Writer (and University of Bristol PhD student) Gerard Cheshire has recently been asking people to look at his paper “Linguistic missing links: instruction in decrypting, translating and transliterating the only document known to use both proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols for its writing system“. (Note that this is actually a draft, but dressed up to look as though it is to be published in “Science Survey (2017) 1” when, as far as I can tell, there is no such journal as “Science Survey”.)
His paper breathlessly reveals that Voynichese is nothing more than Vulgar Latin (though without any obvious grammar or structure). He then proposes a scheme mapping Voynich letters to normal letters (though this lacks “b/f, c/k, ch/sh, g/gh, h/j/ym v/w, x/z” [p.17]), which he then uses to “transliterate” some sentences (though shaped out of strings of words assembled from God-only-knows-how-many different European languages) into something approaching modern-day English. These sentences ‘demonstrate’ that the Voynich Manuscript is (running counter to the radiocarbon dating) actually from the 16th century, and is nothing more than a courtly woman’s health and bathing manual, a fact which every other Voynich Manuscript researcher to date has been too short-sighted to see or recognise, bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.
Errrm… really? Really? Really?
Vulgar Latin
First thing I have to point out is that there is no such (single) thing as Vulgar Latin: rather, the phrase denotes a vast family of vulgar / pidgin / hybrid Latin-ish spoken languages sprawled across all of Europe and over most of a millennium.
Every single version of Vulgar Latin was a purely local affair, nobody spoke them all at the same time – Vulgar Latin wasn’t a universal lingua franca, it was a heterogenous set of hacky vulgar dialects that helped people get by locally. And I simply don’t believe for a moment Cheshire’s implicit claim (completely necessary to his argument, but not expressed anywhere I can see) that this kind of Vulgar Latin had no structure, that each specific instance of Vulgar Latin was no more than language expressed as a diarrhoeal deluge of words that listeners teased meaning out of.
As a result, the entire linguistics mindset running through Cheshire’s paper (i.e. the comparison between a single concerted instance of a script and a vast cloud of unwritten potentialities diffusely surrounding a huge family of languages, each of which is presumed to have no structure) seems utterly wrongheaded.
As such, it makes no sense at all to compare a single slab of written Voynichese text (which gives every sign of having been written in a single time and place) with a wide set of different language potentialities (that, further, were almost never written down, and – further still – would in every instance have had a basic rationale and structure [because that’s how language works] that he requires to be absent).
A Monstrous Mash-up
Even though Cheshire puts forward his speculative translations (which he repeatedly calls “transliterations”, as if that somehow brackets out the mile-wide interpretational chasms he repeatedly has to swing across) of several sections of the Voynichese text, I’m going to give as my example here the top three lines of f82v that he discusses on pp.20-21. This is because f82v is a nice, bright, easy-to-read page in the “Balneo” quire (Q13), which means that the various EVA transcriptions speak almost with a single voice:
tokol.olfchedy.qokeedy.qokedal.shol.qotal.otdal.dal.olshedy-{figure}
qokedy.lshedy.qotol.dol.shedy.shedy.dy.dar.otedy.chetedy.lokam-{figure}
dair.ol.chedy.qotedy.qotedy.chsdy.qotal.qoty.qokal.qokedy.lo-{figure}
Cheshire’s own transcription of these lines (according to his conversion-to-letters-scheme) is as follows:
molor orqueina doleina dolinar æor domar om nar nar or æina,
dolina ræina domor nor æina æina na nas omina eimina rolasa,
nais oe eina domina domeina etna domar doma dolar dolina ro.
Let’s take each line apart in turn to see what he’s trying to get at:
molor = mollor = (soften/calm/pacify) [Latin] – because molor (grind/mill/wear) [Latin] “would be inappropriate”
orqueina = ?
doleina = therapeutic [Catalan]
dolina/dolinar = bath/bathe [Romance languages]
æor = ?
domar = to tame/control [Catalan and Portuguese]
om = hom (homine) = man [Latin]
nar nar = foolish/crazy/up-tight [Romansch]
or = ?
æina = wife [Catalan]
Cheshire’s “reasonable transliteration” (i.e. speculative translation) for this first line is: “Calming with therapeutic bathing is always certain to tame the tense man and wife“.
dolina/dolinar = bath/bathe [Romance languages]
ræina (reina) = queen [Romance languages]
domor = [domar] = to tame/control [Catalan and Portuguese]
nor = daughter-in-law [Aromanian]
æina = wife [Catalan]
æina = wife [Catalan]
na = ?
nas = ?
omina = omen [Latin]
eimina = to eliminate [Spanish and Portuguese]
rolasa = ?
His translation of the second line is: “A queen’s bath always relaxes the daughter-in-law and wife to eliminate the omen, for it to happen“.
nais = to begin/commence/create [French]
oe = ?
eina = ?
domina = lady [Latin]
dome[i]na = domain/room [Latin]
etna (ætna) = to heat/burn [Latin/Greek]
domar = to tame/control [Catalan and Portuguese]
doma = ?
dolar = ?
dolina/dolinar = bath/bathe [Romance languages]
ro = abbreviation for rogo = to ask/request [Latin]
His third line of translation runs: “Begin now the method for the lady’s domain, and heat the room to make the bathing smooth, please!”
Cheshire sums up what these three lines mean as follows:
So, the passage appears to be advice for the mother (queen) of a prince to impart to her daughter-in-law as guidance for seducing her son and becoming pregnant.
Like a badly mislabeled lift, this is wrong on so many levels. Nobody reading the above should need to look through Latin, Catalan, Portuguese, Romansch, Aromanian, French, Greek, and “Romance languages” dictionaries to find words to describe this fantastical nonsense. (Though you might find Partridge’s “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” most fruitily germane to the task.)
Disastrous Dog’s Dinners
What Cheshire has been seduced by here is the beguiling notion that the numerous textual difficulties that Voynichese presents might all be magically explained away by a wave of the polyglot fairy’s wand, e.g. that the Voynich’s tightly-knit buzz of similar words might simply be a result of a large number of active component languages somehow feeding into the plaintext. However, it should be no surprise that these polyglot sirens appear rather different when you take a closer look at them:
For all the undoubted cleverness of Leo Levitov PhD, his particular polyglot reading of the Voynich was (as seasoned Voynich Manuscript researchers will happily attest) more or less exactly the same kind of dog’s dinner as Cheshire’s is. And this was for exactly the same reason, which is that the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text presents so many different kinds of non-language-like behaviours all at the same time that trying to read it as if it were a simple language (even a polyglot mash-up “simple language”) is never, ever going to work.
Specifically, the kind of challenging textual behaviours I’m talking about here are:
– 1) Low entropy (highly predictable, babble-like text)
– 2) Highly structured letter placement rules (e.g. highly stylized word beginnings and endings)
– 3) Two or more significant language variants
– 4) A surprisingly high (dictionary size) : (corpus size) ratio.
– 5) A generative dictionary (i.e. covering many more permutations than normal languages do)
– 6) Only sporadic word adjacency pattern matches
– 7) Neal keys (both vertical and horizontal)
– 8) Where are common words like “the” and “and”?
– 9) Where are the number shapes, number clusters, or number patterns?
– (etc)
My point here is that while it is possible to construct a proof-of-concept plaintext language to partially get around one or two of these issues, all the other pesky behaviours will then cause that ‘solution’ to sink like a Chicago Mafia whistleblower. This is all pretty much what Elizebeth Friedman was talking about in 1962 about people seeking such solutions being “doomed to utter frustration”: it’s a horrible shame that in 2017 people continue to fail to even begin to grasp what is such a basic message.
In the case of Cheshire, a polyglot Vulgar Latin reading would aim to get around points 4) and 5), but would then collapse in a miserable heap at the hands of all the other points. Anyone following Stephen Bax’s miserable lead to try to come up with their own ingenious linguistic reading of Voynichese should wise up to the whole list, because – unless you are even trying to satisfy all these oddly non-language-like constraints all at the same time – you’re plainly wasting both your own time and that of everyone else you try to convince.
Laughable linguistics
When I read nonsensical papers like this (and I can assure you that this is not an outlier, because there are plenty more of them out there), I feel a deep sadness for historical linguistics. Even for unbelievably bright people such as George Steiner (who at his peak was clearly a hugely inspirational speaker, and whose books oddly summon to mind Ioan Couliano’s syncretic layerings), far too many linguists lard their writing with speculative etymological riffs anyone else would be embarrassed to put their name to, even if they were walking home from a beer festival drunk and wearing a foolish hat. (For his sins, Cheshire throws a fair few of these soggy prawns onto his linguistic barbecue.)
And whenever I see linguistics people rap about Ur-languages while constructing metronomically-timelined millennia-spanning etymology trees (yet again), I just despair. All the while modern linguists can’t construct solid etymologies for the words we use in the 21st century, what chance do historical linguistics people really stand going back X hundred years? Honestly, some things lie beyond the limits of useful reconstruction, and trying to claim otherwise is a collective (and discipline-wide) failure.
To me, the structural problem with historical linguistics, then, is that if you remove all the brazenly bullshit stuff, what little is left is perilously close to a tree-less tundra: it remains an academic discipline, sure, but one whose grasp of history is all too often paper-thin (as is its actual use to historians), and whose pretensions to science are largely laughable.
And so I really don’t think that Gerard Cheshire should feel bad about having ended up down a garden path here, when it’s actually historical linguistics that has marched down that garden path en masse. The entire conceptual toolkit that he brought to bear on the Voynich Manuscript was as much use as a Swiss Army Knife made of soft-set jelly: sorry to have to say it in such flat terms, but the poor bugger never really stood a chance.
Wasn’t it the Cheshire Cat who said: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
“… any road will get you there.”
And if you ignore the logical fallacies, you’ll get there even quicker.
As for playing two ends against the middle… Cheshire’s paper simultaneously claims the VMS is “Vulgar Latin” (which he essentially describes as broken-down, simplified, degraded Latin) and proto-Latin/proto-Italic (which existed before there was Latin), so apparently the road that gets you there includes a time machine.
Nick
Reading the post about ‘native Indian’ languages, it struck me that I’ve not seen anyone talk about whether they suppose the Vms’ written text was intended to be spoken, or read. As your post illustrated so nicely, orthography has to be fairly regular if the text is to be read, but not if to be spoken or sung.
I’ve seen this reflected even in some early medieval Latin texts, where a line will run on with no discernable space between words until a breath is needed.
By the same token, a text meant to be spoken aloud could be broken pretty much at random and means used for shortening the text might differ, as might the grammatical structure. As example, have a look at a practiced cook’s notes for a recipe, a technician’s notes-to-self … and I suppose as the extreme, scientific and mathematical notations.
I’m not offering a theory – it just occurs to me that the default expectation has been that ‘underneath it all’ the Voynich text should be one of the ‘meant to be read’ sort. What do you say?
Vulgate was a written language. The Bible used it for 1000 years. Columbus took a copy with him in 1492.
Please correct your interesting but fuzzy narrative, and stop attacking people by creating false narratives of one type or another.
Stick to the text, and the stick to the linguistic and numerical patterns. No where have I seen that the 800 year use the pre-base 10 decimal numeration system built upon the 800 AD Arab innovation of scaling rational numbers to 2-term unit fraction series, whenever possible, considered. Medievals worked from 1454 to 1585 to end the Arab unit fraction system that ended ciphered Greek letters that represented the counting numbers, with 1 = alpha, 2 = beta, …, with unit fractions denoted by placing (‘) after the ciphered Ionian or Doric letter.
Fibonacci’s 1202 AD “Liber Abaci ” rigorously exposed the system that used subtraction of a LCM 1/m such that the greedy algorithm:
(n/p – 1/m) = (mn – p)/mp set (mn – p) = 1 whenever possible.
When impossible, I.e. 4/13 a second LCM 1/m was chosen such that 4/13 = 1/4 + 1/18 + 1/468 as I have previous detailed on the blog.
I will repost Fibonacci’s seven distinctions, methods, the began the Liber Abaci, as Ahmes began his math text with a 2/n table, that generally scaled rational numbers n/p to 2-term and 3-term unit fraction series, a topic that you will likely continue to ignore, whenever you desire.
Medievals were skilled encoders of words and numbers. Look at both sides of their intellectual lives and stop throwing out babies with tbe bath water.
In closing Vulgate was a non-academic language, a spiritual language, that was in use for at least 1,400 years, ended in the English speaking world with the full acceptance of the King James Bible.
Best Regards,
Milo Gardner
Milo: “the Vulgate” is the 4th century translation of the Bible into Latin – it was not written in Vulgar Latin, but in Latin. You are creating your own false narrative by confusing two completely different things – even Wikipedia is able to tell them apart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin
Diane: plenty of people have suggested that Voynichese might be primarily from a (typically ‘lost’) oral speaking tradition, but without anything so useful as evidence or even helpful observations to back the notion up.
