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| Stephen Bax Video 2014 summarized transcript with commentary |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 18-09-2017, 11:41 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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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.
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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.]
![[Image: DoarusComment.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/DoarusComment.png)
- 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.]
![[Image: Karotas.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Karotas.png) - 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.]
![[Image: CentaureaSpecies.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CentaureaSpecies.png)
- 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.]
![[Image: CentaureaChart.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CentaureaChart.png) - [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.]
![[Image: Rsigns.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Rsigns.png)
• 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.]
![[Image: SummaryandTest.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SummaryandTest.png)
• [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.
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| [split] Glyph writing convention discussion |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 17-09-2017, 10:27 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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(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.
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| Medieval Abrahamic religious imagery is not depicted within the manuscript |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 17-09-2017, 10:08 PM - Forum: Positions we can agree upon
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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.
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| Do you believe Voynichese is a substitution code for a natural language? |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 17-09-2017, 09:18 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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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.
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| Positional Rigidity in the VMS |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 17-09-2017, 08:51 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Emma May Smith Wrote: (17-09-2017, 12:25 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How many natural languages have restrictions as severe as these as to a character's position in a word? I've done a very extensive search of languages trying to find something that is even half as restrictive and have not, so far.
Lots.
English, for example, only allows /ng/ in the syllable coda and it must come immediately after the vowel. Also, /h/ is only allowed in the syllable onset and only in combination with a semivowel.
And English is [i]nowhere near the most restrictive language on Earth. Indeed, it is relatively liberal.[/i]
The VMS is much more restrictive.
For example, in English, ng can appear in a variety of positions in the word:
mid/end mid mid mid mid/end
ongoing, wrangle, elongate, lengthen, bringing
So I think nc might be a better example than ng, if one is looking for parallels in English, since it is constrained both before and after (it needs a vowel).
once, invincible, fence, wince, dunce chance
But even though nc may behave like some VMS pairs, here's the important part... notice that the letters adjacent to nc move around also (the associated vowels a, e, i, and o can show up in different positions in words in addition to preceding or following the ng or nc pairs). This is not what one sees in Voynichese.
There are large numbers of pairs in English (and other languages), that can appear in different positions in the word (like ng, some require a preceding vowel or consonant, exhibiting some restrictions as to neighbors, and there are some that don't). Here is a very short list of examples of pairs that can appear in numerous positions in English words:
Beginning Middle End
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psychology, apse, lopsided, copse, tips, chirps, cups, helps, chumps (preceding letters a, o, i, r, u, l, m)
clement, acclimate, carbuncle, muscle, decline, circle, debacle (preceding letters c, n, s, e, r, a)
entail, apprentice, fountain, leant, burnt, flint, font (preceding letters e, u, a, r, i, o)
great, agree, regret, digress, pilgrim, margrave, mangrove, meagre, ogre (preceding letters a, r, e, i, l, n, o)
shift, ashes, Welsh, publish, push, mesh (preceding letters a, l, i, u, e)
This list could go on for pages and pages, I didn't even include consonant-vowel or vowel-vowel pairs, because it would take days to list them all. This level of flexibility in letter arrangement has no direct parallel in Voynichese.
Unlike English, in which most single letters can appear in almost any position in a word, in Voynichese, there are only a few single-glyphs that can move through a vord in various positions. And there is only a small group of pairs can move through any position. Also, unlike English, the glyphs around them are not similarly flexible when associated with the movable glyphs.
There is a great variety of pairs English (as in many other languages), and also a wide variety of letters that can directly precede or follow these pairs. This variety of combinations and flexibility of position is not characteristic of Voynichese.
Voynichese restricts position in three ways:
1. by constraining certain glyphs to the beginning, middle, or ends of Vwords,
2. by constraining which glyphs can appear adjacent to these glyphs, and
3. by constraining sequential glyph repetition (only cc occurs with any regularity).
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| Auctions & W. Voynich |
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Posted by: voynichbombe - 17-09-2017, 02:36 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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This is about antiquarian book auctioning in the timeframe Wilfried was active in. I know very little about auctions in general, and historic antiquarian book auctions specially. The Schoenberg Insitute Database of pre-modern Manuscripts, which is basically a huge and growing collection of entries from all sorts of auction catalogues has an entry about Wilfried Voynich:
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I may be mistaken, but Wilfrieds record struck me a bit strange, if compared to that of H.P. Kraus's (which maybe invalid
due to the timeframe, so if you'd know any other seller or agent more fitting to compare to, I'd be very glad for a hint).
