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Old news, still unresolved |
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Posted by: VViews - 27-02-2021, 09:10 AM - Forum: News
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Hi everyone,
This is not really news, but the issue it raises is still not resolved.
Way back in 2009, there was this ciphermysteries post about an anonymous jewish-arabic Voynich theory.
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The author of this theory referenced a book about the Voynich by "Ethan Ashmole Jones". Nobody has been able to locate this book.
The author of the theory, later revealed under the name "Giannhs Kenanidhs", put his Voynich research on academia. In the paper, he insists the "Ashmole Jones" book is real and even shows photographs of the book's ISBN number: 960-329-302-4.
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The problem: this book, as far as I can tell, has never been found by anyone else. I have searched by ISBN number and got no results.
The researcher has an academia page, presenting as a legitimate linguist from Crete with a number of publications on various topics ranging from ancient greek inscriptions to conlangs, and some musings about spirituality.
I have my own theory about "Giannhs Kenanidhs" and what is going on here, but would be curious to know if anyone here has been able to locate the purported "Ethan Ashmole Jones" book, if it really exists at all.
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| Circular Text Observations |
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Posted by: Klingmann - 26-02-2021, 05:55 PM - Forum: Imagery
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Hi all,
Once again, sorry if this has been discussed before (seems to be my standard opening for my posts! I do search for key words before posting, but I think I must be rubbish at searching!)
Following on from another post I made regarding how the circles were drawn, I have made another tentative observation (which I have no doubt many others have noticed before, at some point or another!)
The text which has been drawn within circles very often has some kind of symbol, or at least a straight line at some point, which seemingly divides the vords, or at least creates some kind of break in the vord sequence within the circle. I guess it is a fairly common assumption that this signifies where the "sentence" starts from...?
If I were to write text within circles as has been done in the VMS, I think I'd have probably had these breaks occuring exactly at 12 o'clock, (or North, I suppose). However, having looked through all of the VMS, it almost seems that the scribe didn't pay much attention to where these breaks were... or did he? If you look over all the text within circles (ignoring the Rosettes page for now), you'll see that the 'breaks' all seem to occur between 9 o'clock and 12 o'clock, with an average of somewhere around 10 o'clock. Some could be said to be slightly below 9, but then again none of them seem to appear at exactly 12 either; they are only just before 12, so they are ALL within that same quarter of the circle.
I'm wondering if this holds any significance at all??
Taking this idea further , could we possibly use it to tell which way up we are supposed to 'read' the Rosettes pages individual circles? In other words, could we use this knowledge (that the scribe always put the circular text break between 9 and 12), to tell us which way up each of the 9 circles is intended to be viewed? (If indeed they are not all designed to be viewed straight from the manuscript)
Support for this argument: Look at the bottom right circle, and the bottom left circle of the rosettes page. The text shows clearly which direction these circles are supposed to be viewed from. If you turn the image clockwise until the text is predominantly level, the break in the text of the circle occurs at around 9 o'clock and 10 o'clock respectively! This also works with the middle-right circle. If you turn the image clockwise so the text is legible (well...as legible as voynichese ever is), the circular text break occurs at around 10 o'clock. (there is another break further around the circumference, but this one isn't as pronounced, so it seems like the previous break is the 'main' one.) Okay, what about the middle left circle? At the moment, with no rotation, the break is at 10 o'clock. Should we view the image this way on? The text isn't as easy to tell if this supports the hypothesis here, but at least some of the text is legible at the current, unaltered rotation.
Support against this argument: Top left circle. The break in the text appears at around 10 o'clock with no rotation. That would suggest the image should be viewed as shown. However, the one word we do get in the circle needs to be rotated anticlockwise by 90 degrees to be read, which would then put our circular text break at 7 o'clock. Hmm... Also, top right circle: the main castle makes you want to turn the page clockwise by 90 degrees. This again would make our line break occur at 3 o'clock. However, there are other structures within this circle which are not on the same horizon as the main castle, so perhaps we shouldn't look too closely at this particular building, just because it seems to be the most dominant structure?
Anyway. That's my random observation for the time being. Forgetting the Rosette theory, it is still interesting to me that the rest of the circular text breaks all occur within this same quarter of the circle.
Happy Voyniching everyone.
Gavin
PS, I seem to be obsessed with ((brackets)) in this post. Sorry!
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| [split] Viola manuscript images |
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Posted by: Koen G - 26-02-2021, 12:14 PM - Forum: Imagery
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Is any viola in manuscripts illustrated differently than odorata? I did a quick google search and as JKP suggests, odorata is about all I find. The habit of the plant and shape of the leaves are unmistakably different from the more tricolor-like image in the VM. The first examples I found all look like odorata:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (c. 1400)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (c. 1500)
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an example from a later book where the white violet does exhibit the habit of the VM plant.
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| Can... : Transcriptions |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 26-02-2021, 01:36 AM - Forum: Imagery
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Well, it's a start. Sloane MS 1975
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Can't read this either.
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Meanwhile, The VMs text of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. clearly has three short, distinctive sections.
