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| Voynich manuscript is decoded |
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Posted by: MarkWart - 14-01-2023, 10:54 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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A group of Czech scientists announced in 2022 that they had deciphered the Voynich manuscript. The manuscript was written in a phonetic encrypted alphabet in the modified Old Latin that was taught in Italian universities. Graduates from Italian universities (Padua, Bologna) also worked as masters at the University of Prague, where early Latin (Prisca Latinitas, also referred to as Latin of the pre-literary period) became part of Latin teaching. The manuscript contains 20 chapters that include chronicles, philosophical musings, healing advice, and gardening experiences, among others. Illustrations of plants in the manuscript represent allegories, mental maps and diagrams also hide various quirks. The first entry in the manuscript was made in 1408, and the last 1445 main authors were Czech church reformists from the beginning of the 15th century. Czech thinkers encrypted the manuscript because of their persecution by the Catholic Church, which labeled them as heretics, and three of them ended up being burned at the stake. Czech researchers have presented a set of facts and translations confirming the correctness of the decipherment of the Voynich manuscript, and they regularly update their website with new translations. If you are interested in the translation of a specific sheet, you can request it.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Complete presentation of the analysis presenting the facts about the decipherment and translation of the Voynich manuscript, including historical context.
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| Tents to let. |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 13-01-2023, 09:16 PM - Forum: Imagery
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This post is to acknowledge and discuss the presentation by Cary and Koen regarding the ‘Tent motif’ as the only representative of the ‘visual arts’ at the recent VMs conference. The ‘tent as sky’ motif, which the Biblical quotations indicate is as old as the hills, was still valid and continued to provide something of an artistic, celestial connection contemporary with the VMs C-14. This is a valid comparison.
A difficulty comes up in part 4 with the introduction of a second motif.
“Lastly, we investigated the motif of wavy undulating lines” The introduction of a second motif provides a historical example, but it also presents a problem and a distraction, and it is also insufficient. The second motif is never named with the *correct* cloud-based terminology. Investigation of this line motif in medieval heraldry reveals that the terminology is always cloud-based, either nebuly in Latin, gewolkt in German and so on. Furthermore, the gewolkt line leads to the Wolkenband, the cloud band of medieval artistry. A nebuly line is one version of a cloud band, and a cloud band is one version of a cosmic boundary. A nebuly line is a cosmic boundary and it provides the “indicator of clouds” by its proper etymological origin. A nebuly line is a ‘cloudy’ line, while “wavy” and “undulating” are redundant, water-based terms that have no celestial connections.
Investigation of this ‘cloudy’ line motif in other parts of the VMs is also necessary. Highly significant is the use of a nebuly line as part of the VMs cosmos. This demonstrates that the VMs artist recognized the use of a nebuly line as a cosmic boundary in this illustration and that the same celestial interpretation in other places has a high potential validity.
The investigation of the second motif provides proof by definition and by demonstration (internal VMs example) of the celestial connection found in the external examples shown. The clarification and strengthening of the second motif offer greater support to the interpretation of the first motif.
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| Should the "600 ducats" part of the Rudolf story be dismissed for good? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 13-01-2023, 02:28 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
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Now that the proceedings of the Malta conference have been published, I started by reading Stefan Guzy's paper about Rudolf's acquisition of the Voynich: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
He provides some much-needed context for what a sum of 600 ducats would actually have meant, and he argues that this large sum for a single manuscript is unlikely.
* The budget for the acquisition of manuscripts for the imperial library was set at 200 ducats a year. Of course, the Voynich could have been purchased for a different collection altogether. Still, what this would mean is that the manuscript would have cost as much as all books and manuscripts the Imperial library purchased over three years combined.
* The most likely candidate acquisition he found was one for 600 florins, which would have been if I understand correctly about 333 ducats. This purchase was for a barrel of rare books:
Quote:The most detailed account of what was bought in the 600 fl. deal comes from a later
journal entry of the Hofkammer’s clerk regarding the 24 fl. transport costs for this deal: ain väßl mitt
allerlai selzamen büchern (a small barrel with a couple of remarkable/rare books). Unlike today,
wooden barrels were used as a common way to transport books safely.
Note on Guzy's translation: "a couple of" in English has the connotation of a small amount. I am not sure if this is present in the German "allerlai", which to me feels more like "all manner of", implying a large variety.
Either way, a barrel of rare books was purchased for 600 florins, which were worth about half as much as the 600 ducats from Marci's letter.
* An example of a prestigious purchase of Herbaria is mentioned: four precious illuminated books for a total of 370 florins (About 200 ducats? So that would be 50 ducats per book).
