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| Improper or incorrect credits |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 18-04-2017, 07:56 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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This is not my favourite topic, and I only start a new thread because I don't want to be off-topic in another one.
Only just a few days ago I wrote in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :
Quote:It's a real pity that this spectre of 'who said what first' is haunting so many discussions.
It is obviously to be expected that if many dozens of people are looking at the same thing, many people will come to the same conclusions completely independently.
and various related statements.
In an interesting blog post by Koen about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , he is unfortunately misled by a particularly bad example of this, when he writes in footnote [2] about who probably first noted the oak and ivy comparison with the Manfredus MS.
The source for that appears to be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , which further refers to a comment at Stephen Bax' blog.
The trouble is that there is no information about 'who was first'. The selection of Edith Sherwood is arbitrary.
It is also the only one of the three (Edith, JKP and myself, who all noted this independently from each other) that is definitely not the right answer.
For those who care about this topic, the comments on Stephen Bax' blog ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) are quite clear, I think.
If one wants to credit someone, one has to get it right.
Not knowing something may be unsatisfactory, but this might just reflect reality.
In this situation it is not acceptable to make things up, because people will be misled in believing it, as happened in the case of Koen's blog post.
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| Book review |
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Posted by: Davidsch - 14-04-2017, 02:19 PM - Forum: News
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The New York Review of Books
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The Voynich Manuscript
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edited by Raymond Clemens, with an introduction by Deborah Harkness
Beinecke Library/ Yale University Press, 304 pp., $50.00
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| [split] Those Scribbles |
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Posted by: Anton - 13-04-2017, 11:32 AM - Forum: Marginalia
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Ah, these scribbles are an interesting thing. I don't support the idea of anything being encoded there, but I mean another thing. It is best seen if you rotate the pic provided by coded (stellar) by 180 degrees. You will then see that these scribbles repeat the capital letter "M" a number of times (three or four times, if I remember correctly) inscribed in the same ornate way (I mean the way that the pen goes). Given this ornate way repeating several times, I wonder if this can be a signature (or part of signature) of the scribe. This could then be a valuable clue.
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| [split] color annotations? |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 11-04-2017, 02:25 PM - Forum: Imagery
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I've also noted a color annotation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (as well as other kinds of text in the leaves that are hard to discern).
I don't know whether René mentioned it earlier (it's something I noticed independently) but if it is a color annotation, it says something about the language of the person doing the annotations or whoever was tasked with the painting.
"G" is green in quite a few languages (green, grün, grön, grønn, grøn, groen, gjelbër, grien, grænt, glas, greng, grin) but most of them are western European, more specifically the germanic languages rather than romance languages (which are usually "v"), eastern European languages are usually "z", and African and Asian languages vary, but are not usually "g".
If the label in the root is intended as "rot" (which seems probable but is not completely certain), then it confirms that the annotations are germanic.
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| [split] Why the VMS text is meaningful or meaningless? |
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Posted by: Anton - 10-04-2017, 08:20 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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EDIT: This thread is split off from here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
***
OK, I guess I need to read your work in detail (which I haven't time to do yet).
Quote:But in a century, no one has found any convincing evidence of meaningful information encoded in the text.
That's not true. I won't mention the work by Montemurro & Zanette, because, as I noted, you suggest that you were able to reproduce the like results with the random text (however, if one works onwards from the pre-analyzed statistical properties of the text it might be trivial that s/he finds co-occurrences to sustain across the text). But, apart from that, there is quite a number of tiny indications. My favourite one is that two most frequent "Voynich stars" (labeled objects of f68r1 and f68r2) - otol and odaiin are both mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and both in the same paragraph. I wonder what would be the probability for that in a random meaningless text. Another one is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the supposed Dracaena - a plant that was largely known in Europe by that time only by hearsay, since Europeans did not yet frequent the Canaries or the Socotra back then, in other words - definitely a rare plant from the perspective of the VMS author, if a European he be) is the only (!) botanical folio not containing any occurrence of a label vord.
There are also clear distribution shifts of some vords to certain sections - such as balneo or recipe. (I can only wonder why this fruitful field is largely unexplored still). Not sure if this would be a characteristic of a meaningless text generated by picking cards.
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| An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text |
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Posted by: DonaldFisk - 10-04-2017, 02:50 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Over the past few months I've been analysing the text, using standard statistical techniques, and now think I have a good idea how it was written. I have posted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. describing my analysis, along with some attached files, on my "blog".
As there's a lot to read there, and you're no doubt ol daiin to know my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I'm afraid they're going to disappoint many of you. I have concluded that the text is almost certainly meaningless. I have also worked out, in detail, the general method by which the text must have been generated. Then, using this method, I have generated a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I verified that this has all the important statistical properties of the original text. The method leaves very little scope for hiding any meaning.
In brief, the text appears to have been generated using state transition tables. At each state, a glyph is written. The transition to the following state is then a weighted random choice, possibly decided by drawing a card or two from a shuffled pack, though I'm open-minded about the exact mechanism. This might be a slow and tedious process, but it fits the data. The state generation tables I have used are capable of generating 90% of the original text, but there's no reason that couldn't be improved upon.
There are a few loose ends. My method focuses on word generation. Deciding paragraph breaks is still somewhat ad-hoc, and I didn't generate labels, though I think I have good reasons why they shouldn't present any problems.
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| [split] Are there trees in the VMS? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 05-04-2017, 07:31 PM - Forum: Imagery
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Edit KG: this thread is split from another one where Marco stated that the VM does not contain any trees. I thought this question worth its own thread.
Thanks, Marco. You touch upon an interesting question which I've meant to bring up before: are there trees in the VM? I agree that at first sight the plants look mostly like herbs, though this is hard to tell for sure since we have no indication of scale. Isn't it thought, for example, that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might be a tree? This is something that really needs its own thread, though at the moment I don't have time to give it the attention it deserves.
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