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| How long is the VMS |
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Posted by: Tom Mazanec - 11-07-2020, 04:08 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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In number of words or characters? What short story or novella would it roughly correspond to?
And BTW, how would the Rohonc Codex and the Codex Seraphinianus rank on this scale?
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| A possible solution to the Beinecke MS408 using transliterated phonetic Hebrew |
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Posted by: Torsten - 11-07-2020, 09:55 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]There is an unpublished article from[font=Roboto, -apple-system, system-ui,] Stephen Wells-Bennett about the VMS[/font][/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]The author says he was inspired by the book "Forgotten Scripts" by Cyrus H. Gordon: "In this book the author describes practical approaches and methods to code breaking that have worked successfully in the past.Simply [/font]put these are finding the right point of entry into a text, making an educated guess and thirdly luck! The author also advises would be code breakers not be too concerned about the minutiae of deciphering texts as most proposed solutions will get improved and refined because more people will study them [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]once they are published" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 2).[/font]
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| The Berry library |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 10-07-2020, 06:37 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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A number of texts of interest to VMs investigation have been shown to have been commissioned by or in the possession of the Valois Duke, Jean de Berry. Primary is the Oresme cosmos, along with the Berry Apocalypse; secondarily, the 'Romance of Melusine', along with the dragon in the book of hours.
This is the man: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
But what about the library? Apparently there once were 300 books, but only 100 survive. So there's two-thirds knocked off for starters. When the duke died in Paris in 1416, what happened to his library?
The situation in Paris was civil war. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The Paris residence of the Duke of Berry were plundered in 1412, so earlier books (Oresme and Melusine) were probably somewhere else.
Most likely would seem to be the castle at Mehun-sur-Yevre. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
When Jean de Berry died in 1416, his widow was his second wife Joan. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
She would certainly have retained some property, potentially books.
Joan was in turn soon married to Georges de La Tremoille. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
And Georges was in service to the Burgundian court for a period of time, possibly ending near the time of Joan's death in 1424. Meanwhile in Burgundy, with the murder of John the Fearless in 1419, marked by a major (+ library) inventory, there is ample time after that for the exchange of gifts, such as books, which would not be inventoried at that time.
No particular details yet, but a strong circumstantial case for the widow (and heiress) of the Duke of Berry to be in contact with the dukes of Burgundy.
The current position on the early history of the duke's library post 1416 seems to be: 'Hard to say.'
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| Voynich2Vec: Using FastText Word Embeddings for Voynich Decipherment |
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Posted by: Torsten - 09-07-2020, 10:55 PM - Forum: News
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There is an unpublished paper about the VMS: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The paper from William Merrill and Eli Baum is available at William Merrils Homepage You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The authors used word vectors to visualize voynich words: "The idea behind this approach is to encode each word as a highdimensional vector of real numbers such that similar words have similar vector representations."
The graphs illustrate that words with morphological similarity do encode similar word vectors (appear in the same context): "A variety of presumptive affixes are very apparent: [qol] vs [ol] vs [sol], for example. We can also see that certain letters are closely related and perhaps interchangeable with others. It is important to remember that these vectors were computed based on the word’s context; the fact that [qolchedy] aligns with [olchedy] suggests that they appear in similar syntactic (or even semantic) positions and not just that they have similar spellings" (Merrill & Baum).
The authors conclude: "While our morphological and topical analyses picked up on structural properties of suffixes and important words in the text, this does not necessarily mean that the text is written in a natural language. Formal language theory tells us that many sequences of structured text can be described by a grammar. Therefore, it is always possible that the properties our embeddings associate with specific suffixes or folia reflect non-natural-language structures or gibberish" (Merrill & Baum).
