Gerard Cheshire’s rehashed 2017 Voynich theory has been through a full media life-cycle this week. Though the newspapers happily collaborated in an emergency Caesarean (ah, it’s a girl), they then swiftly pulled the plug (it’s for the best, poor thing), with the last (w)rites surely not far behind.
Though you might now expect Cheshire to fade away, his optimistic smile still persists. This is because he sees criticisms of his theory as the mechanism by which the self-appointed / self-important Voynich elite protects both itself and the world from his powerful, destabilizing truths.
The Magic Trick
This is, of course, an all-too familiar modern template. Once Claim X lands on our lap (Brexit, Trump, whatever), we find ourselves pressed to decide whether it is (a) outrageous, bare-faced, self-deluding nonsense on a grand scale, where the evidence is twisted to tell a story that appeals to base prejudices, or (b) a heroic outsider movement battling the Establishment, and whose noble cause is simply to Get The Truth Out To The People.
In Star Wars terms, the (small-c) conservative cadre of existing Voynich researchers is thus The Empire, while Cheshire is plucky Luke Skywalker, trying to destroy the collectively entrenched Imperial position: all of which Mustafarian metaphoricity probably makes me Darth Vader. Which is nice.
The thing we’re not supposed to notice is the headily polarized either-or-ness of it all (are you Empire or Alliance? Brexiteer or Remainer? Coke or Pepsi? etc). This modern magic trick works by presenting us with two crazy extremes that we somehow have to choose between: in Gerard Cheshire’s case, he presents us with a binary choice between his complex (yet oddly erudite-sounding) Voynich theory and siding with the same self-satisfied Voynich establishment at which he sticks two punky fingers up.
Just as with Coke vs Pepsi, this is a fake two-way choice, particularly given that drinking your own urine might be a marginally healthier third option. Allegedly.
Russell’s Teapot
Actually, this binary mode of presentation has been a mainstay of nutty Voynich theorists for most of the last decade. “If you so-called Voynich experts” (the rant goes) “can’t disprove my theory, then that proves not only that I’m right, but also that you don’t know a damn thing about the Voynich.”
It’s easy, when stripped down and taken so starkly out of context, to see what a hugely fallacious argument this really is, like an epistemological parody of Nietzsche: that which does not destroy my theory makes it True.
This is the burden of disproof, that Bertrand Russell famously likened to claims for an impossibly unobservable teapot orbiting in space. He wrote:
“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.”
My point here is that whereas in the Olden Days Voynich theorists dished up their shitty theories with a bodyguard of flies (making it almost impossible not to notice which parts really stank), once modern Voynich theorists have done a ten-minute pre-flight check with Wikipedia, they’re ready to launch their theory into a suitably hard-to-reach elliptic orbit.
As a consequence, it has become almost impossible to disprove nutty Voynich theories: all the Voynich theorist has to do is to finesse their story ever-so slightly, turning the impossible back into the highly improbable. Ha! they cry (and some do indeed say ‘Ha!’ at this point), “your efforts to absolutely disprove my theory have now failed, so I must be correct“. And onwards their theory merrily spins, in its far distant elliptical orbit.
Even a Voynich theory as outrageously nonsensical as the Wilfrid-Voynich-faked-it theory (the one that Richard SantaColoma has been peddling for a decade or so) is hard to absolutely disprove. The closest I’ve got is by getting Richard to admit that for his theory to be true, the quire numbers must have been added to the vellum during the 15th century. Even though this makes no codicological sense at all (why give written instructions to a binder about how you want your blank quires to be bound?), who can prove definitively to Richard that this scenario is impossible, rather than merely utterly improbable? And so it goes ever on.
Royal Roads
Nutty theorists also typically believe that it is their coruscant intuition that has given them a shortcut to the hard-for-mere-mortals-to-believe answer: and that it is thus for other (less brilliant but perhaps more meticulous) plodding souls to do the messy follow-on business of joining the evidential start dots to their insightful end dots.
This was particularly true of Nicholas Gibbs’ Voynich theory: this was the one that popped up in in the TLS a while back. (Isn’t now about the time Gibb’s inevitable book describing his brilliant decryption should be appearing?) Gerard Cheshire similarly claimed to have made his giant intuitive leap to the Voynich’s answer in a mere fortnight.
The thing that is wrong with all of this is the idea that there is some kind of Royal Road that will carry you to a quick and easy mastery of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. It was Euclid, of course, who famously told the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy I Soter that “there is no Royal Road to geometry”: understanding the different aspects of the Voynich Manuscript before jumping to conclusions is arguably no less a challenge, and one which fewer people every year seem willing to take on.
Daft Ada
And that’s where we are, really: surrounded by Voynich wannabe theorists who fail to do the work, assume the transcriptions are perfect (they’re not), jump oh-so-rapidly to conclusions, use Wikipedia to avoid outright disproof, and then present their nonsensical theory (often to the media) as if it is some kind of inspiring protest vote against existing theorists’ supposed hegemony. Riiiiight.
Me? I’m not Darth Vader, nor even Daft Ada. What kills these stupid Voynich theories isn’t my Sith death grip, but their own lack of a grip on the basic facts. In Gerard Cheshire’s case, he concocts an entire dysenteric proto-language (i.e. one with no obvious grammar or rules), and a spurious timeline entirely at odds with just about everything else: and yet even with all those degrees of freedom to play with, still none of what comes out makes a flicker of sense. What an abysmal waste of time.
And don’t get me started on peer review. Or indeed ‘Ricky Sheeger’… 🙁
Nick,
I’m not sure why Cheshire has been singled out for such immoderate attack.
For at least twenty years there has been a continuous parade of foolish ideas – called ‘theories’ and some as unfounded as his are still determinedly maintained without challenge by members of that ‘conservative-elite’.
Where (in your words) Cheshire treats criticisms of his theory as a “mechanism by which the self-appointed / self-important Voynich elite protects both itself and the world from his powerful, destabilizing truths” – I find only that motives equally cartoon-ish are attributed by the ‘self-important’ sort of Voynichero to those offering criticisms of whatever theories they happen to like.
Cheshire lost sight of the manuscript in his chase for non-existent proofs for his theory; that’s perfectly normal behaviour for a ‘Voynichero’. I’ve been waiting since 2008 to see some item of evidence for Rene’s theory about Matthias Corvinus’ having owned the manuscript, or for something tangible which might link it to Averlino. None yet. But would you attack Rene’s theory with language like that you use for Cheshire? I cannot imagine you would.
Living at the relatively civilised end of ‘conservative-elite Row’, you may not have been made an object of its less pleasant occupants but over the past ten years, as that elite has emerged, you may have noticed dropping away an iincreasing number of those scholars and intelligent laymen who formerly commented to your blog. Forums and mailing lists are dying off, partly for reasons of fashion, but not least because it has become the norm to stifle discussions which cannot be used to maintain the ‘central European cultural expression’ sort of theory.
We have seen develop, in parallel, an obsession with personalities: living or dead at the same time that this quasi-social hierarchy is employed to deem this researcher or that ‘unworthy of recognition’ when their work is taken… up.
Others are much more aware than you of this relatively new anti-growth, anti-egalitarian and anti-intellectual ‘conservative elite’ and its ethos.
But I most miss the way it has brought a habit of discrimination – on the basis of persons as much as ideas.
You yourself feel free to demolish Cheshire’s character, not just his theory – but I rather think that should Cheshire have attacked (say) Helmut Winkler’s character as well as his theory … or Rene’s or even JKP’s… then that person would have been treated as if guilty of mortal sin, heresy and lese majeste with retaliation inevitable.
And I say ‘retaliation’ deliberately. It’s not a matter of one scholar improving another’s knowledge by correcting an error. It’s an effort to destroy the other person’s reputation so that nobody else will show him any courtesy or engage him in any sort of conversation about the manuscript. Ever see that sort of thing on Reeds’ mailing list?
I want to try returning the study of this manuscript to more normal lines, but to do that it is necessary to discuss how its course became so distorted, and what effects the distortions have on information disseminated today.
It is not an unreasonable thing to want the study of a manuscript to return to being the study of a manuscript and theory-creation is not the normal way we go about researching a difficult item.
Nor does it help anyone if members of the conservative-elite create caricatures of individuals and attribute to them motives which they would find outrageous if applied to themselves or their friends/associates/cronies.
Cheshire is fired by self-belief; by belief in his imaginative narrative for the manuscript, and is impatient equally of research and of correction.
