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| Can we make isoglosses? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 03-05-2023, 10:29 AM - Forum: Marginalia
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"An You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [...] is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel..."
In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia, we have at least three proposed "marking" dialectical features:
* box -> pox
* geis -> gas
* milch -> mich
I don't know if all of these words are actually in the marginalia and if their interpretation as dialectical forms is correct. But if this is the case, then they point to a certain region. Now the interesting thing for us is that not every feature will correspond to the exact same region. One village may say "pox" and "gas", while another may say "box" and "gas" and yet another "box" and "geis". So the idea is that by finding out in which areas these three proposed features occur, we might end up with a very specific region, much more specific than "it's Alemannic" or "Switzerland".
Alternatively, we may found out that we cannot demonstrate any geographical proximity between these features, which would also be of relevance for our assessment of the marginalia.
Now the question is if we will be able to gather enough data to make this work. One strategy might be to start with the rarest feature, which may be writing "mich" for "milch" (?) and see if we can find out where its attestations were written. Since I don't have much experience with this kind of research yet, I wonder if it is feasable to begin with.
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| Another kind of timeline of VMS |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 30-04-2023, 03:13 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
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found this take on VMS provenience and timeline from allempires.com. Something new, something curious.w
I’m notvery familiar with this topic and have only had a brief light look at it so far. At present i have onl had a look at general introductory material and reference articles. It seems that i can't offer any certain opinion unless/until i am able to look through all the pages of the Voynich Manuscript itself. I can't necessarily yet offer any answer to the "code" decipherment. The only thing i have to post so far is a first impression tentative opinion on what the author or date of creation of the manuscript.
This is only a very tentative and may be wrong but after my first study it seems to me that the person (or one of the persons) that the book seems most likely to have been written by is Jacob Horcicky "Sinapius" de Tepenec. The reasons for this are:
Voynich Ms: claimed to have been in Rudolf's library.
Jacob Sinapius: was a courtier of Rudolf's.
Voynich MS: has main sections on herbs, astronomy, zodiacal, cosmology, recepies, biology, pharmacy. (Has pictures of plants.)
Jacob Sinapius: was Imperial Distiller, curator of botanical gardens, personal physician, and chemist/pharmacist, and a tradition claims he cured Rudolf from a grave disease (though this last one may be apocryphal). (Alternatively, Mnis(h)ovsky's first name Raphael means "God heals", and he was a Dr and a tutor at a university.)
He must have been able to read it at least?
Voynich Ms: faded name of Jacob's on 1st folio of the manuscript is maybe like a signature of the author?
This has counter-criticisms though: They say he signed using the noble form which means after 1608 (though this is before the end of Rudolf's reign in 1611/2). They say several books he owed have similar form of his signature accompanied by a number (which is also found in the Voynich ms one too), and they are all similarily faded.
Moreover i guess they have probably already checked to see if the handwriting is similar to that/those of the book.
(Though they say the signatiure of his in the Voynich Ms doesn't match the signature of his in another document.)
If the signature is genuine then none of the owners after him coulds have written the (whole) book (only parts possibly).
Voynich Ms: has Latin and Hebrew-like aspects?
Jacob Sinapius: has Latin and Hebrew-origin names.
Voynich Ms: Pelzer's opinion was that the book is from late 16th or early 17th century, and from Czechoslovakia or Poland. De Ricci thought it was from "Central Europe", and Yale Uni catalogue also says written "in Central Europe" (with a question mark). (Two people also thought it was German (Salomon) or from Germany (Panofsky). Toresella though it was from Italy.)
Jacob Sinapius: his coutier and nobility dates are 1607/1608-11/1622, and he was in Prague/Bohemia?
(Bohemia was part of Holy Roman Empire which was roughly same as kingdom of Germany. Italy was also part of the HRE and not really thatfar from Bohemia?)
Voynich Ms: Why did Rudolf give Jacob the book?
Voynich Ms: The zodiacal and astronomical info in the book might possibly help to find what the place and time of the books writing was?
Voynich Ms: There is no strong proof for any origins before 1600 (no real proof of link with Bacon or Dee). Jacob is the most likely of all the main candidates.