This leaves us with two possible conclusions:
Either the details from the Marci letter are correct, and the emperor really spent three times the Imperial library's annual acquisition budget on a single manuscript. In this case, records of this highly unusual purchase have not yet been found.
Or the information in the Marci letter is incorrect. If Guzy's hunch about the 600 florins purchase is right, this would mean that Marci not only changed the currency to one that was twice as valuable, but also implied that only the single manuscript was bought for this amount instead of the actual barrel of rare books. Even if this barrel only contained five books, this would still mean that the "600 ducats" amount inflates the price tenfold.
So would you consider this enough evidence to assume that "600 ducats" was probably an incorrect price?
(Note: I do not know much about this matter and may have misunderstood things, will gladly be corrected).
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| The Shape of Words - topological structure in natural language data |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 13-01-2023, 10:27 AM - Forum: News
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Found this Stephen Fitz's (from Keio university, Tokyo) paper yesterday.
This paper presents a novel method, based on the ideas from algebraic topology, for the analysis of raw natural language text. The paper introduces the notion of a word manifold - a simplicial complex, whose topology encodes grammatical structure expressed by the corpus. Results of experiments with a variety of natural and synthetic languages are presented, showing that the homotopy type of the word manifold is influenced by linguistic structure.
The analysis includes a new approach to the Voynich Manuscript - an unsolved puzzle in corpus linguistics. In contrast to existing topological data analysis approaches, we do not rely on the apparatus of persistent homology. Instead, we develop a method of generating topological structure directly from strings of words.
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These results show that the topology of the word manifold is influenced by linguistic structure expressed by the corpus. Furthermore, we can interpret dimensions of the word manifold by comparing natural and synthetic data.
New?
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| More rigorously testing the hoax hypothesis |
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Posted by: degaskell - 10-01-2023, 10:45 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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As seen at the conference last year, Claire Bowern and I have recently published a paper examining the statistical properties of meaningless text. Interested parties are referred to the full paper (now available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but briefly, we recruited human participants to produce real, handwritten samples of meaningless text and compared them statistically to Voynichese. Contrary to what has often been assumed, we found that real human gibberish actually tends to be highly non-random and may even explain some of the more unusual features of Voynichese (such as low entropy) better than meaningful text does.
I'll take the cautious scientific approach here and not try to over-analyze what this actually means, but I do want to start a conversation about how to more rigorously test whether the Voynich is meaningful or not. As we argue in the paper, many existing approaches have implicitly operated from the assumption that "meaningless" = "random", so if we find non-random patterns in the text (of word and character frequencies, word placement in sections, etc.), these are often taken as evidence that the text encodes meaningful content. However, our experiments generally contradict this assumption. When we actually sit real humans down and say "write me something that looks meaningful but isn't" - even people without much background in linguistics or the Voynich manuscript - we end up with an explosion of different texts and approaches, many of which are surprisingly non-random. On the whole, this gives me great caution in assuming almost anything about what a group of hoaxing scribes might have been capable or incapable of doing. To borrow a line from a colleague of mine, "I don't know, man, people are weird."
But again, if this is true, how might we more rigorously test if the text is meaningful or not? I think one major outstanding gap is in our understanding of how small-scale characteristics of gibberish might propagate over larger-scale documents like the Voynich, but there are undoubtedly others as well. We suggest in the paper that computer simulations might be one way to approach this, but I'm very interested to hear other ideas.
P.S. Torsten Timm may be interested to note that our experiment broadly seems to support his idea of "self-citation", at least in the sense that some of our participants did actually report doing this.
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| Gallows as abbreviations |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 10-01-2023, 01:59 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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My keynote from the Voynich2022 Conference has been posted here:
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It was recorded and can be viewed here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In addition to walking through my scribal attributions, which won't be new to some of you, I've laid out in the lecture my ideas for interpreting [p] as an abbreviation for [ke], and [f] as an abbreviation for [te]. I won't go into the argument here, since it's explained in great detail in the paper and recording, but I did want to let you all know that I have posted a version of the Rene's IVTFF EVA transcription that shows how the text would appear if the purported abbreviations were expanded.
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For example, the first word of the manuscript [fachys] becomes [teachys]. I'm not a linguist or a cryptologist, so I can't offer an opinion about how/if this proposal is plausible from those perspectives; my argument comes from a scribal and paleographical perspective. I would really love to see how this idea might impact the statistical work of those of you doing computational analyses of the text. Feel free to download the expanded version and work with it. Please let me know how this impacts your work, if at all, and if you find evidence to support or contradict this proposal.
