I decided to go after otol otol. In essence, I wanted to see what affixes otol could have; and whether those affixes serve with other possible functors (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
I used my regex parser to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This tool is in beta, feel free to use it but don't rely on me not changing it.
47 Unique values found
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Prefixes are (ignoring the damned !) (count is one unless specified - count includes duplicates with distinct suffixes):
p,q (59),che (2),ch (10),sh (4),ksh (and one t! on f80r.P.28 which I will ignore)
Suffixes are (again ignoring the damned !) (count is one unless specified - count includes duplicates with distinct prefixes):
om,s,o,chey,osheey,dy (12),dyl,y(3),cheo,ol (2),oaiin,ches,dos,or (2),chcthy,olees,am (2),oaram,chd,aiino,dyl (2),fcho,arol,sar,ky,chy,chd
It appears 74 times with a prefix ignoring suffix. 62 times with a suffix ignoring prefix.
18 times with a prefix and NO suffix. 49 times with a suffix and NO prefix.
13 times with a prefix and a suffix. 84 times by itself.
So, taking the numbers above, we can postulate that otol is a function word; and furthermore, that it takes modifications with the affixes. This is logical, because it can appear either by itself, or in conjunction with affixes - they are obviously modifying the core word, otherwise, what is their function?
And yes, otol may very well be a fusion of ot/ol, except for the fact that it appears primarily as a single entity; and both ot and ol are affixes which do not run concurrently inthe corpus (according to a very quick visual examination by me). OK - so this is circular logic. But we have to draw the line somewhere. So the evidence points towards otol being a separate word.
I run a search for the prefixes in the corpus to see whether they are attaching themselves to other words.
They all appear thousands of times as prefixes. I'm not counting them.
I repeat the search for the suffixes in the corpus.
Again, they are all popular as suffixes.
But what is even more interesting is that the suffixes appear, at first glance, to have an order. Ch can be joined on with /ey,/eo,/es,/ct,/d, etc. It can then have further suffixes plugged in, so we see chcthy ch/ct/ch/y. Etc, etc. Prefixes don't do this as much - we get infrequent versions of them, but not such long constructs as the suffixes.
I take another word. Chol.
Chol is a more popular word, and has 165 distinct forms in the corpus. All of the affixes of otol appear in the list, plus quite a few more. Here is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
So to sum up: we have a popular word (otol) which survives perfectly well by itself. Sometimes it has a prefix; sometimes a suffix. The appendages can be tagged onto one another, in a rhythm. These appendages appear tagged onto another even more popular word (chol).
It's a bold thought but - I'm going to suggest that we see here is evidence of a fusional grammer, where we get a content-word which is modified by prefixes and suffixes to give context to the original content-word.
I'm not just talking about declensions; this is evidence of a strongly synthetic language. I take as an example Spanish, with the perfectly natural word grabandomelo. You take the gerund of to record (grabar), add it to me and end up with this fuser word. It's not exactly the same process as we're seeing here - there are no prefixes and the Voynich verb, if it is a verb, doesn't seem to decline - but it's a similar process.
The next step is to build up a list of the affixes and see if we can develop a comprehensive index to them.
Is there already a thread discussing glyph shape similarities between the different voynich glyphs?
Something like a relationship diagram or periodic table of glyphs.
I know about a blog post from
[--have to search for the link--]
which classifies glyphs into three types (c \ and E ). This seems to be a good beginning for relationships/similarities of glyphs.
I think the first step in reading voynich is to classify the glyphs again before transcribing them very precisely:
- Pen stroke order
- classification which is written by which scribe and their personal differences
- making a really big dictionary with examples of the glyphs and ligatures (the atoms of the script)
After that it is possible to construct a metric which defines similarity on glyphs/ligatures.
Perhaps with this toolset we can better correct transcription errors in a computational way.
When this classification is done the next step would be to analyze the tings which seem to be the syllables. There is a blog post of JKP which discusses Janus Pairs. I think they are good candidates for syllables.
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Not to looking at exact matches in transcription but for similar words. definded by theese metrics. The Levy-Metric but modified to take in account that the transcription may have some errors.
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The voynich script still reminds me of indic script systems. Only a little flavour but perhaps there are some rules which can also help to see more patterns in voynichese?
As a reference for scripts, glyph shapes and so on, comparing the scripts of the world, this website seems to be really good as a reference:
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Posted by: Koen G - 21-09-2017, 09:30 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- No Replies
These parts from our talk with Stephen Bax are about his thoughts on the MS and its study in general (i.e. not specifically focused on his 2014 paper).
[David] Part of the problem with the VM is that it *looks* common enough for people to start trying to identify it, and then build it up on top of their own experiences. But of course, as you say, all we have to is completely eradicate our own cultural references and start afresh with it, building it up without any preconceptions.
[Stephen] That's what I call the pick and mix: you pick the thing that you identify, and too many people email me, literally every week, saying: "I hope I am helping you, and I think this letter looks like a particular letter in Korean." Okay, you picked something, but then the danger is that people stick with that identification: it must be Korean, or it must be Icelandic, etc. And then they try to force home that conclusion, instead of just taking the next step and being flexible: "that letter looks like Icelandic, but the next one doesn't, what am I gonna do about that?" You got to be very critical of your own position first of all. That kind of skepticism is the only way we're going to get forward.
[Koen] One thing that contributes to that as well is that actually the script is really easy to read. So it's accessible for people who normally can't access such manuscript.0 For example if you read a manuscript in a cursive script, you can't even see what's written there if you have zero experience with manuscripts. But in the VM you can easily distinguish the separate glyphs and tell them apart. Do you think that might also tell us something about the people who made this? Because the glyphs do look similar to Latin glyphs to the extent that people think they must have been familiar with them.
[Stephen] Enough of them do look similar to Latin, to make people think: ah, there's a Latin element to it. But yet again there are enough which are unique and so completely different and have a Caucasian or Oriental feel, to make us question that as well. My personal theory - completely in the world of speculation - is that the MS is written quite confidently and consistently - obviously in different hands. But it looks to me like this was not the first MS which was written using this script. Cause if you've ever tried to make up a script, you start doing things, you change it, you scratch it out... and there's not much evidence of that in the MS, so it seems to me that the script is probably not in the first stage of the development in the VM, probably the second state of development.
[Koen] So you want to study it as a product of a culture?
[Stephen] That's the way I see it, the way that it's written is confident. Take a single page of the Voynich, one of the herbal pages. You'll see it's fairly confidently written and quite neatly witten as if somebody is quite fluent in the production of that text. It's not for example so laboured that it must be a copy, with every single letter copied laboriously; there's an element of fluency within the script. That makes me think it's possibly a second level of development of the script, which they are using to product a compendium of knowledge for a particular group of people.
