+- The Voynich Ninja (https://www.voynich.ninja)
+-- Forum: Voynich Research (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-27.html)
+--- Forum: Voynich Talk (https://www.voynich.ninja/forum-6.html)
+--- Thread: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels (/thread-3140.html)
RE: Mark Knowles theories' of pharma and other labels - MarcoP - 06-04-2020
Thank you for your comment Stephen!
I agree with what you write: if Voynichese is not a natural or artificial language, the ms was deliberately made to look like "language written in a bizarre alphabet".
RE: Mark Knowles theories' of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 06-04-2020
Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks for the wonderful chart. That Fontana MS is really impressive as a comparandum. I wonder if something like that was a model for how the VM should look, even though the process used to produce it must be different.
I have increasingly, over time, been thinking that Giovanni Fontana's work is a useful parallel. One thing I am curious about is where or when Fontana became familiar with ciphers. It is true his is a very simple cipher and therefore one might regard that as commonplace knowledge that he could have found easily. However I still wonder. His general qualifications don't make one think he would have been directed towards ciphers. One thing that interests me is that the Doge of Venice sent him to Brescia to deliver a message to the condottiere Francesco Carmagnola. This would of course have been a diplomatic mission, which makes me wonder if he had contact with early diplomatic ciphers; I haven't tried to investigate if this was the case or not perhaps I will some day.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 08-04-2020
A quote from a biography of Giovanni Fontana:
Probably, during the years when Fontana met the Count of Carmagnola (1428-1432 c.), he prepared the “Secretum de thesauro experimentorum ymaginationis hominum”, in encripted writing.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 08-04-2020
Another quote about Giovanni Fontana:
At least ten of his treatises survived to the present and five others, still unidentified, are mentioned in his writings.
Now the Voynich could count as one or more of those texts; I don't think that is the case, but it is possible.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 08-04-2020
Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola serves under the Visconti, Dukes of Milan, until 1425 when he went to serve the Venetians under Doge Francesco Foscari.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 08-04-2020
When one looks at cipher scripts one should realise that the symbols/characters used often varying from city state to city state or more exactly from chancellery to chancellery. So it is interesting to ask to what extent the cipher symbols that Fontana uses are purely of his own creation and to what extent they are borrowed or influenced by existing cipher scripts.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - davidjackson - 08-04-2020
(06-04-2020, 04:38 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is true his is a very simple cipher and therefore one might regard that as commonplace knowledge that he could have found easily.To sum up my own personal thoughts on Fontana: I think he was one of those people who took a quantitative leap with common knowledge. He was familiar with basic ciphers; he took the idea of a cipher and turned it into a code for personal reasons. Most probably for the first time in history. His idea was an antecedent of the same one that caused educated 18th/19th century Western gentleman to write in Greek or Latin - to hide ideas from the common person, to ensure that only the educated could read his work.
He wasn't trying to hide his work from the world, he was trying to ensure that only those worthy of access could read it.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 08-04-2020
(08-04-2020, 09:14 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To sum up my own personal thoughts on Fontana: I think he was one of those people who took a quantitative leap with common knowledge. He was familiar with basic ciphers; he took the idea of a cipher and turned it into a code for personal reasons. Most probably for the first time in history. His idea was an antecedent of the same one that caused educated 18th/19th century Western gentleman to write in Greek or Latin - to hide ideas from the common person, to ensure that only the educated could read his work.
He wasn't trying to hide his work from the world, he was trying to ensure that only those worthy of access could read it.
Yeah, it's hard to know how close a parallel to the Voynich it is. His work was a scientific treatise, to the best of my knowledge. I think the Voynich can be considered in a similar vein as a scientific treatise of sorts. They both have a different scientific focus from one another I think. And they are both written in an unknown script; however one we find easy to read and the other very hard. As I believe the Voynich is written in cipher, so for me there is a greater parallel.
Assuming the author of the Voynich was not Fontana what could these parallels tell us about him/her/them. For me of course the fact that Fontana was Northern Italian is significant given that is in my opinion where the author of the Voynich originates. He was highly educated as one might expect. He was born in the 1390s. He had close ties to Venice.
If the Voynich is to some extent a product of the culture of the beginning of the Italian renaissance then that could be seen as another parallel with Fontana's work.
However why were there not other people at the time or over the following century producing similar works? Why did this urge to produce scientific texts in cipher stop?
Fontana's work is dated to the same period that the Voynich is carbon dated to, yet I don't think Fontana was the author though that might seem a logical explanation.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 08-04-2020
So, if the Voynich is in cipher then why is it in so much more difficult to decipher one than Fontana's? On the face of it one would imagine that the author of the Voynich was much more interested in or familiar with ciphers, so as to be able to produce something more difficult to break. There is no evidence that Fontana has any education in ciphers and apart from the diplomatic message he delivered no evidence that he came in contact with ciphers. So maybe it is not surprising that his cipher was so simple.
I would argue the author of the Voynich was someone with some significant background or acquaintance with ciphers or someone of real genius(like Da Vinci, but not Da Vinci of course) or possibly both. For someone with little background in ciphers to produce such a thing implies to me a big intellectual leap hence "genius"(I don't really like that word, but it serves its purpose). If the author was someone with a strong background and fascination in ciphers as well as a degree of imagination/invention then they could be responsible.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - -JKP- - 08-04-2020
(08-04-2020, 09:43 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
And they are both written in an unknown script; however one we find easy to read and the other very hard. ...
The Fontana cipher is easy to read, so from a cryptanalysis viewpoint, it is not unknown. As far as shapes go, however, almost every cipher I encounter in various manuscripts is different.
If you copy someone else's cipher shapes, then that other person can read your cipher, so there is some motivation to invent your own glyphs, if secrecy is desired.
Most medieval ciphers were the same basic idea, simple substitution codes, but the specific glyph-shapes used to represent the letters vary quite a bit.
In terms of originality, the Fontana cipher was not unusual. The choice of shapes was perhaps a bit more consistent than others (less variable from letter to letter), but there was certainly a dose of creativity in many medieval cipher shapes. It's possible a majority of them were unique.