28-08-2017, 04:47 PM
(This post was last modified: 30-08-2017, 06:05 PM by Koen G.
Edit Reason: removed unnecessary insulting word
)
For what it's worth, I just re-read Bax's (2014) "A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script".
If you have had the misfortune to read many Voynich theories, you'll immediately recognize almost all the things Bax does:
* dismissing previous research as somehow misguided ("all of Currier’s examples can be explained straightforwardly as no more than idiosyncratic scribal differences when writing the same language, of a kind and a degree typical of the period")
* the "house of cards" argument structure, where each component part is claimed to support each other part
* heavy reliance on the results of preceding Voynich theories (Taurus, Sherwood), all the while silently bracketing out the way in which those wonky results were reached
* selective hypotheses that are true when useful and false otherwise (how can the Voynich be an abjad system some of the time and not the rest?)
* viewing the whole of recorded history as a giant grab bag of word-fragments to dip into as useful
* referring to famous historical decryptions as though the exact same methodology is being applied (it isn't)
* relying on polyglot and wobbly historical spelling to smooth over the many internal inconsistencies that immediately present themselves to the reader.
Never mind any of the details (which are also pretty terrible), the first big problem is how to tell Bax's paper apart from any Voynich theory you can name, when he does exactly the same kind of things in exactly the same kind of way that they do.
If you have had the misfortune to read many Voynich theories, you'll immediately recognize almost all the things Bax does:
* dismissing previous research as somehow misguided ("all of Currier’s examples can be explained straightforwardly as no more than idiosyncratic scribal differences when writing the same language, of a kind and a degree typical of the period")
* the "house of cards" argument structure, where each component part is claimed to support each other part
* heavy reliance on the results of preceding Voynich theories (Taurus, Sherwood), all the while silently bracketing out the way in which those wonky results were reached
* selective hypotheses that are true when useful and false otherwise (how can the Voynich be an abjad system some of the time and not the rest?)
* viewing the whole of recorded history as a giant grab bag of word-fragments to dip into as useful
* referring to famous historical decryptions as though the exact same methodology is being applied (it isn't)
* relying on polyglot and wobbly historical spelling to smooth over the many internal inconsistencies that immediately present themselves to the reader.
Never mind any of the details (which are also pretty terrible), the first big problem is how to tell Bax's paper apart from any Voynich theory you can name, when he does exactly the same kind of things in exactly the same kind of way that they do.