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Has anyone actually made ...
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Trip to Egypt
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"Abnormal" words
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[split] Retracer Thread: ...
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THE MASTER REFERENCE GUID...
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| Names of the divine beings of 82r |
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Posted by: Ruby Novacna - 08-12-2022, 11:38 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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The image at the bottom of page 82r consists of three groups of nymphs representing characters from Greek mythology: two representations of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., each accompanied by a small nymph, and the group of three Charites or Graces.
The nymphs in the left and right groups have individual labels, the middle group of two nymphs has a single label.
Except the first label on the left «sororl» which could be Latin, the other four can be understood using the Greek dictionary.
The label for the first Aphrodite on the left, olko.ky EVA, would be Ανανη of ανανεω – come to the surface or of ανανεομαι – mount up – Aphrodite rising from the sea.
The label of middle Aphrodite, sokoly EVA, would be Ζωναια, epithet of Aphrodite, celestial goddess, member of ζωναῖοι, an order of divine beings managing the different zones of the Universe.
The labels of three Charites would be: - dolol – tola for θαλεια – rich, plentiful
- ol.aiin– awn for Αως – dawn, light of day,
- okeear–oneiar for ονειαρ – food, victuals.
The meaning of these labels corresponds well, in my opinion, to the meaning of the names of three Charites: θαλεια, Euphrosyne and Αγλαια.
The nymph Tola (Taula?), the oldest, would be θαλεια; the middle, youngest nymph, Aws (Awn) would be Aglaia- brightness, and the nymph on the right, Oniar, would be Euphrosyne- good food.
Could these labels help us to identify the language of the text, in your opinion?
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| How much survives and how much is lost to history? |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 07-12-2022, 06:18 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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In my thorough research in ciphers from the time of the Voynich I have been very conscious of how much evidence has been lost to history. I have guessed that less than 1% of cipher keys and enciphered letters survive. This is on the basis of having a good idea of a sizeable portion of what survives; obviously I can't have seen everything and it is hard to quantify that of which I am unaware, however given that I have investigated the main European archives having such material I would be very surprised if I haven't seen at least 25% and at most 90%. I could again estimate the rough number of cipher keys/cipher ledgers and enciphered letters from around that time then in existence. These figures leads me to think that less than 1% of this original material survives to the present day.
I wonder how much of other kind of material survives. I would expect that a higher proportion of beautifully illustrated manuscripts survive. I wonder if enciphered letters were more likely to have been destroyed than other letters. So maybe enciphered letters are less likely than other documents to survive. Maybe cipher keys, proportionally, are more likely to survive than enciphered letters, however there also would have been many more enciphered letters than cipher keys.
I guess that crude estimates of the quantity of material surviving and the likelihood of a given document surviving can have some use in searching for documents be it in archives or online.
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| From Voynich to the Beinecke |
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Posted by: navalon - 30-11-2022, 03:39 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
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At the upcoming Voynich Conference 2022, I will present a paper "From Voynich to the Beinecke," tracing the ownership of the VM which has not been precisely described previously. Dec. 1 at 9:30 US Eastern Time. I have now posted several relevant documents, including Voynich's will, a good copy of Ethel's will and documents from her probate file, some of which were not previously published. These are at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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| Are the 1430s the most likely date range for the Zodiac drawings? |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 24-11-2022, 05:15 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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This was not a topic that I intended to look into at all a few weeks ago, but a claim that the Voynich pre-dates 1430 drew me in, so I have found myself looking at the Zodiac roundels and Koen Gheuens' excellent work on them. I tend to research only a few specific areas of the Voynich and this topic was not on my agenda. In fact it does feel like a bit of a distraction from my cryptographic researches. Nevertheless once I start something I tend to continue with it until when or if I feel I have reached an appropriate point to end. I am a little reluctant to raise this topic again as it got somewhat tense before, but it is an important topic and so I think should be raised given that I have given it some more thought.
I want to reiterate that Koen and others have clearly done a good job researching this topic, so that if I disagree with other people's conclusions it is not out of malice or lack of respect for their efforts, but purely determined by my thoughts on the evidence as presented.
As previously discussed and as Koen agrees there is no reason on the basis of the Zodiac clothing fashion to say that the Voynich manuscript could not date from the 1430s.
On his blog, Koen writes:
"Combining this information with the knowledge that the clothing of the VM Gemini, Virgo and archer were typical for the period 1400-1430"
Now if 1430 is not the end of the possible date range for the Voynich Illustrations then the logical implications of statements like this need to be re-examined.
