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+--- Thread: Simon Wayman "decoded partial analysis" (/thread-2136.html)
Simon Wayman "decoded partial analysis" - -JKP- - 08-10-2017
I can't remember anyone posting anything about this video on youtube from Apr. 5, 2016, so I thought I would include a link.
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According to the author, Simon Waymon, it is an extension on ideas presented in Bax's video from Feb. 2014, and focuses on an Arabic interpretation.
Here's a transcript snippet from 15:51 that encapsulates the method (which is taken primarily from the "star charts"):
“Here’s another new star name. This is the most common name on chart 3. These are the first three stars [points out star labels]... The three underneath are some other versions of the name on chart 3. The first star name [reads out pronunciations of similar-looking Vwords]...
Let’s look at the spellings. We can see and “al” followed by vowels. There is a consistent variation within the vowels [points out patterns]... which come and go in their position. The “o” disappears from the beginning of number 5. It appears after the “l” in number 2 and 5. This is typical of the variations I’ve been seeing. We’ve just seen “Tia” [proposed star name] with “o”s on some words.
This is a difficult thing to get across to anyone. I’m showing you all these different words. I’m telling you, they are all variations on the same word.
There are two ways to prove that this is true...[see video for explanation]. Please bear in mind that I’ve been looking at these star names, which I think are matches, for long enough to see how they vary. This is the most common word on chart 3, so it must be important, but the name isn't obvious... [description of Star 3, Taurus, and “Pleiades” cluster]"...
After an overview of positions on the star charts, Wayman anagrams the letter groups to produce names that are similar to one another and more readable as natural language.
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This is primarily a substitution + anagrams theory. For example, "o" is translated as "a", EVA-d as "t", gallows-t is ell and a "g" at the end is sometimes ignored and sometimes interpreted as "n", etc. However, when the author of the video notices significant repetition of common letter patterns that don't quite match known star names, these are then anagrammed to produce similar names.
The author does not give explanations as to why these "star names" appear with such great frequency and regularity in other sections that deal with plants, pools, etc.
He proposes that EVA-dar might be TAeR(N) for Taurus and explains the great frequency of "dar" might be because it has more than one meaning.
I thought this video was interesting, because it illustrates a pattern of "discovery" that I have seen in many of the proposed VMS solutions, that of 1) substitution, 2) ignoring certain glyphs that don't quite seem to fit, 3) anagraming (when trying to apply the substitution pattern to larger blocks of text doesn't quite work), and 4) various justifications for why a word should mean one thing in the context of an illustration and something else when it doesn't seem to fit as well with other illustrations or blocks of text (when the system doesn't generalize to other sections).
I'm not trying to present this pattern in a negative light—just reporting something I've noticed. For example, the very fact that so many attempts at decipherment end up with the researcher variously including and ignoring certain glyphs (like EVA-y at the end of tokens) might have some significance (perhaps they are nulls or markers).
So... we have a substitution code based on the assumption that short groups of text next to recognizable illustrations are labels (and probably nouns), which is an extremely common starting point for many VMS theories, followed by a selective process of including or ignoring certain glyphs when they don't seem to fit (also a very common pattern in decipherment attempts), followed by anagraming, which is a prevalent second or third step taken by many researchers once they start to notice the great amount of repetition in the text, followed by an explanation that words of great frequency which have been given an explanation in one part of the manuscript, might have more than one interpretation when they are encountered in another section (or attached to other "syllables").
What differs in Wayman's explanation from a number of other theories is the assertion that similar names are meant to be read as the same. In other words, there might be five or so variant spellings of the same label. If one considers that the VMS is already highly repetitious, if this were true, then the actual content of the manuscript would be dramatically reduced and the entire manuscript would have to be interpreted as being full of star names. Either that, or similar-looking words might have different meanings if they seem out of place.
Unfortunately, these two ideas combined brings one perilously close to a one-way cipher. If different spellings mean the same thing (as suggested for star names), but the same thing means different things (such as common syllables like "dar") then how does one sort out which is which? It becomes subjective interpretation.
RE: Simon Wayman "decoded partial analysis" - Koen G - 08-10-2017
Free (unregulated) anagramming is one of those lines that shouldn't be crossed, since it almost certainly results in one-way ciphers. As you say, this is especially true when combined with other wiggle-factors.
I'm not sure if I agree with your last objection though, unless I misunderstood. In phonetically written languages, a simple word meaning wildly different things is quite common. Let's imagine for a second that English has phonetic spelling, and consider all words that sound like "to".
To be
Where are you going to?
You are going too fast.
You too are going fast.
There are two people going fast.
That's just off the top of my head, there are surely more. That's five entirely different meanings which, in a phonetically spelled language, would be just one word.
A numeral that additionally marks infinitives, indicates a direction, indicates an excessive degree and a conjunctive?
RE: Simon Wayman "decoded partial analysis" - -JKP- - 08-10-2017
I'm not saying a syllable can't have different meanings in different contexts. Certainly it can.
What I'm saying is that the explanation given by Wayman 1) that different words can mean the same thing COMBINED with the same words meaning different things (within the same theory), brings one into the realm of one-way ciphers (unless one can figure out a way to distinguish one from the other and he didn't give any indication of how to do that).
RE: Simon Wayman "decoded partial analysis" - -JKP- - 09-10-2017
So what Wayman proposed in this video is that Star 3 (which he interprets as possibly being Althoraya) shows up six times with slightly altered names, as follows:
otcheody
otochedy
otcheodar
otchody
tochedy
oteeody
If we look at each one individually in the context of the VMS:
- otcheody is a rare Vword.
- otochedy is found on many of the big-plant and pool pages (sometimes with prefix EVA-q), as well as the later cosmo pages and starred-text pages. It does not appear on the small-plant pages. In other words, it exhibits patterns markedly different from otcheody.
- otcheodar is only on the "star map" folio.
- otchody is on several of the big-plant pages and a starred-text page. It sometimes includes ch or q prefix.
- tochedy is a rare word, but can be found a couple of places with an o prefix.
- oteeody is on some of the big- and small-plant pages, several of the cosmo & zodiac pages. It sometimes has q prefix.
It seems to me, from a theoretical point of view, that one needs to account for these patterns in a holistic way. If the proposed variations behave differently when each token is followed through the manuscript from beginning to end, can one make the assertion that they are the same word with the glyphs rearranged based on looking only at the star charts?
Or could one argue that each section has its own rules (I haven't seen too much evidence of this, other than Currier A and B), but I'll put the question out there anyway since it is a possible argument that might be given to account for Wayman's assertions about the star name.
RE: Simon Wayman "decoded partial analysis" - Koen G - 09-10-2017
Well that is a one way cipher indeed
