The Voynich Manuscript:Decoded ( theory )

[tavie]

I was wondering how another journal could make the same mistake as Romance Studies.  But a quick You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. gives You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that Medcrave is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  That explains a lot.

Onto the theory...one good thing is that he does try to "test" his initial alphabet against the zodiac names and have a commentary section that acknowledges where the hit misses, although his confidence in the overall conclusion seems quite misplaced.

But apart from that, we see the same basic problems that we see in almost every solution:

• lack of accounting for degrees of freedom.  The Voynichese has been tortured to "match" Arabic but there seems no attempt to categorize the distortions that are made to the word, let alone explain them with the aim of demonstrating consistent patterns of change.  Moreover, for some, I couldn't even see how the identifications in the correspondence table gave rise to the word, e.g. he could have explained better how otolyyty becomes al alyah or otal becomes (al) suhayl.
  
• seemingly no attempt to explain how Arabic - or the way Arabic is used in the manuscript - correlates with the structure of glyphs in Voynichese words and the line patterns.  Nor anything to explain the scribal differences or Currier variants.  
  
• word salads.  To his credit, he did attempt translation of sentences, and even some pages.  That's more effort than 90% of solvers.  But the translations show the same issues we've seen in the few other solutions that attempted a translation.  We see a word salad, and the author makes no attempt to compare it with Arabic syntax.  
  

We go from:  

Word salad:  1 die, live, stay, be buried | 2 death | 3 and | 4a agree | 4b what, which/any | 5 join | 6a fly off | 6b souls waiting for release | 7a accept | 7b mercy | 8 Cathars | 

to

Grammatical-but-strange-English:  "Although buried and [facing] death, the Cathar (souls) are joined [by the Quadi and agree to accept any mercy, and the waiting souls fly off to live again." 

That's quite the leap!  And nothing about whether the first makes any kind of grammatical sense in Arabic.  In the acknowledgements at the end, the author references "Dr Esam Alhadi, originally from Sudan, who guided my Arabic translations"  but there is a conspicuous lack of any proof, or even statement, that the word salad is not a word salad in Arabic too.  The other translated sentences are all of a similar style. 

Are my eyes deceiving me or did he genuinely include an image clearly not from the VMS and claim it to be?

You are not wrong!!  He even further annotates it as "Figure 39 VM Object Showing Name “Alfonsina.”  

It took me ages to track it down, since nothing turned up in google reverse image search.  I've eventually found it You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  It is a sketch of a cannon by Antonio Pisanello, previously thought to be da Vinci's.

That is a huge error to have got through any proofreading, although his publisher has accepted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..