While Voynich is listed in provenance records probably referring to prior direct sale transactions 388 times, he is listed as selling agent 70 times, only 1 time as a buyer, and ZERO times as a seller.
Does this indicate he didn't own the books he brought to auction, none of them? Does it seem possible to find out about the owner(s)? Also the list of _different individual buyers seems rather short.
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| [Transcription] Stephen Bax on marginalia |
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Posted by: Koen G - 16-09-2017, 08:03 PM - Forum: Marginalia
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We started the interview with Stephen Bax on the subject of marginalia, so I thought I'd transcribe that already and put it here for discussion. This was not the main part of the interview, but still it was well 8 minutes into the video 
[David] The most obvious question to ask a linguist revolves around the marginalia. As you know many attempts have been made to decipher these brief notes without any definite success, although it appears to be some form of medieval High German. Do you think there is enough text to be definite about a reading and what language is this pointing to?
[Stephen] Well I agree that the marginalia are very interesting. But of course they are secondary to the text. I think there isn't really enough to be conclusive and people have been trying for a long long time to work out what's going on, with some idea that there are Germanic elements in it, but also some Latin elements. For me one of the most convincing interpretations of the final page is that it possibly relates to some remedy related to goats and kidneys and so on. I find the attempt to explore it very interesting, but I think there is nothing really conclusive yet that we can draw from it.
[Koen] If you have marginalia in a "normal" manuscript, usually you kind of see what's going on, you can see if it's a Latin or a German sentence. But in the Voynich we have several bits of marginalia and all of the are problematic. Why would that be?
[Stephen] Again I would like to place this in a multilingual framework. If you look at some old manuscripts, I'm thinking about the Vienna Dioscorides which is a fantastic ancient herbal, if you look at the marginalia in that, it's very multilingual. You have some in Hebrew, some in Latin, some in Arabic; it's a manuscript that's been passed around the world and studied very closely by different scholars who have written things in their own note form, their own language or their own dialect. For me the Voynich fits that perfectly. You've got even the month names which seem to be written in a form of old French. Obviously somebody with their own language was looking at the manuscript and decided to write in what he or she thought were the symbols for the Zodiac depictions. And therefor they wrote in their own dialect. Then you have other people who added certain things in German, other things in Latin.
Now I think the most intriguing thing is the last page, where somebody's attempted to write several lines of script. I agree with your implication, Koen, that it's a bit surprising that we can't even make much of that because you would expect it to be several lines of text in a language that we could identify. But it does seem to be in note form and you got the interesting + signs between some of the words. It does seem to be a mixture of some sort of Latin and some Germanic elements too. Most intriguing for me about that last page is that there are definitely two words of Voynich script within the text. That is significant because it implies that is was somebody who could actually understand the Voynich script and the language behind it, who was trying to write, as I see it, some sort of recipe or remedy of some sort. But they actually referred to Voynich words using Voynich script as well. Okay, it could be a hoax, you never know, but that is an interesting mixture of languages. Again, we must understand that many medieval scholars were multilingual and could switch easily from one language, say German, to a language such as Latin which was more readily understood elsewhere. And if we take that text to be notes from a scholar who knew several languages and also could read the Voynich script and language, then it becomes a very intriguing text. But as you hint in the beginning, we can't even decipher even that with any great certainty.
[Koen] Exactly. Now in your answer you mention the month names that have been written roundels. Some people say It's a northern French dialect, other people say it's Occitan, which is on the other side of France. The difference is crucial between those two. Do you think it would be possible to pinpoint the location given the few words that we have?
[Stephen] I have actually, some time ago, put something on my blog about that and I did investigate briefly some of the origins of the words. For me the most convincing is that it seems to be from a southern French and maybe Occitan dialect, but it's not entirely consistent. One thing I've emphasized on my blog is the issue of language variation. We have to expect that in that period there was a huge amount of variation not only in the way that people spoke, but in the way that they wrote. So for me, the debate over whether it's northern or southern French doesn't seem particularly important. If I were pushed I'd say it's closer to Occitan/ southern French, but that in itself doesn't get us very far because it could have been an Occitan speaker who was living, for example, as a monk in Austria, or in Italy or in Istanbul. It doesn't give us much information as to where the VM was at any particular point in time. So although it's interesting and intriguing, It won't take us very far in understanding where the VM itself came from, or any details of the script or language of the text. For me that's another good reason to say that the VM is an authentic medieval MS which travelled around a lot.
[Koen] It's been used.
[Stephen] Exactly, it's been used, rather than say being a modern hoax.
[Koen] Right. And even if we could find an exact match on the location, it could only tell us where the MS went after it was made and we still wouldn't know for sure if it was made in that location.
