Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

Janick and Tucker use the supposed ID of a sunflower and armadillo as a free pass to start speculating like amateur theorists. None of what they write is to be called evidence.

Since the plant and animal depicted in the VMS comes closer to the Mexican sunflower and armadillo than any plant or animal found in Europe, it is indeed evidence that only a fool would ignore. Moreover, the sunflower and the armadillo were also entered into evidence by supposedly sane supporters of the modern-day forgery theory. And, of course, let's not forget about the swamp lily with a white flower, the jalapeño peppers, and the smoking volcano (or is that a native American teepee?). But in general I agree that much of what Tucker and Janick have to say is a stretch, but their overzealous efforts to establish a theory should not negate elements of evidence that are hard to refute.

I guess you're not familiar with the details of plants or of other plants that look similar to the "sunflower" so you just accept at face value a questionable ID.

I don't know why you think their evidence is hard to refute. It's not hard to refute. For every plant that they identify as a New World plant, there are Old World plants that look similar or the same, so the plant IDs prove nothing. The animal IDs are the same, in fact, some of them are even more questionable than their plant IDs. They have tried to tell us that the fish in Pisces are the same species as the fish swallowing the nymph in the pond even though THEY LOOK NOTHING ALIKE and they don't look like alligator gar, either, which is a very toothy fish. The fins are wrong, the nose is wrong, and there are many Old World (and New World) fish that are more similar to VMS Pisces, such as some species of pike.

Their Voynichese translations are questionable also because they did what so many people do, they picked a handful of words that kind-of-work and ignored all the others that don't.

ANYONE can find a dozen or two or three dozen words in the VMS that will map (via substitution code) to various languages. It is not hard. I did it years ago with about seven different languages, but I knew it wasn't a solution. I knew it was an artifact of the way the tokens are constructed.

If you take 200 PAGES of text in random letters (it doesn't even have to be cipher text) that have a somewhat normal consonant-vowel balance, it is possible to PICK OUT words that will map to real words, but when you try to generalize the method to the rest of the text, they do not make real phrases or real sentences and certainly not real paragraphs when the method is applied consistently. Janick and Tucker "explained" this inconsistency by saying maybe it was a mixture of languages. That's not an explanation, that's an excuse for why their method doesn't work (and also shows that they did not acknowledge that the construction of the tokens is very consistent from beginning to end, even when taking into consideration Currier A and B).

Cherry-picking the .1% of tokens that work and ignoring the 99.9% that come out as gibberish and calling it a decipherment is not science.