22-08-2016, 11:57 PM
(This post was last modified: 23-08-2016, 12:05 AM by ChrisHagen.)
Hi Don - thanks for taking your time to reply and for explaining your ideas. I like that a whole lot more than some zealots who might just say: "Come on! Open your eyes - don't you see it?!" 
I'm on the verge of falling asleep (getting late in Europe) but I will keep a tab open in my browser with your "Method of exactly how to deconstruct..." blog post - and read it tomorrow.
Reading the quote you included here, though, I am far from convinced yet. As you say yourself, "it is a leap of faith to get this far", and yeah, okay, I see the similarities to the cannabis plant in the leaves and the flower buds, but what's going on with the root-to-stem transformation? Why are there extra stems with leaves coming out of the root? Why are the leaves and flower buds not together, but seemingly delegated to separate parts of the plant? Why are there so few leaves? Why is the plant so small, judging from the scale of the leaves?
I ask these questions because I believe they could incite thought and speculation - not to be rude! I like to keep the position of the "skeptical", not taking anything for granted.
Also I want to commend you on the work you are doing, making .PDF files and so on. Even if I'm not convinced by your transliteration of the glyphs into Middle English (I think that if this were a simple substitution cypher, it'd have been broken centuries ago) or your expansion of the transliteration into whole words, I do believe you are making some correct identifications of mnemonic devices in roots and leaves. My personal "pet theory" is that the plants are not drawn in a way to identify them botanically, but rather that the drawings are just as (ok, maybe a bit less...) encrypted as the text.
The tough part about all of this, anything about this silly book really, is then to *prove* anything beyond doubt. We know so little. Baresch, Kircher, de Tepenec... then Jesuits owned it, W. Voynich bought it... it ended up at Beinecke. Vellum is c. 1st half of 15th century. Ink is iron gall... I mean, the list of knowns is so short, and the list of maybes is so long! Of course, this is why we all love it, right?
I'm on the verge of falling asleep (getting late in Europe) but I will keep a tab open in my browser with your "Method of exactly how to deconstruct..." blog post - and read it tomorrow.
Reading the quote you included here, though, I am far from convinced yet. As you say yourself, "it is a leap of faith to get this far", and yeah, okay, I see the similarities to the cannabis plant in the leaves and the flower buds, but what's going on with the root-to-stem transformation? Why are there extra stems with leaves coming out of the root? Why are the leaves and flower buds not together, but seemingly delegated to separate parts of the plant? Why are there so few leaves? Why is the plant so small, judging from the scale of the leaves?
I ask these questions because I believe they could incite thought and speculation - not to be rude! I like to keep the position of the "skeptical", not taking anything for granted.
Also I want to commend you on the work you are doing, making .PDF files and so on. Even if I'm not convinced by your transliteration of the glyphs into Middle English (I think that if this were a simple substitution cypher, it'd have been broken centuries ago) or your expansion of the transliteration into whole words, I do believe you are making some correct identifications of mnemonic devices in roots and leaves. My personal "pet theory" is that the plants are not drawn in a way to identify them botanically, but rather that the drawings are just as (ok, maybe a bit less...) encrypted as the text.
The tough part about all of this, anything about this silly book really, is then to *prove* anything beyond doubt. We know so little. Baresch, Kircher, de Tepenec... then Jesuits owned it, W. Voynich bought it... it ended up at Beinecke. Vellum is c. 1st half of 15th century. Ink is iron gall... I mean, the list of knowns is so short, and the list of maybes is so long! Of course, this is why we all love it, right?