This made me wonder whether the evidence in fact makes the Zodiac drawings more likely to date from the 1430s than other decades.
Having read Koen and Nick Pelling's posts on their blogs on the subject it got me thinking.
There were a few specific details that struck me.
1) The Zodiac Drawings appear to be exact copies
Koen points out how the Voynich Illustrator tries poorly to copy the shadings in a blue dress exactly indicating that the Illustrator was copying from drawings detail for detail.
Koen writes:
"What this suggests is that the VM painter was trying to faithfully follow an example, even though the required techniques surpassed his skill."
This would indicate that the Zodiac drawings were faithful and not altered copies of the source Illustrations.
On that basis it seems reasonable to think that the Voynich Illustrator would have copied the fashion exactly from the original manuscript and not updated it to fit contemporary fashion.
So why would someone alter the crossbowman's elbows? This certainly pushes the dating forward.
Of course if the central Zodiac drawings are exact copies from an earlier manuscript then those Voynich drawings could really date from any time after the inception of that fashion.
In fact given the central Zodiac drawings are copied whilst the other smaller Zodiac drawings around appear invented, it would seem that the central drawings reflect earlier fashion whilst the smaller ones may reflect contemporary fashion. This would imply that the smaller ones fashion are better suited to providing a contemporary dating.
However then one has to ask how much the original manuscript is most likely to pre-date the Voynich copies by 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years. That is not an easy question to answer. Was this a culture of wanting to read the latest best selling manuscript or a culture where people happily pored over old manuscripts? Was someone more likely to be looking at a manuscript 1 year old or 10 years old? In theory one could calculate the estimated mean age of manuscripts consulted at that time. However in practice this would be very hard to do and not necessarily of much use.
2) Diebold Lauber drawings are the most like those of in the Voynich and Lauber's work dates from around 1427 onward.
From what I understand Diebold Lauber's manuscript of Buch der Natur(ca. 1440) is the closest known parallel to the Voynich Zodiac Illustrations; please correct me if I am wrong Koen. I have read that the workshop of Diebold Lauber produced manuscripts between 1427 and around 1467.
Now the obvious thing I wonder is if one of Diebold Lauber's works is where the Voynich Illustrator copied his drawings.
If the Diebold Lauber drawings are the most similar to the central Zodiac drawings then why not assume the date of the Voynich drawings is close to the date of the most similar Diebold Lauber drawings and why assume the original source is not a work of Diebold Lauber himself?
Lauber himself appears to have been known to copy older drawings in his manuscripts without making alterations for reasons of contemporary fashion. This allows plenty of scope for a later dating of the original Lauber manuscript from which the Voynich Zodiac drawings were copied.
Given that Diebold Lauber works date from 1427 to 1467 and given our carbon dating, does that not place the Voynich mostly likely in the 1430s?
It has been argued that Lauber and the Voynich author may have copied from a common source rather than the Voynich author direct from Lauber. However is that likely?
Are the similarities between Lauber and the Voynich too great to have been filtered through a previous author?
Why should an unknown earlier source be a preferable link to that of a known later producer with the greatest degree of similarity to the Voynich drawings?
One assumes the unnecessary complexity of this second source when the simpler option of the Voynich Illustrations being derived direct from Lauber seems the most obvious.
To quote Nick Pelling:
"the Voynich’s zodiac roundel drawings appear to me to have been copied (albeit fairly ineptly) en masse from a single (probably German) calendar of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. What’s different here is that it now seems quite likely to me that the particular calendar was from Diebold Lauber’s workshop."
After all this might suggest that the 1430s is the most likely range for the dating of the Zodiac Illustrations rather than being excluded, given the carbon dating pushes the date to before 1438.
Having looked more into this I wonder why it was ever thought the Voynich pre-dates 1430 based on the Zodiac fashion, that position seems to make little sense to me on closer inspection. I suppose it comes from the interpretation of quotes from a specialist or specialists as well as the mean date on the basis of Koen's collected of examples being 1415. It should be noted that specialists gave their estimate of the dates from which they believe the fashion originates not the date on which a manuscript containing such illustrations might have been copied.
As anyone who knows my research will know that for many years I have believed the author(s) spent a significant length of time in Basel at the Papal Council. This of course is not so far south of Haguenau, so a not unlikely place to find Diebold Lauber manuscripts. Note I made this association with Basel prior to any awareness of any kind of connection in the Voynich to North of the Alps, though I was of course aware of possible Northern Italian links. Obviously my narrative of a journey from North Italy, the Duchy of Milan, to Basel and backs accounts for both Italian and German influences on the Voynich.