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| Viola: Transcriptions |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 24-02-2021, 08:22 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (12)
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I would like to reference and collect medieval European, botanical, text passages about the plant called 'viola'. Text references, transcriptions and translations in the era 1400-1450 are the primary area of inquiry. When the visual identifications match, the relevant texts should be compared. First, there needs to be a database of transcriptions.
Similar threads for other identified plants may help in those areas.
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| The simplest plant |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 24-02-2021, 12:49 AM - Forum: Imagery
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Regarding compound plants, let's look the other way.
It was suggested " that correct plant identifications could provide a crucial clue to deciphering the text." And that surely would be something important, if we had one - but we don't. Why is that?
In order to demonstrate the concept, a single example is all that's required. The best example is the simplest. The best example of a plant that can be named and identified is the simplest plant.
There are a number of VMs representations to chose from, ones that have fairly well agreed upon identifications: violets, water lilies, poppies, etc. So there are various candidates. What is needed is a name. something that is distinctive, if that is possible, the proper name in the correct language, if it is to match the VMs (barring encryption). This would require a compilation of all relevant information about the name of the plant or plants. This could be done.
However the greater problem remains in interpreting the VMs. How to determine which vord(s) to compare with the proposed version of the name of the plant? By the number of glyphs? - By what criteria? As far as I know, there is no answer for that. How does this comparison and potential identification of text take place?
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| Compound plants in the VMS ? |
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Posted by: bi3mw - 21-02-2021, 02:03 PM - Forum: Imagery
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On the net I found the following statement about the plants in the VMS:
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In fact, many of the plants ( in the VMS ) seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third. Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text - a format typical of European herbals of the time. ...
This thesis would at least explain why none of the plants is clearly identifiable. However, I think that the assertion that this was typical for European herbals of the Middle Ages is quite daring. Does anyone know examples of plants that are clearly compound ?
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| Statistical properties of notebook jottings at the line, paragraph, and page level? |
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Posted by: RenegadeHealer - 20-02-2021, 10:25 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I write manuscripts. In medical school, I was known affectionately as that quirky student who attended every class, and furiously hand-wrote as much of what was said, and presented on the screen, as I could manage to write down. I challenged myself to write as grammatically correctly and completely as possible, so that I'd be able to use my notebook as a text to study later. It seemed to work; I can attest that writing something out by hand is a great way to commit it to memory. But I eventually realized that writing down every word in grammatically correct and complete sentences wasn't necessary. I just needed to get down the most important words, or even just pieces of the most important words. This was plenty enough to commit the important fact to memory, and recall it later. It was just hard to allow myself to do it.
I'm wondering if anyone has ever studied and statistically analyzed the way most people abbreviate quick notes in a notebook, for later reference. I'm not talking on the level of letters and words, so much as on the level of lines, sentences, paragraphs, and pages. I wonder how much this varies based on the language used, and the personal preferences and ease of handwriting of the writer. There are two competing demands that I see, which place some universal constraints on how notes get abbreviated. The notes need to be quick to write, such that the writer can keep up with what's happening around him. But they also have to contain enough information that the writer can retrieve it unambiguously later on. I wouldn't be surprised if some general statements can be made about what words tend to be kept, and what words tend to be omitted, when people to take notes in a notebook. In particular, I imagine function words are often omitted, unless they're absolutely necessary for interpreting the note correctly.
Notebooks intended to be read by people other than the writer, without the presence of the writer, can't be as liberal with grammar and word omission as notebooks only intended for the writer's eyes. Still, I reckon they're much less dense with function words and complete sentences than published books.
Has anyone found any verbatim transcriptions of a lengthy notebook, in any language and from any point in history? I'm currently looking for some. If I find any that are usable, I'd be very interested to let Marco, Nablator, and other computational linguistics / statistics gurus here run their tests on them, and see how they match up to transcriptions of both the VMs and to published works in known languages. I wouldn't be surprised to find most notebooks sporting:
- A high type to token ratio
- Line as a functional unit effects
- Page and paragraph clustering of similar words
- Weak word order
- Ambiguous spacing and spelling
- Loose grammar and punctuation
- A slow but steady drift in the rules of abbreviation and overall style of notetaking, from the first page to the last
I fail to see how fast and "just meaningful enough" notetaking would naturally lead to high rates of exact reduplication, though.
If the VMs was someone's notebook, which I think is a reasonable idea given the crudeness of its images and layout (Fisk, 2017), then a transcription of a long, old notebook in a known readable language, might be a good apples-to-apples comparison.
The bad news is, if the VMs really is a notebook, abbreviated in typical ways but written in a novel script and/or language, that does not give me confidence in our ability to decode it. To anyone who has ever borrowed someone else's class notebook, and had to call the owner to make sense of a lot of the notes, I don't think this needs much explanation. This is especially true if the ways that notetakers condense language tends to vary a lot based on the writer, language, and subject matter, and few generalizations about this condensation process can be made.
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| [split] St John's College MS. 18 |
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Posted by: DONJCH - 19-02-2021, 08:13 AM - Forum: Imagery
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There is a really interesting one on P50 of this collection by Don Hoffman
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Roland of Lisbon St Johns College Oxford MS18 Reductiorum Physiognomie
I was surprised not to see this one on a search of Voynich Ninja, it MUST have been discussed before!
Seems to be naked male "nymphs" representing 12 constellations and 7 planets.
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