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RE: Voynich manuscript is decoded - MarkWart - 12-05-2023
(28-03-2023, 09:47 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.qoThat means "it".
RE: Voynich manuscript is decoded - i_want_links_damit - 13-07-2025
While there is some interesting research here and it gets off to a good start it also reproduces a pattern which ironically consists of a reproducible lack of reproducibility. I have seen it a number of times and have also seen the obvious capacity for it to occur in my own work.
The problem lies in disintegration. You convert it to some alphabet then try to match it to what you're familiar with. Long sequences fail but not short sequences. That's just the consequence of numbers. I notice almost a numerological pattern that I have to often put aside because it's simply the nature of numbers, small numbers, that they will be seen again and again as larger numbers are composed of them.
I can take a word, mubumibala and it doesn't exist anywhere to my knowledge as I just made it up. Letters are numbers and you can just make that up too. In fact I have accidentally made the recognisable word bum. There is also ba, well that is part of bad. If I break it into parts then it inherently matches more and more words. I could reduce it to u and assume a process of reducing words to one letter.
Well, that's not really reversible. It's like a one way hash. It can match in reverse to many words. If I repeat that process then for each letter or few letters I can choose from a huge list of words and it becomes easy to choose a combination of words that would be valid in terms of making sense and matching the content on the page. It's a warning sign when you get a string that you then expand to a sentence as if compressed and it produces more than you would get from some of the best lossless compression techniques such as LZMA. Necessarily in that case of reversing a lossy compression you must be filling in the gaps yourself.
I see this here. I look at the page and I do not see a truly repeatable process. I see a mapping to an alphabet and that is a fair first step but then when a wall is hit there is a leap into producing a final step with no concrete or explicable and repeatable steps in between. It comes across as something only one person can do and that surely is because it is, it's subjective. There is a similar thing out there with a potential Hebrew interpretation that relies upon removing letters. I attempted to reproduce this and make a mapping table and hit an unexpected wall. It looked easy at first, the person had presented something that looked like a Rosetta but if you try to repeat it then it doesn't work.
Lets say I make up two phone numbers at random...
433424232477 -> 2424224
654982383240 -> 6482824
They don't match. Why don't they match? A number grows and they have grown apart from zero. The more I take away the close they come to matching. You can match almost any two texts or languages more and more by removing parts. I can make rules for removing parts. I can take out all the even numbers and zero for example as seen above. You notice even though I mashed on the number bar quite differently suddenly they match a lot more. You can also quite easily intuitively pick rules for doing this that is more likely to make it converge with a language you are familiar with as this is your point of reference and sense of right or wrong.
Essentially, it's work presented as finished and with a final result but it doesn't follow throw. It's as if in school the teacher were teaching addition the long way showing each step such as the carry but then half way through instead of continuing with the process just writes the end result on the board missing all of the steps involved. This is in play here and in all other examples. I can understand holding off on disclosing things when the work is in progress but in these cases it is presented as though finished and yet appears as though the critical pieces are withheld.
I can reject or rather a better term is to demote translations using this methodology but at the same time far too many people are too quick to reject this possibility that it uses language itself in this way of breaking it down into shortened versions that increase ambiguity representing a lossy compression that cannot be reliably with high confidence reversed back into the original meaning. It occurs even to some degree with language to the extend I am using it now. Not everything that is in my mind will be preserved or understood when read back despite the use of full complete words and sentences. Many people want to reject that as it raises the level of indecipherability but it must be kept as an option as ought all options. People are far too quick to attempt to collapse the possibilities which is a natural human tendency. I have a disability in which I can't do this properly where as nearly all humans can. I have a certain amount of brain damage in which I cannot as a result for example make small talk. It is however something of an advantage in cases like this but for most people it goes against the grain of how their minds inherently work which is to reduce everything into a few words, an inherently lossy process and a remarkable form of compression albeit one that breaks down in certain scenarios.
