[Other] Philip Neal's work - new web address.

[Diane]

Philip Neal's pages are now at
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Neal's contributions to Voynich studies are invaluable.

They include his original translations of most of the important documents in Latin, and lucid notes on renaissance ciphers and people.

On a more personal note - I was surprised to see that although we have had Neal's meticulous translation and notes made freely available to us for a decade, that

Thomas Conlon is working on a professional edition of the Kinner-Kircher correspondence, to appear in due course, which will improve on my work.

My immediate reaction was "If it ain't broke don't fix it"  but if Neal knows Mr. Conlon and  believes him able to improve on the original, then  I suppose I must bow to Neal's opinion.  Expect I'll still quote Neal, though.

[-JKP-]

I think it's apparent from the translations that were done on this forum that many translations can be fine-tuned and polished. This You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. discussion of an important passage is a good example.

Neal's translation:

Doctor Raphael, the Czech language tutor of King Ferdinand III as they both then were, once told me that the said book belonged to Emperor Rudolph and that he presented 600 ducats to the messenger who brought him the book. He, Raphael, thought that the author was Roger Bacon the Englishman.

-JKP-:
I interpret the statement as follows (I prefer to keep the grammar as close to the original as possible, even if it isn't "smooth" English):

It was reported to me by D[ominus] Doctor Raphael, King Ferdinand III of Bohemia's Bohemian/Czech language tutor, [who] said the book was Emperor Rudolph's, for which he, to the bearer who brought the book, 600 ducats presented, the author but thought by him to be Roger Bacon the Englishman.

As you can see, if you read them both a couple of times, Neal left out the abbreviation "D[ominus]" (I'm not certain whether this is because he felt it unimportant or because he was not familiar with the Latin abbreviation), and there were some other more important differences:

In my opinion, the original Latin does not say that Raphael thought the author was Roger Bacon, it says "he" which could refer to Raphael but could also be the bearer. I think bearer is a better translation than messenger. There were important distinctions between what we see as a low-status messenger and a bearer.

As to "messengers"... In Rudolph's court, there were a number of very influential noblemen (and one in particular) who were the bearers of messages and items between Rudolph II and the other nobility and "guests" (people like John Dee). So it IS possible that the ambiguous "he" might refer to the bearer rather than to Doctor Raphael. It's important to note that some of these bearers can be identified by name, particularly the one who interceded with Rudolph on John Dee's behalf after he and Kelley were cast out of Prague.


Please note also, that MarcoP fine-tuned my version further, by pointing out the grammatical distinction between "dictum" and "dixit" and that the "[who]" in my translation (which I had in square brackets because I felt implied), was not necessary.


So... Neal didn't expand out an abbreviation (and may not have expanded abbreviations in some of the other translations) and also interpreted "bearer" as "messenger" which may lead to different conclusions about what happened with the 600 ducats... was it passed on to a lowly courier as we tend to interpret the word "messenger" today (I doubt it, how many emperors would entrust 600 ducats to a courier), or was it a more important "bearer/messenger", a nobleman, who may have passed on the 600 ducats or perhaps was the owner of the book and retained the 600 ducats?.




No matter how good a job Neal may have done, some of these translations will never have clear answers, the original passages are too short and rely on knowledge already in the heads of the correspondents that we don't have. Another translator, with a different knowledge set, may put forward a slightly different point of view. He probably wouldn't be undertaking this project if there weren't aspects to it that he felt could be improved upon or be worth discussing.

[ReneZ]

Thanks for this news. I will have to quickly fix the numerous links to his work at my site.

This may be a good place to point out that the oldest reference to the Voynich MS (in a letter from Kircher to Moretus), which I had digitised last year, has also been translated by Philip, with the help of Tom Conlon.
This resolves much of the mystery around it, and the reference to the Illyrian script.

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[Diane]

JKP
Neal adds notes to his translations - did you see those? 

Rene - yes, I've read the translation and found the reference even more interesting that I'd expected.

[philipneal]

Thanks for the kind mention. My thanks also to Rich SantaColoma for hosting my pages for many years.

JKP is right, the translations and transcriptions could benefit from more work, but one has to stop somewhere. I was in long email discussions with Tom Conlon about fine points of the Kircher-Moretus letter and we could have gone on indefinitely. My main aim is to get a large body of relevant textual sources online in searchable form. To bring the whole lot to the level of consistency and accuracy expected in a journal publication would take forever.

[-JKP-]

Philip, it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. There have been many complimentary comments here and elsewhere about your research.

[Diane]

- JKP -
.. quite.