So I naturally wonder if this theory is true then did the author see a copy of one of Lauber's manuscript whilst in Basel?
If one is claiming that the Voynich Zodiac drawings come from Lauber then the search for the earliest "surviving" Lauber manuscript with the most in common Illustrations with the Voynich seems a sensible one.
Has anyone made a list of Diebold Lauber's manuscripts that are known to survive and those that don't appear to have?
I saw a list that Nick Pelling mentions and I will probably discuss it with him, though I don't know how complete it is or what efforts have been made to systematically trace all of these manuscripts.
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| Prague City University - The Voynich Manuscript - Research in Action |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 20-11-2022, 05:52 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Has this project been discussed here before? Dr. Stefano Cavagnetto's three year project on VMS sound curious..
"PCU research is centred on areas that help our communities. Sometimes this may involve finding practical solutions to real problems. And sometimes it may involve something that pushes the boundaries of our core disciplines and opens up insight into the mysteries of the world around us.
Uncovering a Medieval Manuscript
Dr Stefano Cavagnetto has uncovered just such a project as he is engaging on a three year journey in cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute in Prague.
Centered around the mysteries of a medieval manuscript closely connected to Prague and Italy, he will lead a series of public lectures and seminars about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript."
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| Disambiguating Voynich Manuscript transliterations with word embeddings |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 18-11-2022, 07:04 PM - Forum: News
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Jirka Lhotka, Francesco Salvi, Liudvikas Lazauskas
Department of Computer Science, EPFL, Switzerland
Abstract
Voynich manuscript is a 15th century document written in unknown language and script.
Consequently, reading and transliterating it to electronic form is equivocal and leads to ambiguities.
We present a way to disambiguate said uncertainties using word embeddings models, which achieves accuracies up to 86% on artificially corrupted texts of the same size.
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| Paula Findlens short article - Father Kircher’s Big Beautiful Books |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 18-11-2022, 06:58 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
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"Publishing the German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80)
has always been a daunting enterprise. By the end of his life, Kircher pro-
duced a vast scholarly corpus. In 1634, he arrived at the Roman College from
war-torn German-speaking lands; by 1641, the Society of Jesus relieved him of
his professorial obligation to teach mathematics and Oriental languages to
focus on his publications. Almost fifty bulky tomes (mostly in Latin but occa-
sionally in German, Dutch, French, Italian, and English) bore his name. Most
were authored by Kircher; key disciples who assisted him and promulgated
his work (Gaspar Schott, Georg de Sepibus, Gioseffo Petrucci, and Johannes
Kestler) also published Kircherian books."
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| Floating gallows |
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Posted by: nablator - 16-11-2022, 12:01 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (28)
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When paying attention to how gallows are written in relation to other glyphs, it soon becomes clear that some (many) are "floating" between words, as if they were not part of them. There is no way to tell when these gallows belong to the word on the left or on the right, both or neither. Transliterations don't acknowledge this fact, usually pushing the gallows to the right and (sometimes) inserting a space on the left when the space is larger than usual. Because of the random choice of space insertion in transliterations, most statistics on words are unreliable.
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| Voynich Manuscript - a technical manual in Old Czech by Elena Konovalova |
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Posted by: Ruby Novacna - 16-11-2022, 11:01 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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A few days ago Youtube offered me a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Russian, three weeks old, about a translation of the manuscript by Elena Konovalova.
I confess I didn't have enough patience to follow the video, so I searched for the text and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. To my astonishment the text dates from 2017 and apparently the work has not been followed up, the details have remained without much precision until today. But perhaps Elena Konovalova's ideas can inspire other researchers.
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| Voynich conference - Some questions |
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Posted by: Torsten - 11-11-2022, 01:06 PM - Forum: News
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Since I can not attend at the Voynich conference I publish my questions to some of the papers in this thread. I will also send the questions via email to the authors. I suggest that this thread is not used to discuss the questions at least until after the Voynich conference is over.
Claire Bowern and Daniel Gaskell - Enciphered after all? Word-level text metrics are compatible with some types of encipherment.
In the paper from 2021 Claire Bowern explains the differences in word frequencies in the VMS by a) two different methods of encoding at least one natural language, b) different scribes, and c) different topics.
Did you suggest that these three different interpretations are all true or did you suggest that they contradict each other?
In the paper of Sterneck et al. you warn that "topic modeling relies on word frequencies and expects consistency across texts" [Sterneck et al. 2021, p. 4]. However the Voynich text isn't consistent across its sections. If we look into the text itself it becomes evident that "no obvious rule can be deduced which words form the top-frequency tokens at a specific location, since a word type dominating one page might be rare or missing on the next one." [Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 3].
