29-04-2021, 10:34 PM
RenegadeHealer, I appreciate your feedback and your suggestion. But I'm not sure exactly how this would work. See, I'm afraid I don't believe a hypothesis about the possible origin and authorship of such a manuscript is so very readily "falsifiable" as a hypothesis in the natural sciences would be. This is not a theory of physics or chemistry or even biology. It doesn't necessarily have any grand universal application that requires a whole host of things to be true if it is true. Either there is or there is not sufficiently substantial evidence in favour of the hypothesis to support the likelihood of its being true, but there's not necessarily going to be any particular piece of contrary evidence that could prove definitely or certainly that it must be wrong. The closest thing I am aware of, which I just discussed in recent posts in this thread, is the analysis of the script that some scholars argue points to a more likely Central European origin. And I have addressed that. But beyond such things, which even themselves are not 100% definite, there are simply so few things that we know for certain about the Voynich manuscript, that I very much doubt that it will be possible to find a "negative smoking gun" that somehow proves that such a hypothesis must be wrong. I don't think theories about this manuscript work that way. I abandoned my previous theories because methodological problems were found: excessively great ambiguity in the letter values of the characters in one case; excessively poor and essentially non-meaningful text in the target language in the other case. But I'm not aware of any proof or strong negative, contrary evidence that they must be wrong; rather, it was found that there was simply an absence of any evidence that they were correct. Falsifiability works very well for hypotheses in the natural sciences; it has more limited application in a strange literary and palaeographic mystery puzzle such as the origin, authorship, and meaning of the text of the Voynich manuscript.
That said, if someone thinks they can identify such features of the manuscript, of course I am always happy to listen and learn. I have done so already, and taken such observations, by Anton and by other scholars, into account. But on the other hand, just because somebody finds one detail that does not have an immediate explanation according to my hypothesis, I'm not going to be in a rush to abandon the hypothesis just because it can't explain one particular detail yet. Perhaps a perfectly logical explanation of everything will be found later, and I simply haven't been able to think of every good explanation of every detail yet. I believe I have found a strikingly substantial set of meaningful lines of text, with a consistent and not excessively ambiguous correspondence table of characters and letter values, along with a set of cipher rules that I have specified in precise detail. I consider that to be significant, substantial evidence. To be frank, I now consider the probability that the line "Spur soueth hoter: theiris son riseth o bimoueth" occurred by pure random chance coincidence from my correspondence table and cipher rules to be very extremely low. I cannot say exactly "how many sigmas" yet, but I dare say I think it is quite a few sigmas of statistical significance in that line alone, especially in the word "bimoueth" spelled backwards. Then there is the line after that, the first line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the center ring of text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the center ring of text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the three words of text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the two words on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , and finally [otol] = "fous", which I found first of all before any of these other pieces of text. And all of those things express meaningful Middle English or in the case of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. meaningful French text, all with the exact same correspondence table of characters and letter values and the exact same set of precisely specified cipher rules as I have explicitly spelled out recently in this thread. I will be blunt, I think that is an awful lot of meaningful text in meaningful places in the ms!!
So I would also like to pose the question in the opposite direction, and ask those who do not believe that there is Middle English text in the ms and do not believe that an English person or people could have written the ms, to please explain exactly how all of those examples of meaningful text, now getting more numerous than just a few words in a few places, could possibly be a complete and total coincidence?
Geoffrey
That said, if someone thinks they can identify such features of the manuscript, of course I am always happy to listen and learn. I have done so already, and taken such observations, by Anton and by other scholars, into account. But on the other hand, just because somebody finds one detail that does not have an immediate explanation according to my hypothesis, I'm not going to be in a rush to abandon the hypothesis just because it can't explain one particular detail yet. Perhaps a perfectly logical explanation of everything will be found later, and I simply haven't been able to think of every good explanation of every detail yet. I believe I have found a strikingly substantial set of meaningful lines of text, with a consistent and not excessively ambiguous correspondence table of characters and letter values, along with a set of cipher rules that I have specified in precise detail. I consider that to be significant, substantial evidence. To be frank, I now consider the probability that the line "Spur soueth hoter: theiris son riseth o bimoueth" occurred by pure random chance coincidence from my correspondence table and cipher rules to be very extremely low. I cannot say exactly "how many sigmas" yet, but I dare say I think it is quite a few sigmas of statistical significance in that line alone, especially in the word "bimoueth" spelled backwards. Then there is the line after that, the first line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the center ring of text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the center ring of text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the three words of text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , the two words on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , and finally [otol] = "fous", which I found first of all before any of these other pieces of text. And all of those things express meaningful Middle English or in the case of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. meaningful French text, all with the exact same correspondence table of characters and letter values and the exact same set of precisely specified cipher rules as I have explicitly spelled out recently in this thread. I will be blunt, I think that is an awful lot of meaningful text in meaningful places in the ms!!
So I would also like to pose the question in the opposite direction, and ask those who do not believe that there is Middle English text in the ms and do not believe that an English person or people could have written the ms, to please explain exactly how all of those examples of meaningful text, now getting more numerous than just a few words in a few places, could possibly be a complete and total coincidence?
Geoffrey