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[Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

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  • [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research
• [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

• [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

  Koen G > 21-09-2017, 09:27 PM

  These parts of our interview with Stephen Bax are specifically about his own research:
  
  
  [David] My understanding of your paper is that you're not translating anything, but instead you have identified ten likely nouns in both paragraphs and labels, which you assume identify the accompanying images. You have then assigned sounds to these fourteen syllables contained within the words and discovered that the sounds correspond within these words, indicating that the words probably can be pronounced, so that they are real words. This makes it likely that  these words are nouns, which can then be transliterated in their English equivalents, which you are doing by identifying the accompanying images next to the text. But you are not proposing either a language or a translation. Is that a fair summary of your work?
   
  [Stephen] To some extent. It's a little bit - you've implied that basically we identify words and then we break them down up into sounds and symbols. It's actually a bit back and forward. If you identify sounds and symbols, then you build up the words. A good example would be the word which might be the word "Taurus" to identify the seven sisters stars [Pleiades]on the page with the smiley moon. If you look at that, you say: this looks likely to be the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus, so therefore the label alongside most likely represent something to do with that. If you the say: this is probably the word Taurus in one for or another - it *could* be the word Taurus, you have to be very tentative at this stage - then the first letter may be a /t/ sound of some sort. But you can only corroborate that if you find other similar matching words through the MS where that/t/sound is also most likely a /t/. You build it up with a process, but each one you do must be speculative and provisional, until you get an overarching scheme in which several of them coincide and you seem to see some light. So that was in a sense the process that I followed and built up the scheme which is in my 2014 paper, and you can quickly find the proposed identifications in its appendix. So yes, in a sense, your summary is a fair way of putting that, but you're right also that the end result is not an overall translation of the MS, of the language or the script. It's first of all a methodological procedure and secondly it does seem to bear some fruit when you start to match it with other possible words in the MS. The point is then that you are coming to a decoding of each sign which should in the future allow you to generate other words as you go through the MS. But it's a very long, slow and torturous process. But you're right in a sense that it's not promising "we have now deciphered the MS, we have found out what the language is". It's more of a methodological approach to go step by step to identify certain patterns in it. It was very specifically identified as a very provisional and partial attempt to make some headway.
   
  What I think is most valuable is the methodology behind it. Some of the identifications I would still stand by, although others are less solid. But it's the methodology which I would stand by as the most interesting part of it.
   
  [Koen] You've said that the underlying language is likely Near Eastern, Caucasian or Asian in origin. Is this still something you think is the most likely?
   
  [Stephen] I wouldn't say that the underlying language is Near Eastern, we just don't know at this stage. But what I did say in my paper is that there seem to be elements which derive from Near Easter, Caucasian or Asian aspects. For example, some elements seem to come from a Persian origin. But that doesn't mean that the language itself is from those families; it could simply be borrowings. It could be that all of the words I identified are borrowings into the language. That's common with nouns, when you think of almost all the names of exotic fruits and vegetables, they derive from other languages, like "artichoke", "avocado"....
   
  [Koen] Especially in these scientific contexts you get a lot of jargon.
   
  [Stephen] Absolutely, a huge amount of borrowing. So I think we're not very far into suggesting what language families we're dealing with. I do think that some of the work by Marco Ponzi and Rene, Darren Worley and others on the Zodiac figures, suggesting an East European or Central European origin for some of those illustrations is quite telling and convincing. I'd not be surprised if the MS was a European production, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the language within it is a European language. If you take the example of Romani, sometimes known as the Gypsy language; if the VM is written in Romani language in a script specifically devised for the VM, it could well be written in Europe, but the origin of that particular language is far from Europe. So we could be dealing with a mixed and unexpected language, but yet produced in Europe.
   
  [Koen] I'd like to pick in on the Romani suggestion - that was not your own idea, I think, it was developed by others on your blog? What is your view on this possibility?
   
