(16-09-2017, 11:19 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Note though that Stephen did not claim that those IDs were necessarily the right ones. What he did defend was his methodology - a slow and careful attempt to match some words and labels to names, and try to catch potential sound values that way. I agree that this method may prove succesful one day.

Now you have a point as well - and I hope Stephen will join us in this thread so he can debate it with us. What if a number of incorrect plant IDs caused you to match some completely wrong sounds with certain glyphs? Isn't there a point where you'd get so far down the wrong street that it's become impossible to turn back?

(16-09-2017, 12:14 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Stephen, I have read your work (including your paper on daiin) and I've watched the video three times.

It is not enough to look at individual parts of the elephant, even a systematic way. An elephant has the same tail as many other animals (rhinos, hippos, pigs) and can easily be mistaken for something it is not if one does not step back and look at the big picture (the textual PATTERNS) in conjunction with the details.


It is possible to take individual words in the VMS that translate to many languages. I can find dozens of Greek works, dozens of Spanish words, dozens of Latin words, and not just words on the same folio, these are sometimes words next to each other that make sense in conjunction with one other and it's done in a very systematic way.


But it is not a solution. When you have a text with tens of thousands of word-tokens, there will ALWAYS be some that correspond to a handful of words in some chosen language. If the text that is being "deciphered" is constructed such that it has a somewhat regular vowel-consonant balance (whether real or perceived), it's inevitable that it will map to a few words.


Looking specifically at the labels you chose...

You came up with a system that maps words like Taurus and Centaur/Centaurus and Coriander to Arabic, but those VMS words map NATURALLY to Latin. That "9" character at the end of daur9 is the Latin abbreviation for "-us" and thus one gets daurus/Taurus. The same for Centaurus. When the "9" is at the beginning of a word in Latin, it is variously con- or com- (or sounds that are similar to those) and when it's at the end, it stands for -us or -um, so 9daur9 maps naturally to Centaurum or Centaurus in Latin. No system needed. It already exists and was used by Latin scribes in the 15th century.

You chose the label for coriander as another example. Judging by the way it is drawn it probably is in the umbellifer family, which we also call the carrot family (umbellifers, in the group that includes parsley, carrot, parsnip, cilantro, etc.,, all look fairly similar if drawn by someone of average drawing ability). If we use the old Latin form of "a" (which is a double-cee shape), then that word maps naturally as well, to Karotas (carrot), a term that was used for many different edible umbellifers in the middle ages, not just the familiar carrot. The label maps more naturally to Latin carrot than it does to Arabic cilantro or coriander.



So why choose Arabic, when they are already readable in Latin using an existing system?


Is the VMS Latin? Maybe small bits of it are loan words for Latin. It's possible. But the bulk of the text is not formed in the same way as the chosen handful of examples, and that difference has to be acknowledge if it is to be solved.

(16-09-2017, 11:50 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd suggest that you both have very valid points to make and it's a shame they aren't being discussed here. And to be frank, again we're falling into another tiresome Voynich he said, you did, they were influenced flame war.