(15-09-2017, 08:06 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Pity, 1 hour 30 ! I am waiting for your summary in writing.

(15-09-2017, 08:56 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The criticisms about mapping more than one glyph to a particular sound (r, in this case) do not show ignorance of language, as was said in the video. If Pelling pointed this out, I'm sure he is quite aware that there can be several similar sounds in a language.

The point is this: The VMS has a limited character set and mapping several glyphs to one sound significantly reduces the number of characters remaining for the other sounds, and this limitation has not been acknowledged in the Bax "provisional" decoding.


I believe it's a valid criticism, not a question that displays ignorance of languages. Persons pointing this out are showing awareness of the peculiarities of the VMS character set in relation to proposals based on substitution codes. One can't simply take a dozen words and map them to a character set and ignore the fact that there aren't enough glyphs left to represent the rest of the sounds in the proposed system.


The problem of "pick and mix" was raised in the video and yet isn't grabbing a few words and trying to organize them into a system that doesn't generalize to any other part of a fairly extensive manuscript, with tens of thousands of word-tokens, also an example of "pick and mix"?


I have to say, even though I don't agree with many of the assumptions and methods proposed, I was enjoying the video up to this point—I thnk the guys were doing a good job. When Bax made a personal attack on Pelling instead of acknowledging that there are problems when you use several different glyphs for one sound group (thus reducing the available pool for other sounds), it spoiled it for me.

Sorry you felt that way, but if you read Pelling's original critique of my work you will understand better what I was arguing against.  Also, if you read my work you will see that it is an attempt at a systematic step-by-step workthrough, far from a pick-and-mix. The point is that if we follow this approach it might then later lead to more generalisable results. Maybe only judge when you have read the papers and seen the whole video?

Stephen

(16-09-2017, 10:36 AM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Naturally, I'm deeply honoured that Bax felt bothered enough about my long-standing criticisms of his Voynich theory, his decoding methodology, and his internally weak arguments that he would use this video as a platform to direct a series of close-to-libelous personal attacks in my direction.

However, if he had spent even 10% of the time he invested in trying to shoot the messenger in reflecting on the actual problems I highlighted, he might well instead have concluded that building his theory on top of (a) page-initial + gallows-initial words and (b) other people's highly interpretative herbal identifications are two central strategic mistakes from which his theorizing could never recover, not in 10 years or even 100 years.

Also somewhat galling was Bax's eagerness to denigrate Currier's work as linguistically naive (i.e. that differences could be explained away as scribal variations), and even to disparage the usefulness of computer-aided statistical analysis in general (that to be useful it "needs to be grounded in linguistics", I think he said). Any theory that requires such basic pillars of research to be undermined is close to a religion, i.e. one that places faith over rationality.