RE: Cheshire at it again: "Palaeographic Instruction for the Ischia Manuscript"
Mark Knowles > 12-12-2021, 04:00 PM
Gerard suggests that others have not applied an intuitive approach, but given that he hasn't studied their theories how he knows this is unclear. Personally, I question whether applying an intuitive approach is a good idea. The definition of intuition is "the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning." In this context I think conscious reasoning is definitely preferable.
Gerard starts with the assumption that the Voynich is Southern European, which may not be correct, although the Italian peninsula is not an unreasonable assumption, though there is some scope for it to be from another part of central Europe.
On that basis he arrives at the Latin language being the language of the Voynich which is very plausible though not certain as there are local non-romance dialects which may be used such as Lombardo. The author could be someone from outside Italy, but who moved to Italy and so not writing in an romance language. There are Germanic features as well as Italian features within the manuscript. It is my personal opinion that it is Italian in origin, but I don't think one can automatically jump to that conclusion.
Gerard then lists the symbols in the manuscript seemingly missing or ignoring the rarer symbols. He then applies frequency analysis to those more common symbols in the manuscript. He then seeks to assign latin letters to the symbols on the basis of that frequency, presumably in order of the most frequent rather than by percentage. This of course is an incredibly standard elementary approach as this is the first idea that would occur to anyone which explains why Gerard thought he deciphered it in two weeks. Others have tried very similar things before, so it is in no way methodologically innovative in the Voynich context.
However this frequency does not work as others have discovered before him. The statistical properties of the text, something Gerard should have studied even if for understandable reasons he did not want to be biased by other theories. These properties preclude the possibility of a simple substitution especially in the context of latin.
So what does Gerard do once he decides that this must be the solution, well he has to try to make it fit? Clearly it isn't just latin as that doesn't fit, so he has to greatly increase his possible word hoard to make it fit. In addition he needs to decide where spaces are not on the basis of where they appear to be, but rather on the basis of where best fits his attempt at translation. Similarly he has to reject all grammar and allow for a complete word salad of text. Of the hoard of words he has created he selects the word that seems to best fit the context of the images and the other words in his word salad. In fact a construction of a sentence is about trying to somehow find the best word fit to the image context. These new words in his proto-romance language he adds to his new created proto-romance dictionary. Of course when the same "word" spelling occurs elsewhere then it is one of the numerous different meaning words with the same spellings. Of course this process of "discovering" the vocabulary of proto-romance can continue indefinitely. It is a degrees of freedom problem. Anyone can apply this method and arrive at a distinct and different solution, but essentially the same kind of solution.
By allowing for great flexibility in potential vocabulary there are a large number of options for a word for the author to consider then with flexibility in spacing and flexibility in grammar and flexibility in meaning there is a lot of flexibility for someone trying to construct a theory.
Others have applied this approach vulgar latin, but each translation is of course unique.
Remember initially his approach lead him to date the manuscript to the 16th century and he only modified his theory when the carbon dating was pointed out to him. A fundamental fact he should have made himself aware of even before he began his research, so much for ignoring the work of others.