Now for ‘Cheshire’ substitute the name of just about anyone who has published a paper about the Vms in the past two years. I won’t name the four exceptions I can think of.
Diane: can you please reserve this kind of nonsense for your own blog? Thanks.
Ah shades of ‘Battle Star Galactica’ and the dreaded fracking Cylons,who by Ruse or truce were all out to anhilate decent human existence. If you think Gerard will go away Hosay, or fall on his sword like our host’s ex nemesis Baxman, then think twice. I don’t know what the mugger has in store, though one can surely expect something along the lines of “all ain’t what it appears to be with this crafty ol Cheshire Kat” my friends.
Nick,
the various skeptical comments about the process of peer review that I have been seeing in the amateur Voynich fora over the last days (and before) are perhaps another example of the heroic fight against establishment.
In any discipline, the people who are truly advancing knowledge know perfectly well which are the relevant and reliable journals. Nowadays, for any such journal, there are at least 20 recent on-line journals publishing on the same topic. The peer review process works quite differently in the two cases.
Re: O’Donovan Comment:
Hear!! hear !!
I am fascinated by the universal parallels between this and the nutcases that surround the Zodiac case. There, too, is an endless stream of case solvers with their overwrought, convoluted, teapot-esque cipher solutions. They are heroes of their own stories, allergic to reality-based criticisms and defending themselves with nearly identical declarations of the perceived bad faith motivations of the critics. Some have even played the “Galileo” card. “My ideas are rejected just like Galileo’s!” If there was a playbook for the Dunning–Kruger effect, the Galileo card would feature prominently.
“Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.”
-Frank Leahy
Rene: as with sausages, there is good peer review and there is bad peer review. :-/
Diane O’Donovan wrote: “Cheshire lost sight of the manuscript in his chase for non-existent proofs for his theory; that’s perfectly normal behaviour for a ‘Voynichero’. I’ve been waiting since 2008 to see some item of evidence for Rene’s theory about Matthias Corvinus’ having owned the manuscript, or for something tangible which might link it to Averlino. None yet.”
René isn’t claiming to have solved the Voynich Manuscript. Cheshire is.
There’s a difference between a working theory (a theory-in-progress) and someone who proclaims loudly in the news to have done something he or she hasn’t.
(For those who don’t know me, I maintain a list of Famous Unsolved Codes, as well as a major website on one of them, the encrypted Kryptos sculpture.)
As David Oranchak said, I find the exact same phenomenon among Kryptos would-be solvers. Though with less public splash, I am contacted multiple times per year by people stating with great confidence that they have solved K4. The most common method is the Scrabble-esque style, where they swish the letters around, pull out a few that make words, add vowels as-needed, then just ignore the rest of the letters. And then they often end by saying, as Cheshire did, “Here, I have started it, now you do the rest.”
In most cases these individuals are well-meaning. A few are mentally ill. A couple have been deliberate attempts at fraud. Several have already sent their “I solved it!” releases to major newspapers and intelligence agencies. On multiple occasions I have been contacted by reporters asking, “Hey, this means it’s solved, right?” At this point the reporters are very impatient, they know the clock is ticking, they want to publish before their competitors. Sometimes they will even have their “Kryptos solved!” draft article already written, and will be quite disappointed when I express skepticism.
When I am contacted by the would-be solvers, as long as they are polite, I do my best to respond in kind. I tell them they now have a timestamp for their potential solution, I ask them for a partial plaintext, and then for enough of the method that a third-party can replicate their results. I have often been impressed by the sheer amount of work that some have put into their potential solutions. Megabytes of spreadsheets, hours spent preparing detailed charts and reports. But it is in their method that things always fall apart. They may have 27 steps, and the first 12 may actually be solid cryptographic techniques, but then there is some illogical subjective leap, like, “Okay, here we have to scramble things, and each line needs to be scrambled in a different way…” Or, “And here, you have to type this 7-character string into Google and then take the fourth entry, which is on Mars, and that crater name is connected to Angkor Wat,” and it goes off the rails. I do my best to let them down gently and as constructively as I can manage. However, if they start to become rude or abusive, I just end the conversation. I have way too many other things to spend my time on.
In this case with Gerard Cheshire (aka the anagrammed Richard Sheeger, was he one of the “peers”, I wonder?) I think Nick’s tone was perfect, responding to Cheshire’s own arrogant tone. The annoying thing about Cheshire’s article wasn’t that he was exploring a new method, it was his self-important way of presenting it as an absolutely correct one. That he was now pedantically “explaining” it to everyone else who had been too oblivious to see what he had figured out in two weeks. I disliked his hand-waving dismissal of generations of researchers as using the wrong approach, as though they were all some sort of establishment behemoth which needed Cheshire’s “innovation” to break through the chains.
If the paper would have been presented as, “A possible way to look at the Voynich text,” and would have been more respectful of other researchers/theories, I don’t think it would have ruffled as many feathers. Innovative ideas are welcome, but, especially in the absence of any substantial plaintext, have to be presented as ideas, not as, “I am right, and all of you, past and present, have been wrong.”
And that brings us back to the curse of Voynich.
This happens if you do not face his work critically enough, and think again everything. The others will do it.
He has relied on individual positions, but these do not mesh.
The mosaic is not finished when the stones are set, it should also vote the individual colors.
Nick has published a book full of “reasonable guesses” in 2006. Until today he defends his interpretation that Averlino has developed the idea of applying a verbose cipher transposition, and polyalphabetic substitution in combination. Why Nick didn’t need evidence for his crackpot theory but everybody else does?
Robert Keller: in very many ways, I developed my Averlino theory straight out of the mainstream of Voynich research – for example, the cryptanalytic side of Curse offers an account of Voynichese conceptually very close to that put forward decades previously by Brigadier John Tiltman (and I tried to make this debt quite clear in the book).
At the same time, I tried (in the historical parts of the book) to explore the historical consequences of what it would mean if Averlino’s little books of secrets (that he appears to have compiled in the early 1450s) were in fact the source material for what ended up as the Voynich Manuscript. This exact technical approach – hypothesizing authorship of a contested document, and then examining the consequences – is what mainstream historians have done for decades: so this was normal historical stuff.
Moreover, I generally tried hard to build on previous work and scholarship: unlike arguably the majority of Voynich theories, I didn’t offer up any kind of alt.history take on events, or attempt some kind of shocking rewrite of the history books etc.
As I hope you know, I have always fully acknowledged the possibility that my Averlino hypothesis might well turn out to be wrong: in fact, I spent a lot of my research time consciously trying to find historical evidence that would disprove it, but was not able to.
In summary: I still think that what I put forward was as close to a fully-fleshed-out mainstream historical theory concerning the Voynich Manuscript as anyone has yet achieved, and I built that from the inside of historical discourse, not as a crackpot outsider.
PS: while the system I proposed combined verbose cipher (e.g. the glyph groups qo/ol/or/al/ar/ee/eee/ain/aiin/aiiin etc all encipher a single token each), in-page transposition (possibly via Neal keys), and 15th century abbreviating scribal shorthand (e.g. contraction and truncation), it didn’t obviously include polyalphabetic substitution, sorry if that somehow wasn’t clear.
Nick: Yes, you tried hard and you believe in your theory. But this is only another way to say you “can’t disprove my theory”. If someone else had written “Curse of the Voynich” you would rate it yourself as pure conjecture and wishful thinking. And you would be right about it.
Robert Keller: if you know of any book on the Voynich Manuscript in any language that even attempts to do 10% of what I tried to do in Curse, please let me know, I’d be delighted to review it (and would happily recommend it to everyone).
Sure, there’s conjecture and wishful thinking in Curse: but there’s also a lot of observation, codicology, research, and genuine insight. Twelve years later, I’d probably present it quite differently: but even so, it remains a book firmly in the mainstream of Voynich research.
Robert Keller: that’s your words, not mine. What I said was that no book I know of attempts – even to a 10% extent – to build up a specific historical account of the origins of the Voynich Manuscript. D’Imperio doesn’t even start: Churchill and Kennedy are the same.
So what book do you have in mind?
Nick: This are your words: “Through my book […] and my blog, I’ve probably written more actual historical research about the Voynich than anyone else alive: I’ve given talks on it, and made a TV documentary on it, and have been interviewed about it on radio and TV numerous times… And I still can’t read it. :-)” @theverge You describe yourself as the leading Voynich expert on earth. Congratulations!
Robert Keller: is there any part of that you would contest? I don’t mind if there is.
Nick: Cheshire wrote multiple papers about the Voynich manuscript. Did this mean that he knows something about it?
