The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[proto57]

Any argument that roughly states  "poor/ inconsistent use of diacritics in PUG 555-568 texts in the Kircher correspondence means forgery"
would mean that consistent and correct use of diacritics was the norm for the period of time that letters in the Kircher(1601-1664) correspondence were written.
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>Height: 1500–1700
>Latin in school education, 1500–1700
>Orthography >Diacritics

TL;DR Latin from 1500-1700 was a language in flux, allusions, references, styles and pronunciation from regional and national vernaculars
found their way into texts of the time. Standards of Latin education across Europe were not even.

Hi Rob: A few points about what you wrote there:

1) No, this is NOT the argument. You have rephrased the actual argument by writing, "poor/ inconsistent use of diacritics in PUG 555-568 texts in the Kircher correspondence means forgery". I would, and have said it like this, "The poor Latin in the 1665/66 Marci letter, noted by several people including Philip Neal, Thomas Ernst, and several others, is evidence of forgery, along with other serious problems with the letter". That is "evidence of forgery", not "means forgery". It is part of the argument, not the whole argument.

2) You have cherry picked that one aspect of the bad Latin, the diacritical mark problems, maybe because I posted that particular argument here. But I made it clear that it was one of several initial issues with the Latin of that letter, and even linked my blog post on which Mr. Ernst's comments appear. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. But I will post his comments below my answers to you, at the bottom of my page, also. All these must be explained as normal, or for whatever reason, not evidence of forgery, not just the one.

3) You wrote, "... allusions, references, styles and pronunciation from regional and national vernaculars". I've no doubt that is correct. But these blanket statements don't suffice to explain the bad Latin in that letter. It is like the use of the woman professor's blanket statement that Marci's Latin was "cumbersome". It is important to know in what ways these examples would form the bad Latin of the Marci letter, and if they would cause it to appear the way it does.

4) You seem to disagree with others here who DO admit the Latin of the Marci letter is a problem, and not normal practice, and so feel a need to explain it by various means... such as Marci's Latin being bad, and copied by the scribe for one. This is different than your explaining that, in essence, "bad Latin is normal", so it does not matter. So it seems that you might be back to "Marci wrote it". Are you? Which is it? It is a tactic in argument, the "shotgun method", to argue multiple, often contrary explanations for the same phenomenon, and the reason for the need to do this is obvious: There is no good explanation, in fact. The type of problems with the Latin are apparently not within some normal range of what people would write, because one would realize that if it were, it would not have elicited particular notice for its level of "badness" over the years.

5) Tackling just the one aspect of the badness of letter's Latin, diacritical marks, is, as I wrote above, "cherry picking", when all aspects must be explained. But worse than that are the many other problems with that letter, which are part of the overall context the bad Latin exists in. The fold lines, different than any other letter I could find, and which do not work as fold lines for any known purpose, imply this is repurposed paper. The seals don't work with themselves, and they don't work with the stains on the inside of the cover... which, BTW, is supposed to be a much later "addition" to the book (I doubt that. More likely to me is that Voynich grabbed an old 17th c. cover and stuck it on his book made of 15th parchment, precisely because he could date neither. The dates could easily have been reversed, and everyone would be arguing the Jesuits stuck a 15th century cover on a 17th century book). And the paper is from a different source, with a different watermark... now that has been explained away in several ways: Marci had different papers; the "scribe" had different papers... now, I suppose, if Marci supposedly did write it in the first place, he just had different paper. And the Elephant in the Room, of course: Voynich unbelievably claiming his "not noticing" a letter, in a book he had bought, and looked through, and a letter written to the great Polymath Kircher... this escaped his attention? Oh but he tore apart covers to find things, and was a book hound dog, sniffing out rarities no one else ever found.

Point being, ALL this must be considered together, not piecemeal, and the picture it describes is obvious to me. There is such thing as a circumstantial case, and in fact most criminals are convicted on only circumstantial evidence. And, a lower percentage of evidence would usually suffice. With virtually every characteristic of this letter being anomalous... every single one! The script, the Latin, the watermark, the folds, the seals, the given provenance... really there is nothing left. Could this or that aspect be explained to some lukewarm "satisfaction"? Maybe, on the surface. But stepping back and looking at the overall picture... no. I could never defend it as real.