Carbon dating doesn't necessarily prove anything because carbon dating has been proven to be unreliable eg material in Sekhemkhet's buried pyramid complex dates 600 years old than his orthodox Egyptological date [which latter is itself also about 600 years old than his real date ca 1800s bc]. Radiometric dating depends on rates/speeds being uniforimatrian, and can be effected by somethings, and material that humans use might be use many years later than the material originated in natural world.
Voynich Ms: called "Sphynx/Sphinx".
Jacob Sinapius: called "Sinapius". (Oedipus means "swollen foot", Jacobus means "heel catcher" and he limped. Thebes is similar to Tepenec. Oedipus awarded kingship, Sinapius was awarded nobility.)
Compare: Codex Seraphinianus created by L Serafini "in a style reminiscent of the Voynich Manuscript"?
(Though the name is also/alternatively abit like Sebuzinet and/or Beckx? The sphinx is female and together with "widows share" it might suggest a woman? The harlot Babylon in 'Revelation' is also a "widow". Though the answer to sphinx's riddle was "man"?)
The 1666 (and 1999) and 600 ducats and 18 quires (3 x 6) of course smacks of 666 and Solomon's 666 talents and Newton and 1656 yrs preflood. But not sure if or what significance is re answer of question of the origin of the book.
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Here is a rough draft timeline i compiled from sources:
11th cent - 1229 Cathars.
1229 Codex Gigas / Devil's Bible (records)
1214-1294 R Bacon, Franciscan friar, polymath, English (suspected author, letter)
late 14th-15th cents (lettering resembles)
1404-1438 (carbon dated)
1460s Alberti inveted polyalphabetical ciphers
15th cent A Averlino 'Filarete', architect, N Italian (proposed writer)
New World species in drawings not seen in Europe before 1493?
15th cent. LMIH / Badianus Ms, Aztec
1521-1576 ms dated to by Tucker & Talbert
1550 A Ascham
c 1550 Cardigan grille perforated paper overlay invented
1599 K Widemann sold books to Rudolf 2.
c1600 J Dee, mathematician & astrologer, Prague (son remembers, ms handwriting, Bk of Soyga, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's mss, diaries not mention it).
Ed Kelly, spirit medium of Dee
1552/76-1611/2 HRE Rudolf 2 of Habsburg, Prague (letter)
1607/1608-11/1622 Jacob Horcicky 'Sinapius' a/de Tepenec, Imperial Distiller, curator of botanical gardens, personal physician and courtier of Rudolf, hauptman/governor, Melnik (faded name on 1st folio of ms)
Unknown / D Misseroni / G Barschius, intimate friend of Marci (former owner, letter)?
c1618 Dr R Mnis(h)ovsky Sebuzinet de Horstein, tutor, cryptographer, friend of Marci (said/believed book, letter)
Andreas Mueller played similar hoax on Kirchir.
1639-1646/1662 M G Baresch/Barschius, alchemist, friend of Marci, Prague (sent ms copies of "Sphynx", letters)
1639/1640/1641 Kirchir, friend of Marci (letters)
1665 JM Marci of Cronland, scientist, friend of Baresch/Kirchir/Mnishovsky, rector Charles Uni, Prague, Bohemia (letter)
1665 A Kirchir, Jesuit, Collegio Romano, Rome (sent ms copies, letter)
GA Kinner, friend of Kirchir (asked K. if deciphered the book)
Fr P P/J Beckx (acquired as part of collection of bks & ms all labeled as from library of)?
Villa Torlonia, Castel Gandolfo?
1873-1912 Mondragone, Frascati, Rome (list of bks for sale published)?
In/after 1911 Baer of Frankfurt showed Voynich ms to C Singer?
1904-1969 T de Marinis
1912-1921-1930 WM Voynich, Polish, Florence, London, US (acquired ms)
1921/1928 WR Newbold, Uni of Penns
1921/1931 JM Manly
1930-1960 EL Voynich, author, widow of W Voynich (inheritied ms) ["widow's share" written in the book?]