Robert Keller: I used mainstream history, mainstream cryptanalysis, and built on the work of giants. What do you think Cheshire did?
Nick: Indeed, only quality matters.
You and Rene are known as Voynich experts. You should use your position to advance an open discussion. Instead you published this rant to destroy Cheshire even his theory was already destroyed.
Robert Keller: what Gerard Cheshire published in 2017 was a sorry, tangled, polyglot mess that needed a significant amount of basic fixing in order to be even remotely OK… all of which I said loudly and clearly at the time. But even so, what he then produced in 2018 and 2019 was in many ways even bigger messes than the mess he started with – e.g. even less supportable claims than before, and accompanied by tons more self-confabulated alt.history.linguistics nonsense. So it would seem that all he actually did through those two years was to invest his time in finding a soft touch journal that would punt his stuff out without really any significant review. Which is nice.
So from my perspective, it looks like Cheshire started with a bad idea and made it worse: what success he has had is in trumpeting those bad ideas loudly: in which case it would seem the only person who destroyed his theory was himself. I’m sure he’s basically a bright bloke, but I surely can’t be the only person who suspects that Voynich research would seem to be playing to his weaknesses rather than to his strengths.
If you think you can see some kind of ‘redemption arc’ going on anywhere in all that, please let me know. All I can see is someone making a long series of poor (if not downright odd) choices (like his whole “Ricky Sheeger” thing, sheesh!), of which I am no more than a bemused spectator.
An ant Gerard Cheshire from Britain writes big stupid things. He is certainly a great scientist, but as far as the manuscript voynich is concerned, he publishes great stupidity. The scientist should work more. Then it will be good.
Things can really take a turn for the worse, unless we see this latest Grinning Cheshire gem for the storm in a teacup that it most assuredly is. Put out in Gerry’s creative press release to convince that, in this ‘more expert than thou’ Vm ego game, there can only be one winner and that’s ‘he who dares’, just so long as the early gained initiatives can be maintained til end game. Gerard’s sheer affrontery in bringing his bluff theory to the fore in a single well spun PhD dissertational yarn ‘piece de resistance’, is in my view, intentionally no less meaningless than most other Beineke 408 non solutions being fed to us…I’d say we just get “Polly put the kettle on and we’ll all have tea”, which may be all that’s required in order to clear our temporarily frazzled senses and got on with our sheet canning of fellow Voynicherios, to which we’ve become so well accustomed.
Nick: When you say:
“So it would seem that all he actually did through those two years was to invest his time in finding a soft touch journal that would punt his stuff out without really any significant review.”
That was exactly what I was thinking. I would not be surprised if he sent his paper to a lot of Journals and the only one that bit was the Romance Studies journal. From what I have read I doubt it is a soft touch journal, though clearly the people who pier-reviewed it did a poor job. The bottom line is if you approach enough journals then by the law of probability one of them will bite. I imagine not being familiar with the Voynich they did not realise the impact that his research would have and thought it a nice theory which it wouldn’t do any harm to float.
Mark: I doubt that the aforementioned Romance Studies journal would not have had a degree of familiarity with Vm. So your assumption on innocent likely biting probabilities seems to me a rather naive take on how the press coverage went down. Especially considering that rags like The Gaurdian and Continental news outlets were happy to share copy and to put their own angle on some specifics.
John Sanders: I would not be surprised if the Romance Studies journal had little aquaintance with the Voynich. We assume everybody has heard of it, but a lot of people haven’t.
It’s my opinion that a peer reviewer either has to say they don’t have enough knowledge of a subject to review it, or should do enough background work to fill in the gaps in their ability to review a subject.
This is difficult with the Voynich-Manuscript because it ideally requires knowledge of codicology, iconography, medieval history, palaeography, linguistics, and possibly also botany and cryptanalysis. A reviewer should be qualified in at least a couple of these fields, but whoever reviewed Cheshire’s paper appears to have lacked historical linguistic knowledge as there were numerous glaring flaws in
the linguistics terminology,
“proto-Romance” language arguments,
letter-frequency assignments,
grammar, and
purported translation (which had strong subjective components and inconsistencies).
It should never have been accepted for publication in its current form.
A few years ago, I was asked to do a technical edit of a fairly long computer book for O’Reilly. I mention it because I have done this for other publishers and technology companies, but was particularly impressed with O’Reilly’s effort to procure feedback from several reviewers (not just one or two) who had strong backgrounds in the field.
I was further impressed with the comments these reviewers had already provided during the process (they obviously knew their stuff). The O’Reilly technical review was done after the book had been edited by the spelling/grammar staff—it was an additional step that some publishers never take (and was probably grammar-checked again after the revisions).
Until then, I was not aware of how widely quality assurance standards could vary. On the outside one assumes the process is pretty much the same from publisher to publisher. On the inside, one discovers that is far from true.
I don’t know how many people reviewed Cheshire’s paper, maybe only two, but if O’Reilly can select six or seven technical reviewers for a long publication, then for a paper as short as Cheshire’s, it would not be unreasonable to ask at least four or five qualified academics to give their opinions. That way, perhaps the publisher could have avoided tarnishing its reputation, and quality standards for Voynich research could be maintained at a higher level.
I think the first comment of Diane is not so bad, cause from my view sometimes the bashing is so harsh, the accused is slayed immediately. Don’t forget the theory publisher often has a hidden agenda by publishing. Then, for the Voynich MS itself it’s good from a marketing perspective.
What Alonka Dunin writes sounds very familiar indeed. And I would like to add my personal big annoyance: there are so much people who think they tell something new, and want to be heard, but the only ripple they cause is repeating hollow words. Filling up the endless space with many many nothing.
They are the real criminals of the fora: they dillute the real information and it has become almost impossible to find real valuable information and get in contact with people who do serious and fundamental research.
Reporters have to produce. They have no time to really understand the things they write about, so they rely on sources they can find online. Those are often the same sources as the researcher used…
I simply always think along the lines of the religious prophecies: one day there will be 1 solution, and when it arrives, you will know that IS the one. Wait for it. Wait some more.
There seems to be a misunderstanding with peer review in this thread. Peer reviewers only make suggestions to the author, and often the editor/publisher, they do not actually make the decision to publish. We have no real way of knowing what suggestions the peer reviewers made in this case. They could have suggested the author rewrite the whole thing, and recommended against publication. The journal editor makes the actual decisions.
It seems rather frightening that a paper with red ink from beginning to end would be accepted for publication by a journal editor.
So… either the peer reviewers didn’t do the job well enough for the editor to see that it was deeply flawed or, if they did, the editor made a highly questionable decision to publish something with red ink on virtually every paragraph.
Dear Nick,
Greatly enjoying your posts about the VM. I’m a C17th art historian and manuscript reader, so I appreciate your focus on the concrete elements of the manuscript, like the locative architecture and the costume (Gemini and Sagittarius support a terminus post to the end of the carbon-date bracket.
I had two questions please.
First, am I right in thinking the month names are a separate hand and give a hint only of the later provenance of the MS?
And second, is it Bertrand Russell’s teapot to suggest that Voynichese is an imaginary language, rather than a code?
The VM is obviously a work of genius, but is there something in it that shows it is a focussed work of cryptic purpose, rather than castles in the air.
I wondered if it shows the private, highly idiosyncratic belief system of a writer, aware of, (obsessed with, even) currents in botany, architecture, mechanics and irrigation, who has created their own universe with a language to match (or who believes this universe has been mystically revealed to them).
I must do a blog post on the VM, but if you – as the foremost empiricist in the field – believe that I’m talking out of hat, I shall of course say so I the piece.
(Ps – yes, numbers 1-5 in the ‘list’ f49v look C16th to me)
Very best wishes,
J
Jay: the month names are indeed in a separate, much rougher-looking hand (and almost certainly in a separate language, probably some French/Occitan/German hybrid).
The suggestion that Voynichese might be an imaginary / constructed language has an excellent pedigree (it was put forward by William Friedman, arguably the greatest cryptanalyst of the 20th century). To be fair, the biggest obstacles it faces are not so much cryptological as historical (e.g. you have to advance a few centuries to Cave Beck to find artificial languages first emerging).
