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Has anyone ever "decipher...
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Cary Rapaport's Voynich a...
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problematic points for an...
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Regaining the lost order
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The gallows intrusion, th...
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Linebreaks and line align...
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No text, but a visual cod...
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Why Voynich Manuscript is...
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Thread for random remarks...
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Analysis of cover attachment and VMS binding. |
Posted by: Wladimir D - 15-03-2021, 06:11 PM - Forum: News
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First, I would like to express my gratitude to Rene Zandbergen for providing a high resolution photo of the VMS end with the lid removed. Previously, this photo was partially posted at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Some conclusions.
An error was made while assembling the cover.
Notebooks are attached with 7 types of twine.
Confirmation that Q9 is sewn incorrectly.
The Q8 was repaired by Voynich himself.
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Discussion of "The Voynich Manuscript: Symbol roles revisited" |
Posted by: RenegadeHealer - 15-03-2021, 01:23 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Matlach, Vladimír & Janečková, Barbora & Dostál, Daniel (2020). "The Voynich Manuscript: Symbol roles revisited." PREPRINT (version 1.3, 20 September — 27 December 2020; version update 12 March 2021). You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. retrieved 13 March 2021.
I'm always in awe of new quantitative approaches to understanding the structure of Voynichese. Statistics and quantitative textual analysis are probably not the only tools needed to solve this mystery, and may not even prove to be the most important ones. Even so, I have no doubt that these tools, wielded correctly, can yield a lot of valuable clues. Mathematics is not my strength, and so I found the math used by Matlach et. al. hard to wrap my head around. I'm not really in a position to judge whether their selection and implementation of statistical tools was ideal, and am curious to hear what experienced textual analysts here have to say on this matter.
On a positive note, the authors of this paper ask an ambitious and potentially helpful question: In the VMs text, what patterns of glyph occurrence should we expect to find, and how does this compare to what we do find? This question is ambitious because in such a unique and unprecedented text, "what we should expect to find" is far from clear or agreed upon. The authors compute metrics for specimens of natural language plaintexts and enciphered texts, as well as Torsten Timm's attempt at reverse engineering a meaningless VMs-like text. They demonstrate that in natural language texts, glyphs cannot be expected to recur at regular, mathematically predictable intervals. But they do exactly this in both the original VMs and Timm's synthetic VMs. The idea of the VMs being a natural language plaintext has never looked more untenable. None of this is new or earth-shattering.
The authors' goal is to identify Voynichese glyphs that might potentially be ligatures of other glyphs. They first demonstrate the viability of their ligature-finding tool on natural language samples. From what I gather, a large part of this involves comparing the observed occurrence of strings of 2~3 glyphs in a text, to the expected occurrence of that same string in a randomly generated pattern made of the same glyph set. (Please correct me on this if I misunderstand.) Thus, their null hypothesis appears to be "The VMs's text is meaningless". I think this is a wise starting point.
I'm happy to see that Matlach et al. have read, understood, and taken seriously the challenge to a meaningful VMs text put forth by Timm and Schinner. What would have been even more interesting, though, is if they had used the output of T&S's algorithm as a control when computing ngram frequency, rather than a more vaguely defined "random chance occurrence of glyphs". Because one of Timm's major points is that the arrangement of glyphs in the VMs is not random, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's meaningful. Matlach et al. do demonstrate that T&S's synthetic VMs and the original VMs are two distinct texts. But they have not falsified the null hypothesis. They have only demonstrated that Timm and Schinner's exact algorithm, as published in its current version, produces an output with statistically significant differences from the original VMs. It could be that T&S's algorithm is on the right track, but just needs some tweaking. Regardless, Matlach et al. have made a satisfactory case for a meaningful VMs text still being possible, at least for now.
A few things about these authors' hunt for ligatures make me worry. For one thing, the thorny problem of EVA [f] and EVA [p] strongly preferring the first lines of paragraphs goes unaddressed. If these two glyphs are ligatures, and are mostly confined to first lines, it seems logical that their component ngrams should occur, non-ligated, fairly regularly everywhere but first lines and labels. This is not what we find, though. The proposed components of EVA [f] and EVA [p] (EVA [id] and EVA [qd], respectively) do not occur anywhere in the text.
Speaking of which, the starring role played by EVA [i] in these authors' ligature formations is odd to me, in light of the mounting evidence from other researchers that EVA [i] is probably not an independent glyph.
Finally, the authors seem to get a bit subjective and arbitrary — "greedy" as the authors phrase it — as to which component glyphs are favored for each ligature candidate. I'd be willing to believe that that EVA [n] indeed is "a ligature of [i] + space", in other words [n] is simply the way [i] is written at the end of a vord. But I don't yet see a good reason to favor EVA [m] being a ligature of EVA [i] + [d], as opposed to, say, [i]+ [l].
I was hoping the authors would conclude their experiment by taking a reliable EVA transcription (why Takahashi?), substituting ligature candidates with their suspected component glyphs, and then performing statistical analyses of these substituted texts. I hope this is a part of their future publications.
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f90v2 |
Posted by: Pardis Motiee - 10-03-2021, 09:02 PM - Forum: Imagery
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I am curious about plant of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . It resembles Silk tree in my view . However I'm looking for better identifications.
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Page 75 - Baths |
Posted by: Pardis Motiee - 07-03-2021, 08:20 AM - Forum: Imagery
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Here's what I've got from first two lines:
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Transcript:
RI.A.T.S.V.RI.A.R.V, D.RI.T.T.V, K.D.RI.A.R, J.V.RI.A.T.S.V, K.D.P.A.R, J.T.S.V, S.A.M, J. T.V, T'. V, H.J.T.D.T, K.D.T, A.T.S.V, A.T.S.V, RI.A.R, A.T.RI.T.D.S.V, R.D.R
ریاتسو ریار دریت کدریار جوریاتسو کدپار جتسو سم جت ت هجتکه ریارا ردر
اتسو را دریط کدر جور اتسو کدپار جتسو سم جت ت هجتکه ریارا ردر
اتشو را دری تکدر جورات شو کدب رجه سو شم تهکه
عطش ور درِ تکدر جورات شو کدب رجه سو شم تهکه
عطش: تشنگی thirst - آتش: شعله fire - ور: ور، وار like - تکدر: تیرگی آب darkness of water - جور:گونه kind - کدب:سفید،تازه white, fresh - رجه:صف row, queue -
تهکه: تهک، عور،عریان naked - شم :در متن ها ی قدیمی به معنای رفتن هم معنا می دهد to go (the word is in old form)
Translate:
عطش ور در اقسام آب های تیره که سفید می شود، سوی صف عور می روم
"I go thirsty/like fire ,in the dark waters which change to white, to the queue without clothes"
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Question:The first page is talking from tongue of Homer a masculine name, but in page 75 we see female figures. And resulted translation explains the picture in first person, شم "I go", like the writer is one of the figures, Why? Are there any evidence that two person had written the Voynich ?
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Old news, still unresolved |
Posted by: VViews - 27-02-2021, 09:10 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (38)
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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 |
Posted by: Klingmann - 26-02-2021, 05:55 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (10)
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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 |
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 |
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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