One theory that I haven't written out in great detail, about the page which I call the alphabet page, folio 57. There's a circle of letters. What I'm quite interested in, is that some of the most frequent symbols in the VM are not within that circle! One possibility which has not been thought about elsewhere, is that what has been written down might simply be the consonants only. That's exactly what you would do with an abjad in Arabic language for example. You don't write the vowels down when you write the alphabet. There is the glyph which I have interpreted as "a", but this is a glottal stop, considered a consonant in Arabic. This is one possibility, which again makes me think that this was a script in some development.
[David who wasn't paying attention] So you think it' was an invented language?
[Stephen] No! An invented script!
[David] Sorry, I thought of that as I said it!
[Stephen] It's a very important difference because I obviously think it is an invented script, there can be no doubt about that. But then, all scripts are invented. If you think of Glagolithic script or Rongorongo, somebody sat down and developed this script, as for example with Armeian. A monk developed the script for the Armenians. The language had been existing for hundreds of years, but he invented a script to encode that language. That is how I see the VM script coming into existence. I would still hope to find that the language underneath the invented script is something we can identify.
[Koen] Would you agree that the person or persons who invented this script were familiar with other scripts?
[Stephen] Yes, absolutely. That's the case with Armenian. The monk who invented the script borrowed from other scripts, but he then made it work for the Armenian language features.
[Koen] So the reason to develop the new script was linguistic, because they thought this language is different, so we need to add new symbols or change them?
[Stephen] Yes, it can be linguistic, but it can also have to do with pride, or the idea that you want your own - we are a proud nation of Armenians, we would like our own script for ourselves, then it's taken up by a few monks and scholars and the people more broadly say, for their national identity: "this is going to be our script". and they teach it in schools and so on.
For me, the way to understand the VM is that is was developed for a particular group of people, for, as you say, particular language needs. But it could also be reasons of pride or secrecy. They may have been a persecuted group for some reason, and they decided to encode their own language in a way that was just for them. There are a lot of possible motivations. But as I see it in historical terms, the next stage didn't happen. The people who were using it died out or it was simply never taken on. Or, another thing, it could be that the script was so faulty that they decided to revert to Latin script.
[Koen] Or that their documents stayed under the radar and are now gone, and that the VM is the only survivor that we have.
[Stephen] It could be that, and it would be great if one day we find another sample of Voynich script.
[Koen] With a manual attached to it.
[Stephen] We're dreaming!
[David] A rosetta stone! But, when we look at the actual glyphs. They are very positionally aware, and you picked up on EVA [k], which you've also given the sound value of /k/, and sometimes it appears in front of the word [oror] and sometimes it doesn't. How would that fit into your reading of the word "juniper" as a noun. What's that glyph doing - is it modifying the noun in some way?
[Stephen] We don't know, We're still grappling with the gallows characters, trying to understand what exactly is going on, because they very often appear as the first character in a page, but they very often appear down the page within another word as well. The first line tends to have a proliferation of them, as if they add some kind of decorative element to that line. If that's true, then that implies that they are sometimes written as gallows, but further down they are written as a different character.
To be honest, we still don't know what these characters are doing. But the identification of [oror] as the word perhaps meaning /arar/ for "juniper" is more than that. It's looking at the distribution of the word throughout the MS, particularly on the folio where I've identified the possible juniper plant. The final /r/ seems to be differentiated when it appears at the end of a line. That causes some confusion since it seems that there are lots of r's in the script, but we'll come to that in a minute.
Occasionally there's a glyph in front of [oror], which could be... I mean, the starting glyph in some of the pages could just be a character indicating the beginning of the page, or a discourse marker or writing marker. But we can't be sure about that, the jury is out on that one.
[Koen] You said that the sound represented by gallows could be represented by a different glyph later on. Would that make them similar to the way we use capitals at the beginning of a sentence?
[Stephen] It could be, although it doesn't seem like a very consistent thing. If you look at the way they are used. Also, on the alphabet page, they seem to be there in the list of letters, consistently as a single letter. So I can't really throw much light on that. In the Roman alphabet, the k-symbol is quite tall, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising if this also represented a /k/. But again, that's speculation.
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[David] One think people often mention is the line as a functional unit (LAAFU) which was first mentioned in the 70's by Currier. So you'd say that's symptomatic of what we've just been discussing?
[Stephen] It's quite interesting this LAAFU. Yeah, you could say that. If you see for example at the end of lines there are flourishes in terms of the script. But again you got to be careful with that. The line might be a functional unit in terms of the *script*, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily a functional unit in terms of the meaning underlying it. It could be a decorative element, saying that basically it's just a paragraph of text. But in order to decorate it at the end of each line, they make some kind of flourish. So it could be that when we look at it, we say "oh, this line is a functional unit", but if we then assume it's a functional unit in terms of meaning, we're making a mistake.
[David] That's a problem with the statistical analysis of the text, we get so tied up with saying "this glyph appeared here", we don't consider it in the way that you're formulating.
[Stephen] Right, the statistical analysis of the text - people pay a lot of heed to it. For example, it seems to follow Zipf's law and this kind of thing. But until we actually understand what each of these symbols means and is, we can't really transliterate it properly. There's the example of the minims: in Latin script you have a slash for the letter "i", but you then can put two of them together for the letter "n", and three for "m", without joining them as we do now. So you then have three slashes representing one sound /m/. So how many letters do we actually have? When we see in the VM three minims, how many letters do we have? Until we know that, we can't really transliterate it accurately in a form that will allow computers' statistical analysis on the text.
[Koen] About LAAFU, I've been reading the work of Emma May Smith, she's also a linguist Voynich researcher. She says that sandhi effects might be at work there, which is for example when you're speaking and you link two words by inserting an extra sound. That the person who wrote the VM was uncertain about how to write his language onto the paper and would insert sandhi effects only at the end of the line. Do you think something like that, some linguistic reality might be at the basis of the LAAFU? Or is it purely a script thing?
[Stephen] It's perfectly possible. Let's take for example Turkish. It's agglutinative, so that means you take a word, add on lots of pieces and end up with a very long word. But you could equally write it out as several separate words. Now we don't know the nature of the underlying VM language, and we don't know how they decided to encode it. And it might be that they separated things we would write together or the other way around. Again, we are in very early stages in terms of trying to understand what this script is actually doing. But I think we have to approach it with that kind of sensitivity, to how languages are encoded in the script. In the example you just gave, there is an element of variation which we have to expect. I think that means a job of at least ten years trying to unpick what's going on.
[Koen] Especially if the writing culture was in development, we might expect even more of these irregularities of spoken language.
[Stephen] Exactly. And another hint is that if the writing system did not catch on, it could be that it's a little bit defective in representing the underlying language, and they said "well actually, let's go over to another script instead". And therefore the script was abandoned. That adds another problem if we want to decode it, because if it's a really poor, defective script in terms of representing the underlying language, then it's a huge difficulty to decode it.
