19-08-2016, 03:56 AM
Blimey, if I had a dollar for each time someone takes a snidey pot-shot at me in online forums, I'd surely have been able to buy my own Flaming Cross of Goa by now, right? *sigh*
Anyway... of late, some people have taken to falsely asserting that both William Friedman and John Tiltman didn't think Voynichese was written in cipher. However, Anton above accurately summarised the real situation: they while they both (and indeed Elizebeth Friedman too) were sure that Voynichese was not written using a simple substitution cipher, it remained unclear to them exactly what kind of cipher or code it was.
Yet the direct and unmistakeable corollary of what all three agreed is that Voynichese cannot itself be a natural language - as noted, "Languages simply do not behave in this way". This is not an optional part of what they concluded, it's a central plank of their shared view of the Voynich Manuscript.
And perhaps because the position I've maintained for the last decade (that Voynichese is an elegant and visually deceptive mixture of verbose cipher, scribal shorthand, and even transposition cipher) is essentially a more nuanced version of Tiltman's position from 40+ years ago, I can see why some people are so quick to disrespect me: because I too agree with that same corollary - that whatever Voynichese is, it most certainly isn't a natural language.
At the same time, I would heartily agree that it would be nice if Stephen Bax's hypothesis could be made to fit more than eight words (badly) out of a text that is many thousands of words long: but the problem is that it can't. Nor will anyone else's obscure-or-warped-natural-language hypothesis fare any better by that same measure: because they can't either.
In fact, you can find around ten English words in the EVA dictionary (purely by chance): and indeed around the same number of French words. Which would surely seem to suggest that there's more chance that the Voynich Manuscript was written in plaintext English in EVA than in whatever fractionally-reconstructed polyglot Ur-language that Bax continues to try to propose.
At the same time, what for me has devalued the discourse most is that Stephen Bax's ongoing defence (of what by any objective standard makes no statistical or practical sense) has encouraged others to put forward their own multitude of equally fragmented and broken pro-linguistic theories. And Bax's public attacks on me have encouraged others to attack me in broadly the same way.
Only in the hall-of-mirrors world of post-Baxian Voynich research would anyone dream of making ad hominem attacks on me to try to undermine what Tiltman and both Friedmans concluded half a century ago. Yet that is exactly what continues to happen, both here and elsewhere.
Anyway... of late, some people have taken to falsely asserting that both William Friedman and John Tiltman didn't think Voynichese was written in cipher. However, Anton above accurately summarised the real situation: they while they both (and indeed Elizebeth Friedman too) were sure that Voynichese was not written using a simple substitution cipher, it remained unclear to them exactly what kind of cipher or code it was.
Yet the direct and unmistakeable corollary of what all three agreed is that Voynichese cannot itself be a natural language - as noted, "Languages simply do not behave in this way". This is not an optional part of what they concluded, it's a central plank of their shared view of the Voynich Manuscript.
And perhaps because the position I've maintained for the last decade (that Voynichese is an elegant and visually deceptive mixture of verbose cipher, scribal shorthand, and even transposition cipher) is essentially a more nuanced version of Tiltman's position from 40+ years ago, I can see why some people are so quick to disrespect me: because I too agree with that same corollary - that whatever Voynichese is, it most certainly isn't a natural language.
At the same time, I would heartily agree that it would be nice if Stephen Bax's hypothesis could be made to fit more than eight words (badly) out of a text that is many thousands of words long: but the problem is that it can't. Nor will anyone else's obscure-or-warped-natural-language hypothesis fare any better by that same measure: because they can't either.
In fact, you can find around ten English words in the EVA dictionary (purely by chance): and indeed around the same number of French words. Which would surely seem to suggest that there's more chance that the Voynich Manuscript was written in plaintext English in EVA than in whatever fractionally-reconstructed polyglot Ur-language that Bax continues to try to propose.
At the same time, what for me has devalued the discourse most is that Stephen Bax's ongoing defence (of what by any objective standard makes no statistical or practical sense) has encouraged others to put forward their own multitude of equally fragmented and broken pro-linguistic theories. And Bax's public attacks on me have encouraged others to attack me in broadly the same way.
Only in the hall-of-mirrors world of post-Baxian Voynich research would anyone dream of making ad hominem attacks on me to try to undermine what Tiltman and both Friedmans concluded half a century ago. Yet that is exactly what continues to happen, both here and elsewhere.