Voynich manuscript decoded?

[Craig B]

The problem being that there are no further texts to "decipher" (that term presupposes there's some kind of genuine content in there in the first place). There's this one, not very large, book, and nothing else. Which fact, combined with its dating and geographical origin, is exactly what leads many people to think it's probably the work of a single hoaxer/fraudster/crank, pick whatever word you want.

I agree with Aepervius. What I meant by "other texts" would include other passages of the book apart from the Billy Goat Liver passage for which a "decipherment" has been offered.

Here is what I mean. Let us take the "Billy Goat Liver" (BGL) phonetic values, and give them to a scholar who has not worked on the BGL passage translation. Then bid that scholar examine the passage for which a translation was proposed in 1943 (see my post #15) which was stated to be in Latin, and to read

The feminated, having been feminated, press on the forebound; those pressing on are moistened; they are vein-laden; they will be broken up; they are lessened.

If the BGL phonetic key produced results consistent with the "feminated" text, we could accept that the two independent decipherments mutually supported each other. I would be content if something of that kind could be shown. Unless of course the BGL and the "feminated" texts are derived from an analysis of the same passage. That would be unfortunate indeed.

 

[Delvo]

@ Delvo Can I ask you to comment further on one of your own observations?... But the circumstance that these inscriptions were being studied by a person with a knowledge of Coptic was in no way a matter of "random serendipity". It was already known, or at least correctly believed, that the ancient Egyptian writing system underlay a language resembling later Coptic.

Until the first bit of information from Coptic was used to fill in part of a hieroglyphic cartouche in 1822/1823, no information from Coptic had been used yet. Most of the hieroglyphic phonetic system had been decoded for sound but not for meaning, but that all could just as well have been done by non-Coptophones, and most of it actually had been. You don't need to know what any of the other words of the text mean in order to recognize the same few things in certain parts of different names, like P, T, and L in both Ptolemy and Cleopatra. That would work in any language in the world whether the person doing it knew the language or not, as long as (s)he had good reason to believe that those little chunks of text were the names Ptolemy and Cleopatra. But then, once you've got the letters' sound values down, how do you get from that to understanding it? You need to know what language it is or something close to it, and call in someone who speaks that. It's a separate process from working out the phonetics; not the same thing. Once you do the first part, the next part calls for someone who knows Coptic. if you have such a person available, you can go ahead. If you don't, you can't yet, but that doesn't magically reverse time and make all of the previous work on phonetics "nothing". It would just mean you have the phonetics but not the meanings yet.

How likely is it that this process will yield, not a decoding, but a creation?

The more the phonetic system is built up, the more it becomes practically impossible to come up with letter-sound associations that aren't the real ones the authors actually used the alphabet for. Getting from the sounds to the actual meanings of anything other than the names we got the sounds from is a separate step which would require a another source of information.

In other words, are they extracting meaning or injecting it?

Neither. The phonetic system is one thing, and the meanings of the words are something else. Why are y'all trying so hard to make them one thing? It doesn't seem possible that y'all could be failing to realize that being able to hear & saying the sounds doesn't confer knowledge of what the sounds mean, but none of the objections that nothing's happened yet here make any sense without such an absurd assumption! Just recall the last time you ever heard any language being spoken that you didn't already know yourself. Poof, there it is: proof that having a language's sounds does not equal having its meanings.

If the phonetic values have been found, then applying them to a further set of symbols will produce coherent text.

Yes, when it's done (which nobody's yet claimed that it is). All we'll need then is to know what language it is and find somebody who speaks it.

It's much the same as recovering an enemy cipher key in war. Once the correct key has been found, the intercepted messages start to make sense.

If you know the enemy's spoken language. If you don't, you'll just get the same thing you get when listening to them in person: sounds you don't understand. That's why the USA in WWII used Hopi "code-talkers". People from outside North America could hear the sounds they were making but not have any idea what it meant.

This is what I am not sure has happened, or is happening, in the case of the alleged Voynich decipherment.

Of course not, because we haven't gotten there YET, which is why nobody's claiming to have gotten there yet!

Given enough imagination I could turn a bunch of squiggles into a recipe for braised nanny goat's liver with coriander if I were allowed to propose that my alleged words were highly abbreviated and culled at will from disparate languages; and if I were in addition permitted, if need be, to state that some of them were in a ciphered unknown tongue.

Um, that one part of the book is the only part that has bits written in known languages with a known alphabet. What's your problem with some people being able to read Latin and German but not an unknown language with an unknown alphabet? How is the ability to read Latin and German supposed to confer the ability to read something else?

 

[Craig B]

... Um, that one part of the book is the only part that has bits written in known languages with a known alphabet. What's your problem with some people being able to read Latin and German but not an unknown language with an unknown alphabet? How is the ability to read Latin and German supposed to confer the ability to read something else?

