Alisa Gladyseva: Voynich manuscript is decoded

[bi3mw]

Now she is writing that she is leaning toward Torsten Timm's autocopying idea.

I find that very astonishing. Do you have a link to this statement ?

[DONJCH]

So, 96v is supposed to be the grape?

[Wladimir D]

Ruby. You seem to be right about Serrano since she mentions Petra. The fact is that in Russian the unstressed "e" in most cases sounds like "i".

She does not mention the page where lavender and grapes are. I also did not understand what, in her understanding, is the last page of plant drawings, where grapes are drawn.

[Koen G]

She is talking about Petra in Constantinople and not Petra in Jordan, right? The Jordan Petra was in ruins by the Middle Ages.

If she's talking about the Petra that was part of Constantinople, I would be interested in her list of references 

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[Anton]

If anybody is innterested, I will watch the video and report what's there. Otherwise I'm lazy to.

[MichelleL11]

She is talking about Petra in Constantinople and not Petra in Jordan, right? The Jordan Petra was in ruins by the Middle Ages.

If she's talking about the Petra that was part of Constantinople, I would be interested in her list of references 

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Yes, l was wondering that on your behalf as well - as bothersome as constant seeking of attribution can be, l also understand how research like this is necessarily built on others work and the system really breaks down when contributions are not acknowledged.

[bi3mw]

If anybody is innterested, I will watch the video and report what's there. Otherwise I'm lazy to.

Yes, please.

[Anton]

OK, so the first thing is that the video is cut halfways on the word "Hesiod", so these 9 minutes look just like the introduction, and without the remainder it's of course difficult to judge the overall presentation.

Alisa starts with claiming the decipherment of the VMS (this is accompanied by applause), she then says that her scientific article has been published in Argentina (? the sound quality here is poor and I'm not sure, but sounds like Argentina), and that her book is about to be published, of which the first volume only will be comprised of 700 pages.

She then says that the key to the decipherment was the plant of lavender (which is placed on the table for illustration), although she does not say in which folio. She was looking for the name of lavender in the text, and discovered it, so that was how she discovered the first characters of the alphabet of this writing system, and then she gradually discovered other characters by searching for other depicted plants names - such as shepherd's purse.

She claims that the MS is written in Galician (Gallegian) language (or "medieval Portuguese") by a famous author, an abbot of a monastery in Spain. She considers it to be some extract from the works of Dioscoredes, since many plant names are borrowed from Greek. She got confident about the connection to Dioscoredes due to the last plant in the VMS being vine, and vine has traditionally been the last plant in medieval works deriving from Dioscoredes, because it starts from the letter V.

She says that Spanish and Galician languages have phraseology and phonetics somehow related to Greek, so many plant names remained to be Greek. For example, carrot in Spanish language derives from the Greek name used by Dioscoredes (David and Antonio, it's your territory ).

The name of the said author is "Syrano" (not sure of the spelling, I was not able to find anything on Wikipedia), but she says he was a historian and a famous author who wrote many works, and many of them in a monastery in Petra (not sure which Petra is meant here).

She describes the structure of botanical folios and claims that after the plant name the description of the plant's morphology follows.

In the course of the video Alisa mentions some plant names in Latin, Spain and Galician.

No references to exact folios or places in the text is given. So all this looks like an introduction. It's an open question of course whether the remainder of the talk included details.

[ReneZ]

he then says that her scientific article has been published in Argentina (? the sound quality here is poor and I'm not sure, but sounds like Argentina)

Could she have meant "academia" (which is academia.edu)?

There is just a 2-page summary with her picture there.

[Anton]

No, definitely not "academia", sounds like "Argentina". Probably this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It's an Argentinian publication indeed.