Thomas Ernst's entire first analysis of the problems with the Latin of the 1665/66 Marci letter, for those who have not goneYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

1) “as soon as it […] came into my possession” (both perhaps versio α) → “mox […] cœpi possidere” [3-4], versio β). “as soon as” requires a subordinate clause beginning with “mox ut […]” but Voynich only translated the adverb “soon” (“mox”). Its use here is incorrect, unless you formulate a separate independent main clause. – “coepi possidere”: no one begins to own sth., but someone can begin to take possession of sth., see Deuteronomy 2:31 in the Vulgate. “I began to take possession of my Christmas gift on 24 December.”

      2) “â nullo”, “â se descripta “, “à te” ([5, 7], β). Both the circumflex and the grave accent were used, primarily in printed Latin, to distinguish adverbs and prepositions. In Latin – unlike French – the circumflex was a deictic typographical device to distinguish the ablative case from the nominative: “vitâ functus”, “primâ fronte”, “hâc arte” (letter by Wolfgang Trefler as printed 1754 in the HISTORIA REI LITTERARIÆ ORDINIS S. BENEDICTI, I, 492-496), “nonâ die” (Oliver Legipont, ibid.). The grave was used a) to distinguish adverbs, b) to distinguish prepositions: “citrà”, “adolphvm à glavbvrg” (Tithemius, Polygraphia 1550, ed. Glauburg). In the “Marci-letter”, all three “a” designate the preposition “by” or “from”, and not an ablative. Even if the circumflex in “â nullo” were considered a smudgy grave accent, the one in “â se” is not. Only “à te” is correct. Writers and printers of Latin texts were just as precise about diacritics as writers of modern French are because the diacritics carry as much meaning as the words they are attached to. The Marci-letter has two wrong diacritics and one correct one above the same letter within the space of 29 words.

      3) “persuasum habui â nullo nisi abste legi posse”, “à te legi posse persuasum habuit” ([5, 7-8], β). The repetition of six words occurs within the space of 35 words. The seventy-year old former rector of the University of Praga, with perhaps sixty years of Latin experience, was supposed to have expressed himself in this repetitive gibberish? No one does, even in an acquired second language. Please try yourself to convey the above information in whatever second language you are fluent in. Lexic repetitiveness in close quarters, born out of insecurity, is typical for Voynich’s Latin. It requires more comment than I can deliver in this brief note. Can I comment on this in more than in this brief note?

      4) “deciphering” (versio α) → “discifrando” ([9], versio β): “discifrando” was and is not Latin, it is Voynich’s pseudo-Latin approximation. Alberti wrote “de cyfris” but only used the noun and no verbal derivatives. According to the OED, “to decypher” was used as early as 1528, and it was probably imported from the earlier French “dechiffrer”, Shakespeare uses to “decypher” a few times in its derived meaning, Cotgrave (1632) lists “Dechiffrer. To decypher.”, but there was no such Latin verb in 1665 (or 1666), only circumlocutions. Christian Breithaupt explains this lexic lack in his Ars decifratoria (1737) [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.], p. 84, my translation: “The term Artis decifratoriæ [sic] traces its origin from the French word Dechifrer; hence it is a foreign loanword. For the lack of a native Latin word – with reference to the Latin of Cicero’s time, that is – there is no reason why this faulty foreign import should not be retained [in Latin].” Breithaupt only uses the adjective “decifratori-“, and always in conjunction with “ars” – about fifty times – but never a derived verb; neither does Feijo in his Teatro critico universal (1728/1740), who already writes in Spanish. How did Voynich concoct “discifrando”? First he latinized the English prefix “de-” into “dis-“. While the etymologies of “dis-” and “de-” interwine – see OED – Breithaupt’s “de-“, English “de-“, French “dé-“, Italian and Portuguese “de-“, Spanish “des-“, all give preference to “e”, whether derived from Latin “dis-” or “de-“. The reason is also phonetic in that shifted emphases weaken preceding vowels [i] → [e:], whether “decipher” or “déchiffrer”, and assimilate similar consonants, here the fricativess “sc” →  “ch”- and “c”-. If phonetically inclined, [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.] is time well and pleasantly spent to delve into vernacular pronunciations and dialects worldwide. – To the phonetically impossible “dis-” Voynich added the lexically impossible “cifrare”, perhaps derived from Alberti’s or Porta’s noun “zifra”, or, more likely, just made up. Summa summarum: “discifrando” never existed in Latin, it is not a spelling error or a neologism, it was not written by Marci or his amanuensis. The word was invented by Voynich to translate “deciphering” into Latin.

