I have always been quite intrigued both about the possibility of Arabic language or script behind the Voynich MS writing, and about star names in the MS. So when I first saw this paper, I made quite an effort to see if I could reconstruct his name matches from the information in the paper, and see how consistent it all is.
After all, consistency is one of the weak points in almost all proposed solutions.
This effort led me to quite a number of sobering insights.
1. He is extremely vague precisely about how to match the Voynich writing to Arabic. This should be a critical element of the paper
2. The main tables for this topic: Figures 5 and Figures 7: do not match.
3. His main key is the star name Alrischa. This name appears in the paper in 8 different ways (or even more?). Figure 2 already has one in the box and one in the caption. In the text we have "Al Rescha" and "Al Resha". Caption of Figure 3: "Alresha" pronounced "Arrisha". Figure 4 has two more. It turns out that the one matching Voynichese is the caption of Figure 2, which is completely different from all the other ones. The apostrophe matters.
4. It was very hard to understand from all his writing, that the correspondence between Arabic and Voynichese he is proposing is a phonetic one. This of course contradicts the match in Figure 2, which is not phonetic at all.
5. I have not been able to find a convincining match (at all!) for the vast majority of star names in Figure 4 or Figure 5.
Short summary: this is not working at all.
Now on the question of the mysterious Alphonsine barrel in Figure 39, here I need to be more critical of the collected voynich.ninja readership than of Fletcher Crowe. At least he has done his basic reading
.
After all, consistency is one of the weak points in almost all proposed solutions.
This effort led me to quite a number of sobering insights.
1. He is extremely vague precisely about how to match the Voynich writing to Arabic. This should be a critical element of the paper
2. The main tables for this topic: Figures 5 and Figures 7: do not match.
3. His main key is the star name Alrischa. This name appears in the paper in 8 different ways (or even more?). Figure 2 already has one in the box and one in the caption. In the text we have "Al Rescha" and "Al Resha". Caption of Figure 3: "Alresha" pronounced "Arrisha". Figure 4 has two more. It turns out that the one matching Voynichese is the caption of Figure 2, which is completely different from all the other ones. The apostrophe matters.
4. It was very hard to understand from all his writing, that the correspondence between Arabic and Voynichese he is proposing is a phonetic one. This of course contradicts the match in Figure 2, which is not phonetic at all.
5. I have not been able to find a convincining match (at all!) for the vast majority of star names in Figure 4 or Figure 5.
Short summary: this is not working at all.
Now on the question of the mysterious Alphonsine barrel in Figure 39, here I need to be more critical of the collected voynich.ninja readership than of Fletcher Crowe. At least he has done his basic reading
.
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