| Welcome, Guest |
You have to register before you can post on our site.
|
|
|
| FBI Paper on the Voynichs |
|
Posted by: voynichbombe - 24-06-2019, 03:05 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (1)
|
 |
Hi All,
as I saw the post about the NSA paper here, maybe the FBI predecessor file on the V. couple, which is also declassified, may be of interest:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I have no idea if this is complete, the reproductions are bad. have to "investigate" later.
best
gert
|
|
|
| Why Roger Bacon? |
|
Posted by: J.R Moore - 24-06-2019, 04:39 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (4)
|
 |
It's universally agreed that Roger Bacon had nothing to do with the VMS for obvious reasons, but what's less clear is why that was ever supposed in the first place. The theory's origin can be traced to Mnisovsky via Marci's letter to Kircher:
"Dr. Raphael, tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me said book had belonged to the emperor Rudolf and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon.”
It's also generally agreed that there's nothing in the contents of the MS itself to suggest a Baconian origin. All the 20th century scholarship on the subject was clearly a post-hoc contrivance predicated on this letter. Had there been no such letter it's entirely likely that no one would have ever thought to mention Bacon.
What I'm curious to know is why did [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Mnisovsky assume it to be the work of Bacon in the first place? If we accept that there's nothing to indicate Bacon in the VMS itself, then we must assume that the theory arose for other reasons. I believe the most likely alternative is that he was either told this by somebody else and was merely passing on the information to Marci, or that he himself made the assumption based on circumstances of the MS's arrival in Rudolf's court. Either way, I find myself returning the same individual: John Dee. At the time, Dee had the world's largest known collection of Bacon's works at his home library in Mortlake, and held him as a personal hero. Dee was an associate of Edward Kelly who himself had a working relationship with Karl Wideman. I know positing Dee as the seller has long been out fashion, and that's not the point I'm trying to make. Dee may not have been the seller, but I cannot think of a simpler, more compelling, explanation for the origin of the Bacon theory as other than having something to do with Dee. [/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Dee may not have ever touched the VMS in his life for this to still be true. It's entirely plausible that it was sold to Wideman via Kelly sometime after Dee's departure from the continent. He could have easily claimed that it came from Dee's Bacon collection which would have been perfectly consistent with his well documented charlatanism. Regardless of whether or not the VMS was in the possession of Dee, I'd like to know if there is a more compelling source of the Bacon theory other than stemming from the world's most prolific Bacon devotee who happened to be in the right place and right time for such a idea to catch on? For if not stemming from Dee in some way, why not claim a Czech or German author? Or a scholar from anywhere but England for that matter? [/font]
|
|
|
|
| Crowdfunding a proteomic analysis ? |
|
Posted by: Thomas_S - 23-06-2019, 12:18 PM - Forum: Physical material
- Replies (2)
|
|
In 2018 it was reported in this article in the New Yorker You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. how in 2011 the team of P.G. Righetti from the University of Milan did a proteomics study of an ancient Bible (which came from China, and had been attributed by some to Marco Polo). Now, to quote the New Yorker :
Quote:After running the samples through a mass spectrometer, Righetti and his team identified eight biomolecules from the Bible, which had been thought to be made from fetal lambskin. But the proteins belonged to cows, proving that the parchment was vellum—made from vealskin—and indicating, along with evidence from the text, that it was probably made in southern France sometime before 1250.
The actual scientific paper is here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Nowadays more researchers are working in this new field of paleoproteomics. Here is a review paper from 2018 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
So I am wondering : what are the prospects of crowdfunding both a DNA and a proteomics analysis of some (ideally all) folios of the VM ? By which I mean : how much do these analyses costs, and who might be willing to contribute ? Just to see if a handful of individuals could match that, or if more wealthy donors would be required.
It might not be too difficult to convince a team of academics to do the job if they were provided the funds on a plate, and it definitely looks like the results of such a study, and a comparison with other XVth century manuscripts (including the most promising herbals and zodiacs), would clearly pinpoints things to a considerable extent.
|
|
|
|
| Solved again and again ... |
|
Posted by: ReneZ - 21-06-2019, 03:41 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (32)
|
 |
A new paper by G. Cheshire just appeared:
"The Algorithmic Method for Translating MS408 (Voynich). Gerard E. Cheshire, June 2019".
It translates portfolio 53 (right) using a host of romance languages.
I got it through academia.edu and I suspect there will be a link at his "science survey" site.
It also mentions a paper I had not yet seen:
3. Consonants & Vowels, Castles & Volcanoes: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I don't know if that link is safe.
|
|
|
|
| VM TTR values |
|
Posted by: Koen G - 14-06-2019, 12:45 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (75)
|
 |
Since the main discussion is going on in the off-topic section, I thought it might be worthwhile to make a separate thread for discussion of the VM values.
Once again I'd like to thank everyone who helped me out, many interventions were required for me to get to this point. I would be so hopeless without you guys.
I redid everything using Rene's ZL2a file (more spaces) as recommended by Nablator. From this I isolated five sections:
- Herbal A
- Herbal B
- Q13
- Small plants (with labels removed, so only the paragraphs)
- Q20
I then used Nablator's code to calculate the following MATTR window sizes: 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500.
Using my corpus of 471 texts, I calculated mean and stdev for each window. This allowed me to normalize the values.
The result is as follows:
Naamloos-2 kopiëren.gif (Size: 26.88 KB / Downloads: 385)
As you can see, both B-sections (orange and red) behave similarly.
Herbal A and the paragraphs from the small plants behave very similarly as well. Is the latter entirely A?
And Q13 has overall much lower values. The way I read the graph, this appears to be the result of larger distance repetitions. Below 5, it starts to approach the other sections again.
|
|
|
|
|
![[Image: 46v47r.png]](https://voynichviews.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/46v47r.png)