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| Categorizing the text-only pages |
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Posted by: RobGea - 09-07-2020, 05:46 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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The VMS has several fairly well definable sections but there are some pages
especially the text only pages, well, slight misnomer; text pages plus other odd ones,
that are not quite so easy to place:
Code: f1r: Q1 ; Intro page
f57v: Q8 ; (not all text, 4 people, circular text), LFD ascribes tentatively to Scribe1
f58r: Q8 ; 3 stars, sequential star points 6,7,8 , LFD:Scribe3
f58v: Q8 ; 1 star at top, 6 pointed, LFD:Scribe3
f66r: Q8 ; column of letters and words {der mus del page}, LFD:Scribe5
f76r: Q13 ; text only , [column of letters] , LFD:Scribe2
fRos: Q14 ; Rosette, LFD tentatively ascribes to Scribe4
f85r1: Q14 ; text only, LFD:Scribe2
f86v6: Q14 ; text only, LFD:Scribe2
f86v5: Q14 ; text only, LFD:Scribe2
f86v3: Q14 -(not all text), unfinished T-O map, LFD:Scribe2
then look for patterns and links between those sections.
Here is my incomplete and provisional attempt:
.f1r - pretty certain to be the Introductory page.
.f66r - most likely part of balneo , entire Quire seems to be a single unit.
.fRos, f85r1, f86v6, 86v5, f86v3 - I would call Quire14 a single unit , a section in its own right.
Leaving these as the most problematic to categorize:
f57v, f58r, f58v, f66r.
Any suggestions as to how to classify/categorize these unruly pages would be welcome.
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| Jan Gryll z Gryllowa |
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Posted by: aStobbart - 07-07-2020, 03:08 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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In "Historie literatury české: dodavky a doplňky, Volume 1" by Josefa Jungmanna, which is availabe on google books, there is a mention of a Jan Gryll who was sent to Rudolf II in 1577. Among other people, this book also containts info on de Tepenec.
Quote:Gryll, z Gryllowa, Jan. - Narozen w Rakowníku 1531; radní městský tamže; wyslán r. 1577 k Rudolfowi II. o potwrzení privilegií města, powýšen od císaře do stawu zemanského. Muž práwa milowný, nábožný. Umřel 1600. I have zero knowledge of czech so I am relying on google translate (how shameful), but "wyslán r. 1577 k Rudolfowi II." translates as "he was sent to Rudolf in 1577"
Anyway I made a quick search on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and he appears to be the author of "Sečtení rokův od počátku světa", dated 1588. This book is digitalized, and there is some gothic writing on the cover. Not surte if the practice of writing on the cover like this was common, but it took my attention:
If Gryll was part of Rudolf's court or in close contact, maybe he came to know about the VMS?
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| Scorecards, Quasicrystals, "Medical Witch"'s Manual |
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Posted by: kgladman - 02-07-2020, 04:32 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hello all,
I am new here so forgive me if this has already been thoroughly discussed.
Has anyone explored the possibility that the text might be neither plain text nor a cipher, but a kind of text that is generated in the course of some activity? I know that people have speculated that one section contains recipes, which are a different kind of text than ordinary connected prose, but I am thinking about things like scorecards one keeps in bowling or other games, tic-tac-toe, and so on. . . not because the text looks like any of those in particular. But it occurred to me (as it may have done to others) that if one were to come as an alien to Earth and look at tic tac toe sheets or tally sheets and things like that, it might not be obvious at first that they differed radically from pages full of words.
I don't know enough about the culture of the time and place that produced the book to speculate what the activity would be that in this case produced text. Maybe abbreviations for prescriptions? Or medical records of people who had been treated by a medical person (levels they had received of this or that drug at different times and counts of how often different symptoms occurred before and after, etc.)? This is just wild speculation, but could it possibly have been the records of a gynecologist/obstetrician, who was not just creating an herbal, but creating a medical theory, with evidence to back it up of actual patients treated, of how and why various herbals worked (so that the drawings were metaphorical, and meant to illustrate principles, like: this composite-plant shows you at a glance the key features--in terms of type leaves, taste of tincture, etc.--that plants which are usable for a given purpose--like abortifacients or aphrodisiacs or what have you---tend to have. No matter where you are on earth. It might even include theoretical explanations of why this is so, like because the plants co-evolved or whatever. But that the point is a practical one: so that you can use this manual if you are a wanderer, like the Roma or Sinti. Maybe Sinti--not sure of the difference.)
