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Casanova decryption claim - Printable Version

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Casanova decryption claim - lelle - 29-04-2019

I haven't seen this one mentioned here:

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I saw it posted on ciphermysteries.com.

What's the ninja-verdict?

RE: Casanova decryption claim - Emma May Smith - 29-04-2019

Bollocks.

RE: Casanova decryption claim - ReneZ - 29-04-2019

I've corresponded with Antoine Casanova some 15-20 years ago. I have a copy of his thesis, which is the only one I know of that deals with the text of the Voynich MS.
I wouldn't be surprised if he were reading (and also writing) here under some neutral name.

I find it interesting that his rather recent claim of just a few years ago, which predates the one from Nicholas Gibbs, and is also more specific, has gone completely unnoticed.

RE: Casanova decryption claim - -JKP- - 30-04-2019

I can't look at their idea  in depth during the workday, but scanning through the transliteration table I already have tried most of these Latin correspondences years ago, and what happens is
  • you get words here and there and even some phrases in Latin (you can do the same in other languages), but there is no cohesive grammar. The parts in between come out unconvincing.
  • I also know that interpreting EVA-r as "r" (or various abbreviations with r) does not map well overall (the same for EVA-l). Once again, you can get plenty of isolated words (this is easy in a text as large as the VMS), but it doesn't hold together well when trying to extract sentences.
  • I am not convinced that the bench chars map to contra (and its variants). That's not the usual way one expands them in Latin and they are too numerous and letter-like to fully support this interpretation, but I'll withhold judgment until I read the paper.
  • I also don't think the cee shapes map to q words, but I will withhold judgment on this as well because I need to read the whole paper to see how their system relates to itself.
.
Their interpretation of Folio 116v doesn't appear to me to be any better or worse than those of others. Certainly, it's plausible, but so are many others. In other words, we need corroboration of some sort to determine which interpretation is right (if any).


I'm not saying The VMS isn't Latin... Occams' Razor screams out that Latin must be considered, but it has to be a convincing transliteration.

Fortunately, I can read French so I will give it a fair reading this evening and see how it holds together.

I hope there are explanations for common patterns like edy (which they have interpreted as Quassus - trembling) because I'm pretty sure words like "trembling" would not occur in almost every line of a manuscript, even if it were poetry.

Similarly, interpreting daiin as "spasms, throat" seems to me to be really stretching credulity, considering that it sometimes occurs several times per line, throughout the manuscript.


Has anyone else noticed that a flush of "Latin" solutions occurred after I posted several blogs explaining Latin abbreviations in 2016 and 2017? (Gibbs, Lockerby, Casanova).

RE: Casanova decryption claim - VViews - 30-04-2019

This illustration on his website reminds me of some of the posts back in the Voynich Humor subforum.
Smile
[Image: 2.png]

More seriously, I'll have a look at his paper. I didn't know about him, thanks Ielle.

RE: Casanova decryption claim - -JKP- - 30-04-2019

I notice they have left out the transliteration step in their examples.

For example, they don't explain how they got from

otcheo dain chty ykees cheg

to

"I manage a sudden leap of the believer by fighting against appearances (symptoms) and to restrain contractions for a while. "



I tried to match up the text with the transliteration chart (I have to go, so I had to do this quickly) and I think it comes out like this...

Ovis contracto saltum contra visus contentis quoque contracts g


I'd like to know what our Latin experts think of that.

If that's not what the writer intended, then he should have included the transliteration step.


.
To me, it looks like the writer took isolated phrases and tried to fit the abbreviations to the phrases (rather than the other way around) to wrangle some sense out of it, but try applying those transliterations to any other part of the manuscript and see what you get!

(I'm less motivated to read the paper now.)

RE: Casanova decryption claim - Koen G - 30-04-2019

Haha Vviews. It is actually rather humorous, one character is cutting garlic and the others are exhaling scents.

But if all those different words are about exhaling scents then the whole VM must be a smelly business.

RE: Casanova decryption claim - Helmut Winkler - 30-04-2019

I think he has grasped the obvious, but his transliteration and transcription and translation are not even near anything which is even likely, the best examples are 66r and 116v, where we can read and understand at least  a little bit, which comes from not knowing Latin and the way medieval mss. were composed and written. But he is in very good company, of course.

Does anybody know if the thesis was printed somewhere or is accessiblee somehow or if there is more in the thesis than in the article?

RE: Casanova decryption claim - ReneZ - 30-04-2019

It's long ago since I last looked at it, but the thesis is looking at a mathematical/statistical model of the text, and is not related to this more recent translation attempt.

I think it may be online now, but it is (of course) in French:

Méthodes d'analyse du langage crypte: une contribution a l'étude du manuscrit de Voynich: These pour obtenir le grade de Docteur de l'Universite Paris 8.  March 19, 1999

Here's a link but without (it seems) the full text:
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there are several such links.

I only have a paper copy.

RE: Casanova decryption claim - -JKP- - 30-04-2019

This is probably the most important sentence in the abstract:

"Assurement, d'une a quatre lettres de voynich s'assimilent a la nature de la lettre nulle selon que nous considerons le manuscrit comme un unique texte ou comme un conglomerat de cryptogrammes pourvus de six alphabets distincts."



The author contends that one to four Voynich letters have the qualities of null characters, depending on whether we consider the manuscript as a unique text or as an assemblage of cryptograms comprised of six distinct/separate alphabets.

I haven't read the rest of the paper yet.