05-08-2024, 01:48 PM
I think the poster above fails to understand that the comparison used depends on what the researcher is seeking to discover.
These are both worthwhile questions and it's foolish to criticize research which explicitly looks at one for not using the methods of the other. For example, when a researcher starts her presentation with the words, "Much research which analyses the text of the Voynich manuscript focusses on its general properties, but I want to look at smaller patterns which exist between words and glyphs.", it seems odd to reply, "Well, I prefer to compare the Voynich text with natural languages."
But, just to humour the poster above, let me state that I did compare my results with that of a natural language. In Latin, the "feature patterns" which the test picked up on were things such as prepositions and the case of the following word. I didn't include that in the presentation because it would be highly misleading as to the nature of those relationships in the Voynich manuscript. But it's clear that important characteristics of a linguistic text can be identified with the test.
Really, the key thing which much of the presented research lacks---and I'm 100% guilty of this---is good analysis. We don't always understand what the patterns and exceptions mean, how they fit together, and what broader rules and processes in play must be. Some suggestions, such as tavie's vertical avoidance rule, are incredibly interesting, but still hard to understand their reasoning and import. But I'm glad that we keep finding new things, or even just new perspectives on things, as we'll never know what small piece of data is important. We're doing well to avoid wild flights of fantasy, building hypotheses on slender grounds, and clinging onto them for a decade without self-awareness that we might be wrong.
- Answering a question like "What kind of text is this?" requires comparison to other texts.
- Answering a question like "How does this text work?" requires comparison of the text with itself.
These are both worthwhile questions and it's foolish to criticize research which explicitly looks at one for not using the methods of the other. For example, when a researcher starts her presentation with the words, "Much research which analyses the text of the Voynich manuscript focusses on its general properties, but I want to look at smaller patterns which exist between words and glyphs.", it seems odd to reply, "Well, I prefer to compare the Voynich text with natural languages."
But, just to humour the poster above, let me state that I did compare my results with that of a natural language. In Latin, the "feature patterns" which the test picked up on were things such as prepositions and the case of the following word. I didn't include that in the presentation because it would be highly misleading as to the nature of those relationships in the Voynich manuscript. But it's clear that important characteristics of a linguistic text can be identified with the test.
Really, the key thing which much of the presented research lacks---and I'm 100% guilty of this---is good analysis. We don't always understand what the patterns and exceptions mean, how they fit together, and what broader rules and processes in play must be. Some suggestions, such as tavie's vertical avoidance rule, are incredibly interesting, but still hard to understand their reasoning and import. But I'm glad that we keep finding new things, or even just new perspectives on things, as we'll never know what small piece of data is important. We're doing well to avoid wild flights of fantasy, building hypotheses on slender grounds, and clinging onto them for a decade without self-awareness that we might be wrong.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)