[Koen] It must have worked to some extent, because they wrote a few hundred pages!
[Stephen] Absolutely, you're right. And also, if Curier's right, and I think he is right, that there is more than one hand writing, then obviously more than one person was involved and therefore that involves an element of success.
[David] Curier also suggested that there were different dialects within the MS, the famous Curier languages. IS that something you've seen evidence of?
[Stephen] Well, again I think that needs to be grounded a bit more in linguistic reality. First of all, there's no reason to say that they need to be different *dialects*, it could simply be script variation. For example, William Shakespeare, we have multiple examples of his signature and each one spells his own name differently, as a mature literate person! So there's no reason for thinking that the Curier A scribe wasn't writing exactly the same language as the Curier B scribe. But there was enough variation, especially since it was a newly developed script, that they wrote things slightly differently, each one consistent to themselves.When Curier called them "laguage A" and "Language B" I think that really confused a lot of people. I think you can interpret what you see in the MS as simply script variation.
[Koen] Curier did express himself carefully, but of course these terms take on a life of their own.
[Stephen] I think you're right. But he did say language A and language B, which caused a lot of confusion. I would say "script Version A" and "script version B", that's the furthest I would go. As we said earlier on, David, I would not invoke any language, speak in terms of script, until we get a better idea of the language beneath it.
[David] Yeah, I was using his terminology. But to take a slightly different angle on this, a lot of the words appear to be made up of stems with prefixes and suffixes. What do you think of reuse of a stem like [daiin]? It's not something we're used to when looking at natural languages.
[Stephen] Well, is that true? I mean, you look at English words and very often they are made up of different parts. Just look at the word "catalog". You've got the word "cat", "a" and "log", different parts that make up a word itself. This was a criticism I think that came from Pelling's thing as well. And the idea is that for example the word "catalog" can't be a word because the word "cat" exists in the language already. This just seems to me... illogical.
I don't myself, as a linguist, see this as an issue. You could have the word that I read as "kentaur" as a perfectly sensible word, and then the word "daor" or whatever as a word that's used somewhere else in the language very frequently. That is not a particular mystery, languages to that a lot.
Your point about it looking a bit odd to English speakers, that's also true. But a language like Arabic has a lot of cases where a root form, made up of three letters, gets around it additions and subtractions, and sometimes you get something in the middle of the root as well. So I don't see much of a problem about particular roots, stems, additions etc. I wouldn't take this as a reason to say: no, this is not a real language, it must be something else. I think it's just another intriguing problem that we need to work through systematically.
[Koen] Do you think it might have to do something with tonal languages? There you get a lot of homonyms - to us-
which they pronounce on a different tone.
[Stephen] Not really, the difficulty with that is that they would have to signal somewhere that this particular form of the word "ma" is different from the form "má". The VM doesn't seem to signal this in any way, which means it would be impossible to read it. I wouldn't myself think in terms of tonal languages.
[David] What about repeating words? Quite often you get words that are repeated or very similar. And then there's Timm's Pairs, with one word above and then a very similar word underneath. Timm himself argues that this shows that the whole thing was a nonsense script. Is this something we see in natural languages?
[Stephen] There could be elements of literary embellishments for example, but again we don't know. I haven't entirely gone away from the idea that there might be a poetic element to it. Coming back to LAAFU, there are examples of even herbals written in poetry. There are aspects of the MS where you'd like to say they include some kind of artistic elaboration. We might agree that the illustrations are not very fine artistically but here are elements, some of the letters are embellished in interesting ways.... and you could argue that underneath it there is an embellished language which has a poetic dimension to it, which could account for some of the repetitions.
[Koen] We've just been discussing this on the forum and there are also languages which in their structure use a lot of reduplication, for example for forming plurals, for reinforcing, so you'd have to know a lot about linguistics to be aware of all the possibilities.
[Stephen] Yes, but I would agree with the people who raise the issue, that it's still a live issue, because there are some cases where it seems to be four or five repetitions of the same or nearly the same word, which is a curiosity. It's an interesting issue, but for me, I'd park it and see if we can explain it at a later stage.
[David] When you're looking at the MS, are you using the EVA transcriptions or are you working directly from the page?
[Stephen] I do use the transcriptions, and I credit the people who developed them because they are a great help. But I do tend now, actually, to look more directly at the script itself, because I'm slightly worried that we might be missing things in the transliteration. It's very useful to have the original text and the transliteration side by side and look at both of them with caution. But the people wo transcribed it did an incredible job!
[Koen] Do you actually still study the MS often?
[Stephen] Yes, I work less on it since I'm still in full-time employment doing different things, and I'm also recovering from some health issues. I'm not so lively in terms of putting things on the net as I used to be, but I still follow it keenly. I follow also your own site, actually (Voynich.ninja forum), but I haven't ever posted anything on there. One thing I'm quite keen to do is to avoid Voynich flaming. In a sense we all know that there's a danger of trivia overtaking, and we've all got other things to do. So I tend to avoid that kind of discussion where it's too nitty-gritty. But I do read them and follow them with great interest.
[Koen] My impression is that many people have gotten to the point where they discuss more each other than the actual MS. That's what you want to avoid, basically.
[Stephen] I think so, and I mean, what I would hope to do is to sometimes have a block of time where I'd be able to sit down and work on the approach to the MS which I see is the most fruitful one, and to try and take some things further in that direction. What this MS needs is some period of careful, detailed analysis, working through the possibilities. That's how I got to my 2014 paper. During 6 to 8 months I managed to devote a lot of time, even some weekends to it. And a lot of library time in the British Library with manuscripts and other documents. And if I'd be able to reproduce that, I might be able to get some progress that satisfied my own curiosity in the MS a bit more.
These parts of our interview with Stephen Bax are specifically about his own research:
[David] My understanding of your paper is that you're not translating anything, but instead you have identified ten likely nouns in both paragraphs and labels, which you assume identify the accompanying images. You have then assigned sounds to these fourteen syllables contained within the words and discovered that the sounds correspond within these words, indicating that the words probably can be pronounced, so that they are real words. This makes it likely that these words are nouns, which can then be transliterated in their English equivalents, which you are doing by identifying the accompanying images next to the text. But you are not proposing either a language or a translation. Is that a fair summary of your work?
