06-03-2019, 02:41 AM
Good points Emma. Wow, "obscurantist Shakespeare". I suppose this means you wouldn't be too impressed by my erstwhile efforts, unfortunately based on overly ambiguous possible letter values for characters, to decipher a paragraph of the botanical section text as an Aramaic translation of an Aristotle quote on plants? 
<Sigh> this is what happens when [sh] can be taken as a ligature of two characters, in either order, each of which could represent any of 3 or 4 related letters. I assure you it was a most poetic translation. Perhaps more poetic than Aramaic, but that is another issue. I won't even mention the bit about Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite... By contrast, my more recent efforts with Hebrew bigrams produce worse output, but with a methodologically much stricter method.
Yes, realistically the knowledge of scholars and researchers about Linear B vastly exceeds our knowledge of the Voynich ms. As I understand it, the biggest difference is that Linear B was more or less governmental record-keeping, the equivalent of census records, inventories, and the like. Even before they came close to deciphering it, in some sense they were still able to relate it to real-world material content. They were even able to distinguish masculine and feminine suffixes based on words next to depictions of men and women! Later they deciphered numbers in a similar manner. The point is, the people who *wrote* the Linear B tablets were trying to be clear rather than obscure, for their own record-keeping purposes.
We cannot necessarily say the same about the person or people who wrote the Voynich manuscript. Most likely they wanted the text to be obscure to the uninitiated, at the very least. Well, they certainly did a very good job of achieving that! How much actual meaning the text could possibly have had for the author(s), or for the initiated, and how many clues they may have left us with all of the illustrations and some of the labels...well, it is just tantalizingly enough to perhaps leave us with the hope of making sense of some of it...perhaps.
<Sigh> this is what happens when [sh] can be taken as a ligature of two characters, in either order, each of which could represent any of 3 or 4 related letters. I assure you it was a most poetic translation. Perhaps more poetic than Aramaic, but that is another issue. I won't even mention the bit about Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite... By contrast, my more recent efforts with Hebrew bigrams produce worse output, but with a methodologically much stricter method. Yes, realistically the knowledge of scholars and researchers about Linear B vastly exceeds our knowledge of the Voynich ms. As I understand it, the biggest difference is that Linear B was more or less governmental record-keeping, the equivalent of census records, inventories, and the like. Even before they came close to deciphering it, in some sense they were still able to relate it to real-world material content. They were even able to distinguish masculine and feminine suffixes based on words next to depictions of men and women! Later they deciphered numbers in a similar manner. The point is, the people who *wrote* the Linear B tablets were trying to be clear rather than obscure, for their own record-keeping purposes.
We cannot necessarily say the same about the person or people who wrote the Voynich manuscript. Most likely they wanted the text to be obscure to the uninitiated, at the very least. Well, they certainly did a very good job of achieving that! How much actual meaning the text could possibly have had for the author(s), or for the initiated, and how many clues they may have left us with all of the illustrations and some of the labels...well, it is just tantalizingly enough to perhaps leave us with the hope of making sense of some of it...perhaps.