      5) “presented” (versio α) → “presenta[v/]it” ([17], β). The translation is correct. Whether Voynich’s “e” for ligature “æ” – “e” was common in humanist handwriting (consistently in Tithemius, for example) and in later Latin, “æ” more common typographically – was intentional or just a vernacular slip, cannot be decided. The inner-textual comparison makes it likely that Voynich stayed with the later Latin and vernacular spelling “pre-” by oversight. This hypothesis is corroborated by the “v/r”. Anyone reading the word for the first time, will invariably read “presentarit”; Neal even transcribed it so. This form does not exist, unless it is supposed to be a far-fetched abbreviation for the perfect subjunctive “praesentaverit”. The “v” looks like an “r” because Voynich wrote it as a vernacular “v”, which is a spelling inconsistency. In humanist and later Latin, the “u/v” were spelled both positionally to indicate the beginning of a new word, and phonetically to distinguish their sound quality, sometimes by the same writer. The statistical preference went to initial “v”, but just as easily phonetics defeated visuals. Thus Trithemius wrote „inuen-“ but also „inven-“ (Epistolae familiares 1508). These double spellings are more common in handwriting, because a writer is more wont to enunciate what he reads, while a printer will regularize spelling for the reader’s eye. However, these variations usually do not occur in endings of the perfect stem. If a writer of Latin writes “destinaui”, he will also write “pr[æ/e]sentauit”. Voynich did both. He had trouble distinguishing his Latinized “u” and “v”. If he intended to write “v” for “u” at all, the closest similarity I can find is “[u/v]itæ”. The only letter-shape the “v” of “-vit” ressembles is that of his “r”. An approximation of “r” and “v” only occurs in vernacular handwriting, English, French, German, what have you. “presentarit” presents two, if not three writing inconsistencies: inconsistent inconsistent “u/v”, inconsistent “v/r”. It is impossible that any writer in his/her native or acquired language will produce these variations, be they phonetic or grammatic, within the space of 193 words. It is only possible if you fake a “period”-text in an unfamiliar language by approximation.

      6) “ego”, “nobis”, “me” ([18, 19, 20], β). Whence the sudden plural “nobis”, majestatis or otherwise? A letter writer either refers to him-/herself in the singular or in the plural. No stylistically competent writer would switch the numerus, especially at such a short syntactical distance. Voynich manages the stretch from emphatic “ego” (which is questionable in its own right) to “nobis” back to “me” within 17 words. His slip is contextual: the “judgement” is a serious matter, thus pluralis majestatis. When WV remembers that the unknowing Marci is writing to the all-knowing Kircher he reverts to the singular. “Please tell me the truth, and tell us now, before I forget.”

      7) A brief look at Marci’s other, his “chocolate-letter”, f. 114r, September 1665. It was written by the same hand that wrote the earlier letter. Whether there exists another copy of this letter from which this one could have been copied, someone else will know. The following passage is a little to sweet to be true: “[…] Suppleat succulata bona, quæa […] necessaria est […] quam […] expectabo.” If “succulata” (singular) means “chocolate”, vide the comments on “discifrando”. Voynich may have been familiar with the (contested) Nahuatl loanword theory, and added the chocolate-reference because of the “historiam Mexicanam” mentioned earlier in the letter. The word”succulata”, if it existed – I cannot find it in the glossaries of Du Cange, Furetière or Diefenbach –, would have been a late vernacular import into the Latin language; the discussion of its etymology into vernacular languages is extensive and on-going. Perhaps the writer meant “succulenta” (plural), some succulent sweets. “Suppleat”, if I remember my fifth-grade Latin from a very long time ago correctly, requires an accusative (direct) object. If “succulata bona” was intended to be a neuter plural, the sentence ought to have continued: “quae […] sunt […] quae […]”. If “succulata bona” was intended to be a feminine singular, the sentence should read “succulatam bonam” and can continue as is. If the letter is a copy, it is possible but unlikely that the copyist either forgot to copy the abbreviation lines above the “-ā ” which stand for “-am”, or that he forgot to resolve the overlined “-ā” into “-am”. While English declension endings are quickly driven into extinction – it appears only I still cringe at “Who did you talk to?” – no Latin writer would have casually dropped accusative endings. Marc’s chocolate-letter from 1665 appears to be less of a treat and more of a trick.