Paul, you devote a lot of space to explaining how Latin has "general ambiguity" and how it can be difficult to translate certain words. This might be true for someone unfamiliar with Latin, but it is not a problem for those who know Latin. There are many Latin scholars.
Personally I don't find Latin to be especially ambiguous. Try Japanese. It is very nuanced and much of it is understood through knowing the culture rather than it being said outright. A Japanese-born Japanese teacher said to me, "Well, this could mean three things... it just depends... it could mean... [insert different interpretations]." This happens quite frequently with Japanese. Much more so than with Latin. And yet people still manage to translate Japanese texts.
As long as you have a big enough corpus, you don't have to get every word. You just have to get enough of the sentence to work out the word.
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It's confusing for readers when you mention Capricorn as one of the "respective star signs" in the context of a "series of 12 drawings" and then a few sentences later state that Capricorn is missing. It would be better to list respective star signs that actually exist in the manuscript.
The month name is not "roughly decipherable" as "abiril". It says "abiril" in 15th-century Gothic script. And saying it "could mean April" is an odd way to put it, as though you are unsure. It does translate as April. There is no ambiguity about the month names. They are abbreviated Gothic script with spellings that are specific to a particular region.
As for the argument that Frederick III might be involved, I'm not going to argue against that. I have a list of "persons of interest" with regard to the VMS (about 35 names, but some are higher on the list than others) and he is one of the people on the list, for the very reasons you mentioned... he was interested in astrology, plants, and ciphers.
You need to read the information on binding on Rene Zandbergen's site. What you have written is speculative and does not fit the facts. The rebinding happened later. A number of the manuscripts that had been bound within boards were suffering from worm infestations and were rebound.
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For those who have not read Paul's paper, it essentially says that the positional characteristics of the VMS text can be overcome by treating the "o" character as a wildcard vowel, by assigning two or more letters of the alphabet to each Voynich character, and by treating it as abbreviated Latin.
Personally I don't find Latin to be especially ambiguous. Try Japanese. It is very nuanced and much of it is understood through knowing the culture rather than it being said outright. A Japanese-born Japanese teacher said to me, "Well, this could mean three things... it just depends... it could mean... [insert different interpretations]." This happens quite frequently with Japanese. Much more so than with Latin. And yet people still manage to translate Japanese texts.
As long as you have a big enough corpus, you don't have to get every word. You just have to get enough of the sentence to work out the word.
.
It's confusing for readers when you mention Capricorn as one of the "respective star signs" in the context of a "series of 12 drawings" and then a few sentences later state that Capricorn is missing. It would be better to list respective star signs that actually exist in the manuscript.
The month name is not "roughly decipherable" as "abiril". It says "abiril" in 15th-century Gothic script. And saying it "could mean April" is an odd way to put it, as though you are unsure. It does translate as April. There is no ambiguity about the month names. They are abbreviated Gothic script with spellings that are specific to a particular region.
As for the argument that Frederick III might be involved, I'm not going to argue against that. I have a list of "persons of interest" with regard to the VMS (about 35 names, but some are higher on the list than others) and he is one of the people on the list, for the very reasons you mentioned... he was interested in astrology, plants, and ciphers.
You need to read the information on binding on Rene Zandbergen's site. What you have written is speculative and does not fit the facts. The rebinding happened later. A number of the manuscripts that had been bound within boards were suffering from worm infestations and were rebound.
.
For those who have not read Paul's paper, it essentially says that the positional characteristics of the VMS text can be overcome by treating the "o" character as a wildcard vowel, by assigning two or more letters of the alphabet to each Voynich character, and by treating it as abbreviated Latin.
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