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RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - ReneZ - 09-04-2020
Fontana's cipher has a few systematic aspects that seem to be particular for him. For example: using very similar symbols for the vowels.
Apart from that, it seems to me not to be fundamentally different from other systems that use alternative symbols for simple substitution.
In particular the example in the well-known Heidelberg MS Pal.Germ.597 is very similar, and contemporaneous with Fontana's work.
So while these two are similar, the Voynich MS does two things that are very different.
One is that it has something like glyph harmony or a curve-line system, as currently discussed in this forum.
The other is that it has a tendency to cursive writing. This is facilitated by the first point.
These two points are not found in Fontana, the alchemical cipher or any cipher I am aware of.
I could ask if anyone has any examples, but especially the first point seems essentially impossible to achieve with a cipher alphabet.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - ReneZ - 09-04-2020
The following clip from my Histocrypt 2019 paper (on academia.edu) may illustrate this.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - bi3mw - 09-04-2020
At least when it comes to Pal. Germ. 597 it is quite obvious why there is no similarity to the VMS. A simple replacement of the letters is not what I would expect from the VMS. Rather, I suspect that if the VMS had been encrypted, a more complex system would have been used. To what extent this can be reconciled with the rigid structure of the text remains open, since the system, if it really exists, is unknown.
Worth reading:
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RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 09-04-2020
(09-04-2020, 06:26 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Fontana's cipher has a few systematic aspects that seem to be particular for him. For example: using very similar symbols for the vowels.
Apart from that, it seems to me not to be fundamentally different from other systems that use alternative symbols for simple substitution.
In particular the example in the well-known Heidelberg MS Pal.Germ.597 is very similar, and contemporaneous with Fontana's work.
So while these two are similar, the Voynich MS does two things that are very different.
One is that it has something like glyph harmony or a curve-line system, as currently discussed in this forum.
The other is that it has a tendency to cursive writing. This is facilitated by the first point.
These two points are not found in Fontana, the alchemical cipher or any cipher I am aware of.
I could ask if anyone has any examples, but especially the first point seems essentially impossible to achieve with a cipher alphabet.
I could do with reading more on the curve-line system argument, however I think I get what you are driving at. First of all broadly on the subject of a cursive script, it would be possible to produce a cipher alphabet which would lend itself to cursive writing, though I daresay it would require some work. In fact if one was writing a long text being able to write it quickly would be a real advantage, so that could be an impetus to designing such script.
Now, onto the question of the curve-line system. As I have made clear my suspicion is that the Voynich contains a sizeable filler text and more specifically certain vords are meaningless or null as I prefer to say.(For those who like the term, I mean steganography. Steganography is a term that I personally don't like as it has a much wider not-specific meaning than I am trying to convey.) So for me there is always the question of the properties/structure of the meaningful text and the properties/structure of the filler text, which may be very different. Now it is regularly pointed to the structure of Voynichese, which can be something like [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]prefix-stem-suffix. It is however the case that there are a number of vords which don't conform to this structure. Like I would imagine the same applies to this curve-line system. My suspicion has been that these elements of word structure are particularly a feature of the null word/filler text that I have referred to.[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]So to reiterate, when one say the Voynichese words have a specific structure does one mean ALL Voynichese words have that structure or a large number of them do? From what I have seen there are a preponderance of words of defy these proposed structures. So these structural features are probably not universal, though in fact it is true that they are highly prevalent. When I first started to learn about the Voynich my guess was that the repeated words that I heard about were what I term null words and recently after studying labels more I have come to the conclusion that these kinds of words are more common than I expected. This is the explanation which makes most sense to me and is consistent with the idea of the Voynich being a cipher and really explanatory of most or many objections to that idea, such as differences in statistical features. On the basis of having studied labels I find it hard to find a satisfactory explanation than that some of them are null vords. Likewise for a variety of reasons I find it unlikely that all vords are null.[/font]
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 09-04-2020
(09-04-2020, 06:38 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The following clip from my Histocrypt 2019 paper (on academia.edu) may illustrate this.
I should add that the positional glyph string/verbose cipher mappings as I have presented before may also help to reconcile these proposed issues whilst in many ways conforming to the structures of diplomatic ciphers of the early 15th century.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 09-04-2020
I will be quite open and honest in saying that I have thought about ways to reconcile what we observe with Voynichese with the diplomatic ciphers of the period in a way that minimises the conceptual leap from those diplomatic ciphers. I think it is perfectly doable to have a development or modification of the properties of an early 15th diplomatic cipher that fit the apparent significant differences in the appearance of Voynichese.
In addition all alternative hypotheses of the origins of Voynichese I think are more problematic.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 09-04-2020
I think to use a very crude analogy:
If one compares a human being to mold one would think these two things have nothing in common. However, of course, we know they have a huge amount in common. At the cellular level they are both remarkably incredibly similar, so they really have a vast amount in common fundamentally. My simple point is that two things can appear extremely different, yet are in fact extremely similar. Obviously living organisms and ciphers are two quite different things. However I think the analogy has some value. Whilst on the surface Voynichese might appear to be very different from ciphers of that period that doesn't mean that it isn't a closely related form of cipher, though different in some respect(s).
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - -JKP- - 09-04-2020
Mark Knowles Wrote: Whilst on the surface Voynichese might appear to be very different from ciphers of that period that doesn't mean that it isn't a closely related form of cipher, though different in some respect(s).
I don't think it's the surface that makes the Voynich text different. Medieval cipher glyphs are quite varied, almost anything goes in terms of shapes. In fact, most of the people who claim solutions, and many of those who present research findings, are treating it as they treat most medieval ciphers, as a substitution problem, as a cipher alphabet. They make charts the same way charts are made for other cipher alphabets with the VMS glyphs on the left and their natural-language "equivalents" on the right.
Superficially, the VMS text does look to many people like a language, or a ciphered version of a language. In fact, a high proportion of the substitution charts treat vowel-like shapes in the VMS as vowels in their claimed solutions.
But under the surface, the glyphs are not organized the same as natural language, and this is the part that is frequently overlooked. If this were noticed by all the people offering these charts, they would have done more research before assuming it was a substitution cipher.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - Mark Knowles - 09-04-2020
What I regard as the surface phenomena some might regard as phenomena that are below the surface. I regard phenomena that are below the surface as being the underlying mechanics of Voynichese. So prefex-stem-suffix and observations regarding glyph pair entropy and so on... I would describe as surface phenomena in my lexicon.
RE: Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels - -JKP- - 09-04-2020
I am not one of the people who believes in a prefix-stem-suffix system. I think the main proponents of that idea were Hyde and Rugg.