18-10-2021, 08:52 PM
Hi Siv
Thanks for your reply. I want to stress once again that I admire much about your paper. The way you try to keep a logical system while at the same time juggling Voynichese's many oddities is not an easy task. Several of the plants you use seem like the most sensible identifications (water lily, viola...) though as always with the VM others are much less certain.
And it is especially refreshing that you offer a relatively clear way for others to test your system. Often there is a lot of hocus pocus hidden under the hood, which makes falsification impossible.
My two points of criticism remain though:
1) I think that purely statistically, you would be surprised at how many sentences your system could produce from one Voynichese sentence. "P" that could also be "B", vowels that can be inserted... Those things all multiply. More fundamentally, I think the combination of vowel dropping and fuzzy consonants is a big problem. Some writing systems like Hebrew drop vowels, but those use a very rigid consonant system. If both your vowels and consonants are uncertain, I'm afraid the cipher is too lossy.
In your attachment, how is it you get from "whan" to [aiin]? This already feels like a big stretch, since you tend to transliterate [aiin] as "ewn" which becomes something like "hewen" for "heaven". Having [aiin] stand for "hewen" or whatever spelling of the word is perfectly fine, but if "whan" is also [aiin], possibilities are getting out of hand. Further on we have these translations:
[daiin] - dóun, dóuen, theuen, thung
[aiin] - even, wen
[kaiin] - twein
[taiin] - keome
[oaiin] - houven
[chaiin] - leove
[saiin] - swene
This means that [aiin] can correspond to ME óun, óuen, euen, ung, even, wen, wein, eome, uven, eove, wene. And these are not spelling variations, they are different root forms with different pronunciations and different meaning in Middle English.
If every word in a Voynichese sentence has even only two different translations, then a sentence of ten words will give you over a thousand options. Note that this does not take into account the usual ambiguity like homonyms; the system conflates unexpected, unrelated words.
2) I don't think dialect matters much when it comes to testing a cipher. Agreed, things like omission of initial "h" might influence certain statistics, but overall the letter combinations that are possible in any English dialect far outweigh those that can be achieved in Voynichese. I think you will notice this if you try to convert more English texts to Voynichese: no matter which dialect or type of source text, you will keep running into the same problems.
Thanks for your reply. I want to stress once again that I admire much about your paper. The way you try to keep a logical system while at the same time juggling Voynichese's many oddities is not an easy task. Several of the plants you use seem like the most sensible identifications (water lily, viola...) though as always with the VM others are much less certain.
And it is especially refreshing that you offer a relatively clear way for others to test your system. Often there is a lot of hocus pocus hidden under the hood, which makes falsification impossible.
My two points of criticism remain though:
1) I think that purely statistically, you would be surprised at how many sentences your system could produce from one Voynichese sentence. "P" that could also be "B", vowels that can be inserted... Those things all multiply. More fundamentally, I think the combination of vowel dropping and fuzzy consonants is a big problem. Some writing systems like Hebrew drop vowels, but those use a very rigid consonant system. If both your vowels and consonants are uncertain, I'm afraid the cipher is too lossy.
In your attachment, how is it you get from "whan" to [aiin]? This already feels like a big stretch, since you tend to transliterate [aiin] as "ewn" which becomes something like "hewen" for "heaven". Having [aiin] stand for "hewen" or whatever spelling of the word is perfectly fine, but if "whan" is also [aiin], possibilities are getting out of hand. Further on we have these translations:
[daiin] - dóun, dóuen, theuen, thung
[aiin] - even, wen
[kaiin] - twein
[taiin] - keome
[oaiin] - houven
[chaiin] - leove
[saiin] - swene
This means that [aiin] can correspond to ME óun, óuen, euen, ung, even, wen, wein, eome, uven, eove, wene. And these are not spelling variations, they are different root forms with different pronunciations and different meaning in Middle English.
If every word in a Voynichese sentence has even only two different translations, then a sentence of ten words will give you over a thousand options. Note that this does not take into account the usual ambiguity like homonyms; the system conflates unexpected, unrelated words.
2) I don't think dialect matters much when it comes to testing a cipher. Agreed, things like omission of initial "h" might influence certain statistics, but overall the letter combinations that are possible in any English dialect far outweigh those that can be achieved in Voynichese. I think you will notice this if you try to convert more English texts to Voynichese: no matter which dialect or type of source text, you will keep running into the same problems.