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| Why we can't read it and Michael Coe's "Five Pillars of Decipherment" |
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Posted by: kckluge - 27-04-2024, 10:11 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (5)
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A while back I can across a very interesting blog post by a linguist (Peter Bakker, an expert on creole languages) offering thoughts on the MS 408 text from a linguistic perspective (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- the would-be decipherer he refuses to name is clearly Cheshire...). His conclusion is that "If it would have been a real language, in a rational and regular writing system, experts would have figured it out by now."
While I don't think Michael Coe has ever commented on the Voynich text, he's someone who has experience as a key player in the decipherment of the Mayan script. As a result, he has a good understanding of the historical prerequisites for successful decipherments of unreadable scripts, which he has articulated in a number of places as the "Five Pillars of Decipherment" (see, for instance, 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.; Zender gives a slightly revised list of the pillars in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Here are the five pillars (quoted from Coe's paper on the Indus script):
"1 A large and well-published database: there should be many texts, and most of these should encode complete sentences.
"2 A known language which is encoded by the script, preferably reconstructed in phonology, grammar, and syntax to the period in which the script was in use.
"3 One or more bilingual texts, one member of which is in an already deciphered or otherwise readable script.
"4 A well-understood cultural context to aid in the understanding and reading of the texts.
"5 If the script is logographic or logo-syllabic, there should be accompanying pictorial references (as there are in Egyptian and Classic Maya) to apply to the texts.
"Even texts written in an alphabetic system can be difficult to understand if some of these conditions are not met; consider Etruscan, which violates no. 2 in this list - although we can read Etruscan inscriptions (since the alphabet is very similar to the Greek), they are not readily intelligible.[....]"
Looking at the "pillars" in the context of the Voynich mss.:
Pillar #1 (large database): While there is only one "text", the total length of the manuscript text is fairly large. If there is a meaningful underlying text, it is unclear that the entire codex is in a single natural language (or cipher system/key as the case may be) -- as Bowern & Lindemann observe (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), "Although there is some overlap, the most common vocabulary items of Voynich A and Voynich B are substantially different. While the words in both languages are built from the same three-field structure, they do not clearly correspond to each other. They might be the result of different encoding processes, or they might represent different underlying natural languages." Even so, given the volume of text just the Herbal A dialect pages or the Bio B pages would seem to provide ample material to work with.
Pillar #2 (known language): What Coe means here isn't simply that the underlying language is attested somewhere. He's talking about the way the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics leveraged the assumption that non-Egyptian names were transcriptions of Greek names using the phonetic values of the characters, and that the texts as a whole were in a language closely related to Coptic; or the way the decipherment of Linear B leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was an early form of Greek; or the way the decipherment of the Mayan script leveraged the assumption that the underlying language was closely related to the Conquest-era spoken Mayan language. It would be fair to say there is no consensus regarding any underlying natural language (whether enciphered or not).
Pillar #3 (bilingual texts): Yeah...we don't have that. 'Nuf said.
Pillar #4 (cultural context): Unfortunately, we don't have much certainty about that. The bulk of the analysis of the imagery that has been done has focused (understandably in light of Pillar #5) on trying to identify the plant images; there has been much more limited published art historical analysis of the other imagery. Diane O'Donovan has written extensively on the subject, and hopefully will follow through on her current plan to submit several papers describing her views for publication -- as someone who isn't an art historian by training, I'd like to see other professional art historians engage with her views on the subject. Others such as Koen Gheuens have mapped specific motifs over a more limited European range. It's very unfortunate that we don't have any visibility into the content of Martina Pippal's recent course on the subject at the University of Vienna.
Pillar #5 (accompanying pictorial references): In principle, we have those. The plants would seem to offer the most likely leverage point -- efforts to identify the plant drawings go back to Ethel Voynich and Theodore Petersen; Jorge Stolfi put forward an argument that the first word of the herbal pages was likely the plant name (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Unfortunately, efforts to use the plant drawings as cribs haven't worked (at least partly because many of the plant identifications are uncertain or contested).
So, in summary -- yes on Pillar #1, no on Pillars #2 & #3, unclear at best on Pillar #4, and in principle a yes on Pillar #5. Looked at through the lens of Coe's pillars it's not all that surprising the text (if there is one) hasn't been read.
Karl
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| Almanacs: Ptolemy's Phases |
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Posted by: HermesRevived - 27-04-2024, 03:33 AM - Forum: News
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New posts at Lingua Nympharum, now pursuing astrological and astro-meteorological themes, including this post concerning solar/stellar 'phases' and almanacs as a model:
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| New Paper: Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent... |
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Posted by: asteckley - 26-04-2024, 09:48 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (15)
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Our recent paper, “Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent in the Voynich Manuscript” may be of interest to those of you analyzing the Voynich text for its possible underlying language and meaning.
The preprint version can be found on ArXiv: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Abstract:
“This study explores the cryptic Voynich Manuscript, by looking for subtle signs of scribal intent hidden in overlooked features of the “Voynichese” script. The findings indicate that distributions of tokens within paragraphs vary significantly based on positions defined not only by elements intrinsic to the script such as paragraph and line boundaries but also by extrinsic elements, namely the hand-drawn illustrations of plants.”
The paper is a bit technical, so here is a summary of the more interesting results: - Certain word tokens exhibit a propensity to occur –or to be avoided– in certain positions such as the top line of paragraphs or at the beginning or ends of lines. That is not too surprising as it’s been observed to some extent before.
