I was excited when I saw the announcement.
Not so excited after watching the video. They will have to show how they go from the transliteration to the translation (which wasn't really covered in the video) because they did not address any of the problems inherent in the lack of diversity and positional constraints in the VMS text compared to natural languages.
They do allow for multiple interpretations (mostly pronunciation) in some of the characters, but they still interpreted many of the glyphs according to EVA designations and if you do that, such as reading EVA-i as "i", then they are already in trouble in terms of structural differences between natural language and Voynichese.
Also, if you take a very common token and translate it (as a month-name, for example), then you have to account for why it would occur with extreme frequency in other places in the manuscript where one would not expect to see that particular word (or to see it with such great frequency). They didn't address this at all.
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I'm in wait-and-see mode but I'm going to make sure I keep busy in the meantime.
Think about it, using almost the same glyph-transliterations (mostly-EVA) and almost the same approach (substitution code), different people have "translated" the same text as Latin, French, Italian, Romani, Turkish, Sanskrit, English, Welsh, Hebrew, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Greek, Finnish, and probably a few other languages I haven't yet read about.
In any document that's long enough, if the shapes that look like consonants and the shapes that look like vowels are balanced so one follows the other throughout the text, you are going to find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of words in almost any language you can imagine. The trick is to find an approach that looks at the text as a cohesive whole so that it confirms itself, so meaning doesn't have to be wrestled out of it or imposed upon it. I haven't see that yet.
Not so excited after watching the video. They will have to show how they go from the transliteration to the translation (which wasn't really covered in the video) because they did not address any of the problems inherent in the lack of diversity and positional constraints in the VMS text compared to natural languages.
They do allow for multiple interpretations (mostly pronunciation) in some of the characters, but they still interpreted many of the glyphs according to EVA designations and if you do that, such as reading EVA-i as "i", then they are already in trouble in terms of structural differences between natural language and Voynichese.
Also, if you take a very common token and translate it (as a month-name, for example), then you have to account for why it would occur with extreme frequency in other places in the manuscript where one would not expect to see that particular word (or to see it with such great frequency). They didn't address this at all.
.
I'm in wait-and-see mode but I'm going to make sure I keep busy in the meantime.
Think about it, using almost the same glyph-transliterations (mostly-EVA) and almost the same approach (substitution code), different people have "translated" the same text as Latin, French, Italian, Romani, Turkish, Sanskrit, English, Welsh, Hebrew, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Greek, Finnish, and probably a few other languages I haven't yet read about.
In any document that's long enough, if the shapes that look like consonants and the shapes that look like vowels are balanced so one follows the other throughout the text, you are going to find dozens, sometimes hundreds, of words in almost any language you can imagine. The trick is to find an approach that looks at the text as a cohesive whole so that it confirms itself, so meaning doesn't have to be wrestled out of it or imposed upon it. I haven't see that yet.