06-08-2023, 04:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-08-2023, 08:00 PM by Koen G.
Edit Reason: removed excess formatting tags
)
Happy to respond to Torsten's critique.
1) Paleography is, as I have said on multiple occasions, primarily subjective and is based on a human eye interpreting work produced by other humans. Conclusions result from detailed observation combined with experience and expertise. I have studied thousands of early manuscripts in multiple languages in dozens of collections over the last thirty years; published and taught extensively in the field; and am an elected member of the International Committee for Latin Paleography (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), one of only four members from the United States. So I hope that my experience and expertise speak for themselves.
2) Along with anyone else, Torsten is more than welcome to disagree with me in accordance with his own observations, as no one should accept my conclusions without critical analysis. He doesn’t see what I see, which is fine. I leave it to our readers to decide for themselves whose observations they trust.
3) However, elsewhere in his critique of my work, Torsten focuses on the wrong part of my analysis. He has noted on several occasions that he thinks it is a major oversight and methodological flaw that I didn't record which leaves were uploaded to Archetype/DigiPal for initial analysis. In fact, that piece of information (which I can't access anymore anyway) is irrelevant and shows that he has fundamentally misunderstood the point of the Archetype model. Archetype is NOT an automated tool for analyzing visual samples (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It is a visual tool designed to help humans annotate and classify letterforms written by other humans. It does not matter which pages I started with – the choice was fairly random and was just a way to help me get started. Eventually, once I knew which letterforms were going to be diagnostic for identifying scribes in the manuscript (in particular EVA [k], [n], and, to a lesser extent, [f]), I examined every page manually before assigning scribes to each. If Archetype had in fact been an automated system that triggered an AI analysis, the choice of leaves would have been extremely important and of course I would have explained in detail which leaves I chose and why. This critique is, frankly, irrelevant as it has no impact on the results of my work.
4) I understand why it is important to Torsten that my identification of five scribes (or more than one, even) be wrong, as his own conclusions become less likely if there are multiple hands writing Voynichese in internally-consistent ways. His arguments that the manuscript is gibberish and that the A/B distinction is non-existent are directly contradicted by my own work. If there are five scribes, four of whom use Voynichese in very similar ways (2, 3, 4, and 5 writing “Language” B, albeit with scribe 4 showing some important variants), it becomes more difficult to make a convincing case that the manuscript is nonsense and that the A/B distinction is an illusion. I am certain that he will continue to refute me in print and on this site, but I do not plan to rebut his arguments further.
5) Finally, I have issues with the argument that he and others have made about the gradual transition from A to B. While there are clearly issues with making clear distinctions between A and B (and as I am not a linguist or a cryptologist I cannot critique his methodology), that analysis is based on the demonstrably false assumption that the leaves and sections are currently in their original order. They almost certainly aren’t. If we knew the original sequence of leaves (something I am putting a lot of work and thought into at the moment from the perspective of codicological evidence), such an analysis would be welcome.
1) Paleography is, as I have said on multiple occasions, primarily subjective and is based on a human eye interpreting work produced by other humans. Conclusions result from detailed observation combined with experience and expertise. I have studied thousands of early manuscripts in multiple languages in dozens of collections over the last thirty years; published and taught extensively in the field; and am an elected member of the International Committee for Latin Paleography (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), one of only four members from the United States. So I hope that my experience and expertise speak for themselves.
2) Along with anyone else, Torsten is more than welcome to disagree with me in accordance with his own observations, as no one should accept my conclusions without critical analysis. He doesn’t see what I see, which is fine. I leave it to our readers to decide for themselves whose observations they trust.
3) However, elsewhere in his critique of my work, Torsten focuses on the wrong part of my analysis. He has noted on several occasions that he thinks it is a major oversight and methodological flaw that I didn't record which leaves were uploaded to Archetype/DigiPal for initial analysis. In fact, that piece of information (which I can't access anymore anyway) is irrelevant and shows that he has fundamentally misunderstood the point of the Archetype model. Archetype is NOT an automated tool for analyzing visual samples (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It is a visual tool designed to help humans annotate and classify letterforms written by other humans. It does not matter which pages I started with – the choice was fairly random and was just a way to help me get started. Eventually, once I knew which letterforms were going to be diagnostic for identifying scribes in the manuscript (in particular EVA [k], [n], and, to a lesser extent, [f]), I examined every page manually before assigning scribes to each. If Archetype had in fact been an automated system that triggered an AI analysis, the choice of leaves would have been extremely important and of course I would have explained in detail which leaves I chose and why. This critique is, frankly, irrelevant as it has no impact on the results of my work.
4) I understand why it is important to Torsten that my identification of five scribes (or more than one, even) be wrong, as his own conclusions become less likely if there are multiple hands writing Voynichese in internally-consistent ways. His arguments that the manuscript is gibberish and that the A/B distinction is non-existent are directly contradicted by my own work. If there are five scribes, four of whom use Voynichese in very similar ways (2, 3, 4, and 5 writing “Language” B, albeit with scribe 4 showing some important variants), it becomes more difficult to make a convincing case that the manuscript is nonsense and that the A/B distinction is an illusion. I am certain that he will continue to refute me in print and on this site, but I do not plan to rebut his arguments further.
5) Finally, I have issues with the argument that he and others have made about the gradual transition from A to B. While there are clearly issues with making clear distinctions between A and B (and as I am not a linguist or a cryptologist I cannot critique his methodology), that analysis is based on the demonstrably false assumption that the leaves and sections are currently in their original order. They almost certainly aren’t. If we knew the original sequence of leaves (something I am putting a lot of work and thought into at the moment from the perspective of codicological evidence), such an analysis would be welcome.
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