15-04-2021, 12:02 AM
Aga: it's different for the marginalia, the images and the main text. Each have their own difficulties in figuring out whether a theory has something going for it.
I actually think proposed readings for the marginalia are incredibly difficult to prove. This is because they don't have much context. When you ask a scholar to help you to transcribe a troublesome word from a manuscript, he will also require context: at least the full paragraph, the work it is from, the language.. All these are required to assess the most likely reading of the word. In the VM, this context is limited and variable, and itself hard to decipher.
To tie this back to the thread title, luckily Voynich solutions for the main text are easy to prove by expanding them to a larger block of text in a repeatable fashion. But nobody has come close.
I actually think proposed readings for the marginalia are incredibly difficult to prove. This is because they don't have much context. When you ask a scholar to help you to transcribe a troublesome word from a manuscript, he will also require context: at least the full paragraph, the work it is from, the language.. All these are required to assess the most likely reading of the word. In the VM, this context is limited and variable, and itself hard to decipher.
To tie this back to the thread title, luckily Voynich solutions for the main text are easy to prove by expanding them to a larger block of text in a repeatable fashion. But nobody has come close.