RE: What are the characteristics of Labelese?
-JKP- > 31-08-2019, 05:29 AM
I'm not sure what you are disagreeing with, René.
I wasn't talking about where they got their theory (whether it was theirs or someone else's wasn't the point of my post).
Let me see if I can word this better...
What I am saying is that it's crystal clear from their demonstrated example that Hyde & Rugg didn't look at the structure of the text. Whether they got the prefix/base/suffix idea from someone else or came up with it themselves doesn't matter. They adopted it, so presumably they accepted this idea, their example is based on it, they didn't question it, and it's WRONG. Which means they didn't study the text.
So here is how Timm's approach differs from Hyde & Rugg's...
Timm has NOTICED that there are proximity patterns, not only in tokens, but in folios. They're there. I see them. Who else talks about them besides Timm? You can count them on about three fingers.
Most of the "solvers" are way too focused on substituting characters to look at the big picture OR the middle picture. The patterns that Hyde & Rugg missed and that Timm is describing and has mentioned are in the middle picture and I'll be darned if I can think of very many people who have even alluded to them other than Nick. These are extremely important patterns. Hyde and Rugg brushed them off (I can't remember their exact wording but I copied it down because it illustrated not only a lack of research, but a lack of understanding of the textual structure.).
I really don't care whether Timm's conclusions are right or wrong. I'm not even particularly worried if his theory is right or wrong—he is investigating this in ways that further understanding of the text. The Hyde & Rugg method does nothing to further our understanding the text because they are parsing the text incorrectly. They weren't even ready to apply the grille idea. They failed at Step 1.
So... while Hyde & Rugg's idea (which treats the VMS text as filler) and Torsten Timm's autocopying idea might seem superficially similar, they are not the same thing at all. Hyde & Rugg's idea starts and ends with meaningless text. However, autocopied text is not the same as grille text. It does not necessarily have to be meaningless—it's possible to conceive of autocopying methods that encode information (in other words, it might be nonsense text, but doesn't necessarily have to be).
I'll give a simple example. Whatever is different between token1 and token2 and token3 encodes a letter or two or three. You only read the differences, not the similarities. Thus, the next token is copied from the previous one with small differences, but the DIFFERENCES are meaningful. I'm not saying this is how Voynichese is structured, I just want to make it clear that autocopied text isn't necessarily nonsense text. The output from the Hyde & Rugg is nonsense text (and really doesn't match Voynichese patterns at all).
Even if Voynichese turned out to be nonsense text, we have a better chance of discerning it by looking at the text as Timm is doing, than we do by diismissing it with a flawed grille theory.
Timm has been on the hot seat for quite a while now. I've said numerous times I don't agree with all of it (and Nick neatly put his finger on one of my main objections), but he is studying the text and he's done a good job of describing some aspects of it that no one else has written about.
That's why I don't like to see Hyde & Rugg's idea and Timm's research being lumped together. It's insulting to Torsten Timm regardless of whether he has a perfect description of the text, regardless of whether the autocopying idea is right or wrong, regardless of whether Voynichese is meaningless or meaningful.
Getting data and interpreting data are related but different processes and the latter is much harder. It's possible to get the first part right and not draw the right conclusions. Sometimes it takes centuries for data to be interpreted correctly. In the meantime at least he's trying to describe the patterns that most people don't even notice.