  [Stephen] Derek Voght has produced some nice videos on YouTube about it, and others have suggested it in the past as well. I haven't ruled that out as a possibility because basically, the most likely language that underlies the VM script is a language that has not been written down before. It's quite likely that a small group of scholars has developed a script to encode a language that they communicated in normally and to transmit the ideas of the time in terms of herbals etc into that particular group / linguistic culture. If you'd say "could it be Italian?" - well no, because the Italians in that period already had a script. So you then start to look for languages which were prominent  or strong in one way or another, or had a significant community of speakers, but yet did not yet have its own script, and therefore needed one to be developed. Then you come to things such as Romani or others - something like Hungarian, say, which had a prominent group of speakers but did not have a strongly used script at the time. So Romani is not impossible - there would have been a need for some group of scholars to create a script for themselves. We still have too much work to do to establish what it is, but I think the arguments are very interesting. And I really appreciate the attempts by Derek and others to investigate and see whether this particular hypothesis holds water. I think it's great when people do that kind of work.
   
  [David] You've concentrated on the first word of each herbal page, in the reasonable assumption that this is likely to be the name of the plant. Would this be common in herbals in the languages outside of Europe?
   
  [Stephen] First, let me clarify about the first word of each page. It's perfectly possible that the first word of each page is not the name of the plant. It could be within the first or second lines. One assumption is that we will start by looking at the first word, and actually in the VM the first word on many of the herbal pages does seem to be a unique word - an infrequent word in the VM - so this could be the name of a plant. But that's definitely not an assumption you must stand by. You just explore whether it's possible. For example, the "Centaurea" page, for me that's a watertight identification, virtually nobody has suggested another possibility. And the fact that the first word of the page, and also the word of the second paragraph are virtually identical, does make it plausible that this might be the name of the plant in the picture. This is speculation, since you've just got one plant, one word, maybe a second word, but when it becomes more interesting is when you combine that with other identifications, and build up a system like the one I was trying to build up in my paper. But any single identification must be speculative! You can't insist on it. Building it up as a pattern is what's starting to give it a bit more credibility.
   
  But to come back to your actual question: often in Western herbals, the first word on the page with the representation of the plant, is the name. And that is actually common in other traditions, for example in Arabic herbal MSS,very often it's the first word, but not always! Sometimes it's a word later on in the first line, which is then underlined or highlighted in some way. But again: you are looking for likely words that might be the name of a plant, but we can't insist that it must be the first word, that's just the first place you look, but you look at it very cautiously and skeptically and you use your judgement.
   
  [Koen] In another MS I've been studying, you always had a fixed phrase at the beginning, for example "nomen herba" and then the name of the herb. We're unfortunate that such phrases at all do not appear to exist within the VM.
   
  [Stephen] Yeah, and particularly we're unfortunate that they didn't somehow highlight the name in a different ink, or underline, which they do in some herbal MSS. That leaves us fighting around to identify which word it might be.
   
  [Koen] Now, we've been talking about the difficulty of identifying the plants, but that's not really your area of expertise so we'll leave that for a discussion with a medieval herbalist. But your transliterations are heavily based on the imagery. When you started writing your paper, how did you select your sources. For example you relied heavily on Sherwood's plant identifications.
   
  [Stephen] I relied on any identifications of people who seemed to have authoritative arguments for why this plant was the plant that the identified. But also I did look back at other historical herbals to look at the way in which the plants were represented there, looking also at herbals from other traditions.
   
  There's a Finnish biologist who put some very nice discussions on my blog about how difficult it is to identify some of these plants and some of the factors behind why these plants in the VM might look so peculiar and strange. Expecting that many of the plants may not have been drawn from life, or from dead samples, you have to use a lot of interpretations to say what this plant might be. But there are some which I think are pretty convincing and which nobody seems to differ in terms of that being the plant. An interesting example is the juniper which I read as oror or arar, but many people have identified it as the cannabis plant, so it's difficult to say what exactly this plant is.
   
  There is an element of uncertainty, of judgement, of accepting the inevitable variation to do with the drawings, the script, and it is a slow, tentative process, which needs to be built up over a long time. It's not something like "I looked at this plant and immediately I knew what it was and that the language is Hungarian". That kind of too speedy attempt to work through a MS Like this is just foolish and doomed to failure. And actually that reminds me of the TLS article which came out recently, which... can you remember the author of that article? He basically said that the script was entirely a set of Latin abbreviations.
   
  [Koen] Nicholas Gibbs was his name.
   