[Stephen] No, but equally it might only tell us where the writer of those words came from, and maybe if the manuscript had stayed fixed in one place and the writer was a visitor from another part who came to write in his own language. So it doesn't really help us that much, although again it's one of the fantastic fascinations of the MS.
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| [split] An interview with Stephen Bax - 1 to 1 substitution discussion |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 16-09-2017, 07:46 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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To all of you... do you honestly believe that the VMS is a one-to-one substitution code in a natural language?
No one should be immune from critical analysis of their theories, regardless of their credentials, especially in Voynich studies where there are no experts.*
* (To be an "expert" in Voynich studies one needs high-level expertise in code-breaking, medieval languages, medieval paleography, history, iconographic analysis, botany, and more. Not a single one of us is an expert, no matter what credentials or experience we may have. We are all students of the VMS and there are many people with credentials equal or greater than Bax's who have spent decades working on this who receive less respect than he does. Think about it.)
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| An interview with Stephen Bax |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 15-09-2017, 05:01 PM - Forum: News
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Koen and I had a great chat with Prof. Stephen Bax today. We discussed the Voynich manuscript in general, and had some very interesting talks about the linguistic side of things, as well as his personal thoughts on the book.
It is a long video, but I think we flagged up some very interesting ideas!
There's no transcript at the moment, simply because of the length of the video. Anyone interested in contributing is welcome to use the YouTube tools to help correct the automatically generated subtitles that are currently being used.
The video is here:
Stephen has publically joined the forum and says that he looks forwards to chatting with us on linguistic topics. Let's all welcome him to the forums and I hope we can put some really though provoking questions forwards that we can all work together as a community to solve.
[Edit KG]
I'll add links to the transcription threads here as they come in:
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| "De Balneis" - a recap |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 13-09-2017, 06:49 AM - Forum: Imagery
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In the wake of last week's Voynich MS publication by Nicholas Gibbs in the Times Literary Supplement, the historical discussions of the manuscript copies of "De Balneis Puteolanis" in relation with the Voynich MS were picked up by several people, and the information may be found scattered over several blogs, including those of Nick, JKP and Koen, but also in (what seems to be) the first "rebuttal" article in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I attempted a first brief summary in the comments of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , but I believe it deserves a bit more, and in a more central place.
These discussions were triggered by the fact that Gibbs did not mention any of these earlier references. Now while he might be excused for not having read all web resources about the Voynich MS, this does not apply for the recent Yale volume. Not only are the "Balneis" manuscripts mentioned in the essay by Jennifer Rampling, they also figure in the Preface by Ray Clemens, with a rather prominent illustration on one of the first pages.
Nick, in a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , presented a quote from a Voynich mailing list question I asked Jim Reeds on 19 Feb 1996. The answer came pomptly, on the same day:
Quote:Toresella is thinking of some late 1400’s books describing the public thermal baths of Italy. This sub-genre of topographical book has, typically, sections describing the special medicinal properties of the waters in each of several towns. Each section might have an illustration showing what the baths were like. The page layout and the architecture is similar to what we see in the VMS.
The second part was a follow-up by Brian Smith on 9 March 1998:
Quote:It is a reproduction of a 15c copy of “De Balneis Puteolanis” which was written by a Petrus de Ebulo c. 1200. The content was very reminiscent of an herbal — a picture of the bath and a page of text describing it physically and its healing properties. The pictures generally showed a large tub surrounded by pillars or other building elements. Some of the tubs were shown being fed by streams flowing down from mountains in the background or from pipes. A few naked figures stood in each tub, usually men but sometimes women. All of the tubs were single-sex. The style of the illustrations was unlike the VMS but I came away feeling fairly confident that the “balneological” section of the VMS is, in fact, balneological. “De Balneis Puteolanis” would not be at all out of place in a work otherwise about herbs and astrology and the VMS pages showing large tubs stretching across the width of the page would not be out of place in “De Balneis” (if drawn by a more skilled artist).
Following this mail, I found a a link with some illustrations. This particular site no longer exists, but now there are of course on-line digital copies of several of the manuscripts.
It's worth stepping back to the first mention that traces back to Sergio Toresella. His opinion about the Voynich MS, reported by Jim Reeds, and partially reflected in his 1995 paper, had an enormous impact on the general opinion about the MS that prevailed in the old mailing list. He strongly argued for an Italian origin, a humanist handwriting, and a possible relationship with the tradition of alchemical herbals, even though the MS clearly isn't one by itself. In particular the Italian origin seems to have been largely accepted by the majority as likely.
. . . to be continued . . .
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