1932-1934-1954 Dr E Panofsky, art historian (ms origin theory)
1936 R Salomon, medieval history scholar (ms origin theory)
1936 A Nill quoted Salomon
1937 De Ricci (ms origin theory)
1940s WF Friedman (cryptographer)
1943 JM Feely (claimed bk is a scientific diary in shorthand)
TC Petersen, Catholic Uni, Washington (photostats/copy, hand transcription)
1950(s) WF Friedman asked Brig J Tiltman to analyse pages of the text
1953 Mgr Pelzer (ms origin theory)
1959 Mgr J Ruysschaert (published list of books)
1960-1961 AM Nill (ms left to, sold book)
1961-1969 HP Kraus (bk sold to, donated ms)
1962 E Friedman (cryptanalyst)
1967 Brig Tiltman (analysis revealed cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution)
1969-2018 Beinecke Lib, Yale Uni, US (ms donated to, catalogue)
1976 JR Child, NSA (proposed ms is unknown N German dialect)
1978 RS Brumbaugh (claim ms forgery)
1978 ME d'Imperio
1978-1991 J Stojko (claim ms series letters)
1987 L Levitov (proposed ms is Cathar handbook)
1991 Stokjo's theory caused some sensation in Ukraine
1999 discovery of Baresch's letter
2001 G Landini
2001 Reddy
2003 copy of signature located by J Hurych located doesnt match
2003-2016 G Rugg, computer scientist
2004 J Stolfi
2004 Scientific American atricle
2004 G Kennedy & R Churchill (suggest bk may be cas of tongues/channeling)
2006-2014 N Pelling (proposed ms written by Filarete)
2007 A Schinner, Austrian researcher (study supported hoax hypothesis)
2009 Uni of Arizona (carbon dates samples of parts of ms)
2009 (spectrography performed)
2009 J Schuster
2009 Knight
2011 Reddy & Knight
2013 M Montemurro, physicist, Uni of Manchester (findings in ms text)
2013 Montemurro & Zanette
2013/2014 Dr D Amancio, IMCS, Uni of SP (analyse relationships of words in text)
2013/2014 AO Tucker & RH Talbert (identify plants in the text)
2014 (protein testing).
2014 multispectral images taken not show any signs of previous writing
2014-2017 Prof S Bax, Uni of Bedford (claim ms is treatise on nature)
2015 Hannah Lash commissioned by New Haven Symphony Orchestra to compose symphony imspired my the ms.
2015/2016 R Zandbergen (Voynich website)
2016 G Rugg & G Taylor
2017 E Duffy
2017 N Gibbs (claim decoded ms)
2017 Siloe (print replicas)
2018 Prof G Kondrak, Uni of Alberta (analysed ms).
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| How would you decipher the Voynich? |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 27-04-2023, 12:18 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Assuming the Voynich was written in cipher and assuming that you knew precisely what kind of cipher it was and presuming you knew the underlying language that it was written in then I am wondering how one might go about deciphering the manuscript. Obviously to some significant extent this will depend on what kind of cipher it is. When I talked about "kind of cipher" I mean of course the class or type of cipher. I don't mean that you know the exact implementation of the cipher. For example, if you knew it was a very simple substitution cipher then you might not know the precise letter substitutions.
There seem to be some general problems irrespective of type of cipher. We seem to have no crib or at least no crib that we can be confident in and we don't seem to have many clues as to how we might identify part of sentence or other clues that we can use to break the cipher open, although I could be wrong about that.
My question comes from the fact that I have learnt from some diplomatic ciphers that even when you know the precise nature of the cipher it can still be hard work to break the cipher. This comes from things like the sheer number of distinct substitutions, so every specific substitution needs to be worked out. It comes from the situation that when dealing with substitutions for people or places only knowing the historical, political and geographic context will help you work that out.
The Voynich is different from a diplomatic letter as you are unlikely to have many political substitutions, so you would have to look for completely different kinds of substitutions. The Voynich won't have the standard linguistic phraseology that can be found in diplomatic correspondence that decipherers of diplomatic ciphers are familiar with and can spot to help in the decipherment.
To reiterate I think even if one knows the type of cipher one is dealing with it could still be very very difficult to decipher.
The thing that occurs to me would be some kind of stochastic descent computational search of the solution space to explore the many different combinations.
I don't know how to tackle such a problem and I would be curious as to what others think.
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| Oh look, it's a dain. |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 23-04-2023, 11:49 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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So, it's actually two dain, two red ones.