The leap to the end undermines what could be useful work. Their writeups are clearly leading you down the garden path almost as though written more by a tour guide than a scientist but at the same time in respect to research do present some relevant finds as well as possibilities to consider. There are images that could be tree grafting or showing a tree regrowing after being cut down with the stump remaining. It is useful to know that roughly around the time and in the vicinity tree grafting was a thing. In this era everything was going on though and every possibility comes into play. It is also a distinct possibility that the pictures of the water nymphs and plumbing are bodily internals. There is a picture that suspiciously looks like a uterus with adjoining parts and the wavy pattern is very reflective of what the surfaces of some inner organs like the stomach look like. There is a drawing style and mindset associated with portraying internal processes with little spirits in them or workers and another of using little spirits like this to explain things. That's a valid possibility but there is a major leap on actually decoding it. It is progress in terms of expanding and collecting the possibilities but I do not see any conclusive method of translation that is reliable. I suggest trying it against an existing text and you'll find you can mutate it like this through decomposition into anything else with a particular problem with language or language like sequences being redundancy allowing for additional meaning to always be invented.
DNA and language all evolve in a similar way to phone numbers in many systems. In many systems of phone numbers or unique ids when programming there is deliberate slack space and waste which is quite huge. Even the universe with empty space is oddly similar. Essentially when I have made systems to print receipts and barcodes for each person it needs to be hard for someone to fake the voucher. If I make a system of phone numbers then I can make it use a large number and a large increment so that instead of issuing phone number 23432432 then 23432433 I might issue 23737422 with several differences so that a mistype is unlikely to call another number. This is even reflected in DNA as there are universal properties not just of language as we speak it but numbers, combinations and their morphology. You have to be careful when interpreting things like this because unlike compression where you try to pack meaning into every bit there systems deliberately carry noise with them ironically for integrity. This is why you can take most words not of too short a length in English for example, change one letter and still recognise it in most cases. Most words in normal language are longer than they need to be in theory just to carry information for this reason and it makes repair easier, this is something the basic spellcheck algorithm would not be able to work so easily as it normally does without.
What is proposed in this Czech interpretation is that it is like a dictionary compression. I have a tool in process that may be able to hint at if that is the case but it's a long road. It also increases certain problems if the dictionary is constructed arbitrarily, personally or creatively. To put it simply the problem with the proposed form of encoding is that if it is the case that it is like that then it's not that the translation is wrong but that it's impossible to prove that it is correct. It is self defeating to one the one hand present it as though it is but on the other present an explanation of the text which means that it cannot be determined to be. You've disproved yourself. The effort should instead be spend on attempting to prove according to a respectable standard that the encoding is as described which might be possible to do.
It is however interesting. As a possible translation that is heuristically generated and not pulled out of thin air, that is it is based on what is available and constrained such that it fits within the ostensibly plausible there is a good chance of it being quite close to the text in the book making for a good set of candidates. Prematurely declaring victory is self defeating. Having caught a suspect the fits the bill is not the same as having caught the perpetrator. At the same time some people are risking ruling out some leads too easily.
That glyph on the wall is similar to some of those in the manuscript and should if possible be examined further. The penmanship is no consistent in the manuscript. I have seen at least one of those glyphs that seems to be written backwards or corrected. It may be possible many of them are not in the direction you would expect if familiar with handwriting. They can be drawn in one stroke from the start but also there are signs of the first bar then the second being drawn to loop back on it. The writing is not all that consistent. It's ever so slightly reminiscent of if you are trying out new signatures. It looks to me like its at a stage in literature that naturally occurs when you have not decided on a precise style. It is not entirely implausible that it's a student's notebook, a practice book or done by someone versed in the field but with fair talent and either no access to a dedicated scribe or it being a more personal document. It might simply not matter if utilitarian. It's slightly bad handwriting. Mine is awful. There was always that person in class who could get it perfectly consistent. This is an intermediate level. It's also somewhat childlike. At the same time there are contrasting with this some images showing very high skill which raises a question but that is another topic.