[Stephen] To some extent. It's a little bit - you've implied that basically we identify words and then we break them down up into sounds and symbols. It's actually a bit back and forward. If you identify sounds and symbols, then you build up the words. A good example would be the word which might be the word "Taurus" to identify the seven sisters stars [Pleiades]on the page with the smiley moon. If you look at that, you say: this looks likely to be the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus, so therefore the label alongside most likely represent something to do with that. If you the say: this is probably the word Taurus in one for or another - it *could* be the word Taurus, you have to be very tentative at this stage - then the first letter may be a /t/ sound of some sort. But you can only corroborate that if you find other similar matching words through the MS where that/t/sound is also most likely a /t/. You build it up with a process, but each one you do must be speculative and provisional, until you get an overarching scheme in which several of them coincide and you seem to see some light. So that was in a sense the process that I followed and built up the scheme which is in my 2014 paper, and you can quickly find the proposed identifications in its appendix. So yes, in a sense, your summary is a fair way of putting that, but you're right also that the end result is not an overall translation of the MS, of the language or the script. It's first of all a methodological procedure and secondly it does seem to bear some fruit when you start to match it with other possible words in the MS. The point is then that you are coming to a decoding of each sign which should in the future allow you to generate other words as you go through the MS. But it's a very long, slow and torturous process. But you're right in a sense that it's not promising "we have now deciphered the MS, we have found out what the language is". It's more of a methodological approach to go step by step to identify certain patterns in it. It was very specifically identified as a very provisional and partial attempt to make some headway.
What I think is most valuable is the methodology behind it. Some of the identifications I would still stand by, although others are less solid. But it's the methodology which I would stand by as the most interesting part of it.
[Koen] You've said that the underlying language is likely Near Eastern, Caucasian or Asian in origin. Is this still something you think is the most likely?
[Stephen] I wouldn't say that the underlying language is Near Eastern, we just don't know at this stage. But what I did say in my paper is that there seem to be elements which derive from Near Easter, Caucasian or Asian aspects. For example, some elements seem to come from a Persian origin. But that doesn't mean that the language itself is from those families; it could simply be borrowings. It could be that all of the words I identified are borrowings into the language. That's common with nouns, when you think of almost all the names of exotic fruits and vegetables, they derive from other languages, like "artichoke", "avocado"....
[Koen] Especially in these scientific contexts you get a lot of jargon.
[Stephen] Absolutely, a huge amount of borrowing. So I think we're not very far into suggesting what language families we're dealing with. I do think that some of the work by Marco Ponzi and Rene, Darren Worley and others on the Zodiac figures, suggesting an East European or Central European origin for some of those illustrations is quite telling and convincing. I'd not be surprised if the MS was a European production, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the language within it is a European language. If you take the example of Romani, sometimes known as the Gypsy language; if the VM is written in Romani language in a script specifically devised for the VM, it could well be written in Europe, but the origin of that particular language is far from Europe. So we could be dealing with a mixed and unexpected language, but yet produced in Europe.
[Koen] I'd like to pick in on the Romani suggestion - that was not your own idea, I think, it was developed by others on your blog? What is your view on this possibility?
[Stephen] Derek Voght has produced some nice videos on YouTube about it, and others have suggested it in the past as well. I haven't ruled that out as a possibility because basically, the most likely language that underlies the VM script is a language that has not been written down before. It's quite likely that a small group of scholars has developed a script to encode a language that they communicated in normally and to transmit the ideas of the time in terms of herbals etc into that particular group / linguistic culture. If you'd say "could it be Italian?" - well no, because the Italians in that period already had a script. So you then start to look for languages which were prominent or strong in one way or another, or had a significant community of speakers, but yet did not yet have its own script, and therefore needed one to be developed. Then you come to things such as Romani or others - something like Hungarian, say, which had a prominent group of speakers but did not have a strongly used script at the time. So Romani is not impossible - there would have been a need for some group of scholars to create a script for themselves. We still have too much work to do to establish what it is, but I think the arguments are very interesting. And I really appreciate the attempts by Derek and others to investigate and see whether this particular hypothesis holds water. I think it's great when people do that kind of work.
[David] You've concentrated on the first word of each herbal page, in the reasonable assumption that this is likely to be the name of the plant. Would this be common in herbals in the languages outside of Europe?
[Stephen] First, let me clarify about the first word of each page. It's perfectly possible that the first word of each page is not the name of the plant. It could be within the first or second lines. One assumption is that we will start by looking at the first word, and actually in the VM the first word on many of the herbal pages does seem to be a unique word - an infrequent word in the VM - so this could be the name of a plant. But that's definitely not an assumption you must stand by. You just explore whether it's possible. For example, the "Centaurea" page, for me that's a watertight identification, virtually nobody has suggested another possibility. And the fact that the first word of the page, and also the word of the second paragraph are virtually identical, does make it plausible that this might be the name of the plant in the picture. This is speculation, since you've just got one plant, one word, maybe a second word, but when it becomes more interesting is when you combine that with other identifications, and build up a system like the one I was trying to build up in my paper. But any single identification must be speculative! You can't insist on it. Building it up as a pattern is what's starting to give it a bit more credibility.
But to come back to your actual question: often in Western herbals, the first word on the page with the representation of the plant, is the name. And that is actually common in other traditions, for example in Arabic herbal MSS,very often it's the first word, but not always! Sometimes it's a word later on in the first line, which is then underlined or highlighted in some way. But again: you are looking for likely words that might be the name of a plant, but we can't insist that it must be the first word, that's just the first place you look, but you look at it very cautiously and skeptically and you use your judgement.
[Koen] In another MS I've been studying, you always had a fixed phrase at the beginning, for example "nomen herba" and then the name of the herb. We're unfortunate that such phrases at all do not appear to exist within the VM.
[Stephen] Yeah, and particularly we're unfortunate that they didn't somehow highlight the name in a different ink, or underline, which they do in some herbal MSS. That leaves us fighting around to identify which word it might be.
[Koen] Now, we've been talking about the difficulty of identifying the plants, but that's not really your area of expertise so we'll leave that for a discussion with a medieval herbalist. But your transliterations are heavily based on the imagery. When you started writing your paper, how did you select your sources. For example you relied heavily on Sherwood's plant identifications.
[Stephen] I relied on any identifications of people who seemed to have authoritative arguments for why this plant was the plant that the identified. But also I did look back at other historical herbals to look at the way in which the plants were represented there, looking also at herbals from other traditions.
There's a Finnish biologist who put some very nice discussions on my blog about how difficult it is to identify some of these plants and some of the factors behind why these plants in the VM might look so peculiar and strange. Expecting that many of the plants may not have been drawn from life, or from dead samples, you have to use a lot of interpretations to say what this plant might be. But there are some which I think are pretty convincing and which nobody seems to differ in terms of that being the plant. An interesting example is the juniper which I read as oror or arar, but many people have identified it as the cannabis plant, so it's difficult to say what exactly this plant is.