  [Stephen] That, for me, is an example of what I call pick and mix. Where you simply take things where you think this looks like this and this looks like that, theefore... it's taken me 25 minutes and I've identified the MS as this. And that, for me is just foolish. That's not scholarship, it's not research at all. But the problem is, it is very attractive to online newspapers to publish that kind of thing because they get a huge number of clicks. It's essentially clickbait. Your advertising revenue goes up. But if you spend ten minutes reading an article like that and you know the VM even to an intermediate level, you realize that it's not worth bothering with.
   
  [Koen] We were surprised that he got published at all because we see these kinds of theories every day from all kinds of people, and one gets published and it's suddenly all over the internet.
   
  [Stephen] I think the reason is clickbait, because they know that as soon as you put "Voynich" into something, you get a huge number of people clicking on it, and then you can say to your advertisers: "look, we've had a million clicks today!" But I agree with you, it's amazing that the TLS would publish something like that with so little research! I think it had almost no references to other work or scholarship in the field.
   
  [Koen] Even though in the 1990's already some of his ideas have been suggested on the mailing list, and he doesn't refer to anything.
   
  [Stephen] These ideas of Latin abbreviations have been around for decades. Some of the oldest accounts of the VM have been identifying possible Roman abbreviations, but they were not cited in the work! It's very disappointing when this kind of work is given credence, because then anyone who is trying more seriously to investigate the MS is also seen as some kind of hoaxer or waster. That's an aspect of the VM community which I try to avoid because it doesn't help in the ultimate endeavor of decoding and understanding this fascinating MS.
   
  [Koen] Now that we're talking about the VM and the media: you, yourself have become almost synonymous with Voynich research. Many people started researching the MS because of your paper. How did you experience this, did you expect this at all that it would be such a hit?
   
  [Stephen] I think you're very generous to say so. To some extent you could say that what I did three years ago has been forgotten by lots of people as well, because it is such an ephemeral world. You get a new fantastic theory which everyone says is the latest one and they forget what happened even three years ago. I hope that the approach that I adopted to the MS is one that is of value. I still would stand by it, and that is the very best way that we're ever going to make a dent into the script and the language.
   
  And also, I have to insist again and again, the difference between the script and the language. is a really important  one, because it could be that the underlying language is one that is known to us, but what stops us from getting there is just the script that's lying above it. And this is an element of the research which many people just don't seem to get. Even in recent discussions on the internet you get people confusing the issues of the script and language.
   
  If we look at the work that's been produced more recently - I think Marco Ponzi is someone whose work I really respect, and he's done some interesting stuff trying to identify symbolism using arthistorical comparisons. For example one of the pages seems to represent spring, summer, autumn and winter. By looking at the clothing of the different characters depicted on the page. And that kind of thing is useful and well beyond my capacities. But it can lead us to look closely at the words around the figures and say, is there one word here which might be the word "spring"? etc And then try to work out what those words might be, how the letters link to other words etc and do it in a very systematic way, and gradually - over years - move towards identifying a possible underlying language.
   
  But it is a long, slow endeavor, and the problem with the media is that they want quick, immediate solutions. If you look at the decipherment of linear B in the 1950's, that is an endeavour that started seriously in the 1920's! With a very systematic approach, following more or less the same approach that I've been using. It took 30 years to identify the fact that the script was encoding Greek! A language everybody knew. It was almost staring us into the face, but because the script was so opaque, it took 30 years of systematic and careful work with a number of different people, and many scholars in Greece actually insisting it was not Greek, and then it was shown that it was actually Greek. And that took 30 years. So for us to expect an overnight discovery is really misunderstanding how translation and decipherment works in this kind of case.
   
  [David] To pick up on your example about script and language: over here in Spain there's a late medieval tradition of ???? where the Arabian speakers of Al-Andalus weren't allowed to write Arabic, so they kept writing Arabit, but using the Latin script, which was legal. These manuscripts are fascinating because they appear to be written in no language we understand, but you have to read them aloud, and that language turns to Arabic.
   
  [Stephen] That also illustrates the fact that in medieval Europe there was a huge mixture of languages and scripts. With standardization, we, particularly in mololingual England, tink: "oh, there's only one language and script, why would anybody mix them?" But of course, people have been mixing them in the way that you describe for centuries! So I think you have to see the VM in that kind of context.
  