I am also very convinced that the interpretation of the water nymph images being internal anatomy is very likely to be correct. If attached to the church it is forgotten that they see a lot of innards dealing with disposing of the dead. What is far more compelling is that there is a page with what should stand out immediately to any straight and potent man as a uterus. There is also an intestine. There is a likely pair of kidneys and bladder on one page It is also not unusual to use little spirits to denote anima, to animate, movement. It is also connected to the sky in many a regime, spirit and the movement of the visible celestial objects. It is a not too uncommon form of anthropomorphisation. This is so far one of the most valuable parts of the Czech research. I am somewhat more confident in its analysis of the images and its themes than the text. There is however something weird about the text which I have yet to get to the bottom off and contractions is likely one of the transformations in play along with others. I have found many interesting things but I cannot spend too much time on it and do not want to disclose too much as my methodology at the moment avoids too much speculation. I am building a scientific tool that is designed to be able to test a huge range of possibilities otherwise it's pointless to keep producing them. It will get nowhere. I will try to apply it to this research to actually get a sense of how well it fits then get back to this thread with the results.
RE: Voynich manuscript is decoded - i_want_links_damit - 14-07-2025
I don't want to bump the thread but unfortunately I ran out of edit time to explain the attached images so just this once I'll add some additional information...
The images show page pairs from the late 70s to the mid 80s. They show what are very compelling inner organs. A uterus, interesting with distinctive kink of the large intestine, two lungs, bladder and two kidneys/adrenal glands, two eyeballs or testes and an inner lining with a distinct curvy nodular form that is seen in many a inner lining of a mucus membrane maxing out surface area not just the uvula. I think the Czech interpretation is correct to strongly consider this though it is not the first.
I see Latinistic elements and I will not get into full specifics of what I have found so far as the project is still on going and only in the early stages. A lot is done but it is a big project. There are also strong indications of Asiatic elements which includes Onion Domes, upside down T and O maps and of course a Pangolin. Some of the faces seem to show a slight Asiatic Admixture. I've seen two dimensions in the text of external influences. This might not tell you as much as you think but there are two major discernible vectors. One goes through the Eastern Mediterranean down to Egypt (Syriac seems central stretching down to Kushite and also with an influence on Arabic) and the other takes a quite long journey roughly over the top of the Black Sea to the Caspian via central Asia or North India all the way down to the Philippines if not further. These do not necessarily impact the same thing in the text. One vector seems to be more similar to the script rather than the spoken language in it and the other more familiar with the spoken language.
The research has not yet separated this from ancient flows but it does seat the manuscript among certain languages or cultures in Europe with foreign influence. You'll see something similar with other European languages. If you consider Indo-European for example there will be odd correlations with language going quite deep toward the Indian Subcontinent and it seems to show similar relations. Some of it however so far seems a bit stronger than normal. You have to be careful with this as there are likely spurious matches. The text does something weird which I currently assume to be encoding that very remote Island languages happen to do which is to like to do things like turn the word ban into banana. I would be doubtful of an interpretation that is too localised. It's likely either one of the authors travelled or they are influenced by a lot of foreign literature that they are in possession off. I suspect a possible Chinese Whispers issue and the information in the manuscript to have bounced around a fair bit making it hard to place. In this era the Muslims had taken a lot of these texts prior and then we had taken them back with layers of foreign influences. I would be sceptical of a linguistic pattern that is pure straight Latin without some other influences or that does not somehow explain the seemingly foreign and by that I mean remote elements in the book. If there is a true language in it of meaning ad not just made from random jumbled up bits of language then I would expect it to likely be somewhat informal or colloquial albeit a bit of a mix. Regardless, the text has a very high probability of being derived from something that bounced around the Islamic world and that in turn was derived from the frontier of their crusades and the literature they captured from Greece, Egypt and India to then be recaptured and presumably Latinised and Germanised to some degree or similar. I find any interpretation that does not reflect this surprising.
