09-04-2016, 12:45 PM
VViews:
There are two problems with what you ask of me:
- I never asked someone to produce an example that explains an entire section. (If I ever did, I'm very sorry.) Most of my remarks were aimed at concrete statements or comparisons. For example, at some point Helmut Winkler said the following, in relation to the animal's scales being a sheep's wool:
I then said that I would have liked to see an example of this - he stated that a large number of examples existed, so it's not an unreasonable question.
He then linked You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Perhaps you can see why I was a bit disappointed.
Then people (including myself, because I wanted to help this ongoing line of investigation) produced very specific images of the golden fleece and this nebuly line ram, to explain this image. Again, my criticism remained to the point: both the nebuly ram and the golden fleece are recognized as a ram because of the iconic horns, which the VM animal is missing.
When I offer the example of Byzantium, I do so in an attempt to provide a context in which my observations could coexist. It's not a perfect context, but this statement is already of a higher level than the ones I'm criticizing. By no means I see the VM as a typical product of Byzantine culture, or any culture for that matter.
You won't find a complete parallel for any VM section in any other manuscript. If that existed, in any culture or time, we would have found it already and the Voynich would have been solved. The possibility exists that, like I believe, MS Beinecke 408 is the result of various older sources being copied and adapted, possibly several times, each source and each copy leaving its own marks.
I don't ask people to provide a perfect parallel for an entire section, because such a thing is impossible.
The level of questions I do ask, however, I can usually answer about my own work. If you have questions of this level, please ask them, and I will try to answer:
- "Pattern x is common in y." --> can I see an example?
- "This is a ram because it appears with a nebuly line" --> many other things appear with lines of this type. It does not help to identify the animal.
- "It's still a ram though." --> Why doesn't it have curly horns?
- "It's a nebuly line, like in heraldry." --> In that case, isn't it strange that little effort seems to have been made to make the bulbs symmetrical, while some wavy lines in Voynich plants do show decent symmetry?
These are all simple, to the point questions based on one or two arguments, about those specific arguments. I'd love it if people asked such questions about my work. These questions can be answered, debated... Or they can give the author a chance to explore some problems about his statements.
There are two problems with what you ask of me:
- I never asked someone to produce an example that explains an entire section. (If I ever did, I'm very sorry.) Most of my remarks were aimed at concrete statements or comparisons. For example, at some point Helmut Winkler said the following, in relation to the animal's scales being a sheep's wool:
Quote:you can see these curls on medieval images of sheep again and again
I then said that I would have liked to see an example of this - he stated that a large number of examples existed, so it's not an unreasonable question.
He then linked You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Perhaps you can see why I was a bit disappointed.
Then people (including myself, because I wanted to help this ongoing line of investigation) produced very specific images of the golden fleece and this nebuly line ram, to explain this image. Again, my criticism remained to the point: both the nebuly ram and the golden fleece are recognized as a ram because of the iconic horns, which the VM animal is missing.
When I offer the example of Byzantium, I do so in an attempt to provide a context in which my observations could coexist. It's not a perfect context, but this statement is already of a higher level than the ones I'm criticizing. By no means I see the VM as a typical product of Byzantine culture, or any culture for that matter.
You won't find a complete parallel for any VM section in any other manuscript. If that existed, in any culture or time, we would have found it already and the Voynich would have been solved. The possibility exists that, like I believe, MS Beinecke 408 is the result of various older sources being copied and adapted, possibly several times, each source and each copy leaving its own marks.
I don't ask people to provide a perfect parallel for an entire section, because such a thing is impossible.
The level of questions I do ask, however, I can usually answer about my own work. If you have questions of this level, please ask them, and I will try to answer:
- "Pattern x is common in y." --> can I see an example?
- "This is a ram because it appears with a nebuly line" --> many other things appear with lines of this type. It does not help to identify the animal.
- "It's still a ram though." --> Why doesn't it have curly horns?
- "It's a nebuly line, like in heraldry." --> In that case, isn't it strange that little effort seems to have been made to make the bulbs symmetrical, while some wavy lines in Voynich plants do show decent symmetry?
These are all simple, to the point questions based on one or two arguments, about those specific arguments. I'd love it if people asked such questions about my work. These questions can be answered, debated... Or they can give the author a chance to explore some problems about his statements.