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Some contrarian views on ...
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New Paper: Subtle Signs o...
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Why we can't read it and ...
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Extension to the Currier ...
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[split] Cvetka's theory t...
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this vegetable on f102v2 ...
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Some contrarian views on transcription |
Posted by: kckluge - 2 hours ago - Forum: Analysis of the text
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* Contrarian view #1: Don't bother sweating the "weirdos".
Having built scripts to convert both the L-Z EVA-based transcription and the v101 transcription to the Currier alphabet, my recollection is that the fraction of glyphs for which there is not an unambiguous Currier equivalent (at least with regard to the running text in the initial herbal quires and the bio section) is roughly half a percent. I'll double check, but I'm pretty sure that's right (which is not to say that the transcriptions agree with each other at that level). That means "basic EVA"/Currier/just the vanilla ASCII bits of v101 captures roughly 199 out of every 200 glyphs. That should be good enough to read the text (if there is a text to read) -- and if it's not, then I would argue that there's no point in worrying about it.
To be clear, this is a pragmatic claim not a theoretical one. If the question is "is it possible that reading the text requires capturing every nuance of every 'weirdo' in the text?", then I have to agree that yes, abstractly it is possible. The text could be generated in some way that has some kind of state such that unless we capture all the weirdos we'll fail in trying to read it. I don't think I've ever seen anyone make a compelling case that the bulk statistics of the text make that likely, but it's possible.
Pragmatically, if that's the case then I think that without some additional side channel of information -- finding a "bilingual" document enabling a known plaintext attack, for instance -- we might as well throw in the towel. Which makes investing large amounts of effort in encoding "weirdos" (as opposed to just marking them with something like the Currier alphabet's '*' "here be a dragon" character) an unproductive use of time. Which means "basic EVA"/Currier/just the vanilla ASCII bits of v101 should be good enough.
That's not the same thing as saying that there isn't room for argument over whether "basic EVA" (for instance) is capturing the right equivalence classes of groups of ink strokes. I've seen people claim that whether an 'a' is closed at the top or not matters, for example -- but that's a different issue.
* Contrarian view #2: For the sake of all that's good and bright and beautiful in the universe, can we please, please, please stop using EVA?
While I have never loathed EVA with the blazing white-hot passionate hatred that Glen Claston did (and anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating can go read his Voynich mailing list remarks on the subject), I just don't see the argument for "why EVA?". Granting the premise that there is value in an "analytic" transcription that is neutral about how to read the ligatured gallows or word-final i*<x> sequences, I fail to see why EVA is that transcription -- and in particular, I see no reason to prefer it to Frogguy (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.):
1) I have never understood the virtue of prioritizing making the transcription pronounceable over visual resemblance to the script. I mean, sure, a 'd' kind of looks like an '8' with the upper loop squished, and a 'y' kind of looks like a '9' without a closed top loop, and a 'q' kind of looks like a '4' written by someone who hates corners, but...why? According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it's to help make common words easy to recognize and remember. I suppose this is one of those "your mileage may vary" things.
2) In fact, the pronounceability of EVA has had the unfortunate effect of a non-trivial number of naive newcomers to MS 408 thinking there is actual significance to the phonetic values in the EVA transcription scheme. I realize that the people behind EVA didn't intend that to be the case, and are explicit in various places in making clear it isn't, but if someone just grabs a transcription file without "reading the manual" that doesn't help.
3) The clear advantage of Frogguy is that the learning curve is truly minimal. The gallows, for example, are 'lp', 'qp', 'lj', and 'qj' -- and anyone who has seen the actual text should immediately grok which is which...
4) As Rene says on the page referenced above, "It is very important to point out that Eva is not attempting to identify semantic units in the text. It simply represents in an electronic form the shapes that are seen in the MS. It is left to a later step by analysts to decide which combinations should be seen as units." If you're going to have to transform the transcription to do meaningful analysis anyways, why not do it from something that maximizes the fluency of transcription with a lower learning curve (and probably lower transcription error rate)?
I think that's probably enough of me being a curmudgeon for the evening...
Karl
(PS, coming soon -- the Midsomer Murders MS 408-themed fanfic you never realized you needed. When a visitor researching a possible connection between Midsomer and the mysterious Voynich manuscript is found murdered at a Voynich-inspired spa & herbal treatment center, Winter and Barnaby have to decode the killer's motive before there are more deaths. How many more victims will die before they succeed in...Deciphering Murder?)
