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| Logic issues |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 26-04-2020, 07:21 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (33)
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When reading in papers, blog posts, forum contributions related to the Voynich MS, I regularly run into issues with the logic applied. Sometimes these are obvious, but sometimes they are not, and the logic works like a smoke screen that does not allow us to see clearly. I am sure that in many cases this is not even intentional.
I don't want to start the 'complete list of logical errors' here, but there are a few typical cases that stand out.
In a recent Spanish paper, I once again encountered the problem where weak evidence is used to negate strong evidence. A typical issue is that evidence is not weighted on its objective strength, but on whether it is favourable or unfavourable to one's thoughts.
Another common error is the non-sequitur. A conclusion simply does not follow from the evidence provided. Even when it may seem quite logical at first sight.
The case that I keep running into I would like to call 'proof by example'. It may have a proper name, but I don't know it. It is related to 'disproof by counter-example'. Both may be valid in some cases, but are not valid in many other cases.
If one wants to prove that something is possible, then giving an example is sufficient of course.
However, let me illustrate the problem with an easy example.
Suppose I hold a fruit behind my back and I ask someone to guess what it is, and I tell him that the fruit is yellow. The answer could be: it has to be a lemon, because a lemon is yellow. This is what I would call 'proof by example'. It is obviously not valid, because it could also be a banana.
It is not sufficient to argue about the likelihood of the two cases, because there are even more yellow fruit, some which the guesser is not even familiar with.
If I gave additional hints, they would only work if they actually distinguish between the two.
Someone else might guess: "it is an orange". When I argue that oranges are not yellow, he could say: they are. Here, the perception of the guesser is blurred. It may seem as if I am making a strange point, but this sort of thing is happening all the time.
Since much of the discussions are quite subjective, it is rarely as easy as in this example.
I also could hold a red fruit behind my back, and suggest to the guesser that it is a banana. The guesser would say: no it can't be because bananas are yellow. Well, red bananas exist, so this is a case of incorrect disproof. This also happens all the time.
The Spanish paper I mentioned in the beginning considered:
- the Meso-american herb identifications
- the identification of a meso-american language by Hauer and Kondrak
strong evidence, much stronger than the radio-carbon dating of the paper (sic) of the MS.
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| [split] Aga Tentakulus' Logical System |
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Posted by: Aga Tentakulus - 25-04-2020, 07:28 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (26)
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In 2012 I have started an attempt to work out a logical system with interested people.
Unfortunately they were not very enthusiastic and nobody took part.
Example Taurus / Taurum
taurus / taurum = tus / tum = 8g ?
Warum 6.png (Size: 30.27 KB / Downloads: 241)
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Warum 11.png (Size: 51.03 KB / Downloads: 237)
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[/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Now we play with the signs and front the system a little[/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
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[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Possibly a confirmation[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
usus.png (Size: 93.25 KB / Downloads: 247)
[/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]If I follow the thread, I'll get one of these.[/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
Text Ring Rosette.png (Size: 209.86 KB / Downloads: 227)
[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]1. it is not important whether right or wrong, but a system is emerging
[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
2. nobody would create a system just to make a blah blah blah.
3. therefore I can assume that this is a meaningful text.
4. I must assign the images in the VM correctly, so that I know in which topic I have to compare the text.
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]This was a small part of my work.[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Sorry if I overloaded your site.[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
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| folio 85r - full text (no illustrations) |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 23-04-2020, 06:16 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (19)
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has some interesting characteristics.
There are no illustrations.
The p chars are longer than usual but not overly embellished.
The f is very uncommon compared to the other "gallows" characters.
The rare char x appears on this folio.
Paragraph 5 has to curve down to avoid hitting the short line above. It looks like the scribe forgot there was a short line on the right and started the next paragraph too high.
The text consists of eight short "paragraphs" (blocks of text separated by a slightly larger space and an elongated p at the beginning).
- Six of these paragraphs have short lines that are left- or middle-justified.
- One of the short lines is right-justified.
- N.B.: All of the left-justified and mid-justified short lines end with y.
