Voynich manuscript discussion: 2005 January 22

[Helen]

Misfit - as another poster told you already this is a transcribed alphabet you're looking at. The "phonemes" or "letters" are arbitrarily designated so as to parse the text without recourse to the original characters.

Separately, the so-called "Macedonian" is in fact Bulgarian. The term "Macedonia" - a province of the Byzantine empire lost to Slavs after Ottoman Turks took Constantinople - was first used to designate the Bulgarian-inhabited province of Yugoslavia after WWI. The MS is from the 16th century, not the 20th.

Finally, the "gypsies" you mention spoke an Indian dialect but had no written language.

[Helen]

"...The education of Gypsies who spoke Romany was inhibited because the language has no alphabet or written literature...."

More on Bulgaria and its linguistic minorities here:
http://bulrefsite.entrewave.com/view/bu ... 29p148.htm

[Phiddipus]

I sat and thought about it last night. Because there are odd sequences of words that do not occur in other languages, then it hit me. What if the words themselves are split with the first part of one word attaching to the last part of the previous word. The advantage of this would be that not knowing this, translators would keep disregarding the correct language because it wouldnt make any sense. Wha ti fth etex twe rewri tenli keth iswit het heb rea ksi nt hewr ongp lace. Add to that a cryptogram and it would be gobbledy gook. I hope this is the key...if it is I want credit!

[Boldra]

The "phonemes" or "letters" are arbitrarily designated so as to parse the text without recourse to the original characters.

I don't understand what you are talking about.

Let me try to explain the purpose of the substitute letter schemes. It's quite easy to write a program to count the most commonly occuring words in a piece of text:

Code: Select all

perl -e '$/=" ";while(<>){$word s{$_}++} foreach(keys %words){push(@freq,sprintf("%06d %s",$words{$_},$_))} print join"\n",sort @freq'

But such a program will only take input from a text file. That means a file written with letters like the ones we have on our keyboards. Since the voynich manuscript isn't written with these letters, my program won't work on it directly.

So first someone needs to transcribe the strange letters of the voynich alphabet into common european letters a - z. Then my program can give you this little list of the top ten words in the manuscript (created taking six pages at random):

1. daiin
2. chor
3. chol
4. Shy
5. dar
6. qokchy
7. chy
8. y
9. tchy
10.s

Which you can then convert back to voynichese (I wrote another perl program for that):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
And see if you recognise the language now!

However, since this is an astronomy discusssion and not a linguistics discussion, I'd be much more interested if you recognise any astronomy/astrology imagery from the picture RJN selected as significant: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050122.html . Personally I like the fertility calander theory.

Boldra

[drss123]

After review of several postings on this subject, I've come to the following amalgam solution to the Voinich problem. The book is a transcripted copy, by a gypsy alchemist from the middle ages, of a book accidently left behind by an alien botanist space navigator named ET. This explains the similar, but different, syntax since alien syntax would clearly be different than earth languages. Also, since it's a transcription, the subtlety in the alien written language would be missed, leaving the simplification of the text. E.g. Me trying to transcribe chinese would probably be unintelligible to an Arab. It would explain star maps different than those as seen from earth. It would explain the general format of the document as being alchemical (bushism attempt). It would explain a focus on plants and the additional doodling of naked people (who doesn't have at least some interest in animal reproduction). And, finally, we know ET phoned home but I'm sure he'll be back to get his book.

[drss123]

Because it was a library book. Can you imagine the late fees!?!

[Geniuswitch]

To my opinion, firstable I think this is not describing our sun, to mee the illustration describes something else, the sun image, are 2 moons with a sun in the middle, into the universe, our sun just have one, what is the meaning to star with 3 lone stars in the top and the other ones 2.
Why are 12 blue spaces and 12 red? do you see there is a
n empty space on the middle, just where words finish and end? that s the emptiness of the life, space or everything, were all starts and all finish.
Did someone try to build a model from this? There are a lot of things here that can give us some clues, but one by one, to me, this is not a description, this is a map, where? I don t know but this is a map.

[Jjbreen]

Ok .. so I do NOT cause any legal issues, I have created a PDF of this book, for my own personal self, (from data showing no (C)).

If it is NOT against any "laws of the Lands" ... can I >FREELY< share this?

If anyone has some insite, please let me know.. Thanks!

[makc]

Recently there were some other artefacts found, with scriptures simmilar to Voinich ones. There is even one with known translation, so we should expect some real progress in the area.

[Helen]

Misfit - this is not a Balkan travelogue site. Btw, your "Macedonian" language is a Bulgarian dialect, and Slavs arrived in the Balkans in the 7th century AD - that's a thousand years after Alexander of Macedon died. Please look up sites like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_language and this:
http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2004/03/msg00166.html
before posting here any more. You don't understand what others here are saying, but what you are saying (except for the personal part) has been already discredited by every serious researcher.

If all else fails, look at the TITLE of this thread: "The VOYNICH manuscript" - you say you never heard of Voynich, so why are you here?!

[Helen]

Boldra - have you run your PERL code with any of the transcribed alphabets other than EVA? Several appear here:
http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html

[Helen]

Final from me: for most of the history of voynich.net there was no reliable way to compare illustrations in the MS with other contemporaneous sources without a very-high-speed supercomputer, but now this software is becoming available. I wonder whether such a search (purely optical scan matching, ignoring the script) can be made starting e.g. here:
http://jducoeur.org/game-hist/game-trans.html

The medieval "reader" would only be equipped with pen and paper to decode the script, but illustrations are accessible instantly.

[Boldra]

Boldra - have you run your PERL code with any of the transcribed alphabets other than EVA? Several appear here:
http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html

No, what I wrote was only intended as a demonstration of the usefulness of transcribing the alphabet.

I doubt that a simple analysis of word frequency (or even anything more sophisticated I could think up) would be comparable to what the NSA guys have tried.

Actually, after following your link, I've realised I used the wrong alphabet for the backwards conversion. I used Currier and the original was in EVA.

Boldra

[zain]

General scientific consensus says its a hoax. Probably so but let us assume it is not and look at the figure objectively and throw some questions around..

There are 24 sectors. This could be hours in a day but why do the light and dark alternate rather than 12 light followed by 12 dark?

And what about the red "spokes"? Perhaps just the central sun's rays?

In the astronomy context, 12 is the number of lunar cycles approximating the solar year. The alternating light/dark pairs may signify the waxing and waning phases of the moon. Perhaps they look at the moon differently -- "dark" when the moon was less than half and "light" when more.

The stars don't look like any constellation unless you fudge a lot. More likely, they are just used to fill in the "light" sector. But why are they drawn in the "light" sector rather than in the "dark" sector? Perhaps it is just easier to do so? (or coded?)