Sorry, my error. I thought the Latin and German had been rendered in the Voynich script, and "deciphered" from that, using plausible plant names from the illustrations. Since this is not so, and since no Voynichese has been recovered from either the BGL text or any other part of the book, it is hard to see how any decipherment can be said to have been achieved at all.

My understanding was based on your #59

In order for the found phonetic correspondences between pictured plant names to have arisen from a trick, the nature of the truck must have been phonetic substitution using a made-up alphabet to spell real names/words ...

Have none of these found correspondences proven to be applicable even to the mixed Latin-German BGL text? Because these words were given in Roman letters anyway? Then I don't think it can be shown that any progress whatsoever has been made.

 

[marplots]

(some snipped)
The more the phonetic system is built up, the more it becomes practically impossible to come up with letter-sound associations that aren't the real ones the authors actually used the alphabet for. Getting from the sounds to the actual meanings of anything other than the names we got the sounds from is a separate step which would require a another source of information.

I am not a linguist. Can you tell me why the sounds are important at all? It seems to me I wouldn't have to know pronunciation to decode something like 100110111100. Is it that the sounds link the text to a known language somehow? I am further confused by what you said next:

Neither. The phonetic system is one thing, and the meanings of the words are something else. Why are y'all trying so hard to make them one thing? It doesn't seem possible that y'all could be failing to realize that being able to hear & saying the sounds doesn't confer knowledge of what the sounds mean, but none of the objections that nothing's happened yet here make any sense without such an absurd assumption! Just recall the last time you ever heard any language being spoken that you didn't already know yourself. Poof, there it is: proof that having a language's sounds does not equal having its meanings.

What does capturing the phonetics do for us when the ultimate goal is to decipher meaning? (Or is that not the goal?)

 

[Craig B]

I am not a linguist. Can you tell me why the sounds are important at all?

Because the writing systems under discussion work by using conventional symbols to represent sounds made by people speaking the language. It was the discovery that this happened in Egyptian hieroglyphs that made Champollion cry out: "I've got it".

Champollion knew (to some extent) the sounds of the ancient Egyptian language, because it has survived as the language of the Egyptian Christian church (like Latin in Europe), only written in Greek letters, and these represent sounds. When he could associate some of the ancient symbols with sounds, he began to be able to read these old writings inscribed in temples or written on ancient papyri.

It would of course be possible to devise an entirely non-phonetic script, but that is not the case with the writing systems we're talking about. The Voynich symbols also look like a phonetic script, indeed an alphabetic one.

 

[marplots]

Because the writing systems under discussion work by using conventional symbols to represent sounds made by people speaking the language. It was the discovery that this happened in Egyptian hieroglyphs that made Champollion cry out: "I've got it".

Champollion knew (to some extent) the sounds of the ancient Egyptian language, because it has survived as the language of the Egyptian Christian church (like Latin in Europe), only written in Greek letters, and these represent sounds. When he could associate some of the ancient symbols with sounds, he began to be able to read these old writings inscribed in temples or written on ancient papyri.

It would of course be possible to devise an entirely non-phonetic script, but that is not the case with the writing systems we're talking about. The Voynich symbols also look like a phonetic script, indeed an alphabetic one.

OK, I see how phonetics can link a unknown text to a known language, provided the sounds are shared. What I don't know is that this is what is alleged/proven to be happening with the manuscript in question. Has it?

Is the text understood to be a different language and not some encoded version of a language known at the time?

My skeptical bone is telling me one may not be able to determine the difference between nonsense and a sufficiently unknowable language. How far off is my bone?

It would help me if you could draw a parallel between what might be happening here and, for example, "decoding" whale song. (Aside from the fact that we have living animals to interact with.)

 

[Craig B]

OK, I see how phonetics can link a unknown text to a known language, provided the sounds are shared. What I don't know is that this is what is alleged/proven to be happening with the manuscript in question. Has it?

No.

Is the text understood to be a different language and not some encoded version of a language known at the time?

It is not understood at all.

My skeptical bone is telling me one may not be able to determine the difference between nonsense and a sufficiently unknowable language. How far off is my bone?

Your bone's not right. There are ways of deciding whether a bunch of unknown symbols contain a meaningful signal or not. It has been argued in this thread that "Voynichese" fails the test.

It would help me if you could draw a parallel between what might be happening here and, for example, "decoding" whale song. (Aside from the fact that we have living animals to interact with.)

If you have the appropriate phonetic script you can represent the sounds made by whales or any other creatures. But you cannot therefore decode these sounds. In the fifteenth century a phonetic script was adopted in Korea. Its inventor stated that it could be used to represent bird song. I assume he meant the sounds birds made, and not the meaning of these sounds, if they have a meaning.

 

[Delvo]

Have none of these found correspondences proven to be applicable even to the mixed Latin-German BGL text? Because these words were given in Roman letters anyway?

Unlike some ancient multilingual decrees such as the Rosetta stone, even the one Voynich