- N.B.: Of the 28 longest lines, 14 end with m... (50%) except one of those "long" lines is a bit shorter than the others and actually has g instead of m (9th from bottom). In languages that use Latin abbreviations, the [font=Eva]g and m chars have two different meanings (I don't know if this is the case in Voynichese but it's interesting that the scribe chose a variant character for the not-quite-as-long line).[/font]
In other words, the presence of certain characters may be related to the length and position of lines. Note that the short line that is right-justified has the same m ending as many of the long lines.
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| Regarding history & citations in general... |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 22-04-2020, 11:05 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (4)
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Earlier historians didn't have the Internet.
I'm quite impressed by how much information the intelligence community's Study Group was able to gather about the VMS, especially considering that many places were closed during wartime, travel was greatly restricted, and many treasures (like manuscripts) were hidden away until things settled down.
But the Internet isn't a panacea either. I see bad information and outright wrong information every day (especially on those question and answer sites where the first five people who answer almost never know what they are talking about and then they lock the threads before someone knowledgable answers).
The following is a very trivial example, but here's the kind of thing I see very frequently on the Web (from Merriam-Webster's dictionary):
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[font=Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]Definition of [i]paleography[/i]
1: the study of ancient or antiquated writings and inscriptions : the deciphering and interpretation of historical writing systems and manuscripts
2a: an ancient or antiquated manner of writing
b: ancient or antiquated writings[/font]
[font=Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]First Known Use of [i]paleography[/i]
1749, in the meaning defined at sense 2a <-------[/font]
[font=Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]------------------------------[/font]
- I knew the date of 1749 for the etymology was wrong as soon as I saw it. I have seen earlier references and the ones I've seen probably aren't even the earliest since I haven't actually studied the etymology of the word. For example, in A New Voyage to Italy (1714), Maximilien Misson mentions Greek palaeography, possibly inspired by Montfaucon's use of palaeographia several years earlier. There are probably many others.
- A less trivial example is a wrong translation of a short line of text that was included in an academic paper. Within months it had spread to hundreds of sites on the Web without a single person questioning whether the translation was correct. They simply parroted something that was convenient to copy.
- And then, of course, there are the supposedly peer-reviewed VMS papers that should never have been accepted for publication, and all the VMS "solutions" that get so much airtime in the popular press.
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]-------[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]In other words, you can't trust anything you see, even from well-known sources, and have to double-check everything.[/font]
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Often I spend more time trying to verify things than I do on research (which can be disheartening at times and is probably why I'm writing this instead of eating my lunch). In fact, this is the main reason my blogs sit for months (sometimes years) before I post them. The one I tried to finish last night lacks a citation and I can't find the original source. It has vanished off the Web—drowned out by thousands of posts on the copycat sites. My searches are starting to look like this:[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]searchterm -twitter -pinterest -123rf -shutterstock -alamy -depositphotos -pixabay -canstockphoto -pixels.com (and so on...)[/font]
I don't usually screen out Getty images because they have some good historical information. Sometimes if I can't find what I want I'll include Pinterest, but mostly I'll exclude it. Sometimes I exclude flickr, sometimes not. It depends.
My only real strategy so far is to exclude the Websites that are the worst offenders (like Twitter, Pinterest and the stock-photo sites), but I've noticed that original sources tend to age off (one of my favorite botanical sites doesn't show up any more and I know they are still out there) and this happens faster now that the copycat (re-posting sites) are getting so big. I can't bookmark every site... I already have more bookmarks than I can manage (thousands). And there's no way to bookmark a source you haven't found yet.
[font=sans-serif]So, if anyone has any tips as to how to get past all the copycat sites that are increasingly cluttering the Web with replicated information that doesn't include sources, I would be happy to hear them. I spend most of my time on repositories with digitized manuscripts, but sometimes I need to actually FIND stuff on the Web and I don't want the re-copied stuff, I want the original sources.
[/font]
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| qo- vord formation |
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Posted by: ThomasCoon - 19-04-2020, 12:07 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (27)
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Hello all, long time no see! I've been looking at qo- vords and would like to hypothesize a paradigm to form them:
[q] + [o/a/y] + [k/t/p/f] + [ch/che/chee/Sh/ee/etc.] + [o/a/y] + [r/l] + [d/s] + [o/a/y] + [n/in/iin/iiin/m/im/etc.]
In this paradigm, a group may be present or not (e.g. qotchol vs. qotcho). My theory is that presence or absence of certain characters may be input for a corresponding decoding table.