Thank you!
- Lisa
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| Antonio Francesco Gori |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 05-01-2023, 01:15 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
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Whilst playing about with chatGPL, it informed me that one of the owners of the Voynich manuscript was the 18th century monk, linguist, polymath and artist Antonio Francesco Gori. He's mainly known nowadays for being the bloke who stole Galilleo's finger from his casket and put it on display.
Anyway, the AI claims that amongst the owners of the Voynich was:
Quote:Antonio Francesco Gori: Gori was an Italian scholar who acquired the manuscript from the Jesuit College in Rome. He is known to have made some attempts to decipher it, but he was also unable to make any significant progress.
I'd never heard of the bloke, so I investigated.
I asked the AI:
"What was the relation between Antonio Francesco Gori and the Voynich manuscript?"
It said:
Quote:Antonio Francesco Gori was an Italian scholar who acquired the Voynich manuscript in the late 18th century. It is not clear exactly how Gori came into possession of the manuscript, but it is believed that he acquired it from the Jesuit College in Rome, where it had been held since the early 18th century. Gori is known to have made some attempts to decipher the manuscript, but he was ultimately unable to make any significant progress. The Voynich manuscript remained in Gori's possession until his death in 1796, after which it passed to his son, who later sold it to Wilfrid M. Voynich, a Polish book dealer.[font=Söhne, ui-sans-serif, system-ui, -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Noto Sans', sans-serif, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, 'Apple Color Emoji', 'Segoe UI Emoji', 'Segoe UI Symbol', 'Noto Color Emoji'].[/font]
Well, Gori died in 1757 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), not 1796, so that's wrong. Anyway, I tried to find out more:
"Did Antonio Gori sell Wilfred Voynich his famous manuscript?"
Quote:No, Antonio Francesco Gori did not sell the Voynich manuscript to Wilfrid M. Voynich. Gori was an Italian scholar who acquired the Voynich manuscript in the late 18th century. It is not clear exactly how Gori came into possession of the manuscript, but it is believed that he acquired it from the Jesuit College in Rome, where it had been held since the early 18th century. Gori is known to have made some attempts to decipher the manuscript, but he was ultimately unable to make any significant progress. The Voynich manuscript remained in Gori's possession until his death in 1796, after which it passed to his son, who later sold it to Wilfrid M. Voynich, a Polish book dealer. Voynich is known to have been a collector of rare books and manuscripts, and it is believed that he acquired the Voynich manuscript in an effort to solve its mystery and add it to his collection. The Voynich manuscript remained in Voynich's possession until his death in 1930, after which it passed to his wife, who later sold it to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, where it has been housed since 1969.
One final attempt:
"Who told you that Antonio Gori's son sold Wilfred Voynich his famous manuscript?"
Quote:The information that I provided about the ownership history of the Voynich manuscript comes from a variety of sources, including historical records and academic literature about the manuscript. It is not clear exactly who sold the Voynich manuscript to Wilfrid M. Voynich, but it is known that Antonio Francesco Gori, an Italian scholar, acquired the manuscript in the late 18th century and that it remained in his possession until his death in 1796, after which it passed to his son. It is believed that the son sold the Voynich manuscript to Wilfrid M. Voynich, a Polish book dealer, at some point after that. Voynich is known to have been a collector of rare books and manuscripts, and it is believed that he acquired the Voynich manuscript in an effort to solve its mystery and add it to his collection. The Voynich manuscript remained in Voynich's possession until his death in 1930, after which it passed to his wife, who later sold it to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, where it has been housed since 1969.
I asked the AI a few more questions about Gori but it only referenced him in the context of the VM.
QUESTION: Where is the AI getting this Gori story from?
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| Distinguishing Characters |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 27-12-2022, 07:51 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (63)
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I am working on a cipher at the moment and it has been very illuminating in lots of different ways. It got me thinking about the questions of corrections as I discussed in a different thread. I was just watching a video of Claire Bowern talking about the Voynich and she mentioned the subject of the difficulty of distinguishing between certain characters and deciding if in a given instance we have 1 or 2 different characters. I obviously was aware of this subject, but the video reminded me of it.
I have found the same problem in the cipher from the same time that I am deciphering. Sometimes it is not clear if two characters are the same or different. In fact this seems to be a common problem. So the Voynich is far from unique in this regard. I am not sure if there is a general method or approach applicable to ciphers of that time to discern the true underlying characters and avoid unnecessary duplication and incorrect conflation. I do think there is value in the exercise of trying to decipher old ciphers as it makes one consider simple common issues like these as well as more complex parallels.
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