[Article] Cheshire at it again: "Palaeographic Instruction for the Ischia Manuscript"

[tavie]

Saw on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.that Cheshire has a new You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. out.  Since it was only uploaded published six days ago, I'd like to think it was a rapid response to Mark's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on categorizing wrong Voynich solutions and creating a "Cheshire category".  But it seems from the pdf that it was a submission to Academic Letters in November. 

The paper explains his "methodology" , and so unsurprisingly it's a short note.  The method basically consisted of:

1. deliberately avoiding researching previous attempts because "the solution required an intuitive approach" and "an open mind unpolluted by the ideas of others or any prior linguistic rules"
   
2. identifying the vowels by their higher frequency
   
3. identifying the consonants by "many experiments with short manuscript words" and cross-referencing those with Latin 
   
4. finding any missing consonants that were not in Latin in Romance languages instead.  This led him to conclude that the language is a hybrid of Galician-Portuguese with Greek and Latin.  The Greek is because the manuscript describes a rescue mission from Ischia which had a Greek population.  
   
5. noting that many consonants omitted because it reflects the spoken language and not usual spellings.
   

Some other points:

• Cheshire notes "the lack of formal grammar results in some ambiguity in exact transliteration and interpretation of the text"  You don't say...
  
• Oddly he notes that avoidance of confirmation bias is part of the scientific discipline but gives zero evidence of how he tried to avoid it.  Polluting his brain with other theories and why they failed might have been a good start!
  
• A conclusion that computational methods could never solve the Voynich: "it required a certain kind of human brain."
  
• He's also compiling a lexicon, meaning there's more to come...