- The more surprising find is that there is also a propensity for certain word tokens to occur immediately before, or immediately after, the hand drawn plant illustrations.
The propensities were analyzed in detail to ensure the statistical significance.
A reference catalog of word tokens with propensities was compiled. Only a couple of the tables could be included in the paper due space limitations, so below are a few more of them.
The whole catalog of tables is included in the Supplemental Online Material at:
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Note that the entire analysis was restricted to the portion of the manuscript believed to be written by a single scribe (Scribe 1 as identified by Lisa Fagin-Davis).
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| Dijon 1433 |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 25-04-2024, 07:52 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (4)
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Historical events and beliefs - in Borgogna, none the less. Philip the Good was Duke of Burgundy in 1433.
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| Extension to the Currier languages |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 23-04-2024, 03:51 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (19)
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As should be well known to everyone, in the 1970's Prescott Currier identified two languages ("A" and "B") in the Voynich MS text.
I have been looking at consolidating and extending that work off and on in the past, and just recently completed a first iteration of such a consolidation and extension.
Most of the pages that Currier did not classify appear to be in some intermediate form, which I have decided to call "C" language. Furthermore, using quantitative criteria, all pages have now been classified into these three languages, and a number of sub-categories or dialects.
I consider this not a closed activity. There are still important properties of the text that have not been taken into account.
The details of this first stage are described briefly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
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| Paths to Decipherment |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 19-04-2024, 06:34 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (18)
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I like to be goal focused and I am interested in the key goal of deciphering and therefore unlocking the Voynich. A question that I always have in the back of my mind is which are the best strategies to move towards decipherment. These are my thoughts:
1)A crib or more likely what Nick Pelling calls a block-paradigm. Such a block-paradigm may or may not exist. That would be a parallel and identical document or piece of text to what we find in the Voynich. The question then becomes what is the best avenue to finding such a document.
2)The discovery of a related cipher. This has been a goal I have been interested in, though it is a challenging one as so many cipher records from the early 15th century are lost.
3)Some AI based approach to decipher the script. Statistical analysis on its own I doubt will be nearly sufficient. If AI is used it will need to be highly sophisticated to find the answer from the solution space.
4)Some lost pages or document which will illuminate the script. Finding anything of the kind seems unlikely.
I daresay there are others that I have forgotten to mention.
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| Voynich Talk Episode 1, part 1: A plant is not B plant |
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Posted by: Koen G - 17-04-2024, 02:02 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (24)
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I have hinted at it a couple of times, but finally it is done. I present to you the first episode of Voynich Talk! I wanted to make more videos like the interviews David and I did before, but also I wanted some more freedom in the format.
Instead of interviews with a single guest, I would like to invite one or more guests to talk about a selected topic.
As for the expected publication schedule, there is none. I don't expect to put out more than one video a month, since these take a lot of my spare time, and also I don't want to wear down potential (recurring) guests and topics too quickly. If I can approach some semblance of long-term regularity, I will be happy.
Normally, the talks will be focused on the guests and their input on the topic, and I will just guide the conversation.
However, for this first episode, we did something different. Together with Cary Rapaport, I have been researching the Herbal section (large plants). We studied different elements of the plant drawings, and noticed that many of them were near-exclusively found in either Herbal A or Herbal B. As it turns out, there are many more consistent features indicating the typical A-style and B-style than were previously known.
We developed the system to such a degree that we could now easily classify most plants as A or B by looking at the picture alone.
I even thought that we could probably teach someone else, thereby testing the validity of the system in the process. And so the idea for the first episode of Voynich Talk was born.
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Thanks to Lisa Fagin Davis, Lars Dietz (@Oocephalus), Michelle Lewis and David Jackson for their participation!
For a more in-depth discussion of distinctive plant features, see:
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| The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets |
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Posted by: MichelleL11 - 16-04-2024, 04:06 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (19)
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Very pleased to announce the publication of Keagan Brewer's and my work below:
The Voynich Manuscript, Dr Johannes Hartlieb and the Encipherment of Women’s Secrets
Social History of Medicine, hkad099, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Published: 22 March 2024
Abstract
The Voynich manuscript is a famous European enciphered manuscript of the early fifteenth century featuring herbal, pharmaceutical, astrological and anatomical illustrations, including hundreds of naked women. Some hold objects adjacent to or unambiguously pointed towards their genitalia. This paper therefore investigates the culture of self-censorship, erasure and encipherment of women’s secrets, with a focus on Dr Johannes Hartlieb (c. 1410–68). Hartlieb had enduring apprehensions about the propagation of women’s secrets in vernacular Bavarian, which culminated in a call for ‘secret letters’ to hide recipes for abortifacients and contraceptives. Other cases of encipherment relating to sexual intercourse and genitalia will be described. On the basis of this evidence, we propose that the Rosettes, the largest and most complex illustration in the Voynich manuscript, represents coitus and conception. This hypothesis explains many of the illustration’s features and establishes a variety of future research possibilities.
Because of licensing fees, this is behind a paywall, but a broader summary is available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at The Conversation.
This work expands on what Keagan presented at the Malta Conference.
For those who do not know Keagan and his work, a summary can be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Keagan is scheduled to present on this at our upcoming Voynich Day celebration and we're happy to discuss on this thread.
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