Conversely, the many curious regularities and patterns that Voynichese presents (and indeed the general regularity of the writing) do collectively seem to suggest that it is primarily a writing system, though at the same time somehow managing to follow a deep logic that doesn’t seem to match anyone’s expectations of how languages are, should be, or even could be written. Oh well, doubtless there’ll be yet another Voynich language theory rolling towards us all down the very same rails before very long. :-/
NIck
My specialization at university was historical linguistics, so first I feel compelled to add some nuance to the final bit of this post. Of course, I mostly agree: yes, obviously Ur language theories are ridiculous; written language (i.e. all we know for sure) only covers a tiny, tiny section of human history. So we can only peer through the fog a few meters around us, but everything beyond a certain point in history is unknowable forever.
That said, we have a really good idea of some languages that precede modern ones: Latin, Sanskrit, Gothic… (although Gothic is more like an uncle). By comparing Gothic and the oldest attested forms of other Germanic languages, we also have a clear picture of what their ancestor looked like. Still, we call this Proto-Germanic and mark all used forms (*), to indicate that these forms have been reconstructed and do carry a certain amount of uncertainty.
Language change is unpredictable, but it does follow surprisingly strict rules. What I mean is, we have no way of knowing whether or not English /p/ will shift to /f/ in a century. What we *do* know is that a shift from /p/ to /f/ is a realistic one, since only one aspect changes (plosive becomes fricative). On the other hand, a direct systematic shift from /f/ to /g/ is impossible because three properties of the sound change.
Since we know how languages evolve, we can compare the oldest known offspring of a language and reconstruct it from there. Even though the reconstructed proto-language remains hypothetical, the results are scientific and valuable. Proto-Indo-European was still spoken some three thousand years BCE if memory serves, which is peanuts on the scale of humanity’s existence.
But going beyond Proto-Indo-European is a bit floaty and extremely speculative. It’s a fun exercise, but we just don’t have the data (and never will) to be even a bit certain. This is different for languages like Proto-Italic, since here we have a wealth of information about its direct offspring.
Now to the point…. I have also been “chosen” to receive Cheshire’s paper and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He knows not much about history, even less about linguistics and has clearly not read much about the VM. His methodology is rubbish and he doesn’t even use the correct basic terminology. (He calls folios “spreads” or in the best case “portfolios”. He thinks herbal remedy and homeopathy are synonyms etc.)
As I told him, it is impossible that the VM contains Proto-Italic. The oldest Latin writings we have are Old Latin, and the language was in an inscriptions stage at that point – compare it to attestations of Runic script, carved on objects or stones. That was before I realized that he doesn’t have a clue what “Proto-Italic” means.
Anyway, I sent him a detailed explanation of the flaws in his paper, assuming he’d appreciate some pointers, but he replied that it’s a shame I put so much time in it since he knows he’s right – so no need to correct him.
Apart from this, I also see a surprising amount of ethical difficulties here. As you indicate, he faked magazine publication. By stressing that he’s a PhD student, one also gets the impression he’s a linguist, which is far from the truth. He also lied that “proper linguists” agree with him (impossible) while he gets criticism only from Voynich enthusiasts. Furthermore, he presents his paper as a purely linguistic endeavor, in which the VM is only marginally relevant. His title doesn’t contain any reference to the VM and he doesn’t use the word “Voynich”. He told me this is because he doesn’t want to be associated with, well… with us basically 😉 But the contents of his paper is nothing more and nothing less than yet another Voynich-Latin theory.
He’s been sending me some more translations, which indicate that he doesn’t even grasp the basics of Latin. Whenever his method produces a pseudo-Latin second person verb, he translates it as a first person.
Anyway, given his complete deafness, lack of any relevant knowledge, lack of research ethics and tendency to implicitly insult me, I’ve decided to stop replying. Aint nobody got time for dat.
Koen: thanks for your detailed comment, much appreciated. The bit that got my goat the most was his repeated use of “transliteration” as a fake academese replacement for “unbelievably speculative simulated translation”. Ho hum.
Nick,
Transliterations are commonly used by academics, thereby only exposing what was written on the page. There are topics, math being one, that written texts are only shorthand notations. To read the mental and written texts, as originally written, in their entirety, missing math steps need to be added back.
A case in point is the 1202 “Liber Abaci”, Europe’s only math book for 250 years, ended in 1454 when the Ottoman Empire overran Constantiople, ended the Byzantine Empire. Oddly the Latin text was not fully translated into English until 2002, with the life work of L.E. Sigler. Sadly, many sections of the texts were only transliterated, thereby missing the intellectual nuggets that remain hidden to academics that make no attempt to complete Sigler’s life work.
Milo Gardner
For more on Milo Gardner’s analysis of the Liber Abaci: http://liberabaci.blogspot.co.uk/
Milo: the author of the paper I’m reviewing here tries to pass off all his extraordinarily subjective speculations and overoptimistic interpolations as “transliterations”, as if by calling them that he can give his work a halo of “science-iness”.
Milo
“1202 “Liber Abaci”, Europe’s only math book for 250 years”.. not sure what you include with ‘math’, but copies of Euclid were still being made and used as late as the fifteenth century and inform secondary works to the present day. The same is true for Boethius’ Arithmetic, believe it or not. And the first mention I recall reading of that in Latin Europe is the comment by Gerbert d’Aurillac that he found a copy bound with another work in the north Italian monastery where he was abbot until elected Pope.
Then, if you want to move from geometry and arithmetic to specific applications:
merchants handbooks where you learned to do mental arithmetic of some complexity and conversions of weights, measures and money
Plus the various astol-onomical tables which required several maths. skills to work with.
Then the sort of thing written down in a couple of mercantile handbooks but which had earlier been taught by rote: traders traded before Fibonacci.
I really can’t agree that the Liber Abaci was the ‘only’ book that you could learn maths from. Before or after the fall of Constantinople.
Nick,
Let me begin by agreeing with one aspect of your vulgate post. Of course Vulgate was an oral and written Latin language. Oral forms were regional in scope, as you fairly pointed out. Yet oral Vulgate was replaced by Italian, connects to Dante and others hard work , points that your Wikipedia linked did not include. Written vulgate in the 1600s was changed to an academic form compared to the Vulgate known to Jerome, specifics can be detailed by Koen, and trained linguists.
Koen, you may wish to comment on pertinent written forms of Vulgate that stayed the same, and those words and metaphors that changed, during the Jerome to Columbus periods.
Nick, your Classical Greek education, as learned in the UK, was oddly and sadly elitist compared to the history of economic thought, during the same time periods, that I studied in the US.
The British Museum is a case in point. The BM, to this day, oddly places Greek math above its parent, Egyptian fractions and Egyptian math, specifically by only transliterating Henry Rhind’s 1858 purchases in Cairo, the EMLR and RMP. The BM limited its Egyptian arithmetic to additive issues, rather than as Plato and others reported most Greeks learned math by traveling to Egypt. Archimedes could not place a paper in Alexandria’s library without the approval of Eratosthenes, a Greek policy that continued the very old Egyptian practice.
Greeks practiced number theory learned from Egyptian math texts. Egyptian, Greek and Number theory from any era, including our own, defines multiplication and division operations as inverse to one another. The 1900 BCE Akhmim Wooden tablet multiplied (64/64) by 1/3, 1/7, 1/10, 1/11 and 1/13 into exact n/64 quotients and 1/320 remainders. Two-part answers were returned to 64/64 as proofs by multiplying by 3, 7, 10, 11 and 13, vivid facts missed by Peet (in 1923 by only citing n/320 data) , but acknowledged by Hana Vymazalova in 2002. Peet and the BM oddly conclude, to this day, that Egyptian division was limited to a guessing method named “single false position”, actually a medieval geometric solution to second degree equations…that was not limited to a division definition.
Let me stop here, having bypassed your UK classical education in ways that probably make your head ache. Be a BM believer, and maintain skeptical views of Egyptian number theory that reached the medieval era, if you wish.
But you have been informed that your medieval number eye has been blind, and can not be used to properly decid the VM, likely filled with Arab unit fractions.
Best wishes,
Milo
Milo: it is hardly elitist of me to point out that the Vulgate Bible was not written in Vulgar Latin. And you are surely not doing whatever camp you think you’re in any favours by continuing to confuse the two (immensely different, if similarly named) things together, despite my best efforts.
Milo, did you read Cheshire’s paper?
Milo
Better than wikipedia, but not so good as the hard-copy version.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15367a.htm
I’m assuming that the oldest western (Latin-) church would know their stuff when it comes to the Vulgate, since their history goes back to the time it – the Vulgate [version of the Latin BIble] – was written.
Koen is right about Cheshire, and also about historical linguistics being an accurate science. The key to it is historical phonology. Proto-Germanic is a hypothesis consisting of the phonological system of the proto-language in the form of a table: labial, labiodental, dental etc times voiced stop, unvoiced stop, fricative etc (similarly for the vowels), and a set of context-dependent rules deriving the phonological systems of attested languages from it. Lists of words (e.g. zwei = twee = two) are the evidence for the hypothesis. The evidence for proto-Germanic is strong, consisting of hundreds of clearly related words and an absence of systematically anomalous ones. Phonological constraints are also what allows us to cite cognate words of similar but not identical meaning (e.g. Zaun = tuin = town) without claiming a licence to do so ad hoc.
Claims that Indo-European, Uralic and other languages are related as members of the Nostratic superfamily are not constrained in this way. They may possibly be true, but the hypothesis is inherently weaker than the Indo-European hypothesis because it is not a phonological hypothesis and the pool of possibly cognate words is too small to establish one. Is there any prospect of progress? I see one in the analysis of apparent Indo-European loan words in other language families, particularly Sumerian (Whittaker’s Euphratic) and Old Chinese (as reconstructed by Edwin Pulleyblank and Christopher Beckwith): watch this space!
Nick: I have devised a test for individuals claiming to be able to translate the Voynich. The test does unfortunately have to rely on the honesty of the test taker and a non-photographic/savant memory of the manuscript. However if the test taker lies to us they are also lying to themselves about their ability to translate it. I think whether you or I believe they can translate the Voynich most people claiming to be able to translate the Voynich really believe they can and so would be happy to pursue the test in all honesty with the conviction that they will do well.
This is my version, but it could be applied more generally:
I copied a selection of clearly written labels from the 6 rosette foldout page (this could also be applied to other pages with clear distinct labels) onto a blank image page. Then the distinct items of Voynich text are numbered 1,2,3,4,…..
The test taker is emailed the list and required to translate the items. Then the test taker is then emailed a copy of the 6 foldout page with labels removed and asked to mark where each label by number belongs.
Throughout the test the test taker is told not to in any way consult the original 6 foldout page image. (This is where the test taker’s honesty is required. If they cheat obviously they will be able to fix the results. There is no way of preventing them from cheating) There is no time limit for the test though it would be troubling if it were to take them a very long time.
At the end of the process a comparison of the correlation of the label numbers marked by the test taker on the page and their actual location can be made. One would expect the correlation to be about as a good an assignment as would be achieved by a random process if their translation method does not work. If there is a very close correlation between where they think the labels belong and where they actually belong then I think their analysis deserves further investigation.
I am sure this test could be refined. I recall the kinds of tests people like James Randi or Richard Dawkins have applied to people claiming to have special abilities or alternative medicine using techniques akin to double blind trials; this is not an exact parallel, but you get the idea. I am particularly reminded of a test Richard Dawkins applied to “Dowsers”, these are people who claim to be able to divine where there is water.
I think this example can be found at:
https://youtu.be/eK2HiO495P0
Nick,
We agree with respect to the main topic of this thread. Anyone that only employs transliterations is likely throwing baby out with the bath water.
To accurately decode any text, written at any time, the cryptanalyst must travel back in time, dropping off modern metaphors that define modern culture, and pick up clues to think in the time period that is under study.
Vulgate, orally and written, offers many knotty issues that I am unprepared to address, beyond the fact that oral vulgate was so debased by the 1200’s that many books were written on the importance of replacing it for person to person communications. Dante has been given credit, rightly, or wrongly for placing the final nail in the public death of oral vulgate in Itaty. It is said that when an issue of public syntax arises in written Italian that Dante’s advise should be followed.
Written vulgate was upgraded into an academic context that one of our US Supreme Court justices, Scalia, studied as a youth, rising to the apex of the law, never learning the (vulgate) Latin that was used by his Sicilian father. Near his death, on CSPAN, Scalia said he had one regret in his life, for nit appreciating the imagery and beauties of the oral language of his father, (vulgate) Sicilian spoken in his father’s home town.
