geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Yes. I believe this is a rather small number of changes to have to make in order to produce a text with as much not only meaningful and grammatical text but also moreover historically relevant text to political events in England in 1405.

I understand that you need to make changes in order to convert the Voynich text into something that you consider legible and meaningful, but I am talking here about the process that would have been followed by the composer of the text, according to your proposal.

This person would have changed:

" kirche-eek -- irour-isynge, picchynge, path-isynge -- is also accitynge tir-biri "
" siest side, lo! sis dis-lisynge "

into:

" KrcheeeK  irOrisK  pYcK  pthisK  isOsl  KtisK  tir  iriB "
" sYOs  Ydis  lO  sis  dislisYeK "

but for no reason at all.

It can hardly have been to make it end up more Voynich-like.

This is the generic problem of all four-step solutions, that only look at the decryption of the text, and ignore what the composer would have had to do.

I want to answer this objection very clearly, and explain very patiently and in precise detail how the composer of the text did have a very good reason to make precisely the changes in these two lines that you claim this person would have made "for no reason at all".

The reason was to make the characters for the letters "Y", "O", "R", and "K" appear as frequently as possible throughout the final form of the text.

The change "irour-isinge" -> "irOrisK" makes the character for "K" appear at the end of the word, just as it does in the word "YORK".

The change "picchinge" -> "pYcK" likewise makes the character for "K" appear at the end of the word, as in "YORK", and it also makes the character for "Y" appear in the word rather than the character for the letter "i". Again, the composer of the text made both these decisions because the goal was to make the characters for the letters in "YORK" appear as frequently as possible throughout the MS text.

The change "path-isinge" -> "pthisK" again makes "K" appear at the end of the word, as in "YORK". Further, the composer of the text omitted the letter "a" from the MS text entirely for two reasons: Because "a" is both of the first two vowels in the word "Lancaster", and because omitting "A" from the alphabet entirely makes "B" the last letter of the backwards alphabet, and putting "B" in last position is a theme of the MS text, the reason being to make the first letter of the hated name "BolingBroke" appear last rather than first everywhere.

The change "is also" -> "isOsl" again omits the letter "a" for the reasons explained above, and further this spelling makes the character for the letter "O" appear in the middle of a word rather than at the beginning or end of a word, which is consistent with the medial position of the letter "O" in the word "YORK".

The change "accitinge" -> "KtisK" again omits the letter "a" for the reasons explained above, and again makes the character for "K", which appears in "YORK", appear as frequently as possible in the text, including at the end of the word, as in "YORK".

The change "biri" -> "iriB" makes the letter "b" appear in the last position in the word and in the line. The letter "B" is thus "banished" (or I should say "dehsinab") to the last position in every way possible in the text, for the reason that the composer of the text desired to make the first letter of the hated name "BolingBroke" appear in last position in every possible way.

The change "siest" -> "sYOs" makes the characters for the letters "Y" and "O" appear in this word where otherwise they would not. This achieves the composer's goal of making the letters of the word "YORK" appear as frequently as possible throughout the MS text. 

The change "side" -> "Ydis" makes the character for the letter "Y" not only appear in this word where otherwise it would not, but also moreover makes "Y" appear as the first letter of the word as written, just as it does in the word "YORK". 

The change "dis-lisinge" -> "dislisYeK" makes the characters for the letters "Y" and "K" appear in this word where otherwise they would not. Moreover, this change makes the character for the letter "K" appear in final position in the word, just as it does in the word "YORK". 

I hope that this detailed explanation of each reason that the composer of the text had to make each and every one of the changes in these two lines of text helps to clarify for readers the process by which my theory proposes that the Voynich MS text was composed.

Geoffrey