There is an element of uncertainty, of judgement, of accepting the inevitable variation to do with the drawings, the script, and it is a slow, tentative process, which needs to be built up over a long time. It's not something like "I looked at this plant and immediately I knew what it was and that the language is Hungarian". That kind of too speedy attempt to work through a MS Like this is just foolish and doomed to failure. And actually that reminds me of the TLS article which came out recently, which... can you remember the author of that article? He basically said that the script was entirely a set of Latin abbreviations.
[Koen] Nicholas Gibbs was his name.
[Stephen] That, for me, is an example of what I call pick and mix. Where you simply take things where you think this looks like this and this looks like that, theefore... it's taken me 25 minutes and I've identified the MS as this. And that, for me is just foolish. That's not scholarship, it's not research at all. But the problem is, it is very attractive to online newspapers to publish that kind of thing because they get a huge number of clicks. It's essentially clickbait. Your advertising revenue goes up. But if you spend ten minutes reading an article like that and you know the VM even to an intermediate level, you realize that it's not worth bothering with.
[Koen] We were surprised that he got published at all because we see these kinds of theories every day from all kinds of people, and one gets published and it's suddenly all over the internet.
[Stephen] I think the reason is clickbait, because they know that as soon as you put "Voynich" into something, you get a huge number of people clicking on it, and then you can say to your advertisers: "look, we've had a million clicks today!" But I agree with you, it's amazing that the TLS would publish something like that with so little research! I think it had almost no references to other work or scholarship in the field.
[Koen] Even though in the 1990's already some of his ideas have been suggested on the mailing list, and he doesn't refer to anything.
[Stephen] These ideas of Latin abbreviations have been around for decades. Some of the oldest accounts of the VM have been identifying possible Roman abbreviations, but they were not cited in the work! It's very disappointing when this kind of work is given credence, because then anyone who is trying more seriously to investigate the MS is also seen as some kind of hoaxer or waster. That's an aspect of the VM community which I try to avoid because it doesn't help in the ultimate endeavor of decoding and understanding this fascinating MS.
[Koen] Now that we're talking about the VM and the media: you, yourself have become almost synonymous with Voynich research. Many people started researching the MS because of your paper. How did you experience this, did you expect this at all that it would be such a hit?
[Stephen] I think you're very generous to say so. To some extent you could say that what I did three years ago has been forgotten by lots of people as well, because it is such an ephemeral world. You get a new fantastic theory which everyone says is the latest one and they forget what happened even three years ago. I hope that the approach that I adopted to the MS is one that is of value. I still would stand by it, and that is the very best way that we're ever going to make a dent into the script and the language.
And also, I have to insist again and again, the difference between the script and the language. is a really important one, because it could be that the underlying language is one that is known to us, but what stops us from getting there is just the script that's lying above it. And this is an element of the research which many people just don't seem to get. Even in recent discussions on the internet you get people confusing the issues of the script and language.
If we look at the work that's been produced more recently - I think Marco Ponzi is someone whose work I really respect, and he's done some interesting stuff trying to identify symbolism using arthistorical comparisons. For example one of the pages seems to represent spring, summer, autumn and winter. By looking at the clothing of the different characters depicted on the page. And that kind of thing is useful and well beyond my capacities. But it can lead us to look closely at the words around the figures and say, is there one word here which might be the word "spring"? etc And then try to work out what those words might be, how the letters link to other words etc and do it in a very systematic way, and gradually - over years - move towards identifying a possible underlying language.
But it is a long, slow endeavor, and the problem with the media is that they want quick, immediate solutions. If you look at the decipherment of linear B in the 1950's, that is an endeavour that started seriously in the 1920's! With a very systematic approach, following more or less the same approach that I've been using. It took 30 years to identify the fact that the script was encoding Greek! A language everybody knew. It was almost staring us into the face, but because the script was so opaque, it took 30 years of systematic and careful work with a number of different people, and many scholars in Greece actually insisting it was not Greek, and then it was shown that it was actually Greek. And that took 30 years. So for us to expect an overnight discovery is really misunderstanding how translation and decipherment works in this kind of case.
[David] To pick up on your example about script and language: over here in Spain there's a late medieval tradition of ???? where the Arabian speakers of Al-Andalus weren't allowed to write Arabic, so they kept writing Arabit, but using the Latin script, which was legal. These manuscripts are fascinating because they appear to be written in no language we understand, but you have to read them aloud, and that language turns to Arabic.
[Stephen] That also illustrates the fact that in medieval Europe there was a huge mixture of languages and scripts. With standardization, we, particularly in mololingual England, tink: "oh, there's only one language and script, why would anybody mix them?" But of course, people have been mixing them in the way that you describe for centuries! So I think you have to see the VM in that kind of context.
[.............................]
[Koen] As we've said, there has been some criticism on your work, notably by Nick Pelling. One of his points of criticism is that you map three glyphs to the sound /r/. Is that a correct summary?
[Stephen] When I read the critique about the /r/, I almost fell off my chair laughing because many different articles have two sounds in the region of /r/. A very obvious one is Spanish. Pero means "but" and perro means "dog". Those two r-sounds are in the same area phonetically. In fact, in Spanish, they are meaningful, significant differences, a /r/ and a rrrr-sound which are quite different. English has this too, in Scottish, but there they don't happen to have a meaning difference.
Many languages have this. In Spanish they are encoded into the script by a single "r" versus a double "r", but in other languages they are encoded into the script in different letters completely. (Arabic example where three sounds in the region of /d/ get a different letter shape.) That's rudimentary linguistic knowledge. So if the VM happens to have two letters for an /r/, that would be nothing unusual at all! It just depends on the language that it's trying to encode.
Now, the third of them, EVA [m] is in my view a terminal form, a form that is used at the end of words, lines or paragraphs, which is for me a terminal form of EVA [r]. Somebody who doesn't know anything about linguistics will say: "what do you mean, a terminal form? The same letter with a different shape?" Well yes! Arabic is a perfect example of this. You have a different shape of the same letter depending on whether it's in the beginning, middle or end of the word. It's the same letter but with a different shape. So for me as an Arab linguist, it's not at all unexpected to find a script where you have - for example Voynich [r] is the most common form of /r/ through the MS. But you have EVA [m] as the terminal form which is used as a decorative form with a tail. And this character hugely comes at the end of words, lines, paragraphs...
Again, that, for me, is year one linguistics. I wouldn't stake my house on it, because all of this needs to be researched and developed. But the fact that's it's a possibility should be indisputable with anybody with some basic linguistic knowledge.
[Koen] The problem, probably, that Pelling sees is that if you have to reserve one glyph already for a form of a sound that comes at the end of the word, your phoneme inventory becomes really small. That's something you hear a lot.
[Stephen] Really small? How really small? If we've got 24 main symbols, there's still perfectly enough - especially if some of the vowel sounds are not written down. I don't see that as a significant objection. But until we have the full set of sound symbol correspondences, we can't say. But to say that it's a possibility seems to me to be just plain linguistic logic. If that objection is supposed to say "oh, the whole scheme is not worth thinking about", then I think that's just very poor criticism.