Think outside the modern box, and travel back to the medieval 1300-1400s to attempt to break the VM code. Drop off modern thinking, even the transliterated views of the British Museum, and any like modern culture defending institution, where ever it spews out nationalist biased info.
I think of Mexico’s national anthropological museum that dehumanizes native peoples by displaying them with blank faces, while filling in Conquestadore faces with blue eyes and full facial features. European and US museum offer subtle biases along the same lines, sad situations that must be erased to fairly study any cultural era not fairly represented in our school books, and cultural institutions.
Best Regards,
Milo
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjC64cnxl0k
Your research is not good. You are always at the beginning. At this rate, you will not achieve a positive result in a hundred years.
Nick, you want the key to the translation ? ( MS – 408 ).
Milo. Think about it. Greek alphabet.
1. Alfa = A.
2. Beta = B.
3.Gama = G.
4. Delta = D.
5. Epsilon = E.
etc.
Jewish substitution.
1. = A,I,J,Q,Y.
2. = B,R,K.
3. = G,C,S,L.
4.= D,M,T.
5.= E,H,N.
etc.
Nick,
Your personalized myopia is amazing per […]
Milo: if you’re going to complain about people’s myopia, you might consider looking to see who actually posted the comment you’re complaining about. [Hint: it wasn’t actually me.]
Nick,
Again, you are superficially correct. Someone named D posted the idiotic
claim that the “Liber Abaci” was not Latin Europe’s only math book from
1202 to 1454. Without D being identified, you may have used the pseudonymn
…unlikely off course, but your terse erasure of my pertinent points means,
to me, that you may side with D…both of you were under educated in 20th century classrooms, neither of you had have access to the English transliteration of LE Sigler’s 2002 Engllish version of 1202 Latin text. The 1202 Latin math text
Determines its own context by statements and proofs, number based facts that are vivid, and can be double checked by anyone with a pencil, paper and a
Math brain.
Returning to the main thread, Cheshire ,did not offer a bilingual Vulgate
Written language. What was offered as evidence were fragments of
Oral words and phrases connected across Southern Europe. Silly is the
highest value of a well written paper that reached unverified conclusions.
Milo
Milo: if you want to know who “D.” is, it’s Diane O’Donovan (who is definitely not me).
Whatever points that she and I agree on are few and far between, and don’t seem to include anything to do with the Liber Abaci, whatever your interpretation. My erasure of most of your comment was to try to prevent you making a fool of yourself, but it seems that I was somewhat wasting my moderating effort in that regard.
In regard to Gerard’s theory, that of others and our own theories.
I must say first I have found Gerard from my interactions with him to be a very polite and friendly person albeit with a deeply mistaken confidence in the validity of his own theory. He has clearly invested a significant amount of time and effort in constructing it. Most people who say that they can translate the Voynich believe their theory is correct and can get angry and annoyed when others reject their theory. (I should say of course that I am not expert on Human psychology.)
I guess admitting that you are mistaken after trumpting your theory can result in embarassment; we humans can often be motivated by ego. People naturally experience disappointment when their theory in which they have invested time and emotional commitment is proven false. I think wanting your theory to be true can often overtake a sober reflection on a theory’s pluses and minuses. This all makes it very hard for people to admit that they are wrong.
Having said that I believe people who don’t construct theories add little value. Some of us have big theories about the manuscript as a whole some of us have little theories about a small part of it. Ultimately all attempts at really significant contributions are, at this time, theories not certainies. It is true that an individual can make empirical observations about the manuscript, without any interpretation made, but these only take you so far. Progress is made through process of speculation and theory building. So some people can hide behind not constructing theories and thus it is impossible for anyone to say their theories are wrong. Progress can be made sometimes through incremental collective efforts, but other times one individual makes a big leap.
We all need to turn the mirror inwards to see if our theories stack up.
Ultimately we are left with the question:
Am I also someone mistaking these same mistakes or is my theory more than this?
Often, but not always there is no rigourous objective way to be certain of this. So we inevitably to some extent have to fall back on subjective analysis which often meaning relying on instinct. We need a very health dose of doubt in our theories, but also, which might seem contradictory, a determination and confidence to keep pursuing your theory and its consequences to their limit; being crippled by doubt does not help. One needs to listen to others, but also have the self-confidence to ignore others as we know there have been thinkers who were right, but widely ignored or dismissed. Most of all one always needs an openness to change one’s mind and potentially reject one’s theory and construct a new theory.
I think what is vital in analysing a theory is the predictions that it makes. So if for example the translator were to translation a line like “I, Prince Gunter of Hamburg, wrote this manuscript in 1412.” (fictional).Then this is a prediction that can be explored. Or if they translate a line a saying “This is thyme”,or in a specific place on an astronomical chart “Monday” or somewhere else “Dusseldorf Castle” and so on. In addition making the rules of their translation method precise and repeatable is important i.e. their translation algorithm. I think very broadly speaking it is much more difficult to assess non translation theories of the Voynich objectively i.e. a theory of the manuscript which does not claim to produce a translation. It is difficult to distinguish whether perceived patterns are more than coincidences which result from normal random chance. Some may feel that it is straightforward to analyse a theory to tell if it is broadly speaking correct or not, in some cases this may be true in others I think it becomes more difficult.
As some may know I favour the development of a rapid and simple testing procedure for new translators. This should make the assessing of a new theory much quicker and simpler especially given the number of theories out there. I have already designed and implemented one part of this process.
Anyway, so I ask myself:
Is my theory fundamentally flawed or is there real mileage in it?
I think there is mileage in it, but then I would say that or would I?
Nick,
Fooling yourself that I am the bad guy may come to an end.
Good-bye. Your personal attacks have not been subtle. It
Seems number people, like myself, can not communicate
with word people that defend their word space by throwing
out personal attacks. I am moving on.
Living in the present, as you do, and overlaying personalized
modern views over the medieval VM is an odd practice the you
will continue, missing many needles in the haystack.
Transliterations, by anyone, offer very fuzzy windows to the VM era.
Needed deeper translations of the “Liber Abaci” and other Arab
and European unit fraction number theory and language exts offers
reliable ways to visit the past, leaving modern classroom oversights
behind..
A range of valid windows, math and language, to the politicized past
are needed. Vulgate offers one class of Opportunity that few know
how to exploit in a professional manner.
Best wishes,
Milo
Milo: you clearly still have no idea what the difference between Vulgar Latin and The Vulgate is. And that is not a “personal attack”, I simply fail to see how I can spell it out any more clearly. 🙁
Mark Knowles wrote: “Most people who say that they can translate the Voynich believe their theory is correct and can get angry and annoyed when others reject their theory.”
Since I am amongst the loudest detractors (having written blow-by-blow commentaries on Bax’s, Gibbs’s, Lockerby’s, and Cheshire’s “translations”) I want to make it clear that I am *not* rejecting their theories.
The theory is not usually the problem (although forming one too soon can hinder rather than help)… it’s the arguments *for* a particular theory and the actual results that either
1) don’t make any linguistic sense or
2) yield only a handful of words using a method that doesn’t generalize to
the rest of the manuscript or
3) which subjectively manipulate the results by cherry-picking, anagraming,
or positing one-way ciphers.
We are constantly bombarded with translations based on unsubstantiated statements and assumptions. That’s not a fault of the theory, that’s a problem with the translator’s knowledge base and his or her method. There is also a notable unwillingness to offer a range of explanations for data that clearly has more than one possible interpretation.
—————–
People who know Latin (or think they know it) argue that the VMS is Latin. Those who know Arabic, argue that it’s Arabic. Those who know Czech, argue that it’s Czech, those who know English, argue that it’s English, and so on…
How can this happen? Because the VMS is a string of glyphs that resemble vowels carefully interspersed with glyphs that somewhat resemble consonants but which are ambiguous enough to interpret either way. What most translators fail to notice is that a disproportionately large number of glyphs only appear in particular positions.
Hundreds of pages of text will *always* yield a few words in any language (I have found hundreds) and a few might even be adjacent to drawings that appear to match.
I’m quite open to theories about it being abbreviated text, or Latin or Czech or Arabic or Georgian or Armenian or auto-copied, or synthetic, or what-have-you. I don’t reject any of these possibilities. What dismays me is that those who claim to have solved it, regardless of their theories, have not made solid, cohesive, defensible arguments.
If you genuinely study Voynichese meta-structure, you will see it has a unique positional dynamic—one that goes unacknowledged (and perhaps unnoticed) by the majority of researchers who claim solutions. If you don’t study the meta-structure, then whatever you think you see may be an illusion.
JKP: I heartily agree with almost all of your comment. However, I should perhaps caution that the idea that Voynichese has a meta-structure quite distinct from its structure carries an innate presumption that we can necessarily discern structure from meta-structure, and that is quite a problematic claim. But this is arguably just as mucha commentary on those (particularly linguistic-minded) theorists who propose that they have identified Voynichese’s core structure and that all the annoying remainder is some kind of meta-structure which they can airily hand-wave away.
It may well be that some of what gets typically treated as meta-structure might genuinely be meta-structure: for example, I can quite conceive that Neal keys might well prove to be no more than a textual way of highlighting a short section of text, that was perhaps even written in red ink in the original. However, until we can even start to say definite things about how Voynichese works, we should probably try to avoid prematurely separating structure and meta-structure. 🙂
Dear Milo,
I am not sure which languages you prefer reading, so I can’t offer you a serious sort of reading list. I have taken this from one of the web-pages which turned up when I googled ‘Medieval mathematics text’.
—
From the 4th to 12th Centuries, European knowledge and study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music was limited mainly to BOETHIUS’ translations of some of the works of ancient Greek masters such as NICHOMACHUS and EUCLID. All trade and calculation was made using the clumsy and inefficient Roman numeral system, and with an abacus based on Greek and Roman models.
By the 12th Century, though, Europe, and particularly Italy, was beginning to trade with the East, and Eastern knowledge gradually began to spread to the West. Robert of Chester translated AL-KHWARIZMI’s important book on algebra into Latin in the 12th Century, and the complete text of Euclid’s “Elements” was translated in various versions by Adelard of Bath, Herman of Carinthia and Gerard of Cremona. The great expansion of trade and commerce in general created a growing practical need for mathematics, and arithmetic entered much more into the lives of common people and was no longer limited to the academic realm.
—
The same little article does go on to talk about Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci).
http://www.storyofmathematics.com/medieval.html
You can still some pre-Fibonacci maths texts if you like. Just look online for the names I’ve written in capitals and add ‘manuscript’ after them. Or go to just about any great library’s scanned books and look for them. Hope this helps.
Just a thought.
Having just read the various exchanges above, it seems to me that there is normalised determination here to find all offered solutions wrong, as the de facto stance. Clearly the scholarly and scientific view would be the opposite, as any opportunity to understand the VM codex and contents would be enthusiastically embraced and tried out in the slim hope of success. So, where is this positive and constructive contribution? After all, it may be that the correct solution has already been offered somewhere down the line, but we won’t know until we properly and rigorously investigate. Egg on face anyone? No thanks!
In the same light, the title of this blog page seems rather reactionary and lacking in benevolence. It isn’t an ethos I associate with at all. I prefer kindness and generosity of spirit.
Ricky.
ricky wrote: “Having just read the various exchanges above, it seems to me that there is normalised determination here to find all offered solutions wrong, as the de facto stance.”
If someone offered a solution, I don’t think it would get that reaction. But no one has offered a solution so far, at least not one that is logical and verifiable by others.
Most of the “Latin” solutions are complete nonsense. It’s very clear that the people offering them don’t know Latin (or don’t know medieval Latin). They clearly don’t know how to expand Latin abbreviations either. Those who know Latin can see immediately that those offering the “solutions” are just guessing.
Ricky: the single biggest problem with Voynich research is the huge number of poorly constructed (yet loudly trumpeted) Voynich theories, which the Nahuatl botany Voynich theory is a good example of. It is easy to propose botanical matches to many of the Herbal pages’ drawings, but almost impossible to turn those matches into a coherent and persuasive argument about the rest of the manuscript. As far as that challenge goes, T/T/J fail to reach base camp, let alone climb the whole mountain.
I try – probably more than just about any Voynich blogger – to explore alternative ways of looking at the Voynich Manuscript, so I don’t really recognize the negative caricature you present of me.
Yet there are basic things we know about the Voynich Manuscript which sharply constrain the range of possible answers: for example, the radiocarbon dating gives us a tolerably close pointer to a build date, while the 15th century marginalia and quire numbers give us a solid feeling for the latest date we should be comfortable with.
