Tim King's et al. translation

[MarcoP]

Many thanks to Gioynich for telling us about the paper and the talk and to Tim for stopping along!

The discussion seems to be focussing on Step2, i.e. the Latin words on which the authors base their translation. My impression is that Step1, the output of the phonetic mapping, is also worth discussing. I am particularly interested in the question of whether text in Step1 qualifies as Latin. If one considers the first four lines of f1v, there are three Latin words: iure, ede, duce (two of which are repeated twice): less than 20% of the text is Latin.

aequiren iaduure eseselion iure piure uren
ineloon iure arein edie sacaedn aequedeure ieden
ede aquin aquieaquin sin ed aequacioon ilin aequeelieden duce
duce iaequoa duura deuren useionu iaequeeden

Also, if one compares Step1 and Step2, it turns out that most of the about 60 edited characters affect word endings. Latin grammatical structure is mainly conveyed by particles (like prepositions and conjunctions) and suffixes. Recognizable Latin particles are absent in Step1, and suffixes are systematically altered in Step2. This suggests that the possible presence of Latin grammar in the text does not derive from a phonetic mapping of Voynichese, but from editing by the authors of the paper.

But I must say I am not a palaeographer. Our best hope is that this paper comes to the attention of Lisa Fagin Davis and she gives her authoritative opinion, as she did for other proposed translations.