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Why we can't read it and Michael Coe's "Five Pillars of Decipherment" |
Posted by: kckluge - Yesterday, 10:11 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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A while back I can across a very interesting blog post by a linguist (Peter Bakker, an expert on creole languages) offering thoughts on the MS 408 text from a linguistic perspective (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- the would-be decipherer he refuses to name is clearly Cheshire...). His conclusion is that "If it would have been a real language, in a rational and regular writing system, experts would have figured it out by now."
While I don't think Michael Coe has ever commented on the Voynich text, he's someone who has experience as a key player in the decipherment of the Mayan script. As a result, he has a good understanding of the historical prerequisites for successful decipherments of unreadable scripts, which he has articulated in a number of places as the "Five Pillars of Decipherment" (see, for instance, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.; Zender gives a slightly revised list of the pillars in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Here are the five pillars (quoted from Coe's paper on the Indus script):
"1 A large and well-published database: there should be many texts, and most of these should encode complete sentences.
"2 A known language which is encoded by the script, preferably reconstructed in phonology, grammar, and syntax to the period in which the script was in use.
"3 One or more bilingual texts, one member of which is in an already deciphered or otherwise readable script.
"4 A well-understood cultural context to aid in the understanding and reading of the texts.
"5 If the script is logographic or logo-syllabic, there should be accompanying pictorial references (as there are in Egyptian and Classic Maya) to apply to the texts.
"Even texts written in an alphabetic system can be difficult to understand if some of these conditions are not met; consider Etruscan, which violates no. 2 in this list - although we can read Etruscan inscriptions (since the alphabet is very similar to the Greek), they are not readily intelligible.[....]"
Looking at the "pillars" in the context of the Voynich mss.:
Pillar #1 (large database): While there is only one "text", the total length of the manuscript text is fairly large. If there is a meaningful underlying text, it is unclear that the entire codex is in a single natural language (or cipher system/key as the case may be) -- as Bowern & Lindemann observe (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), "Although there is some overlap, the most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. While the words in both languages are built from the same three-field structure, they do not clearly correspond to each other. They might be the result of different encoding processes, or they might represent different underlying natural languages." Even so, given the volume of text just the Herbal A dialect pages or the Bio B pages would seem to provide ample material to work with.
Pillar #2 (known language): What Coe means here isn't simply that the underlying language is attested somewhere. He's talking about the way the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics leveraged the assumption that non-Egyptian names were transcriptions of Greek names using the phonetic values of the characters, and that the texts as a whole were in a language closely related to Coptic; or the way the decipherment of Linear B leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was an early form of Greek; or the way the decipherment of the Mayan script leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was closely related to the Conquest-era spoken Mayan language. It would be fair to say there is no consensus regarding any underlying natural language (whether enciphered or not).
Pillar #3 (bilingual texts): Yeah...we don't have that. 'Nuf said.
Pillar #4 (cultural context): Unfortunately, we don't have much certainty about that. The bulk of the analysis of the imagery that has been done has focused (understandably in light of Pillar #5) on trying to identify the plant images; there has been much more limited published art historical analysis of the other imagery. Diane O'Donovan has written extensively on the subject, and hopefully will follow through on her current plan to submit several papers describing her views for publication -- as someone who isn't an art historian by training, I'd like to see other professional art historians engage with her views on the subject. Others such as Koen Gheuens have mapped specific motifs over a more limited European range. It's very unfortunate that we don't have any visibility into the content of Martina Pippal's recent course on the subject at the University of Vienna.
Pillar #5 (accompanying pictorial references): In principle, we have those. The plants would seem to offer the most likely leverage point -- efforts to identify the plant drawings go back to Ethel Voynich and Theodore Petersen; Jorge Stolfi put forward an argument that the first word of the herbal pages was likely the plant name (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Unfortunately, efforts to use the plant drawings as cribs haven't worked (at least partly because many of the plant identifications are uncertain or contested).
So, in summary -- yes on Pillar #1, no on Pillars #2 & #3, unclear at best on Pillar #4, and in principle a yes on Pillar #5. Looked at through the lens of Coe's pillars it's not all that surprising the text (if there is one) hasn't been read.
Karl
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Almanacs: Ptolemy's Phases |
Posted by: HermesRevived - Yesterday, 03:33 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (3)
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New posts at Lingua Nympharum, now pursuing astrological and astro-meteorological themes, including this post concerning solar/stellar 'phases' and almanacs as a model:
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New Paper: Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent... |
Posted by: asteckley - 26-04-2024, 09:48 PM - Forum: News
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Our recent paper, “Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent in the Voynich Manuscript” may be of interest to those of you analyzing the Voynich text for its possible underlying language and meaning.
