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+--- Thread: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 (/thread-4204.html)
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - pjburkshire - 04-04-2024
(04-04-2024, 10:42 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(03-04-2024, 08:40 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not think the Voynich Manuscript is a constructed language or a cipher text. I think it is a now extinct natural language.
How do you explain the statistical properties of the text?
I leave that to the experts. I think they are doing a fine job.
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - Mark Knowles - 04-04-2024
(04-04-2024, 12:15 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 10:42 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(03-04-2024, 08:40 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not think the Voynich Manuscript is a constructed language or a cipher text. I think it is a now extinct natural language.
How do you explain the statistical properties of the text?
I leave that to the experts. I think they are doing a fine job.
Yes, but that contradicts your idea that it is written in a now extinct natural language.
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - pjburkshire - 04-04-2024
(04-04-2024, 12:35 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 12:15 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 10:42 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(03-04-2024, 08:40 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not think the Voynich Manuscript is a constructed language or a cipher text. I think it is a now extinct natural language.
How do you explain the statistical properties of the text?
I leave that to the experts. I think they are doing a fine job.
Yes, but that contradicts your idea that it is written in a now extinct natural language.
WellesleyCollege
Friends of the Library Lecture: Lisa Fagin Davis
Nov 27, 2023
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31:43
So that's another way of looking at it. And then finally another example
31:48
is something called Zipf's law. So one question you have to ask yourself is, is it a language?
31:55
Is it just random nonsense, is it randomly generated? Does it actually represent a human language?
32:02
And one of the tests that linguists use for this is something called Zipf's law,
32:08
which says that the most common word in a language will appear basically twice as often as the next one,
32:16
which will be twice as often as the next one. And so when you graph that frequency, this is what you end up with.
32:22
If you do this for the "Voynich Manuscript", the "Voynich Manuscript," right?
32:28
That was the right reaction. It's really thrilling to see that because that really suggests
32:35
that it is in fact a natural human language. It's not an invented language like Elvish.
32:41
Elvish does not conform to Zipf's law as much as Tolkien wanted it to or Dothraki
32:46
or Klingon or something. This seems to represent a naturally evolving human language.
32:54
We just don't know what language yet.
33:00
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - Mark Knowles - 04-04-2024
(04-04-2024, 01:00 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 12:35 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 12:15 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 10:42 AM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(03-04-2024, 08:40 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I do not think the Voynich Manuscript is a constructed language or a cipher text. I think it is a now extinct natural language.
How do you explain the statistical properties of the text?
I leave that to the experts. I think they are doing a fine job.
Yes, but that contradicts your idea that it is written in a now extinct natural language.
WellesleyCollege
Friends of the Library Lecture: Lisa Fagin Davis
Nov 27, 2023
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
31:43
So that's another way of looking at it. And then finally another example
31:48
is something called Zipf's law. So one question you have to ask yourself is, is it a language?
31:55
Is it just random nonsense, is it randomly generated? Does it actually represent a human language?
32:02
And one of the tests that linguists use for this is something called Zipf's law,
32:08
which says that the most common word in a language will appear basically twice as often as the next one,
32:16
which will be twice as often as the next one. And so when you graph that frequency, this is what you end up with.
32:22
If you do this for the "Voynich Manuscript", the "Voynich Manuscript," right?
32:28
That was the right reaction. It's really thrilling to see that because that really suggests
32:35
that it is in fact a natural human language. It's not an invented language like Elvish.
32:41
Elvish does not conform to Zipf's law as much as Tolkien wanted it to or Dothraki
32:46
or Klingon or something. This seems to represent a naturally evolving human language.
32:54
We just don't know what language yet.
33:00
Lisa Fagin Davis is a palaeographer, so not necessarily the best person to site regarding the statistical properties of the Voynich text. I suggest on reading up about the statistical properties of Voynichese and you will see the difficulties.
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - pjburkshire - 04-04-2024
(04-04-2024, 01:12 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Lisa Fagin Davis is a palaeographer, so not necessarily the best person to site regarding the statistical properties of the Voynich text. I suggest on reading up about the statistical properties of Voynichese and you will see the difficulties.
I'm not here for the statistics. I'm here because of the illustrations.
- The nymphs are not bathing women.
- The star-images are not stars up in the night sky.
That is why I am here. If you want to chase after a non-existent cipher solution then go for it. It is your time to waste. Have fun. I've played with numbers enough to know:
Q: How many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: How many do you want it to be?
But no matter what statistics you find or invent, numbers will not change the illustrations.
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - tavie - 04-04-2024
I can't speak for Lisa but saying that "this seems to represent a naturally evolving human language" is not the same thing as saying there is no cypher. It is an argument against the text being a constructed language or being meaningless, not an argument against cyphers. It also may have its flaws, but that's a separate issue.
Let's assume for argument's sake that the text is meaningful, that there is a "natural" language. By which in this case I mean one that's not artificially constructed.
Something has been "done" to the text. The statistical properties that Mark mentioned show that the text has been processed, distorted, whatever you want to call it, in various ways that likely interact with each other and generate all the confusing statistics or noise that we see.
This processing or distortion of the text may be a cypher. It may be a cypher combined with other methods that have the effect of generating more concealment and confusion without that being the intention. It's also conceivable in theory at least that the processing is not a cypher but instead is the combined force of all these "innocent" methods. I feel that in such a case, the main thing distinguishing a cypher from such a system is the existence of an intent to conceal, and I get "concealment" vibes from various elements.
In brief, there is either a cypher or a mixture of operations that has virtually had the effect of a cypher. It cannot be an undistorted plaintext of a natural language, even a mysterious extinct one. That is why the statistics are important. Mark is giving you good advice to become familiar with them: not knowing of these statistics is a reason why so many people have dedicated so much of their time to wrong solutions. You don't need to be a professional statistician (I certainly am not) to appreciate the basics of Voynichese's weird behaviour.
(Also, unless this extinct language never had a script of its own, creating the Voynichese script instead of using its own script technically makes it a cypher anyway)
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - Hermes777 - 05-04-2024
(04-04-2024, 01:35 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(04-04-2024, 01:12 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Lisa Fagin Davis is a palaeographer, so not necessarily the best person to site regarding the statistical properties of the Voynich text. I suggest on reading up about the statistical properties of Voynichese and you will see the difficulties.
I'm not here for the statistics. I'm here because of the illustrations.
- The nymphs are not bathing women.
- The star-images are not stars up in the night sky.
That is why I am here. If you want to chase after a non-existent cipher solution then go for it. It is your time to waste. Have fun. I've played with numbers enough to know:
Q: How many statisticians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: How many do you want it to be?
But no matter what statistics you find or invent, numbers will not change the illustrations.
Lol. It is good to see someone here who is sceptical of statistics. Healthy.
I agree that it is good to start with the illustrations. Treat the ms. as a Mutus Liber, a silent book. Try to come to an understanding of the illustrations *before* turning to the text and the maze of statistics.
To my eye, from the map and other features, the ms. concerns a mountainous landscape. (There is zero to indicate a maritime text.)
We can tell a lot from the illustrations. The illustrator could handle circles and technical diagrams and cartography but had no skill at depicting human anatomy, for instance, which must tell us something about his background.
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - pjburkshire - 05-04-2024
(05-04-2024, 03:28 AM)Hermes777 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Lol. It is good to see someone here who is sceptical of statistics. Healthy.
Like the old saying goes; garbage in, garbage out. Lisa Fagin Davis and Claire Bowern both admit that the data is questionable.
Beinecke Library at Yale
The Voynich Manuscript with Lisa Fagin Davis
May 7, 2021
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38:22
we don't know what the words are
we don't know what all the letters are
and so that makes it very difficult to
build hypotheses about what the
language underlying it and what
the relationship is between the words and the
the letters and the sounds
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - tavie - 05-04-2024
That's another quote out of context. It is not necessarily saying it is questionable whether the statistics show something has been done to the text. Also, I don't think even allowing for not parsing the glyphs the way they were intended to be parsed could make it an unaltered plaintext. It's one thing to be sceptical of statistics; it's another thing to be categorical that there is no cypher, without apparently being familiar with the statistics.
RE: The Rosettes Page - March 2024 - Hermes777 - 05-04-2024
Many useful stats gives us the contour and habits of the text. But I am wary of the mystique of statistics. Generally, we are only warranted to apply fuzzy statistics to Voynichese. We are not warranted to say there are 864 cases of [daiin] in the text. No, there are about 860 cases of [daiin] in the text, give or take, or "just over 860." And all the stats are like that, necessarily imprecise.
In any case, it is good practice to avoid the text at first and just study the illustrations. Treat it as a picture book. I think that is helpful. The text, after all, is presented to us in a context - and since the text is so opaque, let's get a sense of the context.
The obvious implication of the map is that it sets out a region, and then the herbs and other things in the ms. are relevant to that defined region. On the face of it, you'd think the herbs belong to the region set out in the map. That might not be right, but it is a natural reading of it.