[Article] Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[Rafal]

Matching the imagery could definitely help to crack a cipher. But it will only work if there is a cipher   And the ciphered text is related to images.

If Voynich is meaniningless, matching the imagery won't help to crack it but is still useful. It helps to understand better where and when the manuscript was created and what the author wanted to express through the pictures.

It is not 100% bulletproof. We cannot for sure exclude scenario like VM was written much later by someone as Wilfrid Voynich who got a bunch of medieval parchment. But most people agree that a chance of such event is very low.

[npcompl33t]

No.

 It would be helpful regardless if it is a cypher. If a disk is found resembling the exact same structure / imagery of one of the Voynich disks, with labels in the exact same spot, only they are in Greek, Voynich would be probably be solved.

Hieroglyphs are not a cypher, yet they were not readable until the Rosetta Stone was found. The goal is to find a Rosetta Stone.

Even if they are not directly interpretable, or contains no meaning, it could determine where the manuscript was written, which may provide more clues, may help locating missing pieces of the manuscript or otherwise new Voynich corpus, information about how it was made, etc.

[JoJo_Jost]

There are a few possible cribs, but individual words aren't enough. I even had a medieval disk once that (with a lot of interpretation) might have matched two VMS disks, but of course that didn't get me any further either. We definitely need more than just individual words—we need whole sentences! Simply because, if there’s a language behind it, it certainly can’t be a substitution; it must be something much more complex. And individual words wouldn’t help in that case.

Example: I’m pretty sure there’s an image of ivy at the bottom of f99r; it has a label: tolsasy - so now what?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If Voynich is meaniningless, matching the imagery won't help to crack it but is still useful. It helps to understand better where and when the manuscript was created and what the author wanted to express through the pictures.

Agreed. And, with a lot of luck, it may lead to the identity of the Author.  It is quite possible that the VMS itself will not tell us that, even after it is completely deciphered.

We cannot for sure exclude scenario like VM was written much later by someone as Wilfrid Voynich who got a bunch of medieval parchment. But most people agree that a chance of such event is very low.

Agreed.  But it is also possible that the BL MS 408 is a copy C2 from an older manuscript C1 (the "first copy"), also on vellum. This second copy C2 would have to be made in ~1420 (because of the C14 result); the first copy C1 could then be older. This hypothesis could explain why the material and execution are so poor.   On the other hand, it complicates the analysis.  Which details of the figures were copied from C1, and which ones were contributed or modified by the C1 copyist?

All the best, --stolfi

[pjburkshire]

Example: I’m pretty sure there’s an image of ivy at the bottom of f99r; it has a label: tolsasy - so now what?

The tricky thing with plants is that they have so many different names.  There is a plant growing in my backyard that I had never seen before buying my current house.  It took me a couple of years of Internet searching and the help of A.I. to identify it as Elephantopus tomentosus, a.k.a. Elephant's Foot, a.k.a. Devil's Grandmother.

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The example that gerrydelasel posted listed multiple names:  "Herb name: Pentadatillus; others call it Palma Christi, others Castos Oro, others Priapiscus, and others Girasol; the Greeks call it Tebeet, and the Gauls call it Perga Major."

The leaves on the illustration on the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. do look like ivy but I've never seen ivy with red flowers or berries or whatever they are.  Is that common on European ivy?

[JoJo_Jost]

Not only the leaves, but also the root as depicted in VMS is characteristic of ivy. The berries are more of a blue than red, though sometimes they can also be reddish-blue or red—but you have to be careful with the colors in VMS.

Common ivy (Hedera helix) produces berries, but only in its mature form.

Mature form: Usually develops only after many years, once the plant has reached the top and accesses light-rich areas. The shoots are then upright and lack tendrils; the leaves are entire and tend to be diamond-shaped to ovate.
Flowering: Late summer through fall, approximately September through November. It is an important late-season food source for insects.
Berries: They ripen over the winter into spring and are then blue-black. Birds eat them.
Toxicity: The berries are considered poisonous to humans. This is primarily due to saponins (Hedera saponins).

Pictures see here on alamy.com

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(As far as I know, you're not allowed to use the images for any other purpose, so here's a link—you'll see lots of shapes there.)

[pjburkshire]

Hieroglyphs are not a cypher, yet they were not readable until the Rosetta Stone was found. The goal is to find a Rosetta Stone.

Michael Ventris didn't find a Rosetta Stone to decipher Linear B.  He created his own.  But he had place names.  Place names are probably a lot more stable than plant names and I expect there were fewer of them.  The list of potential plant names might as well be infinite.  We would probably have better luck with plant parts or attributes than with plant names.  We know there are differences between "A" and "B".  Has anyone made a list of the words that are common on the plant pages but are rare on the non-plant pages?

[npcompl33t]

Hieroglyphs are not a cypher, yet they were not readable until the Rosetta Stone was found. The goal is to find a Rosetta Stone.

Michael Ventris didn't find a Rosetta Stone to decipher Linear B.  He created his own.  But he had place names.  Place names are probably a lot more stable than plant names and I expect there were fewer of them.  The list of potential plant names might as well be infinite.  We would probably have better luck with plant parts or attributes than with plant names.  We know there are differences between "A" and "B".  Has anyone made a list of the words that are common on the plant pages but are rare on the non-plant pages?

Yes, I'm familiar with how Linear B was translated. Linear B was also translated with far less total text than Voynich. They had it (comparitively) easy though, Linear B is basically Greek with different symbols. It was cracked not with the names but because Alice Kober wrote all the different forms down on cigarett cartons and roots with different endings probably represented inflection. The place names were basically the final piece of the puzzle she had mostly assembled. 

Heiroglpyhs also required a Crib, even with the Rosetta stone, Pharaoh's names. 

I aslo wouldn't consider the names of the plants themselves to be useful cribs. I was speaking about the zodiac and cosmological diagrams. 

The broader point though, is your statement:

It took me a couple of years of Internet searching and the help of A.I. to identify it as Elephantopus tomentosus, a.k.a. Elephant's Foot, a.k.a. Devil's Grandmother.

The point was $20million dollars of openAI credits would find this in a few minutes, with millions and millions and millions (intentional triple word use there) left over. If there is anything out there to find, it would find it.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It took me a couple of years of Internet searching and the help of A.I. to identify it as Elephantopus tomentosus, a.k.a. Elephant's Foot, a.k.a. Devil's Grandmother.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (from before the LLMs) identifies plants from photographs.  I used it a couple of times and it worked fine (but they were easy cases).

Around here, the name Elephant's Foot means You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., popular in landscaping.

All the best, --stolfi.

[Mark Knowles]

This is what I have argued, for some time. Why would it be a massive overkill to use such a technique?

A huge waste of available space and writing time.

Not if it makes the text very difficult to decipher. You seem to be saying that steganography is a bad technique. By implication Trithemius was just wasting time and space writing his "Steganographia". In fact writing anything in cipher takes more time than not writing in cipher, so on that basis it could be said to be "overkill".