From "decryption" to "translation"

[geoffreycaveney]

I mention Voynich stars because I've studied them some years ago, and I wrote an extensive You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about them, so for me those are the most familiar labels with some statistics at hand.

I would be very careful about considering labels as names, that is, as plain designations. JKP is right that we should be careful even about nouns, but I'd say that names are even unlikely. The "Voynich moons" of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are even more discouraging in that respect than Voynich stars, I believe I have posted about that in the forum, I can't see the way and haven't seen any successful attempt to map those into month names in any language. For the stars, consider "otol" which is the most frequent Voynich star, and it even is mentioned in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (along with "odaiin" which is second most frequent), and then it is seen in totally different visual contexts (see Section 3 of my article cited above), which quite precludes "otol" from being a designator for what is depicted. Rather, it (and any other Voynich star) is a reference to something which is not depicted. And the star names should be guessed (by the reader) by way of their positioning on the star map - just like plant names should be guessed through mnemonics.

We have to keep in mind the possibility of homonyms: the same word "otol" could be the name of a star in a label, and a completely different word in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and elsewhere, and it just happens to be spelled the same way in the language of the Voynich ms. Likewise "odaiin" could be the name of a star in a label, and a completely different word in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and elsewhere, and it also just happens to be spelled the same way.