In the past, I have argued (at length) that certain elements of Voynichese seem to be flagging deception (or, at least, misdirection). Probably best to flag up a couple of pages from the vaults:
https://ciphermysteries.com/2009/06/06/the-voynich-cipher-for-code-breakers
https://ciphermysteries.com/2011/02/16/why-the-voynich-manuscript-is-a-ciphertext
If you aren’t aware of the sustained argument running though “The Curse of the Voynich”, then you probably have a treat coming your way. 😉
PS: a summary of The Curse of the Voynich is here:
https://ciphermysteries.com/2010/01/10/voynich-averlino-hypothesis-summary
Jay: A breath of fresh air and intuitive thought emerges at last. Don’t be reticent in expanding your clever thought train, so as to include the possibilty of, not one genius at work, but an orchestrated alliance of several, each familiar with expertise in his or her paricular field, including those that you specifically mention along with the ability to format an artificial language to support them.
Having been somewhat intrigued, I went ahead and read the actual paper. For the purposes of full disclosure, I am a professional historian who has dealt extensively with the peer review and journal publication process, but I am neither a scholar of the era in question, linguistics, art, nor am I familiar at all with this particular journal. Take my comments for what you think they are worth.
I am surprised that this article made it through the process to publication. There really isn’t much “there” there. I would think translations of entire pages would be there at a minimum, but I didn’t see that. I would think that would make it harder to judge whether the translation is in any way accurate. It’s also way too strange for a typical journal article. The central argument is not far removed from “it came to me in a dream.” That doesn’t fly with me.
My best, and most charitable, guess is that the editor(s) has no expertise with this sort of article and sent to peer reviewers who also had little expertise with it (seriously, scholars generally don’t spend their lives hunting for buried treasure). The peer reviewers did their best, made suggestions, etc., but ultimately it came back to the editor(s). The editor(s) decided to publish it thinking the article was a well intentioned effort to explore the linguistics of an unknown language, and didn’t realize it was actually the academic equivalent of alien abduction stories.
The peer review process works fairly well, but only when everyone involved knows the subject matter well.
I am pleased to read the comments from someone else who has personal experience with peer reviews. I second that it is amazing that this one ‘slipped through’, but it will not be the only case ever, unfortunately.
I refer back to my earlier comment that there are different types of journals. In every field there are a few that are well known to be at the forefront of advancement of the field. These journals never lack contributions and they can afford to be very selective, as it should be.
However, in all journals the process tends to work the same.
The editor selects possible reviewers. He invites them to review based on the abstract. Reviewers may accept or reject the invitation. This review is voluntary, not paid for, and in addition to normal professional duties. Again, ‘top’ journals have ‘top’ reviewers and they rightfully consider this activity as an important part of progress.
The process works well. The editor knows he can rely on his reviewers, and he can expect that the author of the paper being reviewed acknowledges the importance of the reviewers’ comments.
And this last point is where I suspect it may have gone wrong.
Voynich MS publications tend to be ‘fringe’ topics, and the only journal I know that has some experience is ‘Cryptologia’. The papers may well generate highly conflicting review comments. (I have seen this happen). This puts the editor in a difficult position. If he ignores his reviewers, he won’t be able to count on their voluntary support in the future.
Authors who are inexperienced with the review process may consider that they can ignore reviewers’ comments. (I have seen this happen too). This again puts the editor in a difficult position.
In top journals, the editor can and will be strict. In smaller journals, that don’t always have too many contributions, the editor may decide to be lenient.
I’m not at all familiar with accepted publication ethics of top geek science journals, but in the case of pissant rags like the Express, Daily Mail and Guardian, all of whom rushed to sign on for Gerrards day in the sun fun release, first to copy would have been their only concern. First rule for the press corps has always been, not who’s right but who’s first to hit the stands, so stuff the ethics, publish and be dambed and if the headline just happens to piss off a few nerds, sour grapes to them. If the story turns out to be a bitter harvest, so be it. The late extra ‘man bites dog’ lead will put the sorry saga of Vm on the back burner as too any memories of Doc Cheshire VC , the fake professor from Bath.
Sometimes I just try to see what happens. I take a book, ca 1500. Author known, provenance known, language known, and yet confirmed by a university.
Example Latei. I take single words, so difficult is not the Alfabet and enter that with Google. The language recognition tells me: Romanian, once Spanish, Italian, Indian, etc. And sometimes even Latin.
Now, if I take another electronic translator and enter a word, I suddenly have 10 options. That’s great ! Now I can even put together the sentences myself as I need them.
In a month there is a new solution, and the nice thing is, you can even want the source language.
Hi Rene,
I’ve also been through the peer-review process a few times, from both sides. I think the problem – and I hope David Jackson will excuse me quoting his comment on Voynich Ninja, but his phrasing is perfect – is simply that Cheshire’s article went into a crappy online paid for journal that just needs to bulk out its content. There are loads of them, that will pretend to peer review – in reality it’s just proof reading – before publication.
And, quite apart from its other faults, Cheshire’s paper shows that he has no understanding of even the most basic technical linguistic vocabulary. Artemij Keidan explains this rather splendidly here:
http://www.academia.edu/39217683/No_the_Voynich_manuscript_has_not_been_deciphered
…and that’s something which anyone editing a linguistics journal would have picked up immediately if they’d bothered to read it.
I just think it’s a great shame. We have so few academic articles on the Voynich Manuscript, and this is only going to reduce confidence in the reliability of what we do have. Not to mention discouraging academics from going near the subject in future.
(And as an aside, I still think that the Yale facsimile represented a fantastic opportunity for someone to write something authoritative about the state of research on the script and ‘language.’ It might have kept some of the recent ‘decipherments’ out of the press, if nothing else.)
Sir Hubert, I preferred to write “smaller journals, that don’t always have too many contributions” rather than “crappy online paid for journal that just needs to bulk out its content” 🙂 I don’t know the editor. He may be a good guy.
The review process for this article was already completed in January, IIRC from some boastful online comments by Gerard Cheshire. So there clearly was some sort of interaction with the author. Apart from that I don’t know.
I repeat that I consider the acceptance amazing. Not just for the lack of linguistic contents, or the lack of knowledge about how the Voynich MS text works, but also for the completely non-scientific way it has been written. Self-praise, over-confidence, etc.
Politicians (and media) talk about ‘truths’ and ‘facts’, whereas good scientists think in terms of ‘improving our understanding’. Or at least trying to, and admitting that whatever we do may not be the last word.
And in the end, it doesn’t even qualify as a storm in a teacup. Just the N’th bogus interpretation of a rather unimportant old book. (This may not be a popular view in the various fora 🙂 ).
An equally big failure is in the media, and I am not so optimistic that this will be easily stopped even after now having had three or four debacles in short succession.
The academics interested in the Voynich MS that I know are not too disturbed by these bad media events. They know which are good and bad journals, and where is good and bad press, It is gratifying that at least Lisa Fagin Davis has a heart for the Voynich MS and is willing to take a qualified stance in these cases, and confront the bad press.
Thank you very much indeed, Nick and John, you’re both very kind, but I was standing entirely on Nick’s shoulders – my previous theory was a transcendental universe imagined by the author, and treated as an ecstatic revelation, with its own language of Tolkienesque scope.
I read Nick’s attribution to Averlino, but I wondered if the VM was too – for want of a better word – weird, and imagined it might be someone in Averlino’s circle, possibly under the influence of f.16.
However, I understand your point about the ‘page references’, and I begin to understand that it is a code rather than a received language of the spheres. ‘Amico di Averlino’ dissolved and I began to appreciate Nick’s attribution properly.
I agree that the Voynichese is all one handwriting – I liked your point about the shape of the letters, showing that the author was used to humanist script – but I wondered about the drawings. There’s a curious mixture of clumsiness and precision, but the architectural details in the Rosettes page are very finely drawn indeed. I know little about Averlino, so I defer entirely. You will know Averlino’s drawings backwards, so passages in the VM might be so similar they raise the hair on the back of your arms.
Attributing the VM to Averlino puts him in the top ten of most extraordinary minds – as a cryptographer and a synaesthete – viewing machines and organic structures as one.
If Averlino designed the Milanese battlements, isn’t it encouraging that the swallowtail merlons in the VM predate their construction? In most art history that would be a likely signature.
Very much looking forward to reading the ‘Curse of’ online – thank you for the precis, yes I had indeed read it – but I must ration myself. In the last 48 hours I forgot to meet a friend for coffee and several times my husband has said, ‘You’re thinking about that manuscript again, I can tell.’
Hope you all have a great weekend.
Very best wishes,
J
Did anyone see the following? I thought it quite informative:
https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/has-voynich-manuscript-code-solved-cracked-no-peer-review-process/
Jay wrote: “I agree that the Voynichese is all one handwriting –…”
I don’t believe the VMS is all one handwriting. There are at least two.