RE: Voynich manuscript is decoded - R. Sale - 15-07-2025
VMs illustrations can often be a bit ambiguous. It's not a pangolin. The scales are backwards.
The reason it is not a pangolin is because of the parts of the illustration directly below the 'critter'. The undulating line has crests and troughs that are bulbous. By heraldic definition, this is a nebuly line. "Nebuly" derived from Latin 'nebula' for 'cloud'. Nebuly lines and their more elaborate variations function in medieval art as cosmic boundaries (wolkenbands) and as representations of the element of air.
A pangolin has no use for a cosmic boundary. The critter is a representation of the Agnus Dei. Furthermore, the markings below the nebuly line are representative of droplets of blood. The structural representation of the three parts is similar to the historical illustration of f 18 of BNF Fr. 13096. The critter is on one side of the boundary and the droplets are on the other side. So far, this placement is unusual. Other representations tend to keep lamb and blood on the same side of the cosmic boundary.
The VMs artist also used a nebuly line as a cosmic boundary in the VMs cosmos, indicating that the artist was familiar with the proper interpretation of this artistic technique.
RE: Voynich manuscript is decoded - i_want_links_damit - 15-07-2025
The direction of the scales does not rule it out as being a Pangolin. It is however a relevant point that it could be a sheep (a ram). That is a rebuttal of value. Your process of elimination on the other hand is logically invalid. None of the pictures in the book have full scientific accuracy. It's not like Da Vinci's botanical works and drawings where the precision is superb and pure such that there can be no mistake as to what you're looking at. This is what it would take to be able to rule out identification based on such a singular detail. You can consider it as though not design in a manner so as to avoid mistaken interpretation.
However, it could well signify a cloud inspired form. If you consider how a child draws a cloud then exaggerate the curve. I think it's more likely the Aries Ram. It is a rather crude drawing with a weird stance (a bit like from bull fighting). It might be ambiguous in that sometimes the animal hangs its head when exhausted or wounded but also when charging to sweep up. It is not impossible that it oddly combines both the Aries Ram and Agnus Dei itself. In these pages there is a woman holding what appears to be a golden Christian cross and it would potentially be consistent with that.
It could be a spurious indication of a foreign influence but then there are others. I do not believe it's conclusive what the drops could indicate. They are just vague lines. These are also commonly used to denote precipitation or floating. Again, children even do it subconsciously sometimes in drawings which seems oddly scientific as it indicates thrust. The ink for these seems to be a red but the problem there is that the standard ink is also dark red. You could also interpret it as two women very smelly feet at the top and a cloud of flatulence escaping the woman handing over the bagel.
You still have Onion domes. The book is likely to be authored around the time these potentially just start to appear in Europe. The earlier remaining examples are a bit later in the possible timeline for authorship. I would suggest that it could be around on the cusp of whatever this particular wave is of an influence from the Near East spreading across Europe. I might suggest some influence potentially being the result of pilgrimage. In Europe the Onion Domes have a cross on top of them but this doesn't really look right and I suspect is tacked on later roughly the same as with moons where as the natural continuous geometric shape is normally more like a point of a weapon.
I did not make it clear but I have not yet dated all of the foreign influences on the book to form a timeline. However, it does make sense the Pangolin is spurious as the impression I get is that the link all the way to the Philippines and possibly South East Asia is thousands of years old and what this tells us is that it is very likely to be derived from a real language and in a sense in the same linguistic genetic pool (sharing common ancestors) or race of languages (it seems human, not alien so far) as those surviving today with caution as these findings are very preliminary, at this point only 5% of the work is done and early tests have been run to test it while being constructed. The link to the near east likely is more recent.
