Logging in after a while (so many other interests), I read Diane's post and didn't read an attack in René's wording "invented". After all, all our analysis is "invented", in the sense that it is thought up by people. Those people are not all equal in their judgements of course, but that doesn't take away the fact that an idea is "invented". I see the connotation of the word not as negative, but I understand others may interpret it that way.
Reading a bit more about "experts" and "is it cipher or not" also I see many black-and-white ideas. If it is A, it cannot be B?
My idea -and no, I am not an expert, not in any relevant field about the VMS and also no trained expert from experience-, of a combination of natural languageS and a cipher method is just an idea, but it could be the case. After all none of us have figured it out yet, which leaves a lot of free space for speculations, even from amateurs like me or others.
In research funneling the possibilities is needed to exclude the impossible, but here the impossible
looking option cannot be excluded yet, because there's still no step closer to the solution. The statistics Nick Pelling put forward of "there are about 10 words in the VMS transcription that look like English and that is more than the 8 found by Bax" is a strong point. I had a lot of doubts about Stephen Bax' video, but at least he tried to make his arguments and that takes courage.
The idea I had in mind was actually that the names referring to the botanical drawings were inverted, and so the whole script. So a combination of Arabic/Hebrew (right-to-left reading) but then only per word, with the whole text written from left to right.
I won't have time to dive further into this interesting manuscript, so will share my ideas here, maybe it can inspire others.
I compared the drawings of a few folios with real plants and using this method (and a different transcription), it may be possible to discover some words.
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The "official" transcription in EVA for the possible "label" of the plant reads
oteor. aiicthy
My view of the transcription reads:
- from right to left
- different letters ("EVA" = my idea); "y" = e, "ii" = v, "L" (l) = n, "o" = o (or a, depends, like Russian), "e" = s, "s" = z, "c" = i and the gallow symbol "k" = TR or TH, depends
Thus the text:
Becomes, read from right to left:
Est( r )iva Rost( r )o (extra space added as the software makes a copyright symbol from the ( r )
The Greek name for the tomato plant, that looks a bit like the plant (leaves, and the base of the flowers at least) drawn. Rosto could refer to the red used too.
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Stephen Bax analyses this as "Cotton" - You are not allowed to view links.
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"officially" reads
ytchas.oraiin.chkar=,
ytchas.oraiin.chkor=, or
ytchar.oraiin.chkar=
What I read is "rothis maro raisCHe" or "roCHis maro raisTHe" or "roTHis maro raisTRe" with Rothis/chis referring to "red" again, "raische/the" to "root" and "maro" is the name of the pea plant, also looking a bit like this plant drawn:
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The leaves of both plants look alike and what is drawn in the VMS looks like the pea fruits with the peas indicated in red as kind of seeds in the VMS plant
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"official" EVA is
otchodeey=, okchodeey= or otchodchy=
I would read it as "eisdoistra or eisdaistra". The drawing could be a Devil's tail, used in Chinese medicine:
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The text, when read from right to left, to me has a certain Greek/Cyrillic "feel" with words added from Latin or old German and many other languages. The idea of different languages put together to have a certain natural language combination, but indeed ciphered. What definition of cipher is, may be for that other topic, but a text that is not recognised after almost a century would be a kind of "cipher" (if meaningful), right? If not, it would have been decrypted already.
I admit this is nothing more than an idea and feeling, but somehow it makes more sense to me to read from right to left and to recognise Cyrillic, Greek "letters" in the VMS characters.
The "official" EVA at least looks very arbitrary and biases a lot. Starting from the text itself without paying too much attention to a random choice of transcriptions would be the best option I think.