RE: Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript
Ahmet Ardıç > 28-02-2024, 10:23 AM
Dear Tavie,
Statistical methods itself will not be verification tools and-or solution alone without linguistic methods to broke VM kind texts.
Sumerian serves as a particularly good example. The process of deciphering the Sumerian language was accelerated by the prior decipherment of Akkadian. Akkadian had been deciphered before Sumerian. However, the example I provided applies to the ancient writings of any unreadable language. For a previously unreadable language, statistical comparisons may be useful in determining its relationship to living languages. However, even if a kinship bond is found between two languages through statistical methods, deciphering unreadable ancient texts will still be necessary. This is because the compared languages are written in different scripts, there is a time gap between them, and deciphering the ancient text requires phonetic linguistic analysis. So, while statistics can guide you and make your work easier, reading texts without analyzing their phonetic structure will still not be possible.
The example I provided above shows that we still need linguistic methods in deciphering two languages identified through statistical comparisons as being related. Now, let's assume you want to decipher texts written in an alphabet that you encounter for the first time and is thought to be unrelated to any living language. So, let's ask this question: Why did you think that the X language is not related to any living languages? The answer from linguists would be that the statistical approach of comparative linguistics did not show any overlap between X language and the known languages being compared.
Does the situation in VM texts resemble the situation described in the X language? Has it been possible so far to correlate/associate the VM language with any known language using statistical methods?
To establish a connection between two languages through statistical comparison, you always need to find the known texts of the languages you can already compare. There is a concept of dead languages in our world. Also, some languages are not dead, but because the ancient cultures that spoke these languages did not have a tradition of writing in their past, we may not have written ancient texts to understand their ancient language. That's why linguists try to explain the historical phonetic structures and vocabulary of these languages with linguistic methods. In other words, we know that in the historical process, linguists have used methods of comparative linguistics other than statistics to reach final solutions in such situations.
Finding statistical overlaps makes the job easier, but not finding any does not mean "finding a solution is impossible". There is no need to create an understanding that belittles statistical methods or researchers who do not use these methods in their work. Because such an perception would be disconnected from reality. Because we also use statistical methods. However, statistical methods did not lead us to the solution. Only one of the many evidence we presented contained a statistical approach. Statistical methods did not decipher VM texts or Sumerian texts. These methods can provide insight into which area to focus on in the decipherment process, expedite the process, and allow us to add new evidence to the existing ones. The situation where VM texts did not show any statistical correlation with any living language occurred. There were several main reasons for this. Firstly, the errors in the alphabet transcriptions made were one of them. Secondly, it was the writing style chosen by the author about 600 years ago to make the texts difficult to read. Sometimes, due to situations such as writing words syllabically and abbreviation writing styles, it is possible to think separately (independently) about syllables that are written separately as a word. Thus, when making comparisons, you end up comparing a word of one language with a single syllable of another language.
The situation with the VM texts doesn't end there. Some of the syllable-character-signs used by the author, which may seem like individual letters to you, are actually independent words. I have provided examples of these. The author has written some words by dividing them and combining others (multiple words) in order to make the texts less readable. Moreover, the reason for developing such an alphabet was to prevent easy reading of the texts. In this case, would it be possible to find any correlation by conducting statistical comparisons with this particular writing style and the incorrectly matched alphabet transcriptions? Certainly, obtaining a clear and analytical final result using statistical methods alone in this case is not possible.
Therefore, other methods employed by linguistics in the past may be necessary to decipher such texts. There's no point in assigning too many features or miracles to a method. The only solution is to apply all known methods to all known scenarios tirelessly. However, if your perspective and key have not led you to a solution despite examining the transcription table and words, then you should change your perspective and key. Everything is not simply black and white, and you know that too.
Furthermore, reading what you wrote, I realized that you have an opinion despite not knowing our current progress. We have read many sentences as well as some full pages. Currently, two different discussions about VM have emerged worldwide. However, you are not yet aware of this.
1-) There are researchers who are still trying to decipher the VM-texts, believing that they have not been decrypted.
2-) Among the Turkologists and linguists who know Old Turkish, there are those who are discussing with us. For example, Prof. Dr. M. Asgarov is one of them. He referenced our alphabet transcription and read more than 10 pages of the VM, which he showed me. Our debate revolves around the details of these readings. In other words, we both know that the content is Turkish, but we do not agree on the details, such as whether the meaning of a word from 600 years ago could be A or B.
Our effort here is twofold: Firstly, there are many experts working in the field of the Turkish language who are still unaware of the existence of a book called VM, and we are trying to inform this group about the subject. On the other hand, we are also trying to explain the subject to researchers who still believe that the texts have not been decrypted (as is the case here), so that among them, those who know Latin, Ancient Greek, or botanists or doctors interested in the terminology of ancient writings can help us by assuming that some words may be in these languages.
Without this assistance, it will not be possible to translate the entire 240-page book accurately into modern languages, because, as I mentioned, the biggest obstacle to translating the whole book into modern languages is almost some unknown-words seen in every line throughout the 240 pages. If the author is multilingual, they may be writing certain words in Turkish and others in languages other than Turkish (or another language). This is a highly likely possibility, and if the ancient words of this language, which could be Latin or Greek, are in the texts, it will be difficult for us to match them. Thus, currently, every line throughout the 240 pages is waiting for us to recognize the words contained within to be fully deciphered.
Thanks