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| The Medici agenda |
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Posted by: Linda - 18-08-2017, 09:50 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
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So this is an idea where the Medici family continued to show secrets of the world in their commissioning of art. I see connections to Botticellis paintings with regard to both geography and flora. Let me show you a later painting which I see as representing the world in its entirety.
Calumny of Appeles The timing of this painting is just after Columbus' journey.
![[Image: 1200px-Sandro_Botticelli_021.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Sandro_Botticelli_021.jpg/1200px-Sandro_Botticelli_021.jpg)
Now take a look at this projection. Not perfect but do you see the similarities?
![[Image: worldmapper_basefuller.jpg]](http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/worldmapper_basefuller.jpg)
Australia would need to swing around 90 degrees with Antarctica making up the top half of Venus to the far left of the painting. Can you see the arm? The old hag is a T-O map trifecta of Africa, making up her head, Europe, the UK is her pointy sleeve, and Asia with India as the trailing dress. Note she is toe to toe with the tip of North America,
Jason Davies has a tool which can help make the shapes morph more closely to those in the painting
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I haven't been able to capture it yet but will see what I can do.
If you then go back in time, you find Cosimo Medici to be connected with various people that could have been part of making the manuscript, from geographers to cryptologists and astronomers, among others. I still see quite 13 as showing the ecumene through bodies of water, and the Birth of Venus seels to me a continuation of what is shown geographically, followed by Primavera, which to me combines more geography with a multitude of flora, in addition to the generally accepted imagery of the graces etc. Calumny of Appeles then shows the entire globe of land masses in its entirety.
In 1439 the works of Strabo were introduced to Italy at the Council of Florence, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. who also knew Columbus
I see this as the information shown in quite 13. Notably, Strabo's ecumene ends exactly where the quite 13 one does. He also saw Sagres point as the wester most point in Europe, which is where Quite 13 starts it's journey.
![[Image: C%2BB-Geography-Map1-StrabosMap.PNG]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/C%2BB-Geography-Map1-StrabosMap.PNG)
Strabo also incorporated the work of Hecataeus in his writings, I see his periplusas being recreated in Quite 13 as well.
There are more connections, but I will stop here to see if anyone sees a glimmer of what I am seeing in this.
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| Gallows distribution |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 16-08-2017, 09:28 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (4)
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Can anyone out there confirm or deny this?
Stolfi mentions in a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that he found the following gallows distribution:
Quote: I just noticed a curious coincidence:
>
> total *occurrences* of words (tokens) with
>
> 0 gallows .... 17363 (49.4%)
> 1 gallows .... 17443 (49.6%)
> 2 gallows .... 323 (0.9%)
> 3 gallows .... 3
> Many (if not all) of the 2- and 3-gallows words are probably due to
> omission of word spaces by the transcribers. Other data errors may
> have injected a few percent of noise in these figures.
>
> Still, the coincidence is intriguing. It seems safe to assume that a
> "correct" Voynichese word can have at most one gallows; so we have
> almost exact 50-50 split between 0-g and 1-g words.
Even curiouser:
w/o gallows with gallows
+--------------+--------------+
w/o tables | 8772 (25.2%) | 9016 (25.9%) |
+--------------+--------------+
with tables | 8591 (24.7%) | 8423 (24.2%) |
+--------------+--------------+
These are counts of tokens (word instances) in the whole majority-vote
transcription; minus key sequences, labels, unreadable/contentious
tokens, and the 326 tokens with two or more gallows.
The "gallows" are the EVA letters [ktfp], including any platforms
("ct", "cth", "ith") and isolated "e" suffixes ("te", "cthe", etc.).
The "tables" are the letters "ch", "sh", "ee", and any isolated "e"s
that are not attached to a gallows letter.
I can't be bothered to dig into this right now - does anybody have the stats to prove or disprove this antique statement?
