25-04-2017, 03:01 PM
Thanks to everyone for a lively discussion. Voynich.ninja has allowed real development and exchange of views after years of drought - since the early 2000s, really.
It's fantastic to see this happening.
Given that I'm not a linguist, and not even terribly interested in the written part of this text - there's something which always bothers me about the 'grille/random' argument versus linguistic and cryptological arguments. It's simply the narrow range in which the issue of 'language' is addressed.
But if something isn't prose, and isn't poetry, it can still be meaningful. The shorthand idea is one option.
But there are others.
Whether or not we concede the interpretation which Don Hoffmann attached to each of the glyphs, he did show that they could be interpreted as a mixture of initial letters and numerical values. I don't know if anyone had even considered something as simple as that: initial letters and numerical values. Yet we use that sort of language all the time.
Some time ago, just for the heck of it, I asked Julian Bunn if he would print off a page of Voynichese showing each glyph with a different colour value - it isn't impossible that the pictures are talking about one thing and the text another - and among the 'others' I had considered the sort of patterns used in fabrics: carpets, tapestries, woven silks and so on.
Julian said he'd do that, but it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps he talked himself out of doing so much work for a non-language test.
I guess my point is that the 'random nonsense' versus 'intelligible prose' never gets far - so why not consider other types of text, including technical ones?
It's fantastic to see this happening.
Given that I'm not a linguist, and not even terribly interested in the written part of this text - there's something which always bothers me about the 'grille/random' argument versus linguistic and cryptological arguments. It's simply the narrow range in which the issue of 'language' is addressed.
But if something isn't prose, and isn't poetry, it can still be meaningful. The shorthand idea is one option.
But there are others.
Whether or not we concede the interpretation which Don Hoffmann attached to each of the glyphs, he did show that they could be interpreted as a mixture of initial letters and numerical values. I don't know if anyone had even considered something as simple as that: initial letters and numerical values. Yet we use that sort of language all the time.
Some time ago, just for the heck of it, I asked Julian Bunn if he would print off a page of Voynichese showing each glyph with a different colour value - it isn't impossible that the pictures are talking about one thing and the text another - and among the 'others' I had considered the sort of patterns used in fabrics: carpets, tapestries, woven silks and so on.
Julian said he'd do that, but it hasn't happened yet. Perhaps he talked himself out of doing so much work for a non-language test.
I guess my point is that the 'random nonsense' versus 'intelligible prose' never gets far - so why not consider other types of text, including technical ones?