The difference is more than just tiredness or haste. Slant, length, spacing, some of the specific lettershapes… all consistent within themselves but different from each other.
There may be more than two but I’ve only had time to look at the first two in depth. I have so many trails I’m following, it’s hard to find time to write them all up.
Nick,
I agree with Rene that in the usual way academic don’t need to self-advertise with the sort of comments Rene describes as “self-praise” and “boastful”, and that in that context they would mark the amateur. over-confidence, etc.
However, the situation in Voynich studies isn’t quite the same because in a normal field of scholarship considerable pains are taken to ensure that new work shows signs of having read and fairly considered the range of opinions and their evidence; new insights or theories are also properly attributed.
Neal doesn’t have to point out that the work was done which added ‘Neal Keys’ to the terms of reference; nor does Nick need to argue for his precedence when it comes to mentions of Averlino; others do that as a matter of course.
But standards have been so degraded by what I’ve called the ‘theory wars’ that to inform newcomers that their ‘ideas’ have precedents or even that an entire body of work exists is reduced to a decision over whether or not that work is suited to a preferred theory, or even whether or not the work appears to support or to weaken a preferred theory. Take the recently revived efforts to discuss ‘portolan’ charts as example – though some of our elder statesmen knew perfectly well where and when that theme had been introduced, and why, and by whom, and in what detail over a period of years – none said a word.
I’m not arguing that Cheshire isn’t unreasonably self-confident; I am saying that within the ‘theory-war’ atmosphere, the ethical standards are eroded leaving it up to the researchers themselves to set the record straight. It is as embarrassing as it should be unnecessary but the fault lies with the ‘blankers’ not the ‘blankee’. I don’t accept Don Hoffman’s development of the older ‘prefix’-core-‘suffix’ theme but since that theme is introduced in d’Imperio’s book and was also commented on by Stolfi it has a history in Voynich studies and people are entitled to know, and evaluate for themselves, what has been said about it. Including by Don. Similarly, the ‘portolan’ matter and so on.
There is a line between amateur ‘self-advertising’ and the situation we have at present.
Would anybody care for a guessitamate on how many illustrators? I would say a few more than for the script, which would be rather telling in respect of how the whole project was concieved and over what time period it was undertaken; my best guess being quite a while, perhaps years!…
I’d tend to agree that the general architectural design outlines of the 9 RP show a much higher degree of detail and sophistication in comparison with some of the other illustrations, almost as if some means of magnification was used for the more delicate filigree. Of course the clumsily executed castle with the swallowtails and offline tower, must have been thrown together as an afterthought, or else done by one of the students as a chance to play an active role in Vm’s creation.
JK Petersen and John Sanders,
Re the handwriting – it seemed consistent with one writer to me, in a night of going through the Beinecke scans, but I appreciate that in the balance of VMS scholarship that isn’t a weighty argument, and would be glad to read your argument.
Re the drawings, I suppose whether it’s several artists or one the best work should be a stylistic fit with Averlino, if Averlino is the author. The castle looked like a decent sketch to me, but I agree it isn’t finely done like the Guelph and Ghibelline walls along the causeways, which do look as if they were done under magnification. The few online examples of Averlino’s drawing look encouraging, but I’ll be at the Witt next months and I’ll have a look in his boxes.
J
I think the illustrations have mostly been done by one person, with someone else maybe coming in and doing the occasional touch-up or example, or perhaps a poke on the shoulder and a suggestion (I do wonder whether the person who drew the better nose on Aries was around in an “advisor” capacity but not directly involved most of the time).
There is some over-inking, and a lot of breasts have been added, but it’s hard to tell if that was the same person coming back later (the figures are all drawn according to formulas and thus each part may have been drawn in a certain sequence), or if it’s someone else going through it and filling in the blanks.
There are a few spots where a figure that looks more male has been changed to female, for example, but whether that was simply correcting errors or an effort to hide something is anyone’s guess.
I have such a guess. Pharmacy with hearty background. As usual in the past a kind of family business. For me a father-son, grandfather-grandson connection. In this way. I even consider different training places.
But just, just a guess.
I’m almost sure that the folks this lesson is intended for will take it in the way that it’s intended so to speak. A university education is a fine tool and all, but it does depend somewhat on the way that it is used ie. for the better good. Of course a little upper class humility and understanding towards simpler folk, those of a lesser God perhaps, often can do wonders for the more fortunate’s self worth and esteem…I for one have no idea of Dr. Cheshire’s academic background, or for that matter who paid for his schooling and I for one am not the least envious, being of the opinion that it “don’t mean nothing”, so long as it’s put to good use. So far he has done nothing to offend my own not totally alligned thoughts on the origins of Vm, which I’m happy to share without being worried too much how my peers feel, just thankful for opportunity to express views as an equal in some sense. I have a strange feeling that the fine fellow is not going to allow my opinions to adversely affect his own point of view, or he likewise mine an so be it.
That Voynich-faked-it is way better than your rants, sorry to say mate.
First time I even hear about “quire numbers must have been added to the vellum during the 15th century” – what?
I am sure you have you a clear link to where you managed to force someone else to accept your dippy theories. For your almost can’t-get-much-worse reputation you should source such silly claims.
Ender: the quire numbers on the Voynich Manuscript are written in an extremely localised way, i.e. 15th century mid-European handwriting, using a late 15th century numbering style only found in a handful of documents in Swiss archives (which I’ve documented elsewhere). If you can’t directly account for this, then I think you have to abandon the notion that Wilfrid Voynich faked his (now eponymous) manuscript.
So: when I asked Rich SantaColoma for his particular explanation of this, he replied that he thought the quire numbers must have been placed on the blank vellum in the 15th century. Now, given that you apparently disagree with Rich on this, can you tell me how you account for this?
Nick, thank you for the fast reply. I will look more into this but is there any reason we can’t say Voynich faked those numbers as well (given that the ink tests or lacks of thereof are neutral on the topic)?
I couldn’t find anything on this on Santacoloma’s site which isn’t surprising if you say it’s such a damning piece of evidence against the hoax case – but I can’t seem to find the relevant argument on your blog either. Is it somewhere in this post: https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/27/voynich-metatheories-rich-santacoloma-document-x ? That’s the best Google suggest for the key terms you mentioned.
Ender,
Here is link to what your talking about on (I think) Rich’s site:
https://proto57.wordpress.com/. Go down to “The Three Quire Theory”, which says what Nick says it does. From what i understand, Rich says most of the manuscript was “prefoliated”, though someone more modern may have added new numbers. I honestly don’t know that this theory is impossible, and I believe it would be presumptuous to call it a hoax.
Thank you for the pointer, Matt! I will definitely check it out now.
Nick,
I must say as a long-time reader but first-time commentator that I admire your “academic patience”—for perhaps lack of a better term—in dealing with some of the responses you get here. Kudos! And with my apologies to Diane above–I don’t think that you are (or were) being unduly harsh in your assessment (either 2017 or present day). Criticism is an essential part of the scientific process of discovery!
Looking over this whole brouhaha, and looking at G. Cheshire (with his frankly infantile sockpuppet polemics on both your posts and elsewhere – what stuff!), I must say I’m curious as to where you and other experts in this field seem to get this reservoir of patience.
Is it par for the course? Will it always be so? Is the VM specifically something that draws out the wild-eyed? Is it something inherent to the pareidolia(-ic? -ian?) nature of such ciphertexts?
In the book “Voodoo Science” Robert Park explores the (admittedly fuzzy at times) crossing of the line between scientists (mostly in physics) exercising scientific foolishness (i.e. mistaken conclusions drawn from evidence) to practicing outright scientific fraud. His book gave several examples—to my also admittedly fuzzy recollection—of these cases (quantum mythology, cold fusion, +unity/free energy, &c) in which such lines are crossed.
In that book, sometimes that line is crossed without the practitioner realizing that they have done so, and sometimes those who cross even realize that they have bypassed essential steps scientific processes in their enthusiasm and rectify it! But he also shows, in my recollection, that sometimes some people deliberately move (or even originate in) fraud.
Perhaps through his study of the Voynich, G. Cheshire, with his increasingly gossamer connections to scientific methods, has become all the moreso become convinced of his own genius. But his blatant misrepresentations of many elements: of the expertise in the field, his own ‘expertise’ in said field, his institution’s (implied) backing, the ‘peer reviewed’ pedigree of this and previous works… this has made all me think: how do you deal with this Nick? He’s not the only one out there.