  
  [.............................]
  
  [Koen] As we've said, there has been some criticism on your work, notably by Nick Pelling. One of his points of criticism is that you map three glyphs to the sound /r/.  Is that a correct summary?
   
  [Stephen] When I read the critique about the /r/, I almost fell off my chair laughing because many different articles have two sounds in the region of /r/. A very obvious one is Spanish. Pero means "but" and perro means "dog". Those two r-sounds are in the same area phonetically. In fact, in Spanish, they are meaningful, significant differences, a /r/ and a rrrr-sound which are quite different. English has this too, in Scottish, but there they don't happen to have a meaning difference. 
   
  Many languages have this. In Spanish they are encoded into the script by a single "r" versus a double "r", but in other languages they are encoded into the script in different letters completely. (Arabic example where three sounds in the region of /d/ get a different letter shape.) That's rudimentary linguistic knowledge. So if the VM happens to have two letters for an /r/, that would be nothing unusual at all! It just depends on the language that it's trying to encode. 
   
  Now, the third of them,  EVA [m] is in my view a terminal form, a form that is used at the end of words, lines or paragraphs, which is for me a terminal form of EVA [r]. Somebody who doesn't know anything about linguistics will say: "what do you mean, a terminal form? The same letter with a different shape?" Well yes! Arabic is a perfect example of this. You have a different shape of the same letter depending on whether it's in the beginning, middle or end of the word. It's the same letter but with a different shape. So for me as an Arab linguist, it's not at all unexpected to find a script where you have - for example Voynich [r] is the most common form of /r/ through the MS. But you have EVA [m] as the terminal form which is used as a decorative form with a tail. And this character hugely comes at the end of words, lines, paragraphs... 
   
  Again, that, for me, is year one linguistics. I wouldn't stake my house on it, because all of this needs to be researched and developed. But the fact that's it's a possibility should be indisputable with anybody with some basic linguistic knowledge. 
   
  [Koen] The problem, probably, that Pelling sees is that if you have to reserve one glyph already for a form of a sound that comes at the end of the word, your phoneme inventory becomes really small. That's something you hear a lot.
   
  [Stephen] Really small? How really small? If we've got 24 main symbols, there's still perfectly enough - especially if some of the vowel sounds are not written down. I don't see that as a significant objection. But until we have the full set of sound symbol correspondences, we can't say. But to say that it's a possibility seems to me to be just plain linguistic logic. If that objection is supposed to say "oh, the whole scheme is not worth thinking about", then I think that's just very poor criticism. 
   
  [David] I think that indicates that whoever devised the script gave special prominence to that sound. As you say in Arabic...
   
  [Stephen] I think - sorry to interrupt you David - I think that there are quite a few other symbols that could be terminal forms. If you look at a page of the VM script, very often at the end of the word you see a flourishy one that goes down a little bit. That for me as an Arabic linguist, is a very normal feature. The way you write Arabic, very often at the end of it, there's a character which kind of flourishes.
   
  [Koen] The one that looks like a /9/ is like an /a/ with a flourish basically.
   
  [Stephen] Exactly. EVA [o] could have EVA [y] as a flourished version of it, and I think that's an interesting argument.
  
  
  [.............................]
  
  [Koen] You have focused what you basically think are labels, single words, or the name of the plant. But if you go from there and you take the sound values that you have proposed and apply them to the whole paragraph, you get a questionable result. Why do you think that is the case, that it's so difficult to translate a paragraph, even if you have proposed a value for about half of the glyphs?
   
  [Stephen] The proposed sound values that I put in my paper are not even half, so we still got a lot more to do. But if you then did put it into a paragraph - you say that what you'd have would be gobbledygook, well no, what you'd have would be a very partial representation of a language that we still can't identify. So of course it will look like gobbledygook. The test will be of course, at the end of the day, if we can identify more and more sound-symbol correspondences and build up to 85% of the whole of the MS..... I mean, the key think of course will be when you can use the correspondences that we've got and apply them to, say, one of the star labels, and say, "aha, this really does look like the name of a star!" Then it starts becoming productive and valuable.But we're still a far way away from that. People like Derek, for example, have tried to show that it does actually work productively for some of the star labels. But I think you're right, we still got to do some research before we can move from the individual words onto sentences, paragraphs and so on.
   