Anyhow I wonder if this might explain why it is done with costly materials but the artist's hand is not highly accomplished as an illustrator, and its in a small portable size, and looks like it has been rebound multiple times and had pages lost, and yet has plants and constellations that seem fanciful (the constellations are maybe common mis-rememberings of foreign skies by travelers from another hemisphere; or they are records of dimensional travel. Is it true that the constellations are earth-inaccurate, and if so, has anyone checked whether the constellations actual exist if you were standing on the surface of some other planet, like the one the Dogon allegedly came from? This no longer sounds as impossible as it did before 2017, when the Pentagon announced it thought aliens could be real.) Many of those things would be consistent with it being a Sinti physician's set of professional documents--this person needed all these things as reference, because they used herbs for medical care, also let the stars help them decide on which remedy to use when, etc. I think it's generally agreed it's a reference work, correct?
It also makes me think that if it were some kind of a text like that, it would make sense that it always seems like a language the reader does not speak. Because it is language-like, "linguistic" without being a natural language. It is TOO regular, as a number of commentators including I think Lisa Fagan Davis (who so kindly made me aware of this forum) have said. As it would be, if it is not an attempt to commit to writing a natural language (which always struggles back against attempts to tame it by punctuation and other typographical conventions), but rather a kind of text dominated by record-keeping abbreviations and conventions of shorthand. It is, perhaps, to language as quasicrystals are to crystals, in the sense that it "fools you" at first glance.
Anyhow I would LOVE to hear from anyone here about what has already been done in this area. I bet there has been some great stuff, but that there is also a lot more to be done, and I would love to help (I am a former CompLit scholar now teaching finance at BU and just checking in here for pleasure, but would love to help any academics for whom this is professionally useful).
I also dream of involving the European Roma and Sinti communities, especially those who have a continuous cultural connection to the region of Italy in which the artifact's initial manufacture took place (bearing in mind that it may have been written "on the road,") in the quest to decipher it, given that I am far from the first to have theorized they might have created it. (Perhaps this has been started?) There is an article on the internet about Romani "witches" of the modern day who claim to be practicing both healing and aggressive magic for clients, in a physician-like way. They might be a thought partner to explore this further: could it be the records of a "medical witch" they count among their forbears?
If needed, I believe we could get crowdfunding and possibly other support from the socially responsible investment community in the United States and England for this work (for reasons I can explain later).
Anyhow let me know if any of this is of interest to others. It is wonderful to be here.
Thanks----Kimberly
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| Guillebert de Lannoy |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 02-07-2020, 01:16 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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The recent discussion about the Black Sea may have seemed to some as being at a geographical arm's reach. Guillebert de Lannoy is the Burgundian connection that ties this in with other items of provenance, which generally include or specifically focus on Burgundy.
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Focusing on Philip the Good, Richard Vaughan does have a bit more to say about Guillebert. He did make the trade circuit to the Baltic, to Russia, south by river to the Black Sea, out to the Mediterranean, and back to Burgundy.
Tradition and history form the semiotic environment that was present for VMs creation.
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| oiin? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 01-07-2020, 09:51 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I'm working intensively with Takahashi's transliteration of Q20 right now. I noticed that there are quite a number of [oiin] there. But upon closer inspection, many of those look like they might actually just be "regular" [aiin]? What do you think?
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![[Image: gryll1.png]](https://i.ibb.co/0Ddn7sh/gryll1.png)
![[Image: gryll2.png]](https://i.ibb.co/P4RxTyB/gryll2.png)