Where does this patience come from? What’s the thought process and your approach? If in our world there is some confederacy of dunces continually insisting on even smaller, even blacker teapots somewhere out there how do you or we ever get to a consensus? Or build the steps to get to consensus? It seems any potential signal is repeatedly lost to noise…
Just wondering. Keep up the good fight!
P.S. is there anywhere I can purchase a copy of your book? Amazon has used copies listed for 600+ USD… Have you thought of an ebook version? 😀
SirHubert, Rene, Bill (and others) above: Thank you for the insights. Though I’ve had some experience in academic publishing, history and humanities peer review is very much outside my wheelhouse. Thank you for your discussion!
corrigenda: in my opinion, the world has become full of people with ‘that steely glint’ of self-belief unshackled from any semblance of workable methodology, and I’m up against them all the time. Welcome to my world. :-/
(I’ll email you separately about Curse.)
Nick,
Could you also email me re: availability of Curse? I’m embarrassed to say I never read the book (having followed your ideas in detail as they developed on the mailing list).
If anyone has the slightest interest, the following appears to be Gerard Cheshire’s latest endeavour:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/333881518_The_Algorithmic_Method_for_Translating_MS408_Voynich
Mark: exciting news! Unfortunately I’m washing my hair / scraping my bunions / mumble mumble something about a dog for the next few months, so it will have to fall to someone else to accept the joyful task of reviewing that load of incoherent bollocks.
I think the use of the word “algorithmic” is a real stretch. Either Gerard has no idea what an algorithm is or he has taken a very loose interpretation of the word. I would be interested in finding an computer that could run his “algorithm”. Anyway I doubt his current work will catch fire as before, so it is probably not worth worrying about.
Just to quote from the abstract:
“As with all Latin palaeography, the sentence structure used in the manuscript is often inversive and fragmented, so it becomes necessary to piece the sentences together in accordance with modern linguistic habits, by rearranging the words and using connectives to make sense of them.”
Yes that’s it! Take the manuscript, shake it well, turn it upside down and then rearrange all those inversive and fragmented words until they make sense to you.
This is certainly the most effective paleographic method I’ve ever heard of. Unbelievable.
Charlotte: at least we now have new words to scold our back-chatting teenage children with. “Stop being so inversive and fragmentary!”
Yes, Nick. These are utterly modern linguistic habits. So cool!
So his “algorithmic” method works like this:
Word 1: read in pidgin Latin.
Word 2: read in badly translated Latin
Word 3: read in questionable Italian
Word 4: read in questionable Old Italian
Word 5: read in Galician
Word 6: read in Italian
Word 7: read in Spanish
Word 8: read in pretend-Latin
Word 9: read in Catalan
Shake, stir, and repeat, with a random sprinkle of fractured Portuguese, Romansh, Greek, and Arabic words thrown in for variety.
As far as I can tell Gerard’s “algorithm” is as follows:
1. Translate characters according to his key. (If correct this is a perfectly reasonable place to start.)
2. Ignoring existing spaces and insert spaces wherever one wishes, search for words in a very wide variety of languages that seem the most mutually consistent with one another and the most consistent with the drawings in the text.
3. Try and divine a meaning from the resultant words without the need for any regard for grammar and being very open-minded about the interpretation.
Then, hey presto, you have some text which is broadly consistent with the Voynich.
One has to expect that the example that Gerard provides is one of the better of his “algorithm” at work.
Of course assuming 1 is correct the problems come in with 2 and 3.
Having a disregard for spaces gives him some degree of freedom in word construction.
The wide choice of languages that Gerard makes gives him a large number of degrees of freedom to choose words that fit his ideas.
Then his great degree of flexibility in interpretation of his resultant text gives him more degrees of freedom.
Overall applying his “algorithm” gives one a huge amount of degrees of freedom such that any Voynich text could be made to fit any subject that the “translator” could wish.
Give its open interpretation this “algorithm” could not sensibly be implemented on a computer.
I would imagine that this “very large degrees of freedom” problem is very very common in flawed Voynich translations. A geniune solution should, I think, have very little degrees of freedom in translation and likely therefore be reasonable to implement a decipherment algorirhm that could run on a computer I would have thought. (The main algorithmic difficulty I would imagone would be translating from the resultant language to any other language including English as machine translation has its limitations and automatically translating from a mediaeval language would make it more difficult. Nevertheless I would not be surprised if the process could be automated to produce a generally meaningful result.)
Even with all those degrees of freedom, the text Cheshire generates is still mostly nonsense.
Mark: the difficulty with writing programs to convert EVA into natural language arises from the need to account for contextual dependency and for spelling errors.
It’s a bit like dealing with an uncorrected OCR text. In such texts, many of the words which occur only once will be OCR errors. Frequent ‘words’ may not be true words if the document in question is a set of notes for a speech. By way of a single small example: Churchill would write in his notes ‘hv’ for ‘have’.
“I would not be surprised if the process could be automated to produce a generally meaningful result.”
I’ve been working on that for a few years. I am using a combination of statistical analyses, pattern matching and experimental transliteration algorithms. Thus far I can recognise in the VM consistent use of Latin forms for leaf, oil, water, health, women, canopy (tent or marquee), to produce, to grow (of crops) and a few other words.
Patrick, I don’t think you have to worry about spelling errors when you have 200 pages of text.
The percentage would not be enough to obscure the overall text. The VMS is very regular, moreso than most medieval texts, so if it is language in some way or another, I don’t expect there would be many spelling errors. If there are, then they are likely misspelled in a very regular (and thus recognizable) way.
I am waiting to see your new version, Patrick. Your old one, which you claimed to be Latin, had almost no Latin words, so it will be enlightening to see how you have revised your algorithm.
J.K. Petersen I am currently writing a new addition to my current series. My error before was due to an expectation of basic uniformity in the VM symbols. I now know that the symbols are heavily context-dependent. That is to say, the symbol which in EVA is ‘k’ may represent, e.g., ‘it-‘ as initial or ‘-li-‘ as medial.
My original transcription program rendered all these as ‘il’. Thus, ‘ita’ came out as ‘ila’. Also, I had based much of my work on the basis that many VM words had to do with it being an apothecary’s manual. Changing transcription ‘apot-‘ into ‘foli-‘ removes the error and produces many more true Latin words. ‘qokchy’ almost certainly transcibes to ‘foliatum’. The VM ‘c’ character appears to represent, ‘c or a vowel’. Thus, ‘ch’ may be ‘ct, at, et’, As words, ‘ch’ is ‘et’ and ‘Sh’ is most likely ‘est’.
As to error percentages, you are quite right. For most statistical purposes when dealing with large texts I ignore pro tem any words which occur only once. For very large texts the cut-off is any word with frequency < 10.
Patrick wrote: “… ‘qokchy’ almost certainly transcibes to ‘foliatum’. ”
If you believe this, you need to take more time to actually look at Voynichese and improve your understanding of the text.
The EVA-q glyph for-the-most part only occurs at the beginnings of tokens. If it equates to “f” then there are no “f” letters in medial or terminal positions throughout the manuscript. This would be very unusual behavior for Latin, or for any language.
The “c” character (EVA-e) often occurs as c, cc, ccc, and even cccc in the VMS, so I think it’s unlikely that it represents “c or a vowel”. In fact, there’s a possibility these are not letters at all. I don’t know any natural language where the same letter occurs three or four times in a row, and not just once in a while—ccc is a common pattern in Voynichese.
I think possible common spelling variation/mistakes are an example of some degrees of freedom; of course it is possible there are spelling mistakes, but it could be convenient to overestimate this. Contextual dependency of course does happen, but it can also be used as a justification for greater degrees of freedom in decipherment. A variety of abbreviated and non-abbreviated words add to the degrees of freedom. If the degrees of freedom the decipherer has to work with is large enough then he/she can extract the text that they want from the Voynich text.
From what I know of most pre-existing decipherments it is a very slow process to produce the resultant text as the process of extracting a suitable meaning given the decipherment theory requires a lot of effort working around and within the available large degrees of freedom in arriving at a suitable interpretation.
This is why it takes so much time for someone like Gerard to translate a page of text as he has to explore most or all of the different possible translations of the text that fit the wide range of languages he is working with to pick one that best fits the context.
J. K.Petersen wrote “The EVA-q glyph for-the-most part only occurs at the beginnings of tokens. If it equates to “f” then there are no “f” letters in medial or terminal positions ”
That is an unwarranted assumption. There are more glyphs than there are letters in Latin. EVA q is not the only representation of ‘f’. As to ccc: the letter c, in each and every occurence, can represent “c or a vowel”. So, depending on the context of the topic and of preceding words, letters, spaces, ccc may represent, e.g.
