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| The Voynich Manuscript:Decoded ( theory ) |
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Posted by: bi3mw - 07-02-2023, 03:45 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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A relatively new ( November 22, 2022 ) theory about the VMS. To me, this seems quite constructed, but everyone can make up his own mind.
The Voynich Manuscript: Decoded
Fletcher Crowe
Published: November 22, 2022
Abstract
The Voynich Manuscript (VM) is an illustrated codex hand-written in a unique writing
system whose pages have been carbon-dated to 1404-1438 CE.1 The document has
been studied by numerous cryptographers, but until this time no one has demonstrably
deciphered the text. The Voynich Manuscript has been called “The World’s Most Mysterious
Manuscript” and “The Book Nobody Can Read.” Sections of the manuscript appear to
deal with strange plants and flowers, naked women lounging in pools of water, celestial
bodies such as stars, the moon and the Sun, and kitchen spices and herbs. This research
shows that the strange Voynich symbols code for Arabic. An equivalency table between
Arabic letters and the Voynich characters is developed, and large sections of the Voynich
text are translated, including pages picturing flowers, stars, spices and women. A 600-word
dictionary of Arabic-Voynich-English was developed. Translation reveals that the text deals
exclusively with the Cathars, a religious heresy prominent in the south of France in the
12th – 13th centuries. A hypothesis is developed that the patron funding production of the
Voynich Manuscript may have been Alfonso V, king of Aragon/Catalonia and, King of
Naples.
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| Plain text of Voynich manuscript |
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Posted by: Addsamuels - 28-01-2023, 10:49 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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When visiting You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I noticed that the transcriptions didn't seem to be accessible for using calculations on as some of them seemed to be without text on relevant sections.
Does there exist a plain-text version of the Voynich Manuscript?
Regards,
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| Folio 8r |
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Posted by: Ruby Novacna - 27-01-2023, 05:59 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (20)
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Several attempts to identify the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant from the picture have been made including on this forum.
Two years ago I suggested reading the words in line 19 shol.kaiin as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the name of the Scammony plant.
My proposition did not elicit any comments, so I'm reopening the discussion:
do you think the plant depicted can be scammony ?
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| The 'Arcaded' pattern |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 26-01-2023, 10:03 PM - Forum: Imagery
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Arcades have been discussed before. The term 'arcaded' has an architectural definition as series of arches interspersed by columns. This may be applied to an actual series of arches or to decorations added onto buildings or to patterns carved into stone. Arches were used a lot.
Then there is the matter of medieval artistic representations that have used this pattern. Quite a few. And one of these is De balneis Puteolanis, which has depictions of arcades nearly throughout. Arcades were associated with bathing architecture.
This pattern of a series of arches, also called arched notches or incised arches, was drawn as if carved into the side of a bathing pool occupied by the nine muses, as in The Book of the Queen.
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The VMs has bathers and arcaded architecture. However, the outside of a bathing pool is rarely shown. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the representation is plain. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the representation is plain in the foreground and arcaded in the back part. This is the only VMs pool with nine women bathers. There are various pools with seven, eight or ten bathers and with other numbers. There is only one VMs example with this arcaded pattern. The use of the pattern offers an independent confirmation that the nine VMs bathers should be seen as the nine Muses. Furthermore, the minimalization and color alteration in the VMs show the extent of intentional visual deception and at the same time, the essential necessity of having the pattern included in the illustration.
And certainly this is not the first connection to the era of Paris in the early 1400s, and the works of Christine de Pizan, and the Valois royalty of France. Right after the Muses of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. comes Melusine on f79v. And Melusine of Luxembourg confirms the Valois connection.
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| Transliteration-related information |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 21-01-2023, 09:03 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (46)
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In this thread I will collect information related to updates of transliteration files and the corresponding tools.
Everyone is also welcome to ask questions, raise comments and report issues.
To start with, following are some recent updates already posted here.
As I posted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the GC and ZL transliteration files have been improved to versions 1b and 2b respectively, to correct the page variable settings. There have been no changes to the actual transliterations.
Then, in the following message, I indicated that the same has been done for the other three files.
FG (output of the First Study Group) was improved to version 1d,
CD (the good old Currier transliteration) was improved to version 1a
and IT (the popular transliteration of Takeshi Takahashi) was improved to version 1a.
In the meantime, FG has been updated again to version 1e.
All changes were small, and did not affect the text.
As I am now working in this area, I have found several additional issues, or rather inconsistencies. As I sort these out, I will add the information here.
Probably more importantly, I recently reported an update to ivtt (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
While that fixed a bug, it introduced a new one, which has now also been fixed, so ivtt version 1.3 is now available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
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| Voynich manuscript is decoded |
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Posted by: MarkWart - 14-01-2023, 10:54 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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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
- Replies (26)
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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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