(05-05-2025, 06:08 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nice toenails Peter, but let's stay on topic.
I hereby vote that we, as a community, adopt "Nice toenails, [NAME], but let's stay on topic" as a catchphrase to be used as a gentle form of correction when someone is derailing a thread. For instance, if I were to post in this thread:
"We all know that Koen is only going on about the Turkish claim as a way to avoid engaging with the truth about the Voynich Mss., i.e. the Blackadder Solution,"
the correct response would be:
"Nice toenails, Karl, but let's stay on topic."
Speaking of on-topic...having at least skimmed one of Ahmet's response documents (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.), his arguments are a mixed bag.
On the one hand, on p.23 he says, "Therefore, if Mr. Koen wishes to make a genuine phonetic-statistical comparison, he should begin by scientifically explaining how he intends to compare more than 300 distinct phonetic values of VM with alphabets containing 24 to 33 characters." It is certainly true that there are a lot of "weirdo" glyphs in the text. Having said that, they are such a tiny fraction of the text (~0.5% IIRC depending on choice of transcription alphabet) that even if the "weirdo" glyphs are (per Ahmet's theory) composite glyphs representing syllables there is a limit to how much they can skew the frequency rank ordering of the underlying letters. So point Koen there.
On the other hand, on p. 12 he says (regarding "word"-based points Koen makes), "If, throughout the entire written history of the Turkish language, some word suffixes can be written separately from the root words, then wouldn’t the person critiquing need to refute the clear evidence presented by the claimant in this context? What is the proof that the syllables, appearing as word-like units, are indeed individual words? How can Mr. Koen prove that every separately written unit, appearing as an independent word in Voynichese texts, is an independent word?" My understanding is that Ahmet's claim is that
a) while all words are separated by spaces, not all spaces are word separators, and
b) (IIRC) the way combinatorial explosion is avoided (or at least mitigated) in breaking the text apart into words is Turkish's use of vowel harmony (if two adjacent vords have incompatible vowels then the space between them must be a word separator) along with context and familiarity with the language
In fairness I have to say point Ahmet on that one, with a caveat -- when he says on p. 13, "When Mr. Koen refers to the selection of 'wrong' words, according to whom are these selections wrong?" he's missing the point (
regardless of how the text is parsed into words) that in a text of sufficient length the most common words will/ought to be common function words from the language.