If a new theory asks us to start by discarding both of these basic pointers, it is surely hard to see why it should automatically be accorded respect and value. The accreditation of the authors is no counterbalance if they have no answer to basic evidential gotchas. 🙁
Ricky: In one sense I am with you, there is no reason to be unpleasant when one can be pleasant.
I think the number of flawed theories trumpeted loudly by their authors who are opposed to the slightest criticism, can aggravate people.
Nevertheless I do feel at times we can descend into needless and unproductive hostility.
You should all listen to yourselves. The point is that you come across as mean spirited, which I find frankly embarrassing and shameful as a fellow VM dude. Why would anyone be so unpleasant to another soul who offers something to your table? I haven’t heard anyone trumpeting about any theory – that seems to be entirely in your imaginations.
I say treat others as you would like to be treated. I mean, how would you like it if you came up with a theory and got treated so appallingly? It would make me think twice, that’s for sure, which goes against the whole ethos of open scientific enquiry.
You need to revise your mindset and welcome all ideas, as you would your own. Otherwise it simply smacks of being proprietorial, as if you are self-appointed and self-important judge and jury. It certainly makes me reluctant to even suggest any ideas, for fear of being ridiculed by bullies. That is totally uncool and reprehensible guys.
Ricky.
I like to watch TV shows where singers present themselves in front of a jury, and their talent (or lack thereof) is judged by a panel of judges. Not all of them. There are way too many. One that I follow allows singers with a wide variety of talents.
Now let’s map this to a hypothetical Voynich theory talent show.
Proponents may explain their theory in front of a jury, after which this is commented on. The usual approach for this type of feedback is:
– say something nice to begin with
– provide any or all negative comments
– finish with something positive
(In the show I watch, the last often simply consists of: “keep practicing”).
It is likely that Nick would be invited to be a jury member of such a Voynich talent show, but I suspect that he might be sent on vacation after a while, because he is simply too honest. Also, in the frame of the present blog, it makes for more interesting and entertaining reading.
Now more specifically about Voynich MS solutions.
Most solutions that I have seen in the last two decades have in common that the people proposing them have no idea what they have gotten themselves into.
Most often, they have only known about the MS for some months (or less) and have not read anything about earlier analyses that have been done.
The Voynich MS text mystery is a fiendish one, because it looks just exactly like a simple substitution of some language. The inexperienced would-be solver is automatically assuming that the ‘unsolved’ bit is just to find the answer to two questions:
– what is the language (or dialect, or variation, or hybrid)
– what is the character mapping translation table
Having been presented, over the years, with a great number of proposed solutions (either directly, or through general publications/announcements) I can share my experience in this.
The first time, well before the year 2000, I was excited when someone sent an E-mail to Gabriel Landini and myself that they had found the solution. However, they never divulged it. Not until this day.
This excitement gradually turned into skepticism.
Right now, if someone sends me a proposed solution, the first reaction is: “Ah, another one”. Expectation is very low, but of course I will read it. The main question to be answered by this first reading is: “does it have something interesting or not”. “Interesting” in this case means:
– the proponent knows something (anything at all) about the statistical properties of the text
– the proponent does not just simply follow the two-bullet solution approach I mentioned above
There are several “dead giveaways” that the proposed solution won’t work.
I have yet to see the first proposed solution that would pique my interest after a first cursory reading.
Now about this blog post and the comments. It should be obvious that Nick wrote it *after* having gone through the paper. He is just being honest.
And it does not really help to start with saying that they proponent really did a great effort and gave it all he got, and to finish with: “keep practicing”
Rick: it’s not historians that invalidate theories, it’s evidence. And when people bring forth theories that are obviously broken according to the most pitifully basic evidence, pretending that they are worth even the time of day helps nobody.
I try to be respectful and honest (and let’s not understate the barrage of flack I get for that), but in the end, broken is broken is broken, and ain’t nothing can unbreak it.
People, people, people. I repeat, listen to yourselves. All you have to do is say “Oh, I hadn’t realised how I came across – I’ll do something about it then”.
Don’t launch into defensive diatribes. How can anyone say that others have “no idea what they have gotten themselves into” when they themselves have no idea either. It’s just a manuscript about fat girls and plants, not a baleful conspiracy to end civilisation. Anyway, that misses the whole point entirely. Yes, of course, they should be encouraged to keep practicing – that is how the VM will be solved no doubt, by trial and error.
It seems to me, therefore, that all of this is underpinned by ego, and a desire to be ‘the one’ who solves it, hence the de facto stance. If that is so, then that goes against all scientific ethos. Personally, I am interested in the VM, yes, but not to the extent that it would influence my behaviour towards others. Especially if they have the balls to offer ideas and I don’t. I say congratulate them, even if the idea comes to nothing.
There are no VM experts or specialists, as none of us can read the damnable thing. To claim such a position of authority would be foolish in the extreme, as all one could mean is that they have spent more valuable time failing to understand it. Such folly is hardly something to boast about.
Yes, I can see that “Nick wrote it *after* having gone through the paper” but that doesn’t excuse the tone. It is just plain nasty. I expect Cheshire wrote his paper in good faith, but it has been emotively attacked, not neutrally considered. A more generously hearted and impassive person would have written something like: ‘A newly proposed solution to the VM is reviewed’. Clearly, the chosen title is designed to ridicule and steer people away, which is also very odd, as it betrays an unfounded sense of insecurity.
I mean, if the idea is wrong then there is no jeopardy, if that is your bag. Also, if people are encouraged to read all ideas then they know that something has been tried and failed, so they don’t waste their own time running over the same old ground. That is our duty.
The bottom line is that one doesn’t ever express emotion with science – even if one feels it, as that results in bias. It’s a basic premise. Neutrality at all times. Moreover, we all represent one another as VM scholars, so please behave responsibly and honourably.
Ricky.
Rick: what you say follows from your premise that there is no such thing as a Voynich expert, which is a fallacious and divisive assertion that the late Stephen Bax liked to make.
Needless to say, I heartily disagree.
Rick, I think you are overlooking something important…
Many of those claiming solutions are SELLING BOOKS and taking people’s money with badly formed logic, insufficient knowledge of the subject areas they try to describe, and insufficient sometimes even contradictory evidence.
Having a theory is one thing. Charging admission for poor scholarship is voluntarily putting your ideas on the line for public critique. Are we supposed to BE QUIET when someone presents poorly researched theories?
Gerard Cheshire didn’t even know how to expand one of the most simple and common Latin abbreviations. He doesn’t even know the basics of medieval Latin scribal conventions and yet he claims the VMS is Latin.
Patrick Lockerby presented a “Latin” translation in which only about 1 in every 25 words is actually Latin and those are only by accident (very short syllables that happen to be words). He clearly doesn’t even know the rudiments of Latin yet he claims it is Latin.
The good researchers will never get the recognition they deserve if poor research is accepted as a “solution”.
Rick Sheeger,
you obviously grossly underestimate the amount of worthless material that has been written under the cover of “Voynich MS solutions”. There is nothing to be gained from having more of it. There is a dire need for different, better informed approaches.
As long as the text of the MS cannot be read, we’re talking about a problem to be solved. The better one understands the problem, the better one’s chances of solving it. Obviously, there are people who understand the problem (much) better than others.
Unfortunately, most people coming up with solutions don’t even really grasp the magnitude of the problem. This is such a crucial observation that I don’t mind repeating that they don’t know what they are getting themselves into.
It’s like a computer programmer who has written a very clever program to quickly and efficiently find all solutions to the equation
a**3 + b**3 = c**3 with a, b, and c whole numbers.
(**3 means to the third power).
Then someone who understands this problem better comes along and says: don’t bother, this isn’t going to work, there is no solution to that.
Then the programmer says: don’t try to impress me. You don’t know anything because you haven’t solved it yourself.
Several random thoughts
There are certain issues for each who’s proposing solution. “The curse of being Voynich solver”… The enormous size of the task seems to be the root of the problem.
When a newcomer proposes a “solution” he or she immediately faces a lot of questions. How do you explain LAAFU? GAFGAFU? What about Neal’s keys, Amanda’s rings and Michael’s watches? How to translate “chor chor chor chor chory” at page 1689? A poor researcher feels he definitely needs to explain all those Very Important Properties which usually ends with exaggeration, scepticism and agression. But these VIPs are so alluring!
Of course one doesn’t have to answer all questions at once. Standard approach for solving hard problems is reduction and solving an easier task and then returning to the main one. This is tricky since on the one hand you should always keep in mind the postponed parts of the task, on the other hand resist critics which point to incompleteness of the solution.
Solving a subtask has also a very good consequence. If your subsolution also deals well with postponed parts of big problem – it’s a very VERY good sign.
The critics as if should behave evenly to all proposed solutions. But that doesn’t hold always. One can easily determine attitude by tone of words used. For example “tinker” – a complete disrespect, “guess” – a word with a reference to randomness, “search” – clearly neutral word. Too sensitive personalities will be upset of course.
It’s often said that it’s the author of the “solution” who has to prove it. That’s absolutely correct. But that’s not the whole truth. More generally each of us is responsible for his statements and has to prove them. The one who says “solution is not correct” must prove this statement just as the one who says “solution is correct” (and it’s not clear which one is harder:)).
Yes, that’s the game with two participants and it can be played another direction with the same criteria. How many of “not correct” and especially “obviously not correct” have proven their statements?
For example to prove “not Latin” statement one has to provide argumentation for the following:
– each known kind of Latin is not suitable
– there are no other kinds of Latin
Prove for at least one of these points is still positively welcome.
How to disprove? That’s up to disprovers:) Just obvious idea. If one presents the solution in some language, then the solution must be as productive as the underlying language. By this I mean frequencies of letters, words, etc and their combinations should match. That’s formalizable and can confidently cut off a lot of solutions.
Rick: Whilst I may not agree with aspects of what Rick says I think his call for a more friendly and welcoming tone is understandable(after all it is Christmas and we don’t want to be Scrooges). Nevertheless as has been pointed out there is a reasonable place for a critique which pulls no punches. Finding the balance between such a welcoming approach that one presents no criticism at all to the most unlikely of theories and at the other end of the spectrum being so scathing and unkind to anyone presenting a new theory that is not fully-formed, is hard.
I think there is strong case for saying that merely by presenting a new Voynich theory one is reducing the size of the unexamined solution space and thereby contributing to Voynich research. Take something I have thought about a lot(sorry), given that broadly speaking every 9 rosette map theory covers a different geographical area each new theory eliminates the number of unconsidered geographical areas which could be viewed as a sign of progress. (This is of course working on the basis that it is a map.)
farmerjohn: those Voynich theories that gleefully trample on facts, histories, science, and particularly common sense (let’s face it, this describes the overwhelming majority of Voynich theories) are a powerful and pervasive toxin that no one person can counteract (no, not even me)… there are simply too many of them.
Maybe one day Voynich researchers will collectively ‘man up’ enough to see this relentless nonsense for the delusional bullshit it is and treat it accordingly.
But from the mute incomprehension apparently plastered across nearly everyone’s face, only a fool would hold their breath waiting for this to happen.
Still, things so improbable that they could pass for miracles do happen all the time, so perhaps we should just hope for the best in the New Year. 🙂
Nick: It is understandable that given that you are on the frontline in responding to every new theory that you would be exasperated.
However I should say that I believe that I have learnt things from other people’s theories even when my own theory is at odds with theirs.
@ D
Read or oral ??
I hope audible.com doesn’t see that.
J.k.Petersen: I’m quite relieved to report that, I claim no aptitude for scholastic research of any subject that comes readily to mind, so I’d hardly be on the receiving end of commissions or royalties for anything related to VM solutions that I might erronously be accused of having made. Whilst being inclined to boast only a layman’s understanding of more sophisticated aspects of VM, such as unknown archaic linguistics, poor architecture, tarot card cosmos formations and crude book binding, I’m obviously not alone in that regard…Not to put to much emphasis on it, but I’d humbly claim to be a fair hand with many naturally learnt aspects of flora & fauna as well as maps/charts and what they might be likely to reveal. My approach to covering up for a lack of knowledges has always been to treat such subjects with wry humour, in hope that my ignorance might escape notice. That does not always work and I’ve surely paid the price with scornful, rude and derisive, though well directed responses. My 2019 New Year’s Resolution will be trying my best to keeping combative unpopular and unintellectually sound jargon out of my intended discussion points, eg. Aged buffalo calf velum, pre 1438 Averlino influence, post 1500 Texmex ink & paint proteins; mixed in with taboo words such as hoax, fake, imposter Asiatic Pangolin or silly Wily & Lily Voynich. That should keep mine host’s often course, undignified ‘dog turd’ ‘blowing smoke rings out of your arse’ suggestions to a bare minimum…A happy healthy wealthy and wisdom gaining New Year to all…and Y’all be sure to buy me new ‘VM for simpletons’ book now y’hear!…
Mark, if someone writes:
dkjf au boo ne el bo tu fe eam re tal vo docg june re …
and claims it is English, you can learn from that? There are a surprising number of people who generate pages of nonsense in a supposedly foreign language (that they don’t know themselves) and then claim they can translate it. Many sincerely believe they are translating it.