  If you transliterate an Armenian sentence into Latin script, then you took out 60% of the letters, and you made the assumption that it was actually a poor representation of the language. What you'd get would be gobbledygook. Nut actually it would be Armenian, but messed up! So I don't see any issue, with the VM, we're still at a stage of ignorance. We have to go, unfortunately, slowly, surely, methodically. And we have to throw away pick-and-mix approaches, which is what we've seen a lot too much recently. Where somebody picks a few things and says aaaah it must be Icelandic.... We've just got to focus very systematically, proceeding step by step, and I think we're in for a ten, fifteen year window.

• RE: [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

  Diane > 22-09-2017, 06:09 PM

  Koen,
  I'm a little shocked by the banality of Bax' comments - most are no more than repetitions of the same-old assumptions, which are constantly left unquestioned and untested by the great majority of persons developing them - e.g. an assumption that the botanical imagery is related to the 'herbals' tradition and then hunting herbals, or assuming that the calendar's roundels do - or ever did - constitute a zodiac and only looking at zodiac series. 
  
   I like Darren Worley's approach, but as so much of Voynich writing,  it too is directed by the tacit assumption that the answer to any question is already known. 
  
  As if the only point of this research were to pull up things suggesting support for an old idea, and usually one based on no more than an impression, or required to suit some ill-considered presumption.  
  
  Surely research should begin by investigating the grounds for what has been said in the past, and the basis of current assertions rather than presuming mere 'ideas' are enough and must prove true in the end.
  
  That Bax can let this fundamental methodological flaw in Voynich-land pass him without notice doesn't auger well, it seems to me. It isn't scholarly method to swallow unfounded assertions whole.
  
  Nor is it scholarly method to merely repeat - unacknowledged -  observations first made by others, and of whose source many are quite well aware.  In some cases, the things he describes as what 'we' (meaning him and whoever) have come to believe were in fact established, proposed, or argued cogently as long as twenty years ago.  
  
  The relative positions of the gallows, for example.  Or  that the elongated letters we call 'gallows' appear in non-elongated form elsewhere.   Why doesn't he acknowledge Neal, or ... well, you know. The others. Julian Bunn for example.
  
  To repeat such observations by others in a tone suggesting them original to Bax (and/or whoever else he means by "we") seems fairly plainly to suggest either dishonesty or gullibility. 
  
   Dishonesty if in fact he, himself, learned these items by reading ... old mailing list posts, or Philip Neal's site, or the posts to ciphermysteries and so on ... and gullible if he never stopped to another informant to provide details of when and by whom some parroted observation was actually first made.  
  
  Even to me, who was involved in the study for less than ten years, and who has no particular interest in the text's written part, the way Bax announces these items suggests either someone who doesn't do his research, or someone who has done his Voynich research but is dishonestly representing others; contributions as his own by the simple means of omitting acknowledgements... or, as others have done, Bax has been gullible and permitted one or more others to do that 'get-the-glory-by-omission' thing which sees wrong attributions, and false reputations for expertise gained by those chiefly interested in the latter.
  
  
  In any case, it casts into doubt Bax' thoroughness as a researcher, and his ability - so vital in a scholar - to think critically about the value of his sources... written or otherwise.
  
  I was hoping, as I hunted the transcript, that there would be some item in all that  mish-mash of things repeated from Reeds, or Stolfi, or Currier, or Pelling, or Neal.. etc., which would be the item that  Bax believes he has so far contributed, himself, to this study.  Of such things there seem too few to have merited so long an interview.
  
  
  Even his stated philosophy... about focusing on the primary source, looking carefully at details, being self-critical as one works, not pre-empting conclusions and so on and so on... some of it is jolly near word-for-word the arguments I've published online, criticising the usual hypothesis-driven style.
  
  Perhaps one of the linguists can recognise the pearl in the morass of 'pick-and-stitch' but I can't.
  
  I had thought Bax ill-done by until now.  Thanks for taking so much of your time to turn the script into text; you've changed my mind on that subject.

