09-04-2019, 01:58 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-04-2019, 02:02 PM by -JKP-.
Edit Reason: fixed typos
)
There are numerous ways of mapping the text to the Latin alphabet and since the earlier transcripts have been mostly abandoned in favor of later ones, the authors should have included a brief transliteration chart rather than making hundreds or thousands of readers hunt up old transcripts in order to understand the paper.
The conclusions are based on many assumptions:
This is one of the conclusions:
"If our capitalization hypothesis is correct, it entails that the symbols in the Voynich manuscript is a
variation of European alphabets. The use of capitalization is limited to European alphabets, such as Latin
script, Greek script, and Cyrillic script. Therefore, the Voynich script is written in either one of these systems
or some variation related to them."
The author does acknowledge that acceptance of numerous glyphs as capitals "significantly" reduces the phonetic values, but gives no explanations as to why readers should accept a conclusion that includes too few values to define an alphabet in any of the languages mentioned in the previous conclusion.
It doesn't look to me like it's well argued or completely thought out.
Personally, I don't care if Voynichese turns out to be right-to-left or left-to-right because I always look at it both ways, but a paper for specific directionality should be argued better than this (it should explain why someone would get rid of a big chunk of the alphabet in order to include capitals).
The author has a 50-50 chance of being right, it's probably one direction or the other (probably not vertical), which means that even a coin-toss (without any research), has a pretty good chance of being right.
The conclusions are based on many assumptions:
- The text is natural language.
- The text includes capital letters.
- The spaces are literal.
This is one of the conclusions:
"If our capitalization hypothesis is correct, it entails that the symbols in the Voynich manuscript is a
variation of European alphabets. The use of capitalization is limited to European alphabets, such as Latin
script, Greek script, and Cyrillic script. Therefore, the Voynich script is written in either one of these systems
or some variation related to them."
The author does acknowledge that acceptance of numerous glyphs as capitals "significantly" reduces the phonetic values, but gives no explanations as to why readers should accept a conclusion that includes too few values to define an alphabet in any of the languages mentioned in the previous conclusion.
It doesn't look to me like it's well argued or completely thought out.
Personally, I don't care if Voynichese turns out to be right-to-left or left-to-right because I always look at it both ways, but a paper for specific directionality should be argued better than this (it should explain why someone would get rid of a big chunk of the alphabet in order to include capitals).
The author has a 50-50 chance of being right, it's probably one direction or the other (probably not vertical), which means that even a coin-toss (without any research), has a pretty good chance of being right.