The only reason casual observers can’t SEE how bad these theories are is because they are unfamiliar with medieval languages and medieval writing styles. If they had the requisite background, they would be horrified. There’s nothing to learn from them except what NOT to do.
Mark,
most of the criticism presented here concerns proposed text solutions. Parallel to this there is also a host of proposals about the MS of the nature:
“it was written by [person / group] and represents [some event / philosophy]”, without presenting a solution to the text problem.
The text solutions are much more quantitative in nature and easier to judge based on several criteria. Your theory belongs the second category.
For some of the proposed solutions in the second category I find it possible to consider: “could be”, but they tend to be entirely speculative, with no specific evidence to back them up.
In fact, the more evidence is provided, the easier it becomes to find errors.
The Aztec theory also mostly falls into the second category. It concentrates much more on the who/where/when question and on the illustrations. However the authors present a lot of very specific evidence, and based on this it becomes incredible. There is no “could be” in my mind.
There is also no “could be” in my mind for any of the proposed text solutions.
Mark: as Rene would no doubt say, what Voynich theories have taught me most is what to avoid when constructing theories.
I agree with Nick that it comes down to evidence. The chief difficulty I have with most theories – including the currently popular ‘SInger variation’ – is twofold:
First, I cannot see why any manuscript has to be explained by theories. It’s a material object, of a type that has a large corpus of relevant scholarship – in this case manuscript studies – to allow reasonable opinions to be formed. Study, not theories, are needed here.
Secondly, when I try to evaluate the theoretical narratives, I find that (i) they offend by their near-total ignorance of that one area in which I may claim specialisation, or (ii) they involve matters in which I have no knowledge at all and thus no right to offer opinions about (such as high German marginalia or Nauhatl-language and botany), OR (iii) when I look at the foundations for their initial premises – their ‘givens’ – I find that the whole tale is based on air, or the next thing to it: received notions.
Unless a person wants to claim professional-level expertise in everything from comparative codicology, to the history of pigments, to comparative language studies, linguistics, textual traditions, comparative historical studies in cartography, art, culture, cartography and so on, it is nonsense to expect to be able to judge – let alone to advocate- that any one person deal with all those aspects of the manuscript’s study. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Truly unbelievable – I come back after a few days only to find you still missing the point. This is ENTIRELY about your attitude, which you have done nothing to adjust, except for Mark who has gone unheard amidst the squabbling hens.
The kind of people who work in academia don’t have egos and they tend to be passive by nature, so they find this sort of pseudo-intellectual noise rather unpleasant and unnecessary. They studiously get on with trying out ideas and they don’t offer them to the arena unless they are sure they have something worthwhile to present. So, to be shot down in flames by academic amateurs can only be interpreted as vindictive and nasty, as I’ve said before.
We are all academic amateurs, so we need to show some respect. Put simply, you are making yourselves a laughingstock, and sadly that includes me. I recall a proverb from school “empty vessels make more sound”. Need I say more? (Yes, probably, I say to myself!) More importantly, if you expect to come up with results then you need to entirely focus your mind, so you shouldn’t have time to communicate. All great thinkers are the quiet ones.
Whilst you bitch and prattle and peck and spit feathers, someone else will be quietly using their mind for better things. Take my word.
Ricky.
Rick Sheeger: your awe of academics and of people who dress up their nutty Voynich theories in academistic PDF clothing is something I don’t share. If I choose to give something an unfavourable review, that is my prerogative: for what it’s worth, my saving grace is that I try to clearly explain exactly why I think theory XYZ is nonsense.
You also seem to view Voynich researchers as a bunch of impotent chihuahuas yapping loudly at the bottom of an impossibly tall tree. Which is pretty much the same kind of dismissive nonsense that the late Stephen Bax used to try to pass off, so it seems that this is probably whom you have picked up your views from. However, you don’t seem to have even the kernel of a practical understanding of what Voynich research is actually about, which makes your opinion about Voynich researchers seem like an ill-fitting hand-me-down, rather than something you have actually worked at yourself.
So… before you come back here again, why don’t you – shock horror – go away and try to learn a little about the Voynich Manuscript? Even the Wikipedia article, though it sprawls like a teenager on a sofa on the first day of the school holidays, has plenty to digest: and Rene Zandbergen’s blessed voynich.nu pages contain more about the Voynich than all but the truly diehard can comfortably digest. So you shouldn’t be short of reading material for a few months.
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence but ‘Rick Sheeger’ is nearly an anagram of ‘G E Cheshire.’
Anyway. Carry on.
Rick wrote: “The kind of people who work in academia don’t have egos and they tend to be passive by nature,…”
I don’t know where you learned this, but I have experienced boatloads of ego in the academic realm and many are not passive at all.
Rick wrote: “We are all academic amateurs…”
Why do you assume that? Many Voynich researchers have multiple degrees, including me. I’ve written curriculum for university courses. There are many Voynich researchers with significant academic credentials and even those who don’t are, in some cases, top-flight researchers.
Rick: Pray please allow us but one final day for venting our collective enlarged SM spleens in scorn and mutual detestation of our peers. A small price for a sacred promise to mellow our confrontive egotistical ways dramatically, once the nasty old year is done. And speaking of 2019, I’m almost certain that friend Wilfred bequeithed his abominable curse upon all self prolaimed gifted intellectuals at just about this time,100 hundred miserable New York winters ago. For the sake of Auld Lang Syne, a Happy New Year to all frustrated Voynicheerios and may each and every one of you be first to achieve the much vaunted VM Resolution.
SirHubert: actually, the only mention of “Rick Sheeger” on the Internet is a Gumtree post here – https://www.gumtree.com/p/groups-associations/wanted-15-minutes-of-your-time-please-/1088613787
The “48question48answers” site is indeed Gerard Cheshire’s: https://sites.google.com/site/48questions48answers/
So “Rick Sheeger” is indeed a sort-of-anagram of Gerard Cheshire, thanks very much for pointing this out.
Rick: Pray for the gods of resentment to allow us but one final day for venting our collective enlarged SM spleens in scorn and mutual detestation of our peers. A small price for a sacred promise to mellow our confrontive egotistical ways dramatically, once the nasty old year is done. And speaking of 2019, I’m almost certain that friend Wilfrid bequeithed his abominable curse upon all self prolaimed gifted intellectuals at just about this time,100 hundred miserable mid town New York winters ago. For the sake of Auld Lang Syne, a Happy New Year to all you frustrated Voynicheerios and may each and every one of you be first to achieve the much vaunted quest for an unassisted VM Resolution.
Nick: And a jolly good fellow by my reckoning, even if he is an imposter.
Nick: I agree, it does look bad for someone to represent themselves as an impartial outsider commenting on a post which is in fact specifically about their own theory.
More to Come…
Gerard Cheshire, University of Bristol
Medieval Manuscripts, Early Modern Linguistics: proto-Romance, proto-Italics. Manuscript Codicology and Palaeography.
Gerard Cheshire, University of Bristol
Writer (and University of Bristol PhD student)
Gerard Cheshire
Expertise in: Bioinformatics, Animal Communications and Anatomy
Gerard Cheshire, Bath, UK (same photo as university of Bristol bio)
Independent Writing and Editing Professional
Gerard Cheshire, Bath, UK
Gerard Cheshire, has been a successful science writer for more than a decade and written on many topics in that time. He developed a particular interest in evolutionary theory while studying human evolution at University College London.
Gerard Cheshire, University of Bristol
Dr Gerard E CheshirePhD. Doctor of Philosophy Student, Member Student, Research Associate. School of Biological Sciences
Amberley Publishing…
Gerard Cheshire has been a freelance writer for over ten years and has many titles to his name.
————
It’s quite a jump from biological sciences to codicology, medieval manuscripts, and palaeography (subjects that one does not pick up overnight). Are there two G. Cheshires at U of B?
Even if it’s the same person, it’s the research results and claims that must be evaluated, not the person. Titles do not guarantee correct conclusions.
Nick: I do occur with your point that “what Voynich theories have taught me most is what to avoid when constructing theories.” As I have written elsewhere this has indeed affected my thinking. So purely on that basis other theories serve a purpose as they can help to illuminate what are blind alleyways or bad ways of thinking about or approaching questions; I have certainly found “map” theories like that of Diane and Gerard useful in that respect.
To give a positive example, I have learnt from Claudette Cohen’s writings some things of interest to me that I did not know or had not thought about before, so although her overall theory does not tally with my own at all it has served a concrete positive value.
In conclusion, I would argue that we benefit more from many of the new, arguably flawed, theories than we would had they not been presented to us.
As I have said the Janik-Tucker theory still leaves me wondering how experts like them made such a big error with their plant identifications and if without a decipherment anyone will or has got the identifications correct and how this should be done.
False identity or not, I think Rick makes a valid point about curbing our, at times unconstructive, negatively.
I had given it some thought a while ago about the psychology of Voynich researchers. In particular the doggedness with which researchers stick to their theories in spite of evidence to the contrary such as Rich Santacoloma and Gordon Rugg to name a couple.
It seems once theories are formed they are unlikely to be rejected or rethought by the theorist; this is of course a criticism that could be levelled at all if us.
Regarding previous comments about academics in some ways I think the situation can be worse. People have jobs, income, livelihood based on their theories. If someone’s life’s work is proven wrong then they could risk losing their job, unless they have tenure, or not being invited to conferences or invited to speak. Their status in the academic community would be destroyed. So it is not a surprise that there cling to their theories with an iron grip; amateur researchers have less to lose by contrast.
I was thinking of Wittgenstein who knowingly formed two mutually contradictory theories in his life. In later life he rejected the theory he formed in his youth, and was popular, advancing a wholly different theory instead. So this can be done, but it is a task that requires a lot of courage.
Rick writes very well. As it is clearly visible, it has a great overview. Every scientist shoud have a great ego. Then it will be good. Without the ego it will still be the beginning, And he never knows the meaning of the MS 408. Not a hundred diplomas from the university and a hundred titles is a not guarantee of being able to understand the manuscript. Scientist not Ego.
Mark writes : I think the situation can be worse.
Mark, I have to agree with you. But the situation is not worse. The situation is disastrous. And that’s the main problem major and important. And that’s certainly bad.
2Mark Knowles
Great point about researchers’ stickness. That clearly takes place. But why?
As for academics’ stickness do you think cilnging to some theory and passively waiting when someone else solves the mystery is better for their careers than continuing working on? Doubtful. In the second case you at least have the chance.
The most common reason to stop your work I think is clearly technical: the task is so sophisticated that advancing theory and producing new theory are almost equivalent options.
In case of admitting you are wrong you normally start to think: what is for sure? What can be used as firm basis for the next step/theory?
2nickpelling
And in case of VMS the only firm thing is surprisingly the ms itself, its text, pictures, materials. Everything else, facts, common sense, history, etc can be shifted. There is some chance the author is from Germany, but no chance aiin is oiin
That’s why most of us are quite tolerant against new theories. Of course, if you had recieved three new theories a week like mr Clemens (and probably you and Rene) you would have different opinion…
Richard Sheeger
->
Gerard Cheshire
Is that correct?
Rick or Ricky is a standard nickname for Richard
farmerjohn: I’ve argued before (and at length, probably too long) that there is pretty good evidence that we can see copying errors in play in the Voynichese text, at a rate of roughly 1 or 2 slips per line of text. aiin / oiin is one example (and I hope you know the basic occurrence stats on this), but there are many others.
As to where the author is from, I don’t know but would be happy to know even the country, that would help us eliminate all manner of nutty Voynich theories. As an aside it’s currently about one new nutty theory per fortnight, it was much worse during Stephen Bax’s prime, heigh ho.
Mark: yes, that’s correct, that’s how his anagram works. For a PhD student, I’d prefer “Grade Cherisher” myself, but what can you do?
Nick: So what would Averlino, fan of anagrams, make of if?
Rest assured that if I use a pseudonym it will not be an anagram of my name; I hate anagrams. Unlike the suggestion of the recent AI theory, I rather hope the Voynich cipher makes no use of anagrams.
2nickpelling
Cheshire’s theory will be beaten by basic letter frequency analysis, I believe. And that’s the end of the story
If VMS has errors then absolutely nothing is for sure. For some reason I prefer to bee against the wind and believe the amount of errors is tiny.
