15-05-2021, 02:28 PM
(15-05-2021, 01:53 PM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is quite a list of good reasons why your theory cannot be correct, but I also agree that transliteration accuracy is not one of them. I think I already wrote it before, but the changes you introduce, seemingly arbitrarily, are orders of magnitude greater than any transliteration errors.
These very significant changes are necessary of course, because, without them, the Voynich MS text cannot be mapped to Middle English (or Latin, German, Greek etc etc), as demonstrated by the Voynich of Bennett, Stolfi, etc.
Even with all these changes, I have extreme doubt about the validity of the resulting plain text.
I am happy to debate and discuss any particular analysis of reasons why you or others may believe that my theory cannot be correct. I do dispute the characterisation of the "Yorkist cipher" rules that I propose as "arbitrary" (or rather the claim that I introduce them "seemingly arbitrarily"). A particular strength of my current theory is that I have provided a very clear reason and motivation for the cipher authors to introduce these cipher rules which curiously reduce the entropy of the resulting cipher text: The aim was to make the letters of the word "YORK" appear as frequently as possible throughout the MS text. That may be bizarre, but it is not arbitrary; it may be a very strange reason, but it is not without reason. Further, an additional aim was to make the first letters of "York", "Mortimer", and "Percy" appear as the first letter of as many words as possible throughout the MS text; to make the final letters of "YorK" and "MoRtiMeR" appear as the final letter of as many words as possible; to make the first letter of the hated name "BolingBroke" appear as the last letter in almost every word in which it appears, and almost never as the first letter of a word; and even to make characters and combinations with very similar physical shapes to the characters for "Y", "M", and "P" -- that is, the characters for "th", "n", "t", and the combinations representing "f, v" and "d" -- also appear as the first letter of as many words as possible throughout the MS text. Yes, all of this may be even more bizarre, but it cannot be called "arbitrary": There is a clear reason and even a political motivation for the choice of letters involved. All three words "York", "Mortimer", and "Percy" are the family names or titles of the principals of the rebellion against Henry IV in the period 1403-1406 and the following years.
Geoffrey