[David] I think that indicates that whoever devised the script gave special prominence to that sound. As you say in Arabic...
[Stephen] I think - sorry to interrupt you David - I think that there are quite a few other symbols that could be terminal forms. If you look at a page of the VM script, very often at the end of the word you see a flourishy one that goes down a little bit. That for me as an Arabic linguist, is a very normal feature. The way you write Arabic, very often at the end of it, there's a character which kind of flourishes.
[Koen] The one that looks like a /9/ is like an /a/ with a flourish basically.
[Stephen] Exactly. EVA [o] could have EVA [y] as a flourished version of it, and I think that's an interesting argument.
[.............................]
[Koen] You have focused what you basically think are labels, single words, or the name of the plant. But if you go from there and you take the sound values that you have proposed and apply them to the whole paragraph, you get a questionable result. Why do you think that is the case, that it's so difficult to translate a paragraph, even if you have proposed a value for about half of the glyphs?
[Stephen] The proposed sound values that I put in my paper are not even half, so we still got a lot more to do. But if you then did put it into a paragraph - you say that what you'd have would be gobbledygook, well no, what you'd have would be a very partial representation of a language that we still can't identify. So of course it will look like gobbledygook. The test will be of course, at the end of the day, if we can identify more and more sound-symbol correspondences and build up to 85% of the whole of the MS..... I mean, the key think of course will be when you can use the correspondences that we've got and apply them to, say, one of the star labels, and say, "aha, this really does look like the name of a star!" Then it starts becoming productive and valuable.But we're still a far way away from that. People like Derek, for example, have tried to show that it does actually work productively for some of the star labels. But I think you're right, we still got to do some research before we can move from the individual words onto sentences, paragraphs and so on.
If you transliterate an Armenian sentence into Latin script, then you took out 60% of the letters, and you made the assumption that it was actually a poor representation of the language. What you'd get would be gobbledygook. Nut actually it would be Armenian, but messed up! So I don't see any issue, with the VM, we're still at a stage of ignorance. We have to go, unfortunately, slowly, surely, methodically. And we have to throw away pick-and-mix approaches, which is what we've seen a lot too much recently. Where somebody picks a few things and says aaaah it must be Icelandic.... We've just got to focus very systematically, proceeding step by step, and I think we're in for a ten, fifteen year window.
All this linguistic talk has made me think of a thought experiment.
For this thread, I am going to postulate the following:
Voynichese can be pronounced
What is more, Voynichese is a created script that was first spoken then written
This is an Indo-European daughter language (an artificial constraint I include simply to reduce the possibilities. If we don't get anywhere, we change this point and start again)
If this is true, then can we take Bax's method and apply it from a different angle - instead of trying to identify nouns, we try to identify function words?
Quote:Function words (also called functors)You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that have little You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or have You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. meaning, and they express You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. relationships with other words within a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. They signal the structural relationships that words have to one another and are the glue that holds sentences together. Thus, they serve as important elements to the structures of sentences. //Wikipedia[/url]
Now, function words have the almost universal tendency of being short in nature. English has the "three letter rule", in which function words generally have fewer than three letters (i, am, is, of) and content words have three or more. The Cervantes Institute [url=https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/aepe/pdf/boletin_34-35_18_86/boletin_34-35_18_86_24.pdf]notes that similar happens in Spanish (a,con,para,de,por although exceptions such as parecer, luego exist). The same effect exists in many different languages.
Why? Without delving into the theory, language erosion. Function words are very common and people have the tendency to shorten them over time, to expend less effort.
In The naïve language expert Drs Claudia Männel & Jutta L Mueller note that many European languages are functor initial - the function extends the sentence (I am going to Rome) (die Amyrillis blüht auf [the flower bursts into bloom]), etc.
To cut a long conversation short: can we identify functors, short words that appear to be giving function to the following words?
Let us take a lexical page, ie, 104r, from the Voynich extractor, transcription H (T.T.).
I identify all words shorter than three glyphs in length. I discard any words with minims in - so aiin is arbitrarily discarded.
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// indicates that longer words appear. - indicates a line with no potential functors Char chey
oar // chey oky ol chry ol.chl.ol // al.lod // qod - - - dam tol // os.l.air. shdy lo.sar.al. Chdy cheo.lor.saiin.// lo sor - - - or shd chol.rar.///ar.ai!n.ar. - rl.shed // dam ol.sheo // chol.// chol.// aiir.chol.kar. Char sar.// l. // ar shar // kar .dl.ral.// ar. or.// or.char.// sor.or.aiin. or.air - - - char.// chey. - chey.chol.cheol. - - - ar.// chol. al.ly dar y. dal ar. l.s. // ar.
And here are all the extracted functors, ranked by frequency of appearance:
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chol chol chol chol chol cheol
chey chey chey chey [font=Eva]Char charChar char[/font] ar ar ar ar ol ol ol ol al al al or or or os or or l l l ar ar ar sar rar sar dam dam
air air lo lo cheo Chdy chol shdy shd shar sheo sor oar oky chry chl lod qod dal dl dar y tol kar kar ly sor ral rl shed lor saiin s
The most popular are all variants of one another - chol / [font=EVA Hand 1][b]chey / [font=Eva][font=Eva][b]char[/font][/b][/font] ar / olal / [font=EVA Hand 1][b]or / os / ar / sar [/b][/font][/b][/font]
So what are these words? Now we move into the word of fantasy.
The most common words in European languages tend to be short indication words. Here's the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
6.18% the
4.23% is, was, be, are, ’s (= is), were, been, being, ‘re, ‘m, am
2.94% of
2.68% and
2.46% a, an
1.80% in, inside (preposition)
1.62% to (infinitive verb marker)
1.37% have, has, have, ‘ve, ’s (= has), had, having, ‘d (= had)
1.27% he, him, his
1.25% it, its
1.17% I, me, my
0.91% to (preposition)
0.86% they, them, their
And other European languages that I've quickly looked up are basically the same (although Roman languages have pronoun propositions up at the top as well).
Now, 104r contains 438 words. The most common word, Chol, appears 6 times (1.36%) which is way below the average English frequency. But we don't know what this page is about. A dry medical text will not contain main indicators and it appears to be obvious that the text does not run in a "we take it and we dry it and we pound it and we stick it" format.
The words tend to be clustered in groups upon the page. If I were to guess, it is almost as if a word crops up and is repeated several times within the same topic. Or appears three times in the same line and is a suffix for other words in the same line:
olcheear chedar or aror!sheey olkeechy or char cheeol sor or aiin ot!am
Let's think of a different angle of attack. Can we fit these proposed functors as suffixes? In other words, are they functor final - acting upon a stem? Could the stem be a verb with the functor acting upon them?
