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+--- Thread: [Other] Course in Cologne focusing on VMS (/thread-2902.html)
RE: Course in Cologne focusing on VMS - hermesj - 18-04-2021
Because this is a thread about one of my courses, I would like to post some news here:
- [font=Arial]For those who speak German: I gave another seminar on the Voynich Manuscript last semester. Because it was an online semester, the contributions are also available as a video, collected on this portal: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (I see that Helmut Winkler already found it). The portal will soon be expanded to include more digital publications (developed by students). [/font]
- [font=Arial]Once again for those who speak German: On Saturday evening, ZDFinfo showed a documentary about all kind of riddles. There is also a short part about the Voynich manuscript, about which I was interviewed. Nothing new is said, but at least nothing wrong (What is not a matter of course for television documentaries…). You can still find it in the mediathek: (VMS part start at 26:24) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font]
- For those who are interested in the parallels I see between the text of the Voynich Manuscript and the Polygraphia III by Johannes Trithemius (looking at you MarcoP, sorry for my delayed answer): I proved at the time (2012) that the use of a cipher similar to Polygraphia III (P3) comes closer to the properties of the Voynich text than known natural languages. This is especially true for word lengths, entropy and the occurrence of very similar words (minimal pairs). The P3 works by replacing letters of the plaintext with whole words in the ciphertext. These words in the P3 are formed in a very regular way. I was also able to show that classical structuralist methods of linguistics work better on texts generated with the P3 and also on the Voynich manuscript text than on inflectional natural languages. I therefore saw evidence that the Voynich Manuscript might be a kind of early “constructed language”, but with only the form but not the meaning concept of a language. But I assumed that one could determine the content from the form via cryptanalysis. I admit that this is very abbreviated now, but I explained it in detail in my dissertation. I never published this in English because I have since found another method that can also generate a text very similar to that of the Voynich manuscript. That`s the autocopy method by Torsten Timm. This method needs much less constraints than mine (for the PIII you need an extensive codebook and Trithemius published it not before 1608). Maybe I will elaborate the approach better if I have an idea how to reverse engineer the codebook. I am also happy to receive suggestions on this. For those of you who want to get an impression of the Polygraphia: You can find it in the Library of Congress, the third part starts on page 382 →
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RE: Course in Cologne focusing on VMS - Pardis Motiee - 19-04-2021
Why not to do more radio carbon techniques or having it two or three times, to reduce errors.
RE: Course in Cologne focusing on VMS - ReneZ - 19-04-2021
There are several reasons for this:
1. These tests are destructive, so part of the MS is lost in doing them.
2. They are expensive
3. The accuracy cannot be improved further. It is limited by the uncertainty in the C-14 calibration curve.