[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[Torsten]

There is already a thread about the paper from 2020. If you have anything to say about it please use this thread.

Torsten: I understand the structure of your argument perfectly well.

Your post doesn't refer to any observation or argument I had presented in one of my papers. Instead you write something about Gordon Rugg, about missing topics which I actually address  and what you suspect from Neal keys. This suggests that you didn't have anything to say about my argument or about the structure of it.

At the same time, it seems to me that the idea of edit distance autocopying that originally motivated that argument has had to be modified significantly along the way - the 'rules' of the underlying 'space' have had to be expanded from individual glyphs to groups of letters in order to keep the claim going, which is uncomfortable at best (somewhat tortured at worst).

There was no significant modification of my theory. It is not even possible to calculate edit distances for individual glyphs since the edit distance is designed to measure the difference between words. Therefore your idea that the argument about some edit distances changed from letters to glyph groups doesn't make any sense.

This reminds me most of Gordon Rugg's claims, which similarly started out simple but had to be progressively modified along the way to overcome basic objections (in his case, line start, line end, Currier A vs B, then intermediate languages, and do on). In the end, his argument ended up being all special cases and no actual substance. From my perspective, these are both arguments that try to explain away Voynichese rather than actually explain it.

Every theory stands on its own. What you have to say about Gordon Rugg's theory can therefore only say something about Gordon Rugg's theory.

Features like Neal keys, line start, line end, themed languages, out of order line writing are problematic for every theory, whether cryptographic, linguistic, or hoax.

If Voynichese was essentially flat and language-like, then both autocopying and table generated text would be acceptable hypotheses, because that is exactly the kind of text you would expect them to produce.

Yet in your zeal to support autocopying, you spend all your efforts playing down all the difficult non-flat stuff, because those behaviours don't fit your model. In my opinion, though, those are the most interesting parts of Voynichese as a system, because they fit nobody's model.

There is simply no need to downplay Neal keys, line start, line end, themed languages. They all are examples of repetition that do in fact support our claim. For instance we explain the themed languages as gradual evolution of a single system from Currier A to Currier B in our paper from 2020 (see Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 7). I also had published a whole chapter about "The line as functional entity" (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 18ff) and a whole chapter about "The paragraph as a functional entity" (see Timm 2015, p. 26ff) and I also address an example of out of order line writing (see Timm 2015, p. 34).

For example, I suspect that top-line Neal keys are the system's equivalent of a single-word rubric - a way of highlighting a word at the top of a page or paragraph. Clearly this isn't compatible with autocopying: but it's not something that deserves to be dismissed because it is incompatible with autocopying, because autocopying actually says nothing about those things it cannot explain.

Sorry, but there is simply no need that mine or any theory must be compatible with what someone suspects.