While I'm still working on this project there are some funny things I can show you. Even for a panel for some basic features on the side the form is massive. In programming there are a number of techniques I have applied across the board for efficiency. This is one of the fields that I am a specialist in. I use all kinds of techniques like the scripts to save cycles, file sizes, key presses and to compact views. Ironically it may turn out that a solution arises not in the algorithms to study the text but the interface and infrastructure around that. For example:
Code:
Concad -> Concatenated
Concat -> Concatenate
Nbours -> Neighbours
Alnum -> Alphanumeric
Freqs -> Frequencies
Cards -> Cardinals
Nbour -> Neighbour
Covn -> Conversion
Char -> Character
Coed -> Converted
Excl -> Exclusive
Freq -> Frequency
Card -> Cardinal
Comd -> Combined
Lang -> Language
Pats -> Patterns
Rixs -> Matrixes
Comb -> Combine
Comp -> Compact
Lens -> Lengths
Mats -> Matches
Olap -> Overlap
Shuf -> Shuffle
Strs -> Strings
Comm -> Common
Cnts -> Counts
Rats -> Ratios
Shad -> Shared
Sord -> Sorted
Stat -> Static
Tots -> Totals
Uniq -> Unique
Lin -> Transliteration
Lid -> Transliterated
Lit -> Transliterate
Ico -> Inconsistent
Con -> Consistent
Arb -> Arbitrary
Occ -> Occurence
Mul -> Multiply
Rel -> Relative
Tpl -> Template
Nat -> Natural
Pat -> Pattern
Eng -> English
Rev -> Reverse
Baz -> Base62
Bef -> Before
Div -> Divide
Len -> Length
Let -> Letter
Lir -> Linear
Rix -> Matrix
Num -> Number
Par -> Parent
Str -> String
Aft -> After
Chi -> Child
Cnt -> Count
Emp -> Empty
Gue -> Guess
Mat -> Match
Ord -> Order
Rat -> Ratio
Tot -> Total
Bth -> Both
Bz -> Base36
# Number of, count or numerical index/id
() Special characters representing the beginning and end of a word.
[] Special characters representing the beginning and end of a line.
{} Special characters representing the beginning and end of a paragraph.
^$ Special characters representing the beginning and end of a word via any mechanism.This is used to compress the text in the interface when the form is small or is supposed to. It's only a tiny excerpt but just doing this sometimes you do see things that have a prospect to be indicative of what it looks like might be going on with the VM but as I have to keep saying I can only get back to people on that after I have actually followed all leads using the methodology I am applying which is more long term than short term. It's not a minor project. Very approximately I have done around 100 hours out of around 1000 scheduled and that is in spite of being quite fluent at the work. Though it should be considered the fascinating connection between a modern equivalent to a scribe working with machines and their codes with an ancient scribe writing books.
Notice this has the phone number effect. This is one thing in the pipeline, to work out with the words as presented how resistant it is compare to other languages to mutations. That is, it's like testing how well a hash function works for collisions. If it collides easily with few character mutations then something has sucked out the redundancy normally in language and there's already indication of this. You see in my list how long words where you can safely mistype a character then correct now have only one character differences. Comb, comp and conv are now all vulnerable to an undetected or uncorrectable error. I recommend you try this yourself and especially pay attention to the mistakes you made. I did Lin twice and had to change Linear / Lin to Lir. Also pay attention to the different rules that emerge in different cases with prefix as basic but then it becomes more complex for each special case.
I avoid collisions with the full language as I am not using it but this can be a problem later if I cannot foresee the full working set. Instead I do it against the restricted subset I have present in the current interface. There are ways around this. A scribe is not using a word processor. I can systematically go back and change anything as I am using magic. For the scribe the later words that collide have to move instead of the prior words which are the immovable object. It is also possible to detect and partially reconstruct a restricted set if you know the topic and it appears elsewhere but again, this is for later. This is kind of basic but I overlook nothing if possible in my holistic approach.