Well:
chol, which appears six times by itself, merges with 8 other words:
chey appears four times by itself and a further five times as a larger word.
dam 2 / 5. char 4 / 7. sar 2/ 2. air 2 / 11.
The two glyph words are really common as part of larger vords, but this can partially be discarded simply because we know they are common.
ar appears 57 times; or 65; etc.
Sadly I have to cut this experiment short here for time reasons - I'll post it here to see if anyone has any feedback. Always a dangerous thing to do!
Reading in the vague vaults of the Hermetism I noticed that not only humors and planets were associated with plants, but also colors are connected.
I never looked at the colors in the Vms, but for those who investigated that: how many separate colors are there in the ms?
I'm hoping for: violet, blue, orange, yellow, green, red, and black. That is 7 distinct colors.
More importantly, are all colors used in the herbals?
Since Stephen Bax is now on the forum and can directly respond to questions about his original video "Voynich - a provisional, partial decoding of the Voynich script" posted on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., this might be a good time to discuss some of the ideas presented in the video.
PLEASE NOTE. This is only a summary transcript (you can watch the video for the full story or read this as you follow the video). I have not included every word. I left out many repetitive words and ones that refer to pointing at things on the screen to make it as streamlined as possible. Note also that I have commented on the information in the video from personal and professional points of view. My opinions are in square brackets and usually in blue.
I'll start by stating my perspective... I don't see this (or anyone else's "solution" as a "provisional, partial decoding". I haven't seen any decodings yet. I see these as theories (there is nothing wrong with theories).
There isn't really any such thing as a "partial decoding" unless the part that has been decoded can be verified as correct. Some claims have more credibility than others and there are a few good efforts out there that might bear fruit eventually, but none are yet convincing enough or comprehensive enough (they lack confirmatory support) to establish that the theories are indeed fact (actual decodings).
Here follows a summarized transcript of the video, with my observations and opinions added as commentary. Bax's statements are marked with quotation marks.
Background and Premise. The first 4 minutes is devoted to introducing the speaker and the history of the manuscript, and transitions into the next segment with the following statement [a slide of the Taiz & Taiz 2011 quotation is shown onscreen], "... that despite all these years and the efforts of very many people, we still don't understand a single word of it. But I propose today to put that right to some extent. I'm proposing today a provisional, partial decoding of the manuscript..." [A link to the full paper is posted onscreen.]
Brief Introduction of Method. The next segment gives a brief reference to the history of code-breaking, specifically citing Simon Singh, The Code Book (and, in turn, Champollion Young, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Michael Ventris, Linear B script from Crete), with an image of Singh's book. "And the question is, how did they do it? Because I... basically I want to follow more-or-less their approach." Examples of method follows, including identification of proper names (looking for names of pharaohs and towns), building up a scheme of sound-symbol relationships, and then identifying the language. Bax then proposes following the same method with names of plants in the VMS and that a "small-scale approach" might be better than using a "big theory approach, top-down." "So I propose to examine five plants in the manuscript, and one constellation, the constellation Taurus... trying to identify the probable proper names of these plants, and then gradually working out the sounds of each Voynich sign, side-by-side".
Plant Labels. The next segment illustrates two folios from the VMS big-plants section, 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. with an inset enlargement of Voynichese oror. Bax: "When I was looking at the manuscript... I noticed this rather interesting pattern here... which looks like an o and then a character which is transcribed in some of the transcripts as an r, and then another o and r. It's quite unusual to get a repeating pattern like this in the manuscript, so I thought to myself maybe that's a word, it could actually be a word, and it's transcribed as oror, but I thought it might actually resemble the word arar, which is the Arabic word for juniper and also the Hebrew word or related to the Hebrew word for juniper." [For the information of readers, since this is an interesting topic, oror occurs 16 times, alal 43 times, olol 49 times, arar 57 times. The pattern oror only occurs by itself (without suffixes or prefixes) on one rosette page and one starred-text page.]
Details About the Plant Labels on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f16r. Bax points out poror on the top left of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a plant with four broad leaves and long flower stalks), toror at the beginning of the last paragraph on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a plant thought by some to be Cannabis) and orom on the top right which he describes as follows, "And I thought to myself also this word here [orom], could be oror but with a slightly different ending, which I'll come to in a minute... But it then occurred to me that this plant here, in this picture [f16r], might well be a type of juniper... and I thought that might be the name of the plant and the text linking with the picture. So I produced a short article about this two years ago and sent it round to a number of people to look at... [description of juniper with pics]... Some people have identified this as the Cannabis plant, but for me the spiky leaves are far more like this one. So it seemed to me that this oror shape might be in fact representing the Arabic a'ra'r or something similar to that..." [Comment: I personally don't think You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks like juniper. Juniper has whorls of leaves all along the stem, the VMS plant has single leaves at the ends of long petioles. Juniper has short clusters of berries at the nodes, the VMS plant has spikes of florets with leaflets coming out from the florets at the terminal end of the stalk, but I'm willing to consider the possibility, even if I think it's unlikely. I also don't think the plant on f15v, next to poror, has anything to do with juniper.]
Pleiades and Taurus. [Image f68r is shown on screen, with a chart of glyph correspondences in the lower right. "Now, I said to you before that not a single word has been interpreted in the whole manuscript but actually there is one word which people have identified, and tried to identify and interpret, and this is the word Taurus.... But here you've got a curious, like a looped line here [f68r] going to seven stars.... It was thought that these seven stars might mean the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, which are in the constellation of Taurus and that this possibly actually means Taurus; some people have suggested that. [This identification with Pleiades and Taurus to which Bax is referring has been made by a number of people, including darkstar1 (January 2001).] "Now, I think that's possibly true because if you take the letters that I've already identified with a'ra'r... and that seems to fit with Taurus more-or-less..." [The following is a detail of the onscreen image with my commentary on the right.]
Coriander. [Plant 41r is shown on-screen.] "And here we have what I think might be the plant coriander. This has been identified as the coriander plant by Sherwood and others, and it seems quite distinctively like coriander.... Although, of course, like all the Voynich plants, there are some rather odd elements of it which nobody quite understands but that could just mean that it's a foreign or unusual version of the plant. But anyway, taking other people's idea that this might be coriander, I notice that there's a strange addition to the text. You've got the normal text here on the bottom, but you've got something added just above the first word.... Now, it struck me that this might be typical of medieval herbal manuscripts. It might actually be the name of the plant, but a different name from the normal name that the writers know. So the writer is basically saying, this plant is called whatever we normally call it but this is what other people have called it.... So I assume that this might actually mean coriander or some version of the word coriander.... There are hundreds of different ways of writing coriander..." [Detail of the onscreen image follows, with commentary.]