In this text attributed to Gaston Febus. Genève, Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms. fr. 169
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In the initial 'Description', the word occurs in f. 9 and f. 73, and the transcriptions seem clear enough (wdIk), yet it is apparent from the context that the word should be 'daim', the French word for a fallow deer.
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So, is this a dialectical variation, a scribal error, or what?
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| Breaking Ciphers |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 19-04-2023, 07:58 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I have a conjecture, which is probably pretty obvious, and yet which there seems to be a tendency to deny especially in the case of the Voynich manuscript.
This is namely that: “it is often much much easier to invent a cipher than to break it.”
The basis from which Gordon Rudd and the like have often said that the Voynich cannot be written in cipher is that if it were then it would have be deciphered by modern cryptographic techniques. I think this overestimates the power of modern cryptographic techniques and underestimates the easy with which a difficult cipher can be created.
To use a phrase, there is “security through obscurity”. And I don’t think one needs to be a genius with some effort to produce a pretty obscure cipher. It would not even need to be academically a clever cipher just have a combination of bizarre obscure features. You would have to give it some thought and effort to come up with a cipher, but I doubt it is that difficult. It seems to me that the Zodiac cipher and the like prove this point. There is no reason to believe the Zodiac killer was an expert cryptographer.
I raise this as I get frustrated when I hear the argument that the Voynich cannot be written in cipher, because if it was it almost certainly would have been deciphered by now. This assumes that it would not have been possible for a cipher from 600 years ago to be created which is not easy to decipher now. (I can say from my own experience that deciphering some 600 year old ciphers is not easy at all. All too often, I think people, who say it is, have never deciphered a sophistated cipher from that time.)
I think an important restriction on the complexity of a cipher tends to be practicality. One can pile cipher upon cipher upon cipher, combining lots of different cipher techniques, however it the cipher becomes too complicated then with the absense of a computer it can become impossible for a human to apply it correctly in a timely manner without making mistakes. So practicality or usability is really the force that holds back a cipher’s complexity much more than difficulty of invention does.
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| SIGBOVIC 2023 paper |
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Posted by: hatoncat - 17-04-2023, 04:32 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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My Voynich Cryptography paper was accepted by the annual SIGBOVIC conference. Note: SIGBOVIC covers the "three neglected quadrants of research: joke realizations of joke ideas, joke realizations of serious ideas, and serious realizations of joke ideas."
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| Bing AI Generating Continuations of Voynich Text |
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Posted by: Psillycyber - 10-04-2023, 11:04 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (4)
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I wrote an article relating to the Voynich Manuscript for LessWrong, a website dedicated to rationality and AI Safety research.
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The article is meant partly as an introduction to the topic of the VMS for that crowd, many of whom may not be familiar with the VMS. So, you might skip the first few paragraphs.
The meat of the article is the question of whether Bing AI (or, I suppose, one of the other AI large language models, or LLMs, like ChatGPT) can generate plausible continuations of Voynichese text.
Why might we in the Voynich community care? Well, if an AI LLM can generate high-fidelity continuations of Voynichese text that reproduce all of the statistical regularities of the original VMS, then that suggests that, somewhere inside the "Giant Inscrutable Matrices" of these LLMs, these LLMs are able to model how Voynichese is produced, which might eventually give us some clues as to how Voynichese was produced. I say "eventually" because, even if we could prove that this current generation of LLMs can generate high-fidelity continuations of Voynichese, this current generation of LLMs won't have the "insight" to know how they are doing that. We would need a later, more powerful generation of LLMs to inspect the "Giant Inscrutable Matrices" of these earlier LLMs to eventually make the rules explicit to us.
Why might we suspect that Bing AI could possibly generate high-fidelity continuations of Voynichese text, i.e., "speak Voynichese"? It's because that's basically the sort of task that these LLMs are tailor-made for: predicting the next token across essentially all of the languages and domains of the Internet. We also know that the most recent generation of LLMs can essentially create and decompress their own languages to themselves across sessions. Even though the size of the VMS corpus is relatively small compared to the size of all of the text on the Internet on which they were trained, if the rules behind predicting the next Voynichese token end up being simpler than the rule of predict the next token across any domain you might see on the Internet, then there is reason to believe that these LLMs might know Voynichese.