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| Computational Attacks on Abbreviated Text |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 16-08-2017, 01:52 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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D. O'Donovan [corrected] posted an excerpt of Latin text on her blog and included the interlinear expansion of the abbreviations You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The original manuscript is BSB CLM 13031 f12r], but I didn't see a credit for the expansion, and I noticed there are mismatches between the original and the expanded text, so here is my version, which I believe is more true to the original (note that letters in red in the original are likely intended to be capital letters).
Praepositio* et praeterea per dyptongon scribitum. Pene vero, quod est coniunctio, per E. Pena quod est supplicium per OE Q. littera tunc recte ponitur, cum illia statim .U. littera sequitur et alia quelibet una plures ve vocales iunguntur. ita ut una syllaba fiat. Cetera per .C. scribuntur. Que [Quae] pronomen cum .A. scribendum. que coniunctio sine .A.
[*I'm not sure why the scribe has written this as Pre perpositio as I'm fairly sure Prepositio/Praepositio was intended.]
My version is not intended as a criticism of the one posted on O'Donovan's site, I just feel it should be as accurate as possible if it's going to be discussed on the forum (and I enjoy expanding the abbreviations).
I've been wanting to write in more detail about the way Latin was expanded in the 15th century, and have touched on it in some of my blogs, because it does dramatically change the statistical properties of word-frequency and other computational attacks, but can't seem to find enough time, so I thought this short excerpt might be enough to provide a start for a thread on the computational properties of medieval texts (note that the example above is about three centuries before the VMS).
[Latin abbreviations are old news to some members, but if you are not familiar with them yet, Cappelli is an excellent resource.]
Even if you study Latin abbreviations, and attempt to break the VMS text out into Latin (as has been tried by a number of researchers, and as has been recently attempted by P. Lockerby), that doesn't mean the correspondence between VMS glyphs or glyph-combinations is consistent. One can see in this short excerpt that "quod" was abbreviated in two different ways. It was not uncommon for words to be abbreviated four or five different ways. By the 15th century, long after the above excerpt was written, handwriting was messier, abbreviations more frequent, and consistency in the abbreviations even less than one sees in the above example.
These abbreviation systems were not limited to Latin. Scribes used many of the same conventions in their native tongues. If the VMS were Greek or Italian, for example, many of the same abbreviation conventions would apply except that the symbols are expanded into letters appropriate to that language.
So... AFA computat'nal attacks on lett'r frequency, et al, r concern'd...even if the VMS were a substitution code, the odds of it being one-to-one substitution are not very good. The use of abbreviations was deeply ingrained in the thinking of medieval scribes and the VMS has many short word-tokens (more than some of the transcriptions indicate).
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| Interesting Vwords - those pesky 4o vords |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 13-08-2017, 05:46 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I am not convinced that there is meaning behind the VMS text, or that it's natural language or has any linguistic significance, but I'm keeping an open mind because someone spent a lot of time creating it and it's clearly not random text. So, I try to look for patterns that reveal how it was constructed.
While looking through the text, I noticed this interesting contrast...
Each of these is a unique vord, with the exception of keeey which occurs twice:
Plant 5r Plant 49r Plant 50v Plant 38v Folio 116r Sagittarius
---------- ------------ --------- ----------- -------------- --------------
qoykeeey oykeeey ykeeey keeey [font=Verdana]> keeey eeey[/font]
It looks exciting if viewed as a deliberate pattern, possibly a "connector" between folios, but... is it?
In contrast, another 4o vord behaves like this:
275 times 87 times 50 times 2 times 2 times 106 times
------------- ----------- ----------- --------- ---------- -------------
qokeedy okeedy keedy eedy edy dy
Superficially, qoykeeey and qokeedy appear similar, but they behave very differently. The first (qoykeeey) is a unique vord that breaks down into more unique vords by removing the first letter. One might almost suspect a system of pointers, as are used in programming languages to connect data in different places. In contrast, the second (qokeedy) is common, and breaks down into additional vords that are not unique.
So it's not as simple as looking at unique vords with morphological similarities (length, glyphs) to see if they have a connecting function. Might there be a linguistic explanation?