Also, IMHO knowledge of country alone will neither beat solvers (too cunny) nor help them (too complicated task). Just a combination of 5-10 facts will somehow advance us further
Mark Knowles: Gerard’s dire Charade did seem a little over the top. A pseudonym more to the point, such as ‘Cash Digger’ might have better fitted the bill.
More to come…
To be honest, for me it does not matter much if Ricky Sheeger is Gerard Cheshire himself, a friend of his, or someone else altogether (all of which crossed my mind when I read his posts).
Also, I don’t find this question of ‘how theories should be addressed’ particularly interesting or useful. This second point is primarily because it has no chance of leading to any useful outcome. The complainer will not be convinced of anything, just like the proponents of invalid Voynich MS text solutions will almost never be convinced they are wrong. The “best” that can happen is that they become silent about it after a while.
These are not just baseless considerations. This is based on many years of personal experience.
The point brought up that there is no such thing as a Voynich expert is something that is almost entirely confined to the Voynich amateur world. It is likely a way to be able to ignore what other people have to say. It is a pity that there is such a great amount of suspicion and envy especially (but not only) among newcomers.
Needless to say, there are areas where I don’t fully agree with Nick, and I am sure this is mutual. However, I agree that the proposed solution of Gerard Cheshire (and many similar ones proposed in recent months to years) is not right.
The fact that it is not finding any kind of general acceptance should also say enough.
I can side with tricky Ricky for his unintended mischaracterisation of so called Voynich experts and amateurs sharing similar degrees of ineptitude (my take). He was possibly speaking tongue in cheek, but oh what chagrin he must have created for some who took the pun as being literal and grossly offencive to their likely inflated scolastic egos. Of course he or she is just a fun loving ‘idiot’ deliberately masquerading as Gerry no doubt; after all ‘Charades’ was the favourite new years eve parlour game in medieval times. If we add to charades a letter ‘i’ for ‘idiot’ and a ‘g’ for ‘galoot’, behold yet another Gerard Cheshire anagram appears. On that cheery note, hope you all have a really good one this evening and happy trails for 2019.
Hi Nick et al: I came here because Mr. Sheeger/Cheshire is currently in a “discussion” on the Voynich Net. I agree with of most of your post, and the many of the ensuing comments. Someone in the comments suggested an acid test of any proposed translation/decipherments/decodings of the Voynich.
I have a simple test I have found very useful: From reading the Friedman’s Shakespeare work, and others, a few years ago I derived what I call the “Friedman Test”. It goes like this:
For a suggested solution to be correct, it must pass BOTH of the below requirements:
1) It must be repeatable: When a person using the proposed cipher system uses it (blindly) to decipher the same passage as the proposer, they must come up with the same results as the proposer.
2) It must have meaning: That solution had to have real meaning in some context.
Many proposed solutions have been repeatable, but have no meaning. Many have not been repeatable by anyone other than the proposer, but the results have meaning. But no solution I have ever seen has come even close to exhibiting both repeat-ability and meaning. And like Nick, René, and many of you, I’ve seen a great many proposals over the years.
As for the Cheshire/Sheeger proposal, it fails this test immediately. As I wrote back when it was first presented to me, in 2017 I think (slightly paraphrased for this comment),
1) First of all, Cheshire is using letter values for characters which seem to be subjective, are arguable, and mostly not founded on any objective reasoning.
2) The “words” Cheshire creates from these letters are therefore highly speculative, and are subject to an infinite number of alternatives.
3) The meanings given for the “words” have multiple meanings, in multiple languages, vastly compounding the options to create the sentences from them, making it already purely speculative.
4) Cheshire has then altered the resulting sentences, adding and removing, “interpreting” them, in order to bring it closer to an acceptable meaning.
5) The resulting sentences are still of little meaning.
Each step compounds the subjective choices of the step before it. So it already fails (what I call) the Friedman test:
1) It is not repeatable, because any translator, using Cheshire’s system and lexicon, can come up with a wide range of results.
2) Those results are meaningless… unless, as he does, one speculates on what they might mean, and modifies them to look better. But, they are, as they come “out of the system”, meaningless.
All that being said, there is one type of proposal which will, on first view, seem to pass the Friedman Test: A limited sampling of chosen VMs words. I think Mr. Bax, and a couple of others, fall into this trap. They will translate a select few Voynich “words”, give the meanings of them, and claim success. Usually this is because the chosen “words” are next to some supposed plant identity. But then it fails when the system… if there is one to begin with… is applied to the bulk of the Voynich text, because the results will not have meaning.
As I’ve also said i my responses to Sheeger/Cheshire, “We will know the correct solution when we see it”. That is my opinion, but I really have no doubt that when and if a correct solution to the Voynich is presented, we will hear a collective, “AHA!”, followed by a mass congratulations. And this, because we will all be able to repeat it, and it will be meaningful when we do.
Should we be so lucky.
Richard SantaColoma: you’re quite correct here, I think we would pretty much all recognize the right kind of candidate, even though none such has yet landed in our collective inboxes.
As an aside: if there’s some kind of systematic abbreviation in play in Voynichese, I suspect that to guide us through to the end line we will have to rely primarily on one or more specific passages in the text that are either largely unabbreviated, or for which we can find a block match in a parallel text. But even there the basic principle is much as you describe it.
Although I know that one is torn and one can cost the reputation, if one goes into the decryption and the technology in more detail.
Since the implementation of Google even when German – English errors occur, I put it in both languages. Also on the implementation of VM text to German with Google I have my problems. Therefore, I used the VM text in Latin, German and English to limit errors.
I will now turn to the question of the text and the key.
Basically, I think the key is simple and contains 6 rules.
Here is an example of words in sequence: Implementation VM – Latin
Obwohl ich weiss das man zerrissen wird und einem den Ruf kosten kann, wenn man auf die Entschlüsselung und die Technik näher eingeht.
Da bei der Umsetzung bei Google selbst beim deutsch – englisch Fehler auftreten, stelle ich es in beiden Sprachen. Auch auf die Umsetzung von VM-Text zu deutsch mit Google habe ich so meine Probleme. Daher setzte ich den VM-Text in latein, deutsch und englisch an um Fehler einzuschränken.
Ich gehe jetzt einmal auf die Frage des Textes und den Schlüssel ein.
Grundliegend halte ich den Schlüssel für einfach und enthält 6 Regeln.
Hier ein Beispiel von Wörtern in Folge: Umsetzung VM – Latein
Da im VM – Text weder Punkt noch Komma ersichtlich ist, habe ich versucht den Text in einzelne Abschnitte zu teilen.
Since neither dot nor comma is visible in the VM text, I tried to divide the text into sections.
VM – Latein:
a nis a at is is unum cis is at is or is as at sat unum nos etate ad et or a acte a nis
as or as
or as is sat unum nos
etate ad at or a nis
acte a nis
totis unum
Englisch:
But this is not the end of it is at one side of it or is as we age, but sat together at the end of the act or a
as or as
or as is the one we have enough
at the end of their age or a
the ultimate act
with one
Deutsch :
Aber das ist nicht das Ende davon ist an einer Seite davon oder ist, wie wir altern, aber saß zusammen am Ende der Handlung oder einem
wie oder als
oder als derjenige ist, haben wir genug
am Ende ihres Alters oder einer
der ultimative Akt
mit einem
Although the remark was not have been addressed to me – it was more or less addressed to the air – I hope I might take issue with Rene’s Zandbergen’s theory that
“The point brought up that there is no such thing as a Voynich expert is something that is almost entirely confined to the Voynich amateur world.”
I think what Rene is confusing is successful media presence and personal ‘P.R.’ with what we normally mean by expertise in a given class of manuscript, and within that, with one manuscript.
So, for example, the person who is described, say, as ‘an expert on the Book of Kells’ – though in my experience use of the word ‘expert’ in that way is more usual among video-makers and publishers than in academe – but such a person does not begin their climb to the state of ‘expert’ by studying nothing except the Book of Kells.
They will also have spent years learning about Irish and continential history; have read (in Latin and in Irish) a wealth of early Christian and other writings; they will have learned more than the rudiments of codicology, and will be able to talk just as easily about other early medieval monastic products – including the cultural circumstances of production (did the monks only write after Compline?) and so on.
If anyone announces that they are a ‘Voynich expert’ yet would not presume to walk into the British Library (say) and pronounce their opinions to the curators; if they have never yet produced a single paper which passed (non-Voynich) peer review on codicology, palaeography, medieval history, iconographic studies.. or anything of that sort… then they are stretching the longbow.
Rene has fair claim to be among the most knowledgeable historian of Voynich theories; Other individuals are also entitled to claim specialisation in some aspect of Voynich-research. But there is noone who is a ‘Voynich expert’ in any sense comparable to that in which we’d describe Alain Touwaide (for example) as eminent in the field of medieval manuscripts of medicine and pharmacy. It is the preliminary range of studies which permits specialisation, and which enables others to say a person is an ‘expert’… though I wish they wouldn’t.
Hello again,
I hadn’t realised you’d been discussing the ‘Friedman test’ here too. In response to the two specified criteria:
1) It must be repeatable: When a person using the proposed cipher system uses it (blindly) to decipher the same passage as the proposer, they must come up with the same results as the proposer.
2) It must have meaning: That solution had to have real meaning in some context.
The first criterion only demonstrates a lack of familiarity with epigraphy and palaeography. For example, anyone who works in the field will tell you that translating Latin into English can be done in many ways, simply because Latin has a small vocabulary and English has a very large vocabulary, so different scholars will arrive at quite different sentences. And the same scholar might arrive at different sentences too. Also, the specific meaning of the Latin might be interpreted differently, again due to the limited and therefore ambiguous lexicon. In fact, that is exactly what epigraphy and palaeography are all about, by definition. So, any expectation of a direct and consistent translation can be thrown right out of the window.
The second criterion only demonstrates not having actually read the Cheshire papers more that fleetingly, as the translations quite clearly do have meaning in context. The chosen phrasing of the manuscript author is brief and indirect, but the translations certainly fit the images and make sense. Also, there don’t seem to be any that fail to make sense. The newest paper, about the volcanoes on the map, is self-explanatory to me.
Rather than obvious and superfluous label’s like ‘this is a volcano’ the manuscript author presumes that the reader already understands the images, so they provide additional descriptive information instead, such as ‘the anus of his heat’ in reference to their belief in Vulcan tormenting them. It’s a bit of black humour thrown in for good measure. Works for me – very Medieval indeed.
Not only that, but there is even a crown clearly seen floating above one of the volcanoes, to show that it is Vulcano, the volcano where Vulcan was believed to live and rule over the underworld. Medieval folk were quite literal in their beliefs, so the crown would have been understood to represent a king by a Medieval reader.
Cheers,
Ricky S.
Gerard: What is with the Ricky pseudonym and refering to yourself in the third person?
You will make people think you have multiple personality disorder.
You can talk my friend – are you Mark or Richard? :O) Now you’ve got me doing it too.
I don’t know where this confusion began – amusing as it is – I simply wanted to introduce an element of rationality and logic to our discussions about the VMS, that’s all, by taking a contrary stance. And it seems to have worked….I think!
Have an excellent weekend dudes. You guys!
Ricky S.
Do people in Bristol say “dudes” much? “You guys”?
Ricky Sheeger wrote: “For example, anyone who works in the field will tell you that translating Latin into English can be done in many ways, simply because Latin has a small vocabulary and English has a very large vocabulary, so different scholars will arrive at quite different sentences.”
I haven’t found that to be true. The meaning behind the sentence is usually essentially the same. One translator might come up with, “He saw the sunset later in the day.” The other might say, “Later in the day, he observed the setting sun.” Technically, the sentences are different, but we understand them in much the same way.
Poetry has a wider range of interpretation because poetry is not just about meaning and grammar, but also about rhythm, meter, and sound, and one has to sacrifice some of this when changing it to a different language. But even here, the overall impression conveyed by different translators is usually similar.
Gerard: My middle name is Richard.
The following recent news article may be of interest or amusement… https://phys.org/news/2019-05-bristol-academic-voynich-code-century-old.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566 appears to be the paper.
Tea: “head-shaking bemusement” might be closer to it. :-/ Which peer reviewed it, Eastbourne pier?
Tea: Well, you have to congratulate Gerard for managing to persuade some apparently reputable people that he has got it all figured out. Then again someone else managed to persuade the Times Educational Supplement, so persuading people to accept Voynich theories seems relatively easy.