I explain the basic idea here in the article:
Quote:Humanity is essentially in the same relationship to the VMS as AI large language models (LLMs) are to the entire textual output of humans on the Internet. The entire Internet is the LLM's Voynich Manuscript. This might help give people some intuition as to what exactly LLMs are doing.
The LLM starts off with no clue about human concepts or what our words mean. All it can observe is statistical relationships. It creates models for creating that text that allows it to predict/generate plausible continuations to starting text prompts. In theory, with sufficient statistical mastery of the text in the VMS, humans should be able to simulate a process by which to generate increasingly-plausible-sounding continuations of "Voynichese" in the same way that AI LLMs generate plausible-sounding continuations of English or Japanese, even if humans never "understand" a single "vord" of Voynichese. As our process becomes increasingly-good at generating continuations of Voynichese that obey all of the statistical properties of the original distribution, we might say that humans would be asymptotically approaching a high-fidelity simulation of the process (whatever that was) that originally created the Voynichese.
So, in this article, I take my first stab at getting Bing AI to generate a continuation of Voynichese text. I also (futilely) try to get Bing AI to explain its method. Unfortunately, I don't think this will work as a backdoor method to find the way Voynichese was created because no current LLM has that much insight into how it decides to do the things it does. It would require a later, more powerful LLM to go back and analyze what Bing AI was doing here.
But before we get there, I wrote in the comments under the article some suggestions for, if someone wanted to continue this project to really rigorously find out how well Bing AI can generate Voynichese, how I would do it:
1. Either use an existing VMS transcription or prepare a slightly-modified VMS transcription that ignores all standalone label vords and inserts a single token such as a comma [,] to denote line breaks and a [>] to denote section breaks. There are pros and cons each way. The latter option would have the disadvantage of being slightly less familiar to Bing AI compared to what is in its training data, but it would have the advantage of representing line and section breaks, which may be important if you want to investigate whether Bing AI can reproduce statistical phenomena like the "Line as a Functional Unit" or gallows characters appearing more frequently at the start of sections.
2. Feed existing strings of Voynich text into Bing AI (or some other LLM) systematically starting from the beginning of the VMS to the end in chunks that are as big as the context window can allow. Record what Bing AI puts out.
3. Compile Bing AI's outputs into a 2nd master transcription. Analyze Bing AI's compendium for things like: Zipf's Law, 1st order entropy, 2nd order entropy, curve/line "vowel" juxtaposition frequences (a la Brian Cham), "Grove Word" frequences, probabilities of finding certain bigrams at the beginnings or endings of words, ditto with lines, etc. (The more statistical attacks, the better).
4. See how well these analyses match when applied to the original VMS.
5. Compile a second Bing AI-generated Voynich compendium, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and see if the statistical attacks come up the same way again.
There are probably ways to automate this that people smarter than me could figure out.
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| Abbreviations, anyone? |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 04-04-2023, 06:43 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I know that the potential use of abbreviations has been an ongoing topic. Here is a manuscript with a particular part of the text noted for the use of abbreviations. Perhaps it is useful. Better to be redundant than silent.
Beromünster, Stiftskirche St. Michael, Ms. C 14
Paper · 265 ff. · 21 x 15 cm · Beromünster · second half of the 14th century / 15th century
Compendium morale de avibus / de quadrupedibus – Heinrich von Langenstein, De discretione spiritum – Johannes Gerson, Opus tripartitum de praeceptis Decalogi, de confessione, et de arte moriendi – Bonaventura, De praeparatione ad missam – Moralitates super evangelium sancti Lucae – Jacobus de Cessolis, De ludo scachorum (excerpts) – Sermon on Mary
Composite manuscript of catechetical-ascetic content, in quarto format on paper. Three fascicles of various strengths. The oldest is from the second half of the 14th century; it is written by Albert von Münnerstadt, Conventual from the Commandry of the Teutonic Knights of Hitzkirch, and contains Moralitates super evangelium sancti Lucae. In the second half of the 15th century, probably in Beromünster, this was bound together with two natural science Compendia moralia (excerpts from Thomas of Cantimpré's encyclopedia) and with catechetical treatises by Heinrich von Langenstein, Johannes Gerson and Bonaventure. Scholarly manuscript for regular use in the area of pastoral care (hasty hand with numerous abbreviations, especially in the third fascicle). (luz)
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