. There is no need to decide between cipher, natural language, synthetic language earlier than it's really required. Many things can be done before that. Especially:

• investigating what's the real Voynichese alphabet
  
• exploring contextual affinities
  
• tracing internal narration structure
  

This is only in the field of the text analysis, and I left aside imagery and marginalia.

Rockets to the moon, I say. But how? Nick has a ten-year-old theory. I'm sure it's a good theory, but if it was something that could be put into practice, why hasn't that happened? And many of us have tried to match images in the VMs with those in various medieval manuscripts. It makes for interesting discussions, but there are certain problems, as Diane has pointed out.

The problems include subjective interpretation and the use of one-to-one correspondence. What to do? Institute a paradigm shift. Instead of following any sort of one-to-one correspondence, *require* a two-to-two correspondence. A pair in the real world that corresponds to a pair in the VMs. This will not eliminate subjective interpretation, but it significantly reduces the number of options, after which other specific criteria can be applied.

It works like this. Suppose we have a stadium full of people and we ask a question. Will everyone who is not a twin please leave? And everyone complies with the protocol. The number of those remaining will be greatly reduced. It also works in the VMs. Anyone can recognize VMs Pisces as a pair of fish. And rather than being a clever paradigm that is too complex to implement, the pairing paradigm is so simple and obvious at the beginning that it basically fails to register among those investigators who seem to feel that this complex problem requires complex solutions.

Make the paradigm shift. Institute the pairing paradigm. Follow where it leads: example after example after example. All concentrated in the first five houses of the VMs Zodiac. Then look back and ask how it is that this pathway exists in the VMs?  Perhaps a better understanding can be gained by following a simple path that the Vms author provides.

I suppose the real question of this thread is: what is an expert?

For me, an expert is someone who has first gone through a period of almost obsessive fact-gathering (primary evidence where possible) as well as deep immersion in sources contemporaneous and/or closely relevant to the thing concerned. And then, at the end of all that, is someone who is left with the clarity of insight and strength of mind to be able to break down related arguments (both their own and other people's) into their component steps.

By that token, the true mark of an expert opinion is not so much that it is oracular as that it is well-informed, clear-headed, insightful and genuinely analytical.

The problem is that this sometimes leads the expert to take a view on a subject that can prove hugely unpopular. Back in 2004, for example, it became completely clear to me that we had a good number of immovable data points and deeply telling observations that all signalled a mid-fifteenth century origin for the Voynich Manuscript. Yet all that ever summoned to my door was wave after wave of hostility from Voynich theorists: arguably, those waves have yet to abate, despite radiocarbon dating.

The sorry truth is that in the Voynich Manuscript study community (and in many others like it), expert opinion has never been more asked for, more deeply needed, and yet more openly reviled when it arrives.

(19-08-2016, 08:38 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[deleted for brevity]

It works like this. Suppose we have a stadium full of people and we ask a question. Will everyone who is not a twin please leave? And everyone complies with the protocol. The number of those remaining will be greatly reduced. It also works in the VMs. Anyone can recognize VMs Pisces as a pair of fish. And rather than being a clever paradigm that is too complex to implement, the pairing paradigm is so simple and obvious at the beginning that it basically fails to register among those investigators who seem to feel that this complex problem requires complex solutions.

Make the paradigm shift. Institute the pairing paradigm. Follow where it leads: example after example after example. All concentrated in the first five houses of the VMs Zodiac. Then look back and ask how it is that this pathway exists in the VMs?  Perhaps a better understanding can be gained by following a simple path that the Vms author provides.

Instead of Pisces, Cancer might be a better example. A pair of fish is traditional. A pair of crayfish/lobsters is not.

Quote:Instead of Pisces, Cancer might be a better example. A pair of fish is traditional. A pair of crayfish/lobsters is not.

Well, while we discussed expert opinions in the imagery thread, we now return to discussing imagery in the expert opinions thread.  Let's keep the thread on topic.

I think it is only important to the expert himself, how he sees others.

What?

I think it is only important to the expert himself, how he sees others.

If you think you are an expert, could another person be on you level of expertise ?
Probably not, otherwise you would not be an expert: if the whole world has the same information and knowledge, 
you have no better or more information and therefore you are not an expert.

An expert is somebody that has supreme knowledge.

So what should an expert do with all that knowledge? Share it? But nobody understands him/her.
Well, that is a difficult issue and makes communication difficult but not impossible.

And then there are experts who are expert on a new field. They invented that new field. Nobody understands them.
Do you think that Jean-François Champollion was considered to be an expert on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. BEFORE he deciphered it ?
 
The challenge is to respect opinions and to remain open-minded. Always.

If you can not do that, well, you will never discover anything new with that approach.

Quote: Diane said:
That is why a specialist in western Christian art, presented with a figure of that sort, might consider the range of forms known to them within their own field of specialization, and identify the figure as "St.Michael" because they know nothing else that is similar in medieval Christian art.  And they would be mistaken; the piece might be Lucanian Greek of the 5thC BC, a precursor of Michael, but no Christian saint.

If s/he is a specialist in western Christian art, they will know the history of "St Michael" and be able to discuss the wider implications of the iconography, precisely because of their expertise -they should be able to consider the surroundings of the icon in order to decide that actually, it's outside of their area of expertise.

It is the layperson who sees something similar to a 15th century interpretation of St Michael and is unable to consider a wider interpretation.

Sorry, what were we discussing originally here?