Congratulations to Gerard Cheshire, he has got himself in the Daily Mirror.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/code-worlds-most-mysterious-text-16018074
As a non-linguist and random smart-ass engineer… That first passage sounds a LOT like children’s “pig latin” or “horse latin”…
I wonder if they paid Gerard for his story at all, I think it unlikely, but if they did it looks like a profitable business to me.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1127637/Voynich-Manuscript-solved-voynich-code-cracked-what-means-voynich
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7031849/Worlds-mysterious-text-cracked.html
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9082501/voynich-manuscript-meaning-deciphered-code-broken/
The media lap these stories up. Anyway Gerard has pushed hard and got the glory that maybe he seeks if only temporarily.
Tracy Hall: it’s horse-something, that’s for sure. :-/
I think I got it.
The Cheshire paper must have been reviewed by media reporters.
All the so called “experts” are acting like experts who’ve been bested by an amateur!
Keep it up! It’s very entertaining! 🙂
We might not agree with much of what Gerard has to say, though his academic peers seem to have been happy in giving the man a PhD. to hang on his shingle, should he so choose…One thing you’ve got to hand to U of Bristol is, that when a body first goes down to it, then gains right of passage into it’s not so old, not so bold or hallowed halls, at least they get to keep any self aquired initiative and like powers of subjective thought from their formative years. How many of those that ‘go up’ to wherever they are wont to ‘go up’ to, are not instantly and permanently deprived of any such useless assets they may possess, in the interests of being lectured to and shaped to fit a predetetmine typecaste by the all knowing.
Toneii: try to imagine a room full of experts all facepalming at the same time. Now square it.
Like many suggested decodings of the Voynich Manuscript, they rely on the unprincipled and unsupported assumption that VMS contains a mixed language with no or little inflection, drawing scattershot from *contemporary* languages of multiple families without regard for how language contact and change actually work. It’s extremely unlikely that VMS has no morphology; compare, for example, the work of D’Imperio and others (Friedman, Tiltman, Stolfi, etc), who provide substantial evidence for internal morphological structure in Voynich words. Furthermore, there is the minor problem that Proto-Romance was not a Lingua Franca of 15th Century Europe.
The Flemish equivalent of the BBC, VRT (the quality of whose digital journalism has been going steadily downhill in the last few years, to be fair) also fell into the trap:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2019/05/15/onderzoeker-kraakt-de-voynich-code-honderd-jaar-oud-mysterie-va/
And the Guardian too. Et tu, Custos?
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/16/latin-hebrew-proto-romance-new-theory-on-voynich-manuscript
Pleasingly, there are links at the end to two other decipherments also reported there. I guess if two men say they’re Jesus then one of them must be wrong…
Kisharang: You’ve got to give it to the Flems. First depiction is f84r and my very favourite nymph pool show, having as an added effect Wilfrid’s clever Voynich antiquarian bookshop promotion F U B L (Fred’s Uncirculated Books London) and yet to be identified penciled word beneath. Sure to promote interest amongst our keen eyed dutch friends.
SirHubert: the article mentions (very questionably) that Alan Turing had failed to crack the Voynich Manuscript. It’s also true that Einstein, Mozart and Marilyn Monroe also failed to crack it, though it has to be said that Elvis Presley did come up with a reasonably plausible linguistic theory.
SirHubert,
Not if they’re Mexican or Spanish.:)
Bristol University have now taken down the press release and issued a statement:
=====================================
Yesterday the University of Bristol published a story about research on the Voynich manuscript by an honorary research associate. This research was entirely the author’s own work and is not affiliated with the University of Bristol, the School of Arts nor the Centre for Medieval Studies.
The paper was published in ‘The Journal of Popular Romance Studies’ following a double blind peer review process by two external academic referees, a process used to validate the research quality of a study.
When a member of our academic community has a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, the University’s Media Team will determine whether the findings are of public interest. If they are, the team will communicate the research to the media and on our University website.
Following media coverage, concerns have been raised about the validity of this research from academics in the fields of linguistics and medieval studies. We take such concerns very seriously and have therefore removed the story regarding this research from our website to seek further validation and allow further discussions both internally and with the journal concerned.
===========================================
(https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/voynich-manuscript.html)
Diane: At least Gerard is in total agreement with the likes of Rene, Mark, J.K.P. and your good self, on absolute accuracy of the carbon dating, report of which we are desirous of obtaining, by instrument in writing, no less.
J.K. Petersen on November 11, 2017 at 8:15 am said:
==
As for playing two ends against the middle… Cheshire’s paper simultaneously claims the VMS is “Vulgar Latin” (which he essentially describes as broken-down, simplified, degraded Latin) and proto-Latin/proto-Italic (which existed before there was Latin), […]
==
You are confusion two similar named, but unconnected concepts. Chesires means this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_script, which has nothing to do with Italic languages and an ancestor of Latin. It’s a writing style, not a language.
Koen Gheuens on November 11, 2017 at 1:59 pm said:
==
As I told him, it is impossible that the VM contains Proto-Italic. The oldest Latin writings we have are Old Latin, […]
==
Same confusion. Chesire doesn’t claim the _language_ is Proto-Italic, but the scipt, the writing style. In other words, he claims it is an older form of this Italian renaissance style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italic_script .
The original paper (which I think is crap, but for other reasons) is here:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566
Ruud Harmsen,
Cheshire described BOTH a language (which he calls “proto-Romance”) and a script style (which he calls “proto-Italic” when referring to the VMS glyphs).
He discusses both issues in his paper.
His paper describes how he deciphered the content (his so-called “proto-Romance” language) using a substitution scheme that he developed to read the so-called “proto-Italic” VMS glyphs.
John – it’s true, I’m willing to accept a date-range for the whole as 1404-1438, but with some reservations, given the bias in sampling method. I use ‘bias’ in the technical, not the personal sense. The fact is simply that the samples were not selected according to the ISO and so can’t be considered strictly representative. In other words the possibility remains that the lower half includes bifolios, or even quires outside that range.
It’s a mere possibility; from what I’ve read I’m fairly sure that a majority would agree the script, the palette and so forth places the rest pretty close to when the top eleven quires were inscribed.
Having seen references in so many articles to Gerard Cheshire’s theory it worries me for reasons that lie outside of the subject of the Voynich itself. It seems a worrying indicator of how articles in our media can be so poorly grounded in the subject that they concern. It also seems like a story appears in one publication and then spreads like a virus onto many others.
Having said that, the key for him was getting his article in the Journal of Romance Studies.
It seems the tide may be turning?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-bristol-48309665
I geninuely hope that it doesn’t cause Gerard problems. The problem lies with the Journal of Romance Studies not being thorough enough, though one doesn’t know the extent to which Gerard promoted, hyped or publicised it to third parties.
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/voynich-manuscript.html
The question is who reviewed it for the Journal of Romance Studies and how did they come to their conclusions.
Sorry to intrude again (just passing through), but there are now three different journals being mentioned as having published this article.
It was actually published in “Romance Studies”: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yros20
The “Journal of Romance Studies” is a different journal, and I imagine they are by now getting a little narked to see themselves being associated with this mess, in multiple reports and commentaries: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/publications/journal-romance-studies
And Bristol University’s recent press statement hilariously mentions the “Journal of Popular Romance Studies”, which is yet another different journal: http://jprstudies.org/
The first two deal mainly with literature and culture, and therefore aren’t ideally placed to peer-review or publish this work. But the last one deals with “popular romance” (love stories), and I frankly would have paid to see it published there.
How he did it in the newspaper?
With good arguments, you can even sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo.
Or maybe they just liked not writing about Brexit or economic failures.
The word “university” and “doctoral thesis” have probably done the rest.
Oikofuge: thanks very much indeed for the clarification! I’m probably going to post about the whole Cheshire mess this weekend (after all, everyone else seems to have sounded off about it), and this is just the kind of useful thing I’ll be needing. 🙂
I must admit I am starting to feel rather sorry for Gerard. I hope this situation doesn’t impact his current research. It could affect his reputation in Bristol University, even though his main research is quite different, and also leave him with egg on his face in general amongst those who know him. Clearly he believes his theory, I blame the Romance Studies Journal, for allowing this situation to arise and putting everybody in an awkward position.
I have been invited to publish, not at my own request, in an important academic journal relating to this history of cartography on the subject of the 9 Rosette page, however, as I said previously, I will be very careful to emphasise that my ideas are as yet unproven, that is not to say that I will say that I think they are wrong, but rather I will endeavour to put them in the context of other ideas, space allowing. I think it is a really valuable thing to make the cartographic history community aware that there is a possible historical map they may not have known about. I just think it important to be clear about the limitations of the research and what is known and what is uncertain. I think care handling the subject is key.
I think one shouldn’t be deterred in publishing in an academic journal that one’s thesis has been disputed as on that basis almost nothing connected to the Voynich would be published in an academic journal as one can always find someone to dispute almost anything. I believe if one is honest that it has been disputed and briefly how then I think it is fine to publish and newspapers and others won’t be mislead. Now, I sure people will get brickbats from the Voynich community on the basis of one’s ideas, but that is fine. I think really Gerard’s problem was that he didn’t mention that his ideas had been disputed.
Update: The Bristol University statement at http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2019/may/voynich-manuscript.html has now been edited to give the correct journal name.
Mark Knowles: “I must admit I am starting to feel rather sorry for Gerard. I hope this situation doesn’t impact his current research.”
I don’t feel sorry for him at all. He created his situation. He’s an adult with academic credentials. He should strive for higher quality and set a better example.
I hope it DOES impact his current research. I hope he applies more rigorous standards of research AND proof to his current and future projects.
Mark Knowles wrote: “I think really Gerard’s problem was that he didn’t mention that his ideas had been disputed.”
I don’t think that’s the problem at all. It doesn’t matter if ideas are disputed if they are backed up by good evidence.
Did you actually read his paper? The problem is inadequate research into medieval and pre-medieval linguistics combined with hasty conclusions. He was in too much of a hurry to accept his initial impressions without testing his own theory against the larger body of VMS text.
well, it’s been an experience; one more trip around the merry-go-round for old times sake. At least this one got beyond a couple of words (NOTE: you can map “RONALD MCDONALD” onto a section of Voynich text…. although I don’t claim it is a recipe for a Big Mac). But the price to be paid to enable getting to the length of a short sentence is the freedom to pick and choose words arbitrarily from a whole host of languages to match your chosen target.
this all confirms the power of “confirmation bias” I think.
back to the real world …
And now to close the door again like leaving the room
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/17/bristol-university-distances-claim-15th-century-voynich-manuscript/
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/17/university-backtracks-on-disputed-voynich-manuscript-theory
I think we need to have some sympathy for Gerard.
Mark, Gerard Cheshire is not a victim of anything or anyone. He has concocted all of this himself. He first proposed his ‘solution’ already two years ago, initially contacting the Beinecke and later some others like myself.
He has chosen to ignore all critical comments on his work that I know of. He may have received feedback from others that I have not seen.
Let it be a warning for you.
Gerard Cheshire was so completely convinced that he was right, that he ignored, or explained away all critical comments.
You are doing the same. You are 95% convinced that your explanation of the rosettes folio is correct. You have recently suggested that your discoveries related to this ‘map’ are likely to be important findings for the history of map making. Cheshire proposed that his work was important for the history of romance languages.
I wish Gerard Cheshire all the best, but he really hasn’t done himself a favour with this.
Rene: He is a victim of having made a mistake, a thing which all people do at some point. For that I think he deserves sympathy. He made a judgment which we all have to and I think a mistaken one.
You say “Let it be a warning to you”
I say me and you and all of us.
You clearly have not read what I have written. It is all here to be read, we have a public record.
You say: “You are 95% convinced that your explanation of the rosettes folio is correct.”
No, I said I am 95% convinced it is a map. Those are two quite different statements.
You say: “You have recently suggested that your discoveries related to this ‘map’ are likely to be important findings for the history of map making.”
No, I said nothing of the kind. Please find me the quote.
I said: “I have been invited to publish, not at my own request, in an important academic journal relating to this history of cartography on the subject of the 9 Rosette page, however, as I said previously, I will be very careful to emphasise that my ideas are as yet unproven, that is not to say that I will say that I think they are wrong, but rather I will endeavour to put them in the context of other ideas, space allowing. I think it is a really valuable thing to make the cartographic history community aware that there is a possible historical map they may not have known about. I just think it important to be clear about the limitations of the research and what is known and what is uncertain. I think care handling the subject is key.”
I think maybe Gerard Cheshire’s experience should be a warning to you to do thorough research before making false statements.
Cheshire didn’t just make “a” mistake. He made many mistakes that he had opportunities to rectify.
He ignored critical reviews on his earlier papers. Information that could have led to better scholarship. The same mistakes from the early papers are in the most recent one.
And he’s not acknowledging any mistakes. Even after Bristol retracted the Press Release, he’s holding to his statements. He still says he has made a “breakthrough” and demeans Voynich researchers by calling them a “marginal group” (which would include you, Mark).