• RE: [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

  Diane > 22-09-2017, 06:53 PM

  (22-09-2017, 06:09 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Koen,
  I'm a little shocked by the banality of Bax' comments - most are no more than repetitions of the same-old assumptions, which are constantly left unquestioned and untested by the great majority of persons developing them - e.g. an assumption that the botanical imagery is related to the 'herbals' tradition and then hunting herbals, or assuming that the calendar's roundels do - or ever did - constitute a zodiac and only looking at zodiac series. 
  
   I like Darren Worley's approach, but as so much of Voynich writing,  it too is directed by the tacit assumption that the answer to any question is already known. 
  
  As if the only point of this research were to pull up things suggesting support for an old idea, and usually one based on no more than an impression, or required to suit some ill-considered presumption.  
  
  Surely research should begin by investigating the grounds for what has been said in the past, and the basis of current assertions rather than presuming mere 'ideas' are enough and must prove true in the end.
  
  That Bax can let this fundamental methodological flaw in Voynich-land pass him without notice doesn't auger well, it seems to me. It isn't scholarly method to swallow unfounded assertions whole.
  
  Nor is it scholarly method to merely repeat - unacknowledged -  observations first made by others, and of whose source many are quite well aware.  In some cases, the things he describes as what 'we' (meaning him and whoever) have come to believe were in fact established, proposed, or argued cogently as long as twenty years ago.  
  
  The relative positions of the gallows, for example.  Or  that the elongated letters we call 'gallows' appear in non-elongated form elsewhere.   Why doesn't he acknowledge Neal, or ... well, you know. The others. Julian Bunn for example.
  
  To repeat such observations by others in a tone suggesting them original to Bax (and/or whoever else he means by "we") seems fairly plainly to suggest either dishonesty or gullibility. 
  
   Dishonesty if in fact he, himself, learned these items by reading ... old mailing list posts, or Philip Neal's site, or the posts to ciphermysteries and so on ... and gullible if he never stopped to another informant to provide details of when and by whom some parroted observation was actually first made.  
  
  Even to me, who was involved in the study for less than ten years, and who has no particular interest in the text's written part, the way Bax announces these items suggests either someone who doesn't do his research, or someone who has done his Voynich research but is dishonestly representing others; contributions as his own by the simple means of omitting acknowledgements... or, as others have done, Bax has been gullible and permitted one or more others to do that 'get-the-glory-by-omission' thing which sees wrong attributions, and false reputations for expertise gained by those chiefly interested in the latter.
  
  
  In any case, it casts into doubt Bax' thoroughness as a researcher, and his ability - so vital in a scholar - to think critically about the value of his sources... written or otherwise.
  
  I was hoping, as I hunted the transcript, that there would be some item in all that  mish-mash of things repeated from Reeds, or Stolfi, or Currier, or Pelling, or Neal.. etc., which would be the item that  Bax believes he has so far contributed, himself, to this study.  Of such things there seem too few to have merited so long an interview.
  
  
  Even his stated philosophy... about focusing on the primary source, looking carefully at details, being self-critical as one works, not pre-empting conclusions and so on and so on... some of it is jolly near word-for-word the arguments I've published online, criticising the usual hypothesis-driven style.
  
  Perhaps one of the linguists can recognise the pearl in the morass of 'pick-and-stitch' but I can't.
  
  I had thought Bax ill-done by until now.  Thanks for taking so much of your time to turn the script into text; you've changed my mind on that subject.

  
  Postscript. Purely in the interests of objective fact... when I explored the 'Romany' thing and published a fair bit about that line of investigation, my sources and my observations and final conclusions... I don't recall anyone suggesting that the possibility had been considered before.
  
  The number of Voynicheros who read and/or downloaded those posts amounted to about the number of active Voynicheros at that time (before the end of 2011).   
  
  Nor can I recall anyone mentioning to Worley when the sudden announcement of a 'Romany' theory was made, that there had already been published a good deal of work in which the subject was first raised, and then investigated - albeit  in terms of culture, art and lines of transmission, not of language. 
  
   My conclusion (just btw) is that it was unlikely in the extreme that the Romany had been in any position to have their language recorded by anyone in medieval Latin Europe - ethnology as a science  yet to be born, and the Romany socially isolated and soon ostracized by the Latin population - though there is an account which mentions that at least one Indian Romani spoke Basque.  
  
