Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[Ahmet Ardıç]

The best alphabet transcription is the one that allows us to read the largest number of words correctly.

[I'm starting to understand that when you talk about your ATA transcription, you mean just your alphabet, not transcription of the entire text of the manuscript?
Is that why you never give the number of occurrences of the words examined, because, quite simply, you don't know it?
And yet, if you have your alphabet, you can easily match it with a transcription /transliteration of your choice, to allow your readers to read the manuscript in Turkish.]

Dear Novacna,

I don't understand exactly what you mean by your question. I don't understand what you mean by the term "your alphabet". In linguistics, an "alphabet transcription" refers to the process of representing the sounds or symbols of a writing system using the letters of another alphabet, typically the Latin alphabet. I wrote that VM text signs can be at least 340 and at most 360 and shared the images. There is no "my alphabet".

When I say ATA alphabet transcription here, I am talking about the table of sound value correspondences of VM script signs (representing the sounds or symbols of a writing system of VM to Latin letters) with Latin letters.

All syllable signs appearing in complex forms are read from the direction where the handwriting begins to the direction it ends. The letter signs, which appear intertwined with each other, are read from the outside to the inside. If one sign is above the other, they are also read from bottom to top. The writing direction throughout all pages is from left to right, and when these texts are read from left to right when a syllable character arrives, you will continue to the left to right by voicing it from outside to inside and from bottom to up. If you follow our previous reading examples carefully, you will already understand what I am talking about.

The most important detail here is to understand how to read compound characters (syllable signs). When this is understood, you will see that all these syllable signs are read as 24 simple sound images, a few tamga signs, and the sound values of the forms of the numbers (as shown in the ATA tables). There is no need to memorize the sound values of 340 different signs to read these texts. Because compound/syllabic characters have already been derived from a small number of signs, we have understood how this derivation is made. This being the case, you can write any word with simple signs or syllable signs. So much so that the author has already done this in the writing of certain words.

In other words, there are no capital letters here. The strange and long-looking signs are multi-syllabic signs and some of them are even just one complete word.

If what you want to say to me is something like "Now you have transcribed these signs, you should complete the readings quickly"; I have written before why texts cannot be read quickly. I also mentioned how the task of translating these texts into today's language could be accelerated. I won't repeat it here.

Old English and original Shakespeare texts were written with the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, but the orthography and some characters (like thorn "þ" and eth "ð" in Old English) varied. Ordinary people can't read old original Shakespeare texts easily because the varying orthography and occasional use of unfamiliar characters like thorn "þ" and eth "ð" make it difficult to understand. In addition to the varying orthography and occasional use of unfamiliar characters like thorn "þ" and eth "ð" in Old English, other factors that make reading old Shakespeare texts difficult include archaic vocabulary, syntax differences, and the evolution of word meanings over time. These elements combine to create significant challenges for modern readers attempting to understand the original texts.

Even any linguist whose main subject is Old English cannot read Shakespeare's texts as if he were reading a newspaper, and cannot understand them immediately. Their translation was a process that took years, with long discussions over each sentence. Even today, some linguists continue to debate the meaning of some words used at that time.

So, if you can read an original Shakespeare text that is approximately 400 years old and written in 26 simple letters and understand it immediately, and if you can quickly translate these old texts into today's English (that is, at least if you have such an ability), I guess you can also understand what process and how long it takes to translate VM texts. You can try to empathize a little with how it can be read. Of course, it will take some time to translate the agglutinative language texts written with 340 to 360 script signs using abbreviations in a local dialect of Turkish 600 years ago into today's language.

But actually, you can speed up this whole process if you want. First of all, perhaps one in 10 thousand linguists working in the field of Turkology is aware of the existence of this VM manuscript. So they don't even know this manuscript exists yet.

Anyway, I don't want to waste time rewriting the troubles in this process. First of all, the following processes will not accelerate that much until the common misconception that VM content will be in one of the European languages is eliminated. We will continue to carry out translations in our spare time, through the efforts of me or three or four others. You can be sure that the content is mainly in Turkish and one day the entire book will be translated into today's. 

When you look at the quality and number of evidence we have presented carefully and scrutinizing the details, even if you do not know Turkish, if you have some logic and some mathematical probability awareness, you will understand that we have deciphered the language of VM texts. 

Or, without understanding this, you will continue to search IE languages in VM content for the next hundred years. I think some of you may want to leave the task of decoding VM texts in one of the European languages as a legacy to your grandchildren, considering that you may not live to live that long.