Rene,
You put your position re the Amalekites so well that I expect I shall quote you at some stage.
As to the map – I wonder if you recall that when I first set about testing that long-floated idea in 2011 you said you had already said so and that you thought it a map of … was it Mecca? Baghdad? …
I then spent some time investigating the question, and concluded that the drawing was a map, but one whose informing attitudes, style of drawing and range was incompatible with theories of an ‘all Latin’ content for the manuscript. At least, before 1438. I was unable to find any support in it for your Mecca/Baghdad theory, though.
I assume we must all be wrong in one way or another – were it not so we’d be reading the written and the pictorial text of this manuscript as easily as a medievalist reads a fair copy of some Book of Hours.
In Voynich writings, mis-statements, errors of understanding and ideas formed with insufficient knowledge of a subject are ubiquitous. It hardly seems fair to call one person’s error a ‘false statements’ as if to call them liar, while maintaining other errors immune from retaliation because they happen to suit a preferred theory. I trust you’ll agree with that and that it is a mistake to pay more attention to who speaks than to the value of what is said.
If we keep the manuscript’s study at a higher priority than maintaining any theory, perhaps the incidence of error will fall as people cooperate to amend each others’ mis-steps. It is true, just as you say of Gerard, that the person corrected must be willing to accept it in a good spirit.
Which reminds me – I’ll soon be publishing a post in which I correct a couple of small errors in your essay in the Yale facsimile edition, but rest assured that I know the difference between factual and moral error.
Thank you, I am perfectly happy to leave it at that.
JKP, I greatly value all your insights into the Voynich MS text and illustrations, but I do have a rather different opinion about the “marginal group” statement.
Marginal: yes.
Group: no.
More in general, I’ll have to remember that responses to this blog appear in an order that cannot be predicted by the responder, so I stress that my comment “Thank you, I am perfectly happy to leave it at that” was to the latest post from Mark Knowles.
Rene: is there a technical term meaning “in the margins of that which was already marginal”? :-/
As someone with zero Voynich expertise, but some knowledge of how academic institutions go about Doing Science, I’d just like to comment further on Mark Knowles’s point: “I think really Gerard’s problem was that he didn’t mention that his ideas had been disputed.”
From the University of Bristol’s point of view, I think his problem is larger than that. He initiated a sequence of events that currently gives every appearance of causing reputational damage to the institution. They’ll want to know why he invoked the name of the University when submitting a paper that was very much “off book” as far as they were concerned. Bristol actually has a department of Mediaeval Studies – were they contacted at any point? If not, why not? If so, what did they say and why weren’t they acknowledged in the paper? How did that dramatically hyperbolic press release come into existence? To what extent was Cheshire involved in writing it? There’s a real minefield here, and Cheshire seems to have walked right into the middle of it, despite spending enough years in academia to have gained a PhD.
The university press office will likely be under examination, too – there were a host of red flags in the text they issued. And the editors of Romance Studies will no doubt be conducting their own review, deciding whether to tag a Notice of Concern on the paper. But Cheshire is the “root cause”, without which none of this would have happened, and the university will be very interested both in why he chose to go about things in the way he did, and how he is responding to the current problem.
Oikofuge: However I think institutions, whether they be Universities or Journals have a responcibility to do their job in this situation. The Journal’s pier reviewing process clearly failed.
Didn’t the University endorse his paper, so it wasn’t just him name dropping them. They should have checked before endorsing him. The University should have consulted the Medieval Studies Department.
I tend to feel generally that it is necessary to focus on the failure of institutions than individuals. The newspapers failed as well in this case as in all the other cases of claimed solutions.
Oikofuge: The people who really annoy me are the media. The newspapers need to do a better job in this situation and others, the Voynich is not unique in this respect.
Quoting Mark Knowles: “Didn’t the University endorse his paper, so it wasn’t just him name dropping them.”
The idea that the university endorsed, and then withdrew endorsement, is (I think) a product of journalistic misunderstanding of how these things work.
If you’re on the payroll of a university and you have a new publication, the Press Office will publicize it my releasing a statement to the press, if they think it might be of interest to the public. They do this either because the author contacts them, or (nowadays) because they pick it up from automated systems that send out alerts if an author has a new publication, at which point they get in contact with the author. So it all happens in a loop between Press Office and author – there’s no implicit stamp of approval from the university administration, who will at that point be blithely unaware of what’s going on unless either the author or the Press Office decides to contact them because they have specific concerns about the nature of the work being reported.
What’s expected, however, is that authors operate within the “command structure” – that relevant seniors are kept apprised of what’s going on within their area of authority. In this unusual case, Cheshire was doing something that wasn’t relevant to his own line management in Biology, but would have significant repercussions for Mediaeval Studies and the university as a whole. (And that’s true whether his findings were valid or invalid.)
So he should really have embarked on this publication without mentioning his academic affiliation, or have hooked into the relevant command structure before starting the submission process. Given that his paper mentions the University of Bristol, and that the University’s subsequent disclaimer denies the publication’s affiliation with the University as a whole or with specific relevant departments, it seems he did neither of these things.
It certainly isn’t the first time a university has been caught on the hop when the activities of one of its researchers is plastered all over the media, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
Kisharang cont: You will have noted, as will have others, that in addition to it’s stand out feature of the nymph figure letter forms, there is another that sets it apart from the other bathing scenes in the quire thirteen set. Of course it is in the artistic use of a type of rough “parallel hatching” to show depth dimension to the demountable pool siding. I recall seeing precisely the same unusually wide spaced method used by the Taylor- Boole school, notably by Edward Taylor in a particular beach landscape, though also likely used to good effect by his students, including wife Maggie Boole, sister of Ethel Lilian Voynich.
Well, “marginal group” wasn’t my wording, it was Cheshire’s, and he said it to put down any (and all) Voynich researchers who disagreed with his ideas so that their criticisms would be given less credence.
.
Anyway, the furor appears to have died down and now the press has added the misconception that Turing tried to solve the VMS, even though he probably never saw the manuscript.
A possible name of a plant.
I know how fast you are led astray.
Here is a possibility of a plant description.
I also know that a swallow does not make a summer!
If I did not have my reasons, I would not write it.
I will not translate it, and will delete it later.
Wir nehmen das Wort Taurus / Taurum. ( Das einzige Wort wo einen realistischen Hintergrund hat. ) Wir vergleichen es mit dem ersten Wort dieser Pflanze. Wir schauen uns die Pflanze an. Jetzt versuchen wir das ganze in Einklang zu bringen. Wie könnte das Wort heissen, und welche Pflanze könnte es sein ? Es gibt kein richtig oder falsch, es sind nur annahmen.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2276736249215683&set=gm.2087167844726339&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Interessanterweise habe ich das Wort auch nicht gekannt. Ich hatte das Wort gesehen, und mir war sofort klar um welche Pflanze es sich handelt. Das dass erste Wort noch dazu passt, und mit Taurus im Einklang steht hat mich echt überrascht. Das es auch noch in deutsch einen Sinn gibt, hat mich glatt aus den Socken gehauen.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2277087122513929&set=gm.2088115247964932&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Machen wir noch eine Gegenprobe. Suchen wir mal wie oft dieses Wort ” Po8g ” im VM vorkommt. Es ist zwar ein einfaches System, aber für das reicht es gerade noch.
http://www.voynichese.com/#/all:pody/649
Wenn ein Wort so selten vorkommt, ist es sehr wahrscheinlich das es sich um einen Namen handeln könnte.
Peter, now take your substitution system and apply it to the rest of the text above the plant.
Unfortunately that does not work. Although the signs make sense in every possible arrangement, a sentence is out of the question. For that, it’s just too few characters. Trying to attach an unknown to these characters is a tedious job and usually ends up in the trash.
At the moment I am working with reference material.
The book may be based on the University of German origin. But some pictures tell something else. If the combination of language and images matches, it would be possible that it comes from the same corner as the VM. Here I see a way to find matches. (Same place, same language)
I hope that it is so, otherwise it has no more meaning than any other books.
https://trin-sites-pub.trin.cam.ac.uk/manuscripts/uv/view.php?n=O.2.48&fbclid=IwAR3xE0ejcE1XB28j8d1twNFXpUPLYWBSnw5077B7wA10N371-aB1RzLZM2M#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=1&xywh=-1071%2C-161%2C6021%2C3193&r=0
At first glance I could read words and even some phrases in the manuscript. I think Mr. Cheshire ( I hope I have his name correctly) Is on the right track, that this is colloquial language of a period in time in Iberia, the munuscript now being dated at 1402- 1430.
I speak fluent Portuguese of the colloquial Brazilian type, presumably from the 16th century; when Brazil, a country colonized by first the Dutch, soon after by the Portuguese in the 1500’s. I studied Latin for four years, and sang a lot of church latin, Bach, Mozart, etc.
I can readily understand Catalan, the 16th century style Spanish of Colombia, South America, and I can understand Italian as exactly the same as Portuguese for several sentences, and then incomprehensible! I spoke french first which also shares vocabulary and similar phraseology with all of the above languages.
Portuguese is an old dialect, closer to Latin, and supposedly closest to Romanian, though I have never had the opportunity to speak with Romanians.
But Portuguese remained the same, or less changed while Spanish or Castillion evolved and diversified over the centuries; as I have read in studies of the history of languages of Iberia, in which reportedly, Portuguese hasn’t changed much since 1000 AD, with many ottoman turk, and Arabic words in the vocabulary. These I can attest to. Classical Spanish and Portuguese are very similar, almost the same; but the colloquial Spanish has diverged and diversified far more than Portuguese.
In Mr Cheshire’s efforts, he wrote down colloquialisms and everyday abbreviated forms of speaking which I immediately recognized- while he didn’t. He is definitely onto something. There simply is too much Portuguese idiom, vocabulary and phrasing here!
Also, if you look at a handwritten letter of Elizabethan English, not only does the manner of calligraphy of letters require study to understand our own written mother tongue, the language itself is of that period and quite different from modern English. It is the same for Portuguese in terms of the written language; formation of letters, vowels and consonants as handwritten in the 16th century.
Remember that correct spelling is a very recent formality.
But what really intrigued me about the text in this manuscript, also in Cheshire’s attempts to correlate words… was how utterly colloquial and the same some of the phrases are to modern day Brazilian Portuguese, with recognizable vocabulary, particularly nouns; while most in the manuscript certainly remained incomprehensible to me. But that is a lot I could recognize only in a brief 20 minutes.
For perhaps not being fluent in any of these languages I mention, Cheshire is an academic linguist. He is definitely onto something in connecting the strange text especially to Portuguese and Catalan.
It helps to know languages, both the weird way they were written centuries ago; and manners of speaking colloquially to recognize what Mr. Cheshire is correlating.
The writer of this manuscript may have written it partially in code .The botanical paintings, maps?, and diagrams also seem coded. I sense that the author is a woman.
It occurred to me that there is a strong shamanic aspect to her pictures and coding. At that time the Basque indigenous European population still existed, and remained secretive because of centuries of persecution and conquering. In some places they never were conquered. Catherine of Aragon was Basque.They were and remain today, a secretive shamanic culture of original European lineage and great antiquity. Many of the place names, and surnames in Iberia and France are Basque, an extremely ancient language; the only non Indo- European peoples and language remaining in Europe, except for the Sami in Northern Scandinavia whose language is turkic. See http://www.shamanism.org.
There. I have solved your mystery, but it will remain a beautiful mystery.
Adele, before you decide what language it is and that Cheshire is “definitely onto something”, I would suggest you actually look at the Voynich script. Cheshire injected a significant amount of subjective interpretation to try to arrive at his ungrammatical “solution”.
Also, Cheshire’s doctoral work was not in linguistics, it was in belief systems, and before that, according to his résumé, he was a freelance writer, not a linguist.
People interested in Voynich may be interested in my blog article.
http://www.lingoblog.dk/en/the-voynich-manuscript-the-decipherment-of-ms-408/
The view of a linguist rather than a biologist.
@Sanders
So that you understand it too.
There are so many ideas represented now.
One is convinced that it is Turkish. Another Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Czech, etc.
Now you don’t need a master’s degree to know that it can’t be all of them.
A few words are not enough proof. Therefore, all of them must be considered false. Now it is up to those to defend their theory and back it up with evidence.
I only give hints and explain the connections. It is up to you to refute them with other evidence. Blah-blah alone is not enough here.
As for the wall in Prague. If there are 2 different building materials next to each other or on top of each other, we can assume that there were 2 construction stages.
Since the original walls are made of natural stone and the extension is made of brick, there are also two periods to be seen, regardless of what Wiki says. The original walls can be seen in the photos. No brick.
Think about it before you talk nonsense.