Voynich Decoded

[rikforto]

I think you may misunderstand how I work, I'm not an academic and as such I'm not jumping through academic hoops, 

I do not misunderstand how you work, I have identified gaps in your explanation of how you work and asked for an explanation.

I appreciate you want answers to all your questions and if you took your time and read through my very first decode the full methodology of where I started is there, you may need some tech help to find it but scroll all the way down the academia page, the very first one from april and start there, then work your way through and you'll have all the answers you've asked for :-) 

I had discovered Academia requires a log in to even know if papers exist, and after assuring it I was not an expert on the inner workings of public school principals, I found what follows. Please let me know if this is not fair snapshot in light of the questions that follow and what would be a fairer synopsis of what you wrote.

The glyph 'i' was identified as one, later interpreted as one hour, 'p' as Leaf to Latin terms plantae folio, later refined to sun, followed by temporal markers 'd' (Day) and 'n' (Night), later refined to Noon and Midnight. The glyph 'e' was initially a single unit or portion, then mapped to seasons, and finally to Moon Phases through data-driven pattern analysis of its repetition (e, ee, eee, eeee), aligning with 15th-century herbal context.

It may not be obvious to you as the person who made them, but there are a number of claims here. I have identified the kind of proof they require in parenthesis:

1. EVA-i is identifiable as one (process of identification)
   
2. EVA-i can be refined to an hour (process of refinement)
   
3. EVA-p can be identified as a leaf (process of identification)
   
4. EVA-p can be refined to be the sun (process of refinement, including in what sense that is "refined"; it was more straightforward in #2)
   
5. There are temporal markers
   
6. EVA-d is a temporal marker Day (process of identification)
   
7. EVA-n is a temporal marker Night (process of identification)
   
8. EVA-n can be refined to Noon and Midnight (process of refinement, with special attention to discriminating the two cases)
   
9. EVA-e can be mapped to the Moon phases (process of mapping, see #10)
   
10. EVA-e was identified using a data-driven analysis (the data and analysis)
    
11. "15th-century herbal context" is a well-defined and understood point of comparison (providing that information)
    
12. Depending on how one reads the commas, either EVA-e or the entire set aligns with said herbal context (providing that comparison)
    

I could continue in a similar vein for a good number of other claims, so this is hardly exhaustive, but the nature of my criticism is quite clear from the above. 

That said, the one other thing I would like to highlight is this:

The manuscript’s design mirrors 15th-century herbal charts

Which charts? The fault may be partially mine, but I cannot find an example of such a thing, let alone in your work. If such a thing exists and you can show a concordance between the chart and manuscript, you may well have cracked this thing! But you need to establish that such charts existed and can be mapped onto a text with an unknown alphabet in order to actually demonstrate the concordance.

You are well within your rights to take as much time as you need to formulate a response, or not respond at all; at no point have I rushed you. In fact, I would appreciate an answer where you have more thoroughly considered the gaps I've identified, and I expect that establishing some of these connections will take time, and may need to be answered in a different forum. This is all fine. But, as long as you find time to assert new dimensions to this, do not be surprised if people find time to point out places it may not be especially convincing. (I do understand your process for analyzing Medici's surname, which differs from my confusion at how you identified the glyphs, and I notice that you have no response to the issues I've identified.

As for the probabilities you list in the follow-up, the issue is the same. You need to justify the concordance between the supposed charts in the manuscript, historical charts you say existed in practice, and the plant (or human, as the case may be) drawings you have asserted before they can be said to be the correct ones. Knowing that an LLM generated that analysis explains a good deal; for instance, why there is no "Visual-textual correspondence" in the information that follows that header. Nothing in your decryption, even in free-form translation which introduced terms not in your key, of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows that it is a lemon tree. (Mind you, I am open to that being the identification, I just don't see the textual correspondence.) The odds of that having been hallucinated are greater than 1/50, to say the least. But we can sidestep this statistical argument if you simply justify the claims I have been asking you to and repeated in more detail above.