Why do you assume that different word frequencies indicate topics if noticeable frequency changes even occur between folios?
Tokens containing the sequence 'ed' are common in Currier B and an exception in Currier A.
If you assume that the word frequency changes are caused by different topics, how do you explain the differences between folios sharing the same illustrations like Herbal A and Herbal B?
In Timm & Schinner 2019 the Voynich text is analyzed beyond the paragraph level. The paper comes to the conclusion that by reordering the sections with respect to the frequency of token <chedy> replaces the seemingly irregular mixture of two separate languages by the gradual evolution of a single system from "state A" to "state B".
Why this alternative explanation is not addressed?
You argue that some codes could increase the predictability of word formations.
Have you tested if some of the codes would result in text with statistical properties similar to the Voynich text?
In your paper from 2021 you argue that full reduplication is still in the realm of plausibility for for natural language text. The paper states that number of full word repeats goes up to 4.8 % for natural languages.
Given that you now describe the text as extreme predictable (whatever that means), did you still stand behind your statement about full word repeats in natural languages?
Jürgen Hermes - Polygrahia III: The cipher that pretends to be an artificial language.
The Voynich text is changing from page to page, since a token dominating one page might be rare or missing on the next one, they even depend on there postion within a page or line.
How did you explain that the words depend on the page if as you say the words were randomly selected from a code book?
How do you explain that words containing /ed/ like <chedy> are far more common in Currier A than in Currier B?
Kevin Farrugia, Colin Layfield and Lonneke van der Plas: Demystififying the scribes behind the Voynich Mansucript using Computional Linguistic Techniques.
An alternative model is a gradual evolution of a single system from "state A" to "state B", namely be reordering the sections with respect to the frequency of the word <chedy> [see Timm & Schinner 2019].
Why such an alternative model was not used for cross-checking the results?
Andrew Caruana, Colin Layfield and John Abela - An Analysis of the Relationship between Words within the Voynich Manuscript.
You mention the fact that skewed word pairs exists in the Voynich text.
How many of the skewed word pairs result in an existing word, e.g. like the words <ol> <chedy> would result in <olchedy>?
How many of the skewed word pairs consists of similar words like <chol>/<shol>, <daiin>/<dain> or <chedy>/<shedy>.
Massimiliano Zattera - A new transliteration alphabet brings new evidence of word structure and multiple "languages" in the Voynich manuscript.
Only a very limited number of letters occur with each other in certain positions of a 'word. For instance EVA-q is followed in 97.5 % of the cases by EVA-o, and EVA-n occurs in 97.4 % of the cases after EVA-i. A common idea is therefore to interpret glyph sequences like /qo/ and /iin/ as ligatures or letters. But even then the resulting glyph set is very predictable. For instance a group of EVA-i occurs in 94 % of the cases after EVA-a and a sequence /qo/ is followed in 84 % of the cases by a gallow glyph.
Didn't this behavior suggest that these restrictions are a feature of the Voynich text rather than a question of the transliteration alphabet?
Lisa Fagin Davis - Voynich Paleography
At the BSA Annual Meeting in 2020 you used the fact that "The very common character combination qo is almost completely absent in the zodiac pages and the rosettes page, but appears everywhere else" from René Zandbergens website as second method to cross check your identification of scribe four.
Why did you not mention this fact in your paper written later in 2020? Why did you instead announce to ask Prof. Claire Bowern to search for a pattern, which you already knew?
In your publications from 2020 you claim that you used the software Archetype to identify the five different scribes.
However, your screenshot for Archetype shows only 44 (43 +1) as the number of pages uploaded into Archetype. How did you identify the scribes for the other 180 pages without uploading them into Archetype?
In your paper from 2020 you argue that EVA-k is sometimes written in one stroke and sometimes in two strokes and that only the scribes 2 and 4 wrote EVA-k with two strokes.
How do you explain the observation of instances for EVA-k where an overlapping crossbar or an gap indicates that EVA-k was written in two strokes for your scribes 1, 3, and 5?
By applying Latin paleography to the Voynich manuscript it is assumed that scribes with some experience in writing that script. However, the text in the VMS is the only known example of its kind and represents an unique writing system. It is therefore possible that the writing system was only used to write the text we see in the Voynich manuscript.
Isn't it therefore a possibility hat the scribes were unexperienced in writing Voynichese at the start? Shouldn't we check for a scribe writing slowly and carefully at the start and is becoming more fluent during writing?
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