Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[Ahmet Ardıç]

Hi Ahmet,
thank you for the additional information!
Since a few years, I believe that labels may be a good way to test a proposed solution. So I had a look at your analysis of the Libra roundel in f72v1 (discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

For comparison, I paste here Takahashi's and Zandbergen-Landini's transliterations of these words:

TT  otalal.dalal.ykeols.oteos.aiin.yotoam.oteey.saiin.oteoos.am.

ZL.r otalal.dalal.ykeols.oteo,r,aiin.yotoam.oteey.saiin.oteeos,am

ATA1 OYAPAP SAPAP ÜLCÖP 2 ÖYCÖ ZAĞN 9 OYOEK OYGU ZAĞN OYGÖZEK
ATA2 AY+AHBAP SAPIP ÖLÇÜP 2 ÖLÇÜ-SAĞIN 9 AYA+EK AYGI SAĞIN AY+GÖZEK
ATA3 AY+AHPAP SAPIP ÖLÇÜP İKİ ÖLÇÜ-SAĞIN DOKUZ AYA+EK AYGI SAĞIN AY+GÖZEK

English Translation: “Hey friends, with using the deviating measurement (scale), to make two net-right-measurements for clearly expressing that period over nine months, let's count the months and observe the moon with the tool.”

Comment:

From here we understand that the author's message is for pregnant women.

I don't see any great difference between this translation and other similar attempts, e.g. Cheshire's proto-romance or the recent Hebrew solution by Rainer Hanning.

Here are a few observations and suggestions. I am not a linguist nor any kind of expert, it's just the point of view of a Voynich amateur.

*A*
From how it is presented, the above translation appears to be a word-salad which does not strike me as very meaningful.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about Hanning's Hebrew solution come to mind:

The overwhelming feeling is that Hannig, having extracted Hebrew letters for a Voynich word, then scoured Hebrew dictionaries for any word, archaic and rare as it may be, for anything that will match or semi-match.

Your Turkish-English translation is notably a-grammatical, e.g. it only includes impersonal verb forms (present participle, infinitive, imperative). The approach seems to be: 1) map to Latin characters, 2) browse a dictionary to get a word salad, 3) get some sense out of it. This is the most widespread Voynich translation approach. It works with any language, but it requires renouncing to grammar.
Suggestion: provide more details about verifiable grammatical structures, showing that your approach is very different from those of other "solvers".

*B* 
"Hey friends" sounds like a strange thing to write in a short text at the centre of a page for a central sign in a several pages long zodiac section. I must say I don't think I have ever read anything similar in a medieval manuscript. Is this formula something that is often found in Turkish medieval scientific manuscripts?
Also, the two different meanings of saiin in a single sentence should be supported by parallels in actual documents.
Suggestion: attach examples from other Turkish manuscripts for all the constructs for which parallels exist. Expect anything that is not clearly documented to be considered unconvincing.

*C* 
In the German You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Libra is called "die wag" ("the scales" in German). In the Latin You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it is called "Libra" ("the scales" in Latin).
This is totally normal in European manuscripts. I don't think that "the deviating measurement" is the normal way to say "the scales" in Turkish? Isn't there a simpler word?
Also, the words that should point to pregnancy ("nine months" and possibly the moon), are:
1. the immensely frequent voynichese glyph y which is arbitrarily detached from yotoam and interpreted as the Arabic number 9 (rendered with the Turkish word "dokuz")
2.  oteoos.am which is arbitrarily re-arranged as ot-eoosam;  eoosam is read as GÖZEK, of which it is said:  "The word '+ GÖZEK' is used for observing the sky with a tool and for counting months/days. (Which mean looking to the moon/sky with binoculars or with a lens-observation-tool.) From the handwriting written here, we understand that the author observed the sky with using some kind of lens instrument. (We think at the same time that the author carefully wrote this manuscript with using a magnifying glass. The author should probably have also looked small creatures with using magnifiers for seeing those which creatures invisible with looking naked eye...)"
I would like to see a dictionary entry for GÖZEK, but even if there actually is an entry for "observing the sky with a tool and counting months", I don't think that translating as "nine months" is legitimate. y (nine) and eoosam (counting months?) are separated by four other Voynichese words: it seems implausible that they are closely connected.
Suggestion: always link specific entries in an online-available dictionary or add quotes of a specific Turkish-English dictionary. And, again, make clear the grammatical relationship between words. Maybe parse-trees could help?

*D*
It seems you are not familiar with what others have found about the  Voynich manuscript. For instance this is your comment about the "octe(m)bre" annotation: "This word should have been added in a later period by a different person by using a different pen. We think that this addition was added by the antiquarian Voynich or one of his workers at the time period." Researchers substantially agree on dating the month names to the late XV / early XVI Century; there is no reason to believe that they are as late as the XX Century. But this is just a minor example, you don't seem to be aware of Currier's languages, line effects, low character entropy, reduplication and quasi-reduplication, Grove words etc.
Suggestion: read what others have written about Voynichese (Rene's voynich.nu site is a great resource) and show how your Turkish hypothesis can explain the phenomena that other researches have pointed out in the past decades.

---

There are many people who published translations which are similar to yours in both method and results. If you are not satisfied with Turkish TV and you want to reach a wider, unbiased audience, your best hope is being more rigorous than your numberless competitors.

You wrote:

I am very confident in saying that "in the future, no linguist will be able to prove that VMS writing is not Turkish if her/his professional knowledge of Turkish language is not weak" for sure. 

Things don't  work that way. If you claim that the VMS is written in Turkish, the burden of proof is on you. Linguists are totally free to ignore your claims. On the contrary, you should provide solid evidence in support of your ideas. The translation you propose appears to be comparable with other Voynich translations written in different languages. Of course it is impossible to prove that the VMS is not Turkish (or Latin, or Hebrew etc). This does not show that your hypothesis is better than others, it only shows the current state of Voynich research.