‘-aci-‘ as in ‘facit’
‘-oca-‘, as in ‘locabis’
‘-cii’, as in ‘apicii
‘-eii’ as in ‘plebeii’
and so forth.
Mark wrote “If the degrees of freedom the decipherer has to work with is large enough then he/she can extract the text that they want from the Voynich text.”
Agreed, but the computer programs I write don’t “want” anything at all. If my computer matches a pattern in the VM to a pattern in Latin and fails to find a similar match in Italian, French, German, English etc then I have no reason to depart from a hypothesis that the author of the VM was fluent in Latin and invented his own writing system. Also, once a glyph has been interpreted to have a small set Z of meanings-subject-to-context there remain only Z degrees of freedom in transliterating that glyph.
Patrick Lockerby: you have to be extremely careful with this kind of reasoning. 🙁
There have been a number of simple substitution Voynichese mappings proposed over the years where multiple glyphs mapped to a single plaintext letter (e.g. Stephen Bax had three different letter r’s in his “preliminary” Voynich mapping, which I think was a particularly foolish starting point), but these almost always end up omitting letters from the plaintext alphabet (because they run out of Voynich glyphs).
If your plaintext alphabet ends up containing letters that don’t appear in 200+ pages of text, something has probably gone a bit Pete Tong. 🙁
Because the cccc variant takes a similar position in the words as the //// variant. Is to assume the same system but other statement.
He might apply to 6x /// or ccc, and it still would make sense.
Words with 3 letters like “Teeei”, “Massstab” …. are in German, but there are just a few, maybe 5.
If there is a variant where ccc is in front of the word, please give me the place where it stands. That would be very interesting for me.
Patrick wrote: “That is an unwarranted assumption. There are more glyphs than there are letters in Latin. EVA q is not the only representation of ‘f’. As to ccc: the letter c, in each and every occurence, can represent “c or a vowel”. So, depending on the context of the topic and of preceding words, letters, spaces, ccc may represent, e.g.
‘-aci-‘ as in ‘facit’
‘-oca-‘, as in ‘locabis’
‘-cii’, as in ‘apicii
‘-eii’ as in ‘plebeii’
and so forth.”
If you feel that that each c-shape in c, cc, ccc and cccc can be interpreted in numerous ways, then you are skating very close to a one-way cipher
Peter wrote: “Because the cccc variant takes a similar position in the words as the //// variant. Is to assume the same system but other statement.”
The patterning is similar, but the position in tokens is different (and thus the glyphs on either side of the pattern are different).
The /// variants tend to be at the ends of tokens. The cccc variants tend to be medial.
It is probably worth noting that the two are almost never adjacent and that /// patterns sometimes stand alone.
It is also worth considering that EVA-ch MIGHT be cc shapes and EVA-sh might be ccc shapes artfully hidden (in which case the ccc pattern can also occupy the beginning position) but I don’t see strong evidence for this yet. Nevertheless… I don’t think the possibility should be overlooked.
One thing which always seems to be the case with the claim decipherments/translations is that each that the process is very slow and arduous. The process of deciphering/translating each new word and sentence is described as being slow and difficult. The decipherers/translator will list say 10, 50, 100 or more words that they have deciphered/translated or certain pages or certain passages that they have deciphered/translated.
Now I wonder by contrast that once the key to the cipher is found if in fact the process of translating the whole text will be relatively quick or at least significantly faster than the current claims.
Some might view it as convenient that some people have claimed to decipher Voynichese, but haven’t deciphered most of the text as this is a very slow and difficult process. So their claim is to have sort of deciphered Voynichese.
I wrote this noting that the Turkic theory is still being promoted by those who have presented it, but of course they say there is still much work for them to do completing the full translation. (Anyway they sound like a nice family.)
Mark: I’ve long suspected that most (but not all) Voynichese was readable ‘off the page’ by the encipherer. Rene’s “fourth case” (i.e. that the process of encrypting did such violence to the text that it became inherently unreadable) seems to be broadly the right kind of finesse, but still seems a little strong.
My ‘fifth case’ would be a combination of abbreviation and encryption, where a group of scribes shared the abbreviation style… but without knowledge of how that abbreviation style works, you have an extra high hurdle to jump. :-/
Nick: I think it is most likely Voynichese was readable ‘off the page’ by the encipherer. (Of course I have recently formed the opinion from looking at labels that there are many null words, which technically speaking can’t be said to be “readable”, but nevertheless which I think must have been easily identifiable to the author as they are part of a small number of null groups of words.) If Voynichese were an unknown language then it is true that we would find translation slow, but as I don’t think it is then I think it would not have been. I still suspect that it is known language with a cipher applied which once the cipher is known will be relatively easy to read. I wouldn’t be surprised if under it all there is Latin, though there are other possibilities. If the underlying language were Medieval Latin using for example Tironian notes then I think once deciphered it would be relatively easy to read off the page. Of course this is all speculation.
(When I find enough time I need to devise a rigorous procedure to confidently identify all of the small number of null groups of words which generate a large number of null words; a non-trivial task, I think. Only then I can look at the non-null text that remains.)
I don’t know if you have seen the Thomas Aquinas autographs Vat. lat. 9850 and 9851, https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.9850 and https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.9851. Take a look and you know what B. 408 is, only B. 408 is legible
Helmut: thanks for the links.
If I’ve understood these correctly, 9850 is a small piece of Gothic handwriting (on the second f1r) supposed to be by Thomas Aquinas’ hand, and with someone else’s (later) transcription just below it. Style-wise, it looks to my eyes like an older version of the Voynich’s f116v marginalia, but I’d be a bit surprised if it is genuinely a holograph from the 13th century (it looks more like 14th century to me).
9851 looks more like the genuine article, given that it is properly impenetrable medieval Latin in a properly impenetrable medieval Latin hand. 😉
As far as I know, both mss. are supposed to be Th.A. holographs, cp- https://thomistica.net/news/2016/3/27/thomas-autograph-manuscripts-now-on-vatican-library-website. I was not thinking of any similarities with the B. 408 script, but that both are medieval examples of personal notes and especially B. 408 should be treated as a personal notebook, ledger or whatever, scripts are supposed to be illegible (I read somewhere that Th.A. called his own script littera inintelligibilis, but is readable nevertheless) and it is quite likely that B. 408 is readable and understandable
9851 has a lot of abbreviations, but at least it’s readable.
9850 (the obtuse section starting at 4r), is the kind that makes your brain hurt.
I’ve only seen a few manuscripts like that. I was able to slowly work out the shapes in one of them (they were somewhat consistent but definitely unconventional) but even then it was a slow painful slog.
I don’t know how hard 9850 would be… I can see the numbers, plus e, t, a, l and y are written normally but the parts in between, hmmm, I guess long-ess is normal too, and the 9 abbreviation is small and sometimes not completely closed, but recognizable by position, but even so, I’m not sure I want to try that again, especially when n, m, u/v are all so similar and f indistinguishable from long-ess and r and t written so much the same. Ouch.
I often wonder if people who write like this can read their own handwriting.
Gerard has intermittently been writing brief papers on a number of different herbal plant pages; he has written 7 papers so far each for a different plant. It is interesting to me how someone can write utter nonsense lucidly, eloquently and as if it was a serious piece of work. He obviously and unsurprisingly is experienced writing academic papers and on the face of it his papers look very professional and yet they are vacuous. In addition again he seems to have paid little attention to other people’s plant identifications; I suppose they would be likely to undermine his translations.
Human psychology is fascinating!
My theory is the guy stubbornly can’t admit to himself and others that he is wrong and so doubles down on the nonsense; this is a fairly common human characteristic. He might be able to write a professional seeming paper, but his reasoning capacity seems limited based on my experience. Having said that his theory is quite sensible compared to that of the likes of “Big Jim Finn”.
Mark: poor Big Jim Finn, to find himself compared with Gerard Cheshire. It’s enough to make you look forward to End Times.
I suppose I should point out the following:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YaG9EAAAQBAJ
It funny how we humans can seem unable to let our incorrect theories go. I guess it is down to loss aversion. We find it hard to admit that we wasted a lot of time on something and to admit to ourselves that what we saw as a triumph was in fact a failure.
Of course, someone could say to me, “Well that could apply to you and your theory”. Ultimately it is left for me to judge whether that is the case or not for my own theory about the Voynich Manuscript. For the time being I, also, am sticking to my guns. I guess time will tell who was right to stand by their ideas and who was mistaken.