  What I did find was that the attitude of later writers is too confident in its ill-informed 'skepticism' about the Romany testimonies to their origins.  I considered especially  reports of a certain 'Thomas' - a gipsy leader who gave his origin as southern India.  I also noted during the investigation that it is true the style, as well as the content of much in the botanical section accords with customs of southern India from whence it appears to have been gained during c.10th-11thC, but thereafter passing westwards via Mesopotamia and Syria in to the south-western Mediterranean.  My reasons for these views, the comparative evidence and academic sources were all  outlined in the blogposts.   That, however, was before I learned that there was little point in adding bibliographies.  
  
  The old research blog  was closed when I began 'voynichimagery' but if anyone is still seriously attracted by a 'Romany' theory and wants to read those posts, I'll reprint a few of the more detailed fyi.

• RE: [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

  davidjackson > 22-09-2017, 07:36 PM

  Diane, I really can't be bothered to go into the whole "why didn't he give credit to...." from an informal conversation, so I won't. I don't think it's relevant in this case. Let's stick to more important topics. If he were talking about mathematics and mentioned set theory, nobody would care that he hadn't given a biopic of Cantor.
  
  Let's talk about Romani, because I keep meaning to, and you bought up the interesting subject of a Romani who spoke Basque.
  
  The Spanish (Portuguese and Brazilian as well) gypsies speak Caló, which is a peninsula version of Romani. But what I find interesting is that it is heavily influenced by Basque, more than you would expect.
  
  Hand, Father, Mother (respectively basta, batia, batoa) all seem to derivce from Basque.
  
  The gypsies living in the Basque country speak a bastardised version of Caló called Erromintxela, by the way.

• RE: [Transcription] Stephen Bax on his research

  Stephen.Bax > 22-09-2017, 07:47 PM

  (22-09-2017, 06:09 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Koen,
  I'm a little shocked by the banality of Bax' comments - most are no more than repetitions of the same-old assumptions, left unquestioned and untested by the great majority of persons accepting them - e.g. that the botanical imagery is related to the 'herbals' tradition, or that the calendar's roundels do - or ever did - constitute a zodiac.  I like Darren Worley's approach, but as so much of Voynich writing,  it is directed by a tacit assumption that the answer to any question is already known. As if the only point of research was to support an old idea.  Surely research should begin by investigating the grounds for an assertion (such as that the centres of the calendar constitute a zodiac), rather than assuming it will prove true, and so looking only at zodiacs.
  
  That Bax can let this fundamental flaw pass without noticing it doesn't auger well, it seems to me.
  
  But as well as this, he is merely repeating - unacknowledged - observations first made by others, and in some cases as long as twenty years ago.  The positions of the gallows, for example.  Or the fact that the elongated letters we call 'gallows' appear in non-elongated form elsewhere.   Or the position in a page where the 'gallows' as such appear.  To repeat all this in a tone suggesting the observations original to Bax and whoever else he means by "we" seems either dishonest or gullible.  Dishonest if he, himself, learned this by reading old mailing list posts, or Philip Neal's site, or the posts to ciphermysteries, and gullible if he didn't stop to ask another informant exactly when and by whom this or that observation or conclusion had been made.
  
  To someone who has been around even as long as I have (and that's less than a decade), this smacks of the same over-reliance on self-proclaimed 'experts' whose reputation has been gained in just such a fraudulent manner: by memorising and regurgitating the intelligent work done by others, and gathering ephemeral glory by the simple expedient of allowing, by their own silence, their hearers to believe that what is said is a product of some research of their own.
  
   But whether poor memory, or slight-of-hand, or gullibility is at the root of it, such things raise real doubts about Bax' thoroughness as a researcher and his ability to think critically about the sources he has employed - written or not.
  
  In fact, hunting through and past that mish-mash of things copied from Reeds, or Stolfi, or Currier, or Pelling, or Neal.. etc., to discover exactly what it is that Bax believes he has so far contributed, himself, there seems far too little to merit so long an interview.
  
  Even his stated philosophy... about focusing on the primary source, looking carefully at details, being self-critical as one works, not pre-empting conclusions and so on and so on... some of it is jolly near word-for-word the arguments I've published online, criticising the usual hypothesis-driven style.
  