Hi MarcoP,

Thank you for your suggestions. Yes, you are right in some of your suggestions. Our web page is still in the testing phase and you are right, we should share more dictionary links for more words and we nee to share more information for sure. I think I have some carelessness problem and I accept them and I will complete the shortcomings in our web-page as I find time.

I can say that I am currently focusing on reading new sentences in my spare time and I am ignoring the shortcomings temporarily.

Since my English is not good, I cannot fully understand long texts and texts that are not written in simple words in English.

May be researchers are wrong about the calendar issue.

There is no lunar calendar in VMS. Here in VMS, there is a farmers calendar. Farmers follow nature and divide a year into 12 parts. For example, there are definitions such as (orak / orak ayı ) "when (time) they mow cereals in the field".
For example, in the farmers calendar ORAK is a month period. The author wrote this word in VMS as 'ÇAĞI ORAK' (harvesting time).

ORAK (Temmuz = July / See 'Türkiye Türkçesi Ağızları Sözlüğü'
orak anlamı 1. Ekin biçme zamanı = Crop mowing time)  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

ORAK AYI (Temmuz = July)  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

ÇAĞI mean time and period (the root is ÇAĞ and '-I' is the word suffix) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
“-İ/-I”: these are an Object Pointer Suffixes (Turkish Direct Object Suffix (accusative) such as “the” in English). (Clauson, Guise) There is a construction in Turkish which means "belonging to". In English generally only the possessor is marked as in Ahmet's car. The 's tells us that the car belongs to Ahmet. The possessed (Formation of the Possessed) item in Turkish is suffixed with -i, -ı, -u, 

So, 'ÇAĞI ORAK' mean 'harvesting period' and 'July time'.

In other words, this is not a moon calendar for sure.

I have not studied the Hebrew claims much, but I have only partially read them. If you see both studies (our claim and the Hebrew claim) at the same level, or you think our claim is weak than any other possibility for VMS, you may be really far from linguistics. But this is normal because trying to understand Turkish deeply is a very demanding job.

There are linguists who have confirmed our study. Over time, their number will increase because there is still no awareness about this issue in the Turkish language geography.

I read this VMS texts in Turkish like my daily Russian newspaper, so there is no other area (such as Hebrew) for us.

Unfortunately, you don't know old Turkish or any of the current Turkish dialect therefore, my advice to you is to start with simple sentences if you want to test our work. Believe me, Turkish is a very difficult language to learn structurally. For this reason, it is best to start with simple and short sentences, even if you want to get into this issue a little.

My suggestion you first start to find a short complete sentence, especially working on VMS which book "nobody read before".

As you know, when writing VMS texts the author never use any punctuation marks that indicate that the sentences are over. So, How do we know where a full sentence begins and ends? And how can we separate short sentences? My suggestion is to find a complete short sentence first in VMS writing in order not to be confused in Turkish. Because this issue is very, very important. This question should be asked to everyone who works on VMS. Where do the sentences start and where do they end? Any sentence analysis can not start without knowing this in any language. I have not met anyone before who has thought deeply about this detail. But if we can't analyze a sentence, how do we prove the claims? So we need to separate the sentences for beginning. 

It would be a more logical approach for those who do not speak Turkish to enter the subject with short sentences.

Let me help you with this. We know clearly that the VMS f-65r is written in a full sentence. Because there is only one 3-word sentence on this page. That is why it is a complete sentence.

Please see VMS f-65r:  
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

My advice to you is not to try to understand everything suddenly. Let's start with this page, which we are sure it is a short sentence. Moreover, there are only 3 words and it is simpler to discuss.

Here is the sentence in Folio 65r; OYAIK SAK APAK

Old Trk. / Modern Turkish
OYAIK   / AYAK  (foot) >  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
SAK      /  SAK  (and 'SAP') (stalk) > 
[please see the dictionary link
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
to see the section 'Güncel Türkçe Sözlük' area for in the dictionary page; 'sak(II)' / (sa:k) Abbreviations; bit. (bit = bitki = plant) sak = sap, esk. (esk = eski Türkçe = Old Turkish) ] 
APAK    /  APAK  >  (Apak means Tombul, gürbüz, sevimli in Turkish and fat, chubby, cute in English). 

See this link for APAK
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This Sentence in old Turkish:        OYAIK SAK APAK
Same sentence in todays Turkish: AYAK SAK APAK
(and also "AYAK SAP APAK" is same think)

In this sentence, the author refers to the roots of the plant with the expression (ayak sak) mean 'the stalk foot'/'stalk foot' in English.

AYAK SAK APAK means "The stalk foot is fat (and/or) cute"

As you can see, the spelling of 2 words in this sentence has never changed in 600 years. 

In the first word (OYAIK), the first voice changed when compared with today's Anatolian Turkish. The 'O' sound changed as 'A' in time and this is the dialectal issue only. There are still sub-dialects in Uzbek Turkish that speak this word as OYAK. In addition, the second vowel in the word OYAIK fell next to each other as '-AI-'. The sound '-AI-' turned into the sound '-A-' in time. There are many examples of this in Turkish. 

As a result, there is a very minor difference between the word OYAIK in the dialect of the author became AYAK today, and these are the closest words. In 600 years, this little voice change seems incredibly clear. There is no linguist who can deny these writings in the world. In other words, I think if any Turkish linguist who can say that "this 3-word sentence is not Turkish" I can say he/she probably has a mental problem.

Thanks,

Ahmet Ardıç
ATA Team Alberta

For more information for this sentence analysis please see this link You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.