The preprint version can be found on ArXiv: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Abstract:
“This study explores the cryptic Voynich Manuscript, by looking for subtle signs of scribal intent hidden in overlooked features of the “Voynichese” script. The findings indicate that distributions of tokens within paragraphs vary significantly based on positions defined not only by elements intrinsic to the script such as paragraph and line boundaries but also by extrinsic elements, namely the hand-drawn illustrations of plants.”
The paper is a bit technical, so here is a summary of the more interesting results: - Certain word tokens exhibit a propensity to occur –or to be avoided– in certain positions such as the top line of paragraphs or at the beginning or ends of lines. That is not too surprising as it’s been observed to some extent before.
- The more surprising find is that there is also a propensity for certain word tokens to occur immediately before, or immediately after, the hand drawn plant illustrations.
The propensities were analyzed in detail to ensure the statistical significance.
A reference catalog of word tokens with propensities was compiled. Only a couple of the tables could be included in the paper due space limitations, so below are a few more of them.
The whole catalog of tables is included in the Supplemental Online Material at:
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Note that the entire analysis was restricted to the portion of the manuscript believed to be written by a single scribe (Scribe 1 as identified by Lisa Fagin-Davis).
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Dijon 1433 |
Posted by: R. Sale - 25-04-2024, 07:52 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Historical events and beliefs - in Borgogna, none the less. Philip the Good was Duke of Burgundy in 1433.
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Extension to the Currier languages |
Posted by: ReneZ - 23-04-2024, 03:51 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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As should be well known to everyone, in the 1970's Prescott Currier identified two languages ("A" and "B") in the Voynich MS text.
I have been looking at consolidating and extending that work off and on in the past, and just recently completed a first iteration of such a consolidation and extension.
Most of the pages that Currier did not classify appear to be in some intermediate form, which I have decided to call "C" language. Furthermore, using quantitative criteria, all pages have now been classified into these three languages, and a number of sub-categories or dialects.
I consider this not a closed activity. There are still important properties of the text that have not been taken into account.
The details of this first stage are described briefly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
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Paths to Decipherment |
Posted by: Mark Knowles - 19-04-2024, 06:34 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I like to be goal focused and I am interested in the key goal of deciphering and therefore unlocking the Voynich. A question that I always have in the back of my mind is which are the best strategies to move towards decipherment. These are my thoughts:
1)A crib or more likely what Nick Pelling calls a block-paradigm. Such a block-paradigm may or may not exist. That would be a parallel and identical document or piece of text to what we find in the Voynich. The question then becomes what is the best avenue to finding such a document.
2)The discovery of a related cipher. This has been a goal I have been interested in, though it is a challenging one as so many cipher records from the early 15th century are lost.
3)Some AI based approach to decipher the script. Statistical analysis on its own I doubt will be nearly sufficient. If AI is used it will need to be highly sophisticated to find the answer from the solution space.
4)Some lost pages or document which will illuminate the script. Finding anything of the kind seems unlikely.
I daresay there are others that I have forgotten to mention.
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Voynich Talk Episode 1, part 1: A plant is not B plant |
Posted by: Koen G - 17-04-2024, 02:02 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (18)
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I have hinted at it a couple of times, but finally it is done. I present to you the first episode of Voynich Talk! I wanted to make more videos like the interviews David and I did before, but also I wanted some more freedom in the format.
Instead of interviews with a single guest, I would like to invite one or more guests to talk about a selected topic.
As for the expected publication schedule, there is none. I don't expect to put out more than one video a month, since these take a lot of my spare time, and also I don't want to wear down potential (recurring) guests and topics too quickly. If I can approach some semblance of long-term regularity, I will be happy.
Normally, the talks will be focused on the guests and their input on the topic, and I will just guide the conversation.
However, for this first episode, we did something different. Together with Cary Rapaport, I have been researching the Herbal section (large plants). We studied different elements of the plant drawings, and noticed that many of them were near-exclusively found in either Herbal A or Herbal B. As it turns out, there are many more consistent features indicating the typical A-style and B-style than were previously known.
We developed the system to such a degree that we could now easily classify most plants as A or B by looking at the picture alone.
I even thought that we could probably teach someone else, thereby testing the validity of the system in the process. And so the idea for the first episode of Voynich Talk was born.
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Thanks to Lisa Fagin Davis, Lars Dietz (@Oocephalus), Michelle Lewis and David Jackson for their participation!
For a more in-depth discussion of distinctive plant features, see:
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