Centaurea. [Plant 2r is shown on-screen.] "...This is the plant which is called Centaurea.... This has been identified again by Sherwood and others as the Centaurea... and I think there's very little argument about that.... but this is obviously not a western European version, but it could be from eastern Europe or from Asia." [See images and my commentary below.]
Centaurea History & Text Analysis. "And now, if you look at the first word again, and again it's important to start with the first word because in medieval herbal manuscripts that was typically where the herb was actually named, not always, but typically, it was named there or at least in the first line. So here if we look at the first word and also the first words of the second paragraph, we've got two paragraphs here... and you'll notice that the first letter is the same as the letter that we just saw with coriander, the /k/.... So I was beginning to suspect that this might be the word Centaurea in one form or another... Now Centaurea was a very well-known plant in ancient times and the Middle Ages..." [Centaurea minor (now known as Centaurum) and Centaurea major are shown onscreen along with a centaur from Harley Ms 1585.] "Now, here is an example from an Arabic manuscript... obviously in Arabic they call it "Qnturyun"... which obviously comes straight from the Greek..." [Image of Plant 2r is shown again, with a text-correspondence chart in the bottom right along with a verbal description of the chart. See alternate interpretation below with my commentary.]
[Plant and centaur image shown onscreen.] "... Now, there's a slight problem here and that is that we now seem to have three different signs for /r/." [Close-up of three glyphs used for similar sound values.] "... Now that could be problematic but in fact this is not entirely impossible because it's quite likely, as it seems to me, looking at the shape of this one, that this one here is simply the same shape with an ending downwards to signify, for example, the end of a line or the end of a sentence, or the end of a paragraph. So it seems to me that these two could be exactly the same sound but simply in a different position." [Continued discussion of inherent vowels, etc., and other possible explanations for three glyphs for one sound. See the following image for my commentary on the probable origin of three VMS glyph shapes.]
• Analysis of Plant 3v. [A proposed identification of Helleboreis used to try to discern a name within the text. Since the identification of this plant as Hellebore is controversial, I am reserving judgment on the textural interpretation. The drawing doesn't resemble other drawings of Hellebore (including the Arabic drawing shown onscreen), nor does it resemble the live plant and thus I can't really form an opinion on whether the correct word has been ascribed to the plant.]
• Analysis of Plant 29v. [I have no argument with this being Nigella. It strongly resembles both the flowers and the claw-like seeds—a resemblance that's been noted by a number of people. The description of the text follows much the same format as previous discussion.]
• Summary and Test. [Two charts are shown onscreen—consonants and vowels, and interpretations of the glyphs are summarize. As a test of the interpretation system, Bax chose a word-token (keedey) from one of the plant pages and interpreted it.] "It's tempting to read it as kooton. Now could this possibly... be cotton? Well, if you look at the plant itself, unfortunately there's no sign particularly of cotton in there, which is disappointing. It would be lovely if there was a little cotton bud appearing. So we can't say for certain whether this does actually mean cotton, but nonetheless it's still a possibility and my proposal is that we continue to try and read the pages using the letters that we have and then work hard to get the remaining letters that we don't have so far..." [I thought one word-token was a rather brief "test", so I grabbed a chunk of text from one of the least controversial plant pages. The results are displayed in the following image to the right of the original chart from the video.]
• [The final segment is a recap of familiar VMS history and issues, and Bax's views on the VMS not being a secret code, but an unknown script.]"... I subscribe to the cultural extinction theory of the manuscript's origins. But again, as I say, what we need to do now is I hope build on what I have done so far in terms of decoding the script, decode it fully and then try and identify the language in which it was written.... I've identified, as I see it, roughly ten words and fourteen signs and clusters, depending on how you count the signs and clusters, of course. But I hope I've also contributed in terms of methodology. I believe it's a useful method to focus on proper names just as Champollion did and Ventris did in decoding their particular languages and scripts, and I think that way we can possibly build up a complete sound-sign system—that's what I'm moving towards next, and then finally move toward a full decipherment. If we're lucky, we'll be able to identify the language, that will help us considerably, if not, we'll try to reconstruct the language from the evidence that we have, and try to understand what's going on in that way." [Acknowledgments to Zandbergen, Beinecke, and Yale.]
Based on video published by Stepehn Bax on Youtube February 2, 2014.
(17-09-2017, 10:19 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'll write Voynich script in square brackets [] and sounds in slashes //.
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I like this. Good idea. But could we possibly use slashes for shapes and % signs (which have a mnemonic "o" in them for the shape of the mouth) or something along those lines (I don't care what as long as it's readable and easy to remember) instead of square brackets? Throughout the publishing industry, square brackets are used for author commentary to distinguish it from whatever quotes they are commenting upon. It would be good to keep the square brackets for this purpose.
But... I like the idea of using delimiters to distinguish between shape and sound. We need something like that so we don't have to keep specifying it in words.
Statement
None of the traditional religious imagery that we would associated with late medieval Abrahamic (ie, Christian, Jewish or Islamic) religions is depicted within the manuscript.
Explanation
The manuscript is devoid of traditional Christian, Islamic or Judaic religious imagery. For example, only three crosses appear in the whole codex and none of them in a religious format (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
Also, Professor Raymond Clemens suggested when asked "What's your opinion on the apparent lack of Christian iconography?" that [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]:
Quote:>> RAY Yeah, the imagery is consistent, so if you look at comparable herbals there's not going to be a great deal of difference. Those references will be in the text. So, you know, there will be instructions on what to say when you're picking this herb. But it wouldn't necessarily show up in the images themselves and that's normal in the herbal, the pharmacological material... but I really don't know what to do with the bathing women, that's... [LAUGHS]
Also, none of the images have a clear Biblical or Koranic setting.
The majority of solutions proposed for the VMS are substitution codes for natural languages (with the most common choice being Latin, but with most other common languages like Czech, English, Italian, Greek, etc., also being proposed).
Many of these are one-to-one substitution codes, some are substitution codes that depend on expanding some of the glyphs (one-to-one substitution combined with one-to-many substitution). Recent examples of one-to-one combined with one-to-many include Lockerby and Gibbs (Latin).
A few have also suggested transposition codes (codes that include substitution, but also transposition of the letters, as with anagrams). Sherwood and others have suggested this.
I would like to restrict this poll to substitution codes that do not involve transpositions (in other words, this poll is not asking about solutions that involve changing relofw into flower). It's probably better to ask that as a separate question.
![[Image: DoarusComment.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/DoarusComment.png)
![[Image: Karotas.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Karotas.png)
![[Image: CentaureaSpecies.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CentaureaSpecies.png)
![[Image: CentaureaChart.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CentaureaChart.png)
![[Image: Rsigns.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Rsigns.png)
![[Image: SummaryandTest.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SummaryandTest.png)