  Perhaps one of the linguists can recognise the pearl in this morass of pick-and-stitch, but I can't.
  
  Thanks for taking so much of your time to turn it into text.

  
  Thanks Diane
  
  Your message seems more of a general mud sling than anything else, and at first I thought of just throwing some back, but in the spirit of cooperation which David and Koen are rightly trying to foster on this forum, let me try to be as construcutive and polite as I can.
  
  1. Sorry you found it banal. People on this forum were asked to suggest questions, and so that framed the areas of discussion, as it should. For me that meant going over stuff in my 2014 paper, not new stuff, but that is fine. Not everyone is as well-versed in things Voynich as you. They have a right to ask what they like.
  
  2. You say that I was going over "the same-old assumptions, left unquestioned and untested by the great majority of persons accepting them - e.g. that the botanical imagery is related to the 'herbals' tradition, or that the calendar's roundels do - or ever did - constitute a zodiac". 
  
  Did you ever think that "if a lot of people accept them", then they might - shock horror - be correct?  Just a thought. In any case it is a convenient shorthand to talk about the 'zodiac pages' and so on without actually assuming they are zodiacs or anything else.
  
  You accuse me of "looking only at zodiacs" - but when have I actually done that ever? So it is unfair to say that I "let this fundamental flaw" pass. 
  
  It was a relaxed conversation, not a conference seminar. Why not try to be less bitter and attacking - even kinder? What is the constructive value of such mud throwing?
  
  3. You say it doesn't auger well - an auger is  a tool resembling a large corkscrew, for boring holes in wood   .) Sorry, but if you want to hold me to academic standards then if you mean 'augur' please be accurate yourself.
  
  4. You say I am "merely repeating - unacknowledged - observations first made by others, and in some cases as long as twenty years ago." Yes, I was in a relaxed way taking account of what others have said. In a talk such as that it is not possible to acknowledge every name and date. To say that "suggesting the observations [are] original to Bax and whoever else he means by "we" seems either dishonest or gullible" is ridiculous. I never claimed that all of these things were original to me and everyone knows that they are not. 
  
  5.  You accuse me of 'slight-of-hand'. I assume you mean 'sleight of hand'. See Common errors of English usage: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  Sorry, but you are the one insisting on rigour. 
  
  6. I am really sorry you stoop so low as to accuse me of "poor memory, or slight-of-hand [sic], or gullibility  and say "such things raise real doubts about Bax' thoroughness as a researcher and his ability to think critically about the sources he has employed" .
  
  Honestly! It was a relaxed conversation. If I was another sort of Voynich writer I would now have comPelling reasons at this point to flounce off the forum in a tizz. But I simply say Ho Hum, Diane again. On my own webiste you have abused so many people that I have received a host of complaints about your tone and manner, so now it just washes over me. 
  
  However, you should be aware that to call someone 'dishonest' is in fact libellous and could result in legal action if you said it to someone less amenable.... did you know that?
  
  5. Same again: "allowing, by their own silence, their hearers to believe that what is said is a product of some research of their own" - Rubbish. Read my paper itself and you will see that it is all referenced. This was an informal conversation about the VM in general and I will bet that no-one else thought I was claiming credit for the things you mention.
  
  6. ..."his stated philosophy" - not it is not a philosophy, it is an approach to analysis. If you want us to be academic then we need to take care with such terminology. 
  
  7. You say that it is "jolly near word-for-word the arguments I've published online" - sorry, before 2014 I had NEVER read a single word of yours. Even now I find your website so confusing to navigate that I have never found anything you said which remotely resembles my method. 
  
  But how odd that you first accuse me of being wrong, and saying nothing worthwhile, and then accuse me of copying your ideas! Don't you see any irony in that? 
  
  8. To tell the truth, I have searched your message through and through for some genuine and specific critique which I could answer or respond to, besides what I have already said, but it all just seems like mud-slinging, with a strong hint of envy ('gathering ephemeral glory') and a dose of paranoia (as in I'm right but no-one listens and they they steal my ideas). 
  
  If you have any actual comments on specific things that I said do let me know so I can respond more fully.
  
  Best wishes
  
  Stephen
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