geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Geoffrey, I couldn’t agree less about the standard of scientific evidence applying here. This is definitely hard science. We’re dealing with a phenomenon that is entirely measurable and testable, by all of us around the world independently, thanks to the digitalization efforts of the Beinecke Library.

If I encoded some unambiguous information with unambiguous symbols, then multiple researchers working entirely independently from each other should be able to retrieve that information, with only trivial differences. The same thing applies here. Someone else, given the same set of transformation rules and the same passage of Voynichese, should pull roughly the same information out of it. When I see that happen, I’ll believe that your system is on the right track.

I believe that is possible indeed. However, as it may possibly have been the case with Linear B, I also believe that it may require a cryptologically, mathematically, and linguistically talented and knowledgeable fellow researcher to spend as much as tens or dozens or scores of hours studying the complicated system of character/letter correspondences and cipher rules that I propose, in order to understand the logic of the system well enough to perform such independent confirmation of my results. So the challenge is to convince any other researcher to invest that necessary amount of time to understand my system in the first place, before such independent confirmation can be carried out in practice.

Also, not all writing is 100% "unambiguous symbols". Every language itself, certainly including English, has "ambiguous symbols". And yes, the cipher rules I propose do create a certain additional level of ambiguity in the possible reading of certain words. But not so much ambiguity as to make "bimoueth" spelled backwards be ambiguous or not recognizable! A three-letter or three-character word on the other hand may be enciphered with somewhat more possible ambiguity: For example, "mos", "mous", "mus", "som", "soum", and "sum", possibly with unwritten unstressed or almost silent e's at the end, would all be written as "MOs". Again, the motive is to make the "M" of "Mortimer" appear as the first letter of the word, and to make the letter "O" in "YORK" appear as often as possible. So yes, that is a certain level of ambiguity. But words like "bimoueth" spelled backwards help to reduce the amount and level of ambiguity of the reading and interpretation of the text as well!

Geoffrey