I am assuming that all the gallows characters are functionally equivalent, following Mary D'imperio (1978 pgs. 24-25) and also Marco Ponzi who put them into the same Character class You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I also assume this about the (usually) interchangeable ch/Sh/ee group.
Here are some examples:
qotchoiin
qotcham
qopchor
qokShol
qotchol
qoteeol
qokcheo
qokShy
qokchy
qotchy
qoteeey
qokeey
qokey
qoky
qoty
qokeeo
qotcho
qodaiin
qosaiin
qotaiin
qokaiin
What are your thoughts?
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| Top 10 - Manuscripts, Archives or Documents to Digitize |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 17-04-2020, 07:42 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Given the recent post about the Archive of the Dukes of Burgundy being digitised I am curious as to people's opinions as to which digitisation projects are most likely to advance Voynich research. I leave this a fairly open question as to whether there are specific manuscripts or specific archives(the Vatican Archive would obviously be a very big ask) that people think would make a real difference. I also am curious if we can speculate about time scales for these documents to be digitised 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 100+ years. Also do we think that finding the right document(s) will be the key to understanding the Voynich.(If Nick Pelling's block-paradigm really exists then that could constitute such a document)
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| Thinking about anomalous gallows... |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 13-04-2020, 10:04 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (43)
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Hi, everyone,
I'm currently working on an essay about the writing system in general, and it's got me thinking some of those fancy anomalous gallows. Has anyone considered that some of these may actually be ligatures of two different gallows? I know it's exceedingly rare to see two gallows in a row, but it's not impossible. The examples below are all top-line of a paragraph, so it makes sense that they would get the fancy top-line treatment, whereas the few other examples of two-gallows-in-a-row are not top line.
For example, this one on 87v:
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Perhaps actually [pf]?
And this one on 101r1:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Perhaps actually [fp]?
And this one on 86v6:
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Perhaps actually [ctfh]?
I'm also finding myself quite enchanted by the way the crossbar of a top-line [t] ([k] as well, I assume) can form a bridge from one occurrence to another nearby. Scribe 1 in particular seems quite fond of this (here's a nice example on 8r):
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And my absolute favorite on 100r. So creative and efficient!
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I also love this one on 90r which seems to be both a ligature AND a bridge:
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Maybe something like [ctphdacthy]? Could be a [k] instead of a [t] each time, I suppose, depending on how you interpret that lower left loop.
I thought there might be a thread on this already, but I couldn't find one...
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| Human generated nonsense text |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 11-04-2020, 11:23 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (9)
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I am sure if I have mentioned this before, but I wonder what kind of nonsense or meaningless text a human would be inclined to produce if that was their intention. I think that producing "random" or "randomish" text quickly is too computationally intensive for the human brain, our mind just don't seem to be designed to do such things easily, though of course for a computer this is trivial.(Just in the way that multiplying 2 large numbers together is hard for most people and trivial for a computer.)
It seems to me that a human trying to produce "random" or "randomish" will in fact produce text with a clear structure of pattern to it. Now this is, I suppose, an empirical statement. I suppose in principle one could asks 20 volunteers to produce 2 pages of random text using a sample of invented symbols that they were given to use and then see what the results look like. It would be interesting to see what commonality there are between the different nonsense texts that the different volunteers produced. I suppose for it to be a proper test the volunteers would have to be given some kind of time constraint to produce the 2 pages. They would also have to be forbidden from using any tools such as dice or coins in order to generate the random text. Maybe also all working would have to be done in their head i.e. with a pad to do working on.
I ask this as I hypothese that the volunteer might produce text broadly speaking structured in the kind of way the more repetitive examples of Voynich text is. Phenomena like "copying" or repeating "randomish" sections might be done in order to increase speed of text product. I wonder also if having words structured in essentially to same way, but with 1 or 2 letter differences might be a natural thing to produce.
This question interests me as I have mentioned that I think the Voynich contains a mixture of real text and nonsense. I doubt the nonsense text was generated by any mechanical means such as a cardan grille or anything else, but was just human generated.
Now I don't have 20 volunteers, so this is more of a thought experiment than a proper experiment.
I know discussion has been made of algorithms to generate Voynichese like text. I am not sure of the scope in this context for algorithms to simulate human generated text, just because simulating human behaviour is difficult and complex.(though some human behaviour is easy to model.)
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