lurker > 15-09-2021, 02:42 AM
Quote:Timm’s method involves first creating a few pieces of text and then repeating them many times with changes. This procedure, which can be called “self-citation,” sounds extremely simple, but is apparently able to reproduce many features of the Voynich manuscript text. It also explains the fact that the content of the manuscript has some properties of natural language, but to all appearances is not written in such (thanks at this point to the linguist Jan Henrik Holst, who recently made this clear to me again).
RenegadeHealer > 15-09-2021, 11:56 AM
bi3mw > 15-09-2021, 01:33 PM
RenegadeHealer > 15-09-2021, 03:07 PM
(15-09-2021, 01:33 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I still have great difficulty imagining someone writing a 200+ page manuscript (including illustrations) without the text having any informational content whatsoever. To demonstrate that such a thing is possible, the author would probably have been satisfied with a much less comprehensive work.
I am not saying that Timm's solution is not possible, but just because it cannot be refuted does not make it indisputably correct.
Koen G > 15-09-2021, 03:54 PM
Emma May Smith > 15-09-2021, 05:35 PM
RenegadeHealer > 16-09-2021, 01:22 AM
(15-09-2021, 05:35 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The writer in Timm's theory could have written words with any structure whatsoever, yet they quite consistently kept to the same structure ... what are the rules and why do they exist?
Quote:The rules to modify a source word normally don’t affect the order of the glyphs. This is one reason for the observation that the words in the VMS share the same rigid word structure. Additionally, for a text created by self-citation it appears as a logical assumption that the scribe also used aesthetically motivated design rules for glyph selection, in order to harmonize the overall appearance of the text. These rules specify when two glyphs may follow one another. Currier wrote: “There seem to be very strong constraints in combinations of symbols; only a very limited number of letters occur with each other in certain positions of a ‘word’.” Coarsely speaking, the shape of a glyph must be compatible with the shape of the previous one, and is also influenced by its position within a word or a line. (Timm and Schinner, 2020, p.10. Emphasis mine.)
Emma May Smith > 16-09-2021, 04:16 PM
MarcoP > 17-09-2021, 08:04 AM
Quote:What was not clear to me until now, but what Torsten Timm pointed out to me, is that the self-citation method can also be used unconsciously.
RenegadeHealer > 17-09-2021, 10:08 PM
(16-09-2021, 04:16 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The problem with an explanation which relies on the scribe being "aesthetically motivated" is that it effectively puts the process in a closed box we can't open. We can't judge aesthetics objectively, so will never know why [lk] is so much more pleasing than [lt], or just what bothered the scribe about [pe] and [fe], or why [ych] is pretty at the start of a line but ugly elsewhere...