(26-04-2020, 08:17 PM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Surely, if "A" therefore "B" gives rise to complications, then: "A" and "B" and possibly "C" therefore "D" and perhaps "E" will be much worse.
Deriving conclusions from the similarity of a particular drawing the Voynich MS with a drawing in another manuscript is a typical example of the lemon/banana problem. There may be lots of other drawings in other manuscripts that are equally similar, and it is also possible that the similarity is coincidental. After all, the basic patterns included in it are fairly standard.
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This is EXACTLY why it takes me so long to write blogs, why it takes me so long to post research I did years and years ago.
You find something that looks similar. For example, John Watson, the palaeographer, declared that he was very sure that the foliation was in the handwriting of John Dee. It IS very similar handwriting.
But I am always suspicious of things that are similar if I have not looked around to see if there are OTHER things that are equally similar (or moreso). And guess what. Over the course of 10 years I found a few examples of handwriting that were equally similar and some that might be more so. It takes a long time to confirm or deny similarity.
I really wasn't comfortable talking about the VMS zodiac figures until I had collected about 500 hundred examples of complete zodiac cycles. I honestly didn't feel that 20 or 50 or even 300 was enough to make any kinds of generalizations about them. Now I have about 700, about 620 or so that are complete. It is reaching my comfort zone. I would be even happier if I had 800 but it's becoming extremely difficult to find any I don't already have.
The same goes for many aspects of the VMS. I have collected about 3,000 samples of script that bear a resemblance to the style of writing on folio 116v, but even though I've put a ridiculous amount of effort into this, I have only found a couple of dozen that are really close based on the mathematical system I developed to compare them more objectively.
It's not enough to fully put me in my comfort zone. I'm having trouble finding ones I don't already have (you have to look through about 20,000 manuscripts to find 3,000 samples) but I still don't have enough data to definitively say where the script originated. I am getting close, but I'm not there yet. As I said, it takes a long time and a lot of effort to confirm or deny how genuine a similarity may be.