In linguistic terms, there are situations that might explain the first pattern. For example, in English, the sequence nascent > ascent > scent > cent resembles the first set of Vwords. They are all words in their own right, and don't necessarily have to have any relationship to one other in terms of meaning—only the letter patterns are similar.
IF (this is a big "if") qoykeeey and qokeedy are linguistic and IF (this is an even bigger "if" and one of which I am very skeptical) the VMS were a substitution code, then one could look for patterns in a variety of languages where some letter combinations are rare (as in the first example) and others are common (as in the second) in terms of breaking down into viable words if the leading letter is dropped.
I'm not sure how fruitful this line of investigation would be. I see the ok "prefix" as far too common to mesh with natural language patterns, but I decided to post it anyway because a pattern of patterns, studied over time, might lead to other insights.
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| Voynich theories and Voynich solutions |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 12-08-2017, 10:20 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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The last sentence in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from JKP is one thing among several that made me finally write the present post, about Voynich theories, how to prove or disprove them, and the question: whom are we trying to convince.
There are different types of Voynich theories. For the sake of this argument I classify them into three groups.
1. Unspecific / non-controversial
This is what I'd consider the 'easiest' group. It includes proposals like: "it could be the diary of a travelling monk", the "notebook of a student" and in fact many of the suggestions that are proposed and discussed in fora like this.
Most of the time, it is hard to say anything against them, and it is often a matter of taste how convincing the arguments for or against it are. They are rarely the subject of heated debate. One could often say: "not sure but could be".
2. Translations
These form a very specific group. There are far more proposed translations coming up than is visible to the various fora. The thread to which I linked above is just one of five or six that I have been confronted with in the last half year.
The "good" part of proposed translations is that they are susceptible to quantitative arguments.
The people proposing translations (or similar types of solutions) come in all possible forms. Some are reasonable. Many are adamant. Some are not reasonable (spamming, annoying the staff of Yale, suspecting conspiracies, etc.).
3. Controversial provenance
This vague group includes theories that usually do not include a way to interpret the text, but they are not conforming to all or part of the evidence related to the history of the MS.
This includes (among others) the several different versions of "Kelly did it", the Meso-American theory defended by several partly independent people, and the modern fake theory, which recently showed up again in Koen's blog.
Again, the people proposing these theories come in all possible forms.
The question I really wanted to address in this post is: how much effort and energy should one put in trying to show that any theory is wrong?
Is it worth the effort?
The sentiment of JKP in the post I linked is a very understandable one: people may be misled in believing things that are, in reality wrong. This especially seems a problem if they are in no good position to judge it for themselves.
Usually, the proponents of new theories are asking for feedback. Not rarely, they are expecting acceptance.
Going into this discussion is always reasonable.
It is depending on how this discussion evolves, that one should wonder whether it is useful / worthwhile to continue it.
There are indeed people who refuse to accept any argument against what they are proposing. Without giving names, we have seen that here in the forum too. Outside the forum, this is also happening, and not infrequently.
If the proponent of a theory cannot be convinced of being wrong, is it still worth to argue, in order to convince the "rest of the world"?
As for me, personally, I am confronted with so many different cases, that I don't even have a chance to do it.
I will read all proposed solutions. After all, who knows...
But apart from that I simply have to prioritise what to do with my limited "Voynich time".
Other opinions on this topic are very welcome.
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![[Image: image.jpg?q=f68v2_3-509-349-103-86]](https://voynich.ninja/extractor/image.jpg?q=f68v2_3-509-349-103-86)
![[Image: image.jpg?q=f77r-745-112-176-181]](https://voynich.ninja/extractor/image.jpg?q=f77r-745-112-176-181)
![[Image: image.jpg?q=f102v2-769-177-243-228]](https://voynich.ninja/extractor/image.jpg?q=f102v2-769-177-243-228)
![[Image: image.jpg?q=f75v-110-485-1271-654]](https://voynich.ninja/extractor/image.jpg?q=f75v-110-485-1271-654)
![[Image: LatinExpanded.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/LatinExpanded.png)
![[Image: PlantFace.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/PlantFace.png)