I will mention email correspondence I had with a historian on the Island of Ischia who said that nobody on Ischia believes Gerard’s theory.
Mark,
Thanks for bringing this to notice.
I had been thinking to publish in formal style my own study of that folio – the first (so far as I know) that showed, among other things, certain points it has in common with certain early fourteenth-century cartes marine. I thought it might help if researchers understood how that opinion about the drawing had first entered this manuscript’s study. they knew how that theme first entered the manuscript’s study.
At the time, my conclusions having also included that this map was not of European origin, omits mention of mainland Europe *and Jerusalem* made it a study unappealing to those maintaining traditionalist Eurocentric narratives and efforts to make more congenial ‘variants’ began about 18 months later and of these, the Tuckers’ was bad enough, but this by Cheshire promises to be even worse.
In these circumstances, for me to publish a shorter version of the original study would only seem to the wider public to add another voice to the cacophony, and how are they to judge the relative value of each, or to know who is the imitator and who the imitated?
Thanks again, Mark.
I am very much someone who has a Eurocentric view of the Voynich manuscript and as some know I have my own very detailed analysis of that page. Whether right or wrong my analysis is as far as I know significantly more detailed than any other. Of course, ‘detailed’ does not necessarily mean correct.
I have no intention of publishing my analysis of this page until I have a bit more evidence in support of my wider theory of which this is a part. It looks like I will be publishing a book, at some point, on the subject of 14th and 15th century cryptography, a subject which we can have more certain and reliable knowledge about.
Mark. You spent a lot of time on the manuscript. Time flows like water. And it flows irresistibly into the distance and you are still at the beginning of your research. Where do you go wrong as an amateur? You have to work like a good scientist and really dig into the manuscript. Then you will surely achieve a good result. For now, your work is useless. But you have an effort. Like Diana and that’s good. You have to add both on research and then it will be good.
Mark,
I realise that it has now become almost de rigeur for any theorist to prouce a theoretical reading for that drawing.
When I set out to treat it, though, there was only one other study of which I could find any record. That was Nick’s own effort to relate the drawing to his Miilan-Averlino theory. After reading one of Nick’s posts in 2010, I felt it would be a useful thing to provide those working on the written text with a study of the drawing on which they could rely. The work of research, which I’d thought might take a few weeks at most, took almost all the time I could spare for research for almost three years, though I began posting the basic study from 2011 and since I began getting reports of misuse from as early as 2012, I kept back some parts of the work.
I don’t come to any drawing with a theory about it; I can’t see what purpose that could have, since devotion to a theory must pre-empt the work of research itself. If my finding that the little dragon on f.25v might have been drawn by an Irishman led me to create an imaginary ‘Irish’ fictional history for the manuscript, it would surely distort the way in which I regarded all other drawings in this manuscript.
You say your own study is very detailed. Glad to hear it. I see that Cheshire adopted the same ‘step by step’ method that I’d used when publishing the sections I did. (Afterwards, JK Petersen would attempt to do the same).
Mark, I wouldn’t dream of asking you to share your ideas if you don’t wish too, but it’s another reason that I think the manuscript’s study might progress better if researchers had some ‘Gallery’ site where they could compare, side by side, the various readings that have been offered for that drawing.
As it is all we get are what sound like ego-driven fights, rather than scholarly debate – don’t you think?
The place where any scientist can publish something about the manuscript is: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ivka/voynich-manuscript/talk/4163
Every scientist and historian can have a good time there and write what they think about the manuscript. Putting heads together is good. More heads more sense.
Well, after all, I already wrote to them there too. That he has to work harder. And don’t ask researchers for ideas on how to solve the text. I also wrote to them there that they would never solve the manuscript in this way. Scientists right? They are amateurs.
The manuscript must be well thought out. And don’t talk nonsense.
I’ve just made a reference to the band Gong on another thread so what the hell, even if I don’t give two hoots about Voynich and his silly manuscript. I do have a soft spot though for epistemological parodies of Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer for that matter).
For all Pot Head Pixies. (Hey Pete you gotta meet the Pot Head Pixies) Enjoy:
https://youtu.be/SIgzP4Rj0Ns
By the way Darth Vader (Dave Prowse) was from Southmead, Bristol, which is less than a mile up the road from me. So there!
Most Voynich theories seem to have more in common with chocolate teapots than space teapots.
“What’s that in the sky now?
Teapots that can fly now
Voices in your head
Tell me what they said”
I don’t think it is called-for that a Voynich theory requires a theory of that page. I myself started my Voynich research and interest with that page. Nick’s theory of that page became a jumping off point for me, though overtime it diverged away from Nick’s interpretation in some areas.
I certainly would not claim to have been to first to interpretation that page as representing some kind of map. However, I daresay, like all other interpretations it is unique.
Whilst, it is true that I have made part of my Voynich theory public on Ninja, I am very reticent to make my full analysis of that page public as I want to avoid getting involved in the inevitable arguments over my interpretation with other researchers, which I will necessarily feel I ought to respond to and which will consequently absord the time that I could spend pushing my research forward. I intend to make it public when I feel that I have enough body of evidence for it to stand on its own two feet without my need to justify it, if/when that day comes.
However if you really want to see it I suppose I can share it with you specifically. Although I will not post a download link here. But I would ask you not to publicise it, so that I can avoid the arguments that I am keen to avoid at this time.
I should say it is quite unlike your theory, so I doubt you will be at all persuaded by it. In my interpretation the page illustrates a journey from the Duchy of Milan to Basel and back. So in my theory the page covers parts of Northern Italy and Switzerland.
Mark,
I’d be delighted to read your treatment of that drawing. You can reach me at voynichimagery [gmail com] I’d be glad if you could include bibliography,
Comparing theories won’t be possible, I’m afraid. Sorry, but I don’t use them.
I mean ‘theories’ in the Voynich sense of fictional narratives invented in advance of doing research and towards justifying which the subsequent research aims.
I can’t see the point in that kind of story-telling; simpler (as I see it) just to research the drawing and form any opinions as a conclusion of research not a prelude to it – but that debate over method is one which Nick and I have debated it before. 🙂
I’ll certainly enjoy reading your work – thank you Mark
Diane,
When it comes to the topic of a bibliography of my analysis of the Rosettes foldout, the main book that I would refer you to is “L’abbazia di San Nazzaro Sesia” by Samuel Beltrame , Massimiliano Caldera and Valeria Moratti. It is in Italian and I suspect you would have difficulty obtaining a copy in Australia, though I could be wrong. Other than that I would say that in the case of this page I have relied more on architecture and geography rather than other literary sources as will be apparent from seeing the page.
I will email you a link where you can download it shortly. It is a rather large file at 65MB and you will need to zoom in on it significantly to see all the details. I have discussed some other aspects of my theory on a thread devoted to it on Nnja.
I had completely missed the fact that Dr Cheshire was/is a University of Bristol “expert”.
As the sub-headline in The Guardian piece puts it: “Bristol distances itself from academic who claims to have solved century-old mystery”. That’s me covered then. An obvious quacksalver imho. I do remember the fuss in the local press now.
I also recall an epistemological parody skit at Nietzsche’s expense on the British TV programme ‘The Good Old Days’ in the late ’70s which went down so well with the audience at the Leeds City Varieties Music Hall that the following week they did a similar act lampooning Kantian epistemology, after which instead of ending the show with the crowd singing the usual ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ they changed the words to ‘Down with the Old Ding-an-Sich’, thereby displaying their utter contempt for Kant’s concept of the noumenon and trumpeting their support for Fichte’s argument that philosophy is not a “true” science. Arthur Askey was booed when he tried to tell an off-colour joke about Wittgenstein’s notion of the sprachspiel (language game).
As Arthur Schopenhauer said: ““Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” Dave Prowse and I often discuss this sort of thing during the marvellous weekly seances held on Tuesdays at the Old Sodbury Village Hall.
Steve Hurwood: I won’t hear a disparaging word about Dr Cheshire, not when multiple disparaging words will do a much better job.
Mark,
We live in a global village.
I usually buy from the publisher, or failing that, from Abebooks. (Bookrepository has recently closed down). I avoid buying from the US, though, because their postage rates are insane – typically twice or thrice the cost of the book and sometimes more.
I expect you mean..
Caldera M., Moratti Valeria, L’ABBAZIA DI SAN NAZZARO SESIA. Guida ai percorsi architettonici e figurativi. Published by Interlinea, I Segni,, Novara, 2013 (?)
at the moment I can have a copy of it for 16 Euros – so no problem there.
I look forward to receiving the link.