Continued from the You are not allowed to view links.
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“The interpretation of 116v in this paper is one of the most bizarre things I've ever read. It calls to mind the common phrase, "What drugs was he on?" Even though I read it twice and read it very carefully, and am open to wildly different ideas if they are well-argued and well-supported, I can't see it as anything but... I'm searching for a word to describe it... it has a hallucinatory feel to it.”
I have been thinking hard what struck me so strange about this paper, but couldn’t pinpoint it. It “feels” consistent in itself, good scientific form & all, while.. you know, the obvious reasons.
“Drugs” & “hallucinatory” hit it for me, though (not in an ad-hominem sense, I will explain below).
Firstly, this paper seems a perfect example for linguistic obfuscation in academic publishing (see You are not allowed to view links.
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While fraudulence would be too strong a word, the paper does evoke interest in the reader and suggests a considerable famework, yet very elegantly disguises the absence of substantiality at large.
In linguistic style there are certain identifiable key-phrases, words etc. which point in this direction.
The author kind of gives it away in the colophon section when using phrases like “With this bias, we propose to read(…)”, “Although there is evidence elsewhere for this corruption, it is clearly a weak point of the interpretation.”, “(…) a date of 1429 is implied, which is, however, highly speculative and contradicts the use of the Zoroastrian calendar for the month […] cannot be decided from the available scans of the VM.” and finally: “(…) in contrast to most of the awkward Latin script on this page[…]”. etc, etc.
Now the elaboration on the claims staked in the abstract and in the introduction do not sound at all that convincing anymore. All the little stretches done and tiny patches applied which are needed to keep it together are disguised in the academic necessity to name possible counter-proof (which does, in reality, not happen here).
We may deduct: there is nothing to it, at all. Full stop.
Regarding the seeming consistency, I feel forced to quote Karl Marx: “Religion is the opium of the people”.
Religious systems almost always are self-consistent from the inside view, hallucinatory experiences included.
It is rather fascinating that exactly such a thing seems to take place here. In my above post I mentioned “Pa-Zend” or “-Zand”, a misnomer for reading Avestan, which is the religious practice of interpreting zoroastrian Avesta scriptures written in Psalter- or Book-Pahlavi.
It is a bit hard to explain what happens here, I hope not to over simplify:
In the scriptures Psalter-Pahlavi was used to write Avestan, closely related to Old Iranian and Old Persian, which is an almost completely extinct language, only a few words survive. But:
“Avestan's status as a sacred language has ensured its continuing use for new compositions long after the language had ceased to be a living language.”
The phonetic values are known, to a certain extent, so the interpretation then takes place mostly in modern Iranian, which, as the author of the paper and also @Hubert Dale mention, will lead to A LOT of possible ambiguity.
I am unable to tell to which extent the amount of ambiguity resembles interpreting Hebræic Gemmatria, etc.
What strikes me is that the author could have jumped on the cursive Pahlavi form, “Book-Pahlavi” instead, which offers far more “false cognates” to VMS-ese script than P-Pahlavi does, without flipping or mirroring.
Anyways, different Pahlavi fonts are in use today to print contemporary Avestan copies, and have their respective Unicode blocks (Inscriptional Pahlavi, Inscriptional Parthian and Psalter Pahlavi).
So, ironically there are millions of books out there which “can’t be read”.
Last but not least, it should make us think why the VMS easily lends itself to such a thing.