13-08-2019, 01:59 PM
(10-08-2019, 08:33 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."Proving" is one of these difficult concepts.
I think that it is next to impossible to disprove any of the existing Voynich theories.
The best one can hope to do is to:
- show they are extremely unlikely
- show that they are not based on any evidence
- show that the logic is faulty
(and maybe a few more)
From my point of view, I think it is possible to disprove most existing Voynich theories - for example, I think it is possible to disprove more or less all "pure" linguistic theories, because the way Voynichese works (and indeed, the way the various Voynicheses work) is nothing like English, French, German, Latin, Hebrew, Nahuatl, etc.
The problem comes when people proposing these linguistic theories then go away and hybridize/adapt them to overcome the basic oibjections (e.g. how does language theory X help us make sense of Currier A / B etc? For if it does not, something is badly wrong). These funky hybrids quickly become as complicated than any natural language ever encountered: and the problem then comes that it takes an inordinate amount of time and effort to understand WTF they are (or have become), never mind disproving them as well.
Theories that claim to read the text in some kind of interpretative free-form style yet somehow yielding a readable decryption can normally be disproved by their wonky historical assertions. (Cheshire's text springs quickly to mind here). So there is hope as far as disproving nutty Voynich theories goes.
Cheers, Nick