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Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 22-07-2016
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - Psillycyber - 23-07-2016
Okay, I've had a look at your interesting theory, Don, and while I don't want to dismiss it out of hand right away, there are a few things that seem off to me:
1. Are there no verbs or prepositions in the VMS? That would be surprising, no? I'm not sure it would be clear even as a mnemonic aid to the original author what to do with all of the ingredients if the book was simply a list of ingredients and numbers/amounts attached to them ("sage2 lavender5 onion3 garlic3 coriander4..."), with no words like "mix" or "crush" or "in" or "with". Your theory fits with the observation that there is a dearth of short commonly repeated words in the VMS such as "and" or "in" etc. But the way that your theory fits with this observation is by postulating an equally unlikely plaintext that also lacks these short common words.
Or perhaps you do think that there are verbs and prepositions scattered throughout each recipe, and you just haven't gotten around to deciphering them? Still, that seems like that will be a difficult circle to square due to the VMS's lack of repeated common words (which is really the fundamental problem with almost all simple-ish substitution approaches).
Perhaps, if we assumed that the line is a functional unit or there is some other system like that, I could see the end of the line always being the finished recipe, and maybe the structure would be known well enough to the original author that verbs and prepositions would be unnecessary, although you still need something like "Xingredient + Yingredient = Zingredient" to disambiguate where the final finished product starts. Also, some lines are only halfway filled in and seem to violate the "line as a functional unit" hypothesis.
2. Could you explain how you arrive at some of your abbreviation codes? For example, it is not intuitive to me that I would label "mallow" as "ll". Did you do this by identifying the plant pictures and then matching up labels? If you could describe the process by which you arrived at the codes that you did, that would be helpful.
3. I noticed that you have focused so far on the herbal stuff, which is all well and good, and actually that is ideal because now, for example, you could try to apply your codes to the astrological section and see if your theory is a legitimately predictive theory. That is, does your theory make falsifiable predictions about what we will find elsewhere in the VMS? Can you give me a straightforward procedure for how to apply your codes to the other sections? Or is there a lot of ad-hoc creativity involved (a bad sign for a theory)?
In fact, since you have all these codes, it seems like you should be pretty close to being able to translate the book. So, what does a sample page of the VMS look like when you straightforwardly apply your codes? I'm not going to put in this work because it is not my theory, I'm not as familiar with the codes as you, and I remain skeptical that it would be a waste of my time. But I encourage you to try this. Take a scan of a VMS page, and in the margins write your translation in the spaces between the lines.
4. How does your theory take into account Torsten Timm's auto-copying hypothesis? I suspect that, when you translate a page of the VMS, you are going to find a lot of stuff like "garlic garlic garlic..." or even worse, "garlic galric garcil...." How do you make sense of the strange repetitiveness of the VMS while assuming that it describes a straightforward (albeit abbreviated) plaintext of unencrypted language?
Edit: Additionally, if you could supply translations for the three most common roots, "chedy," "ol" and "aiin," and explain why there is so little average edit-distance between those three roots for all of the other words, then your theory would truly impress me.
Thanks for the effort on this interesting theory so far! I look forward to your responses!
RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 23-07-2016
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - Psillycyber - 23-07-2016
I don't know that the VMS absolutely MUST have verbs and prepositions. It just seems odd if it didn't.
I've never read a book-length piece of writing without verbs and prepositions...but then again, I'm no expert of medieval manuscripts. Is this sort of style common for medieval herbals and/or recipe books? Is there even one other example of this sort of writing from that time period? I don't know, I'm asking honestly.
I'm having a bit of difficulty reading your old deconstructions. Where do the highlighted "astringent" tags come from?
I think we might be speaking past each other a bit when talking about the most common roots. I'm getting this idea from Torsten Timm's paper, "How the Voynich was created." I'm not trying to associate them with your Group I codes.
One last question: so, do you think that the "astrological" section and the rosettes are also mostly talking about herbs and recipes? Do you think the imagery in those sections relates at all to the text, and if so, how so might it relate? Maybe associating herbs with parts of the calendar year? I take it that your hypothesis implies that the entire VMS is a fairly unified document relating almost entirely to herbs and recipes. I wonder how the nymphs in the baths and the piping and whatnot would relate to herbal recipes....
RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 24-07-2016
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 24-07-2016
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - -JKP- - 24-07-2016
(24-07-2016, 06:34 PM)don of tallahassee Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Okay, here is one of the neat parts I've been showing for five years.
... [deleted for brevity]...
Which refers to the Old Man of The Mountains who protected the ahashishieen (his henchmen, the assassins) and the hashish that he fed to them in mountain castles/strongholds in some of Syria's more treacherous hinterland regions.
I know it is a leap of faith to get this far, but, then, the page does show a Cannabis plant, from which hashish is produced, so maybe not that long of a leap. And I'm not anagramming anything or making up new ways to produce the phonetic text.
Isn't that a fitting end to the page? It produced a whole bunch more of glyph/sounds for the alphabet.
But, finding the first iteration of hshesh on the second line of the page was like finding just the right cartouche, don't you know?
Thank you.
Don of Tallahassee
An interesting perspective on the origin of the word hashish and the Old Man of the Mountain (as described by Marco Polo):
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 24-07-2016
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 25-07-2016
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RE: Proposed meanings for code group and Voynich glyph/sound alphabet - don of tallahassee - 25-07-2016
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