Decoding the Voynich Symbols

[Koen G]

I don't get this fear over copyright issues.  Maybe I'm imagining it but it seems we've had several theorists in the last year or two fixating on this, and it doesn't seem it was a common worry before.

I find questions like these very interesting: why do we keep seeing similar behaviors in people who believe they've solved (or are solving) the manuscript. Note that this is different from the "psychoanalyzing" of individuals I spoke out against recently. The MS clearly does something to people in general that often leads to the same results.

I do have some first hand experience with this. When I first started researching the MS, I hadn't really read all that much about its textual properties yet. I guess talk of conditional character entropy wasn't all that mainstream yet as it is today. Anyway, I found that it was actually quite intuitive to find some translations for labels using an internally consistent system.

What happens then is that you're overwhelmed by the fact that it actually works. You show some friends and they say "wow, I can't believe you can actually read this thing". You feel like the solution was there in plain sight, and that somebody else might also stumble upon it tomorrow. So you need to be fast. Get it out there, stake your claim. That's really the driving mechanism, I believe. As a typical solver, your solution seems so obvious to you, that someone else must come across it sooner or later. So you have to be quick to claim it. This feeling drives a lot of the behavior we see in people who think they found the key.

So then comes the dilemma. You can show that it's yours by making the information public. But then other people will obviously start working with your method and one of them will translate the whole MS faster than you and they'll get all the credit.

Expectations like these also explain in part why theorists often don't react well when it turns out their system doesn't work and they're just one in a long, long line of people going through these same experiences. The interactions with others are opposite to what they had envisioned.

Anyway, that's just my view on the broader phenomenon. My advice to you, 5dd95 is to simply publish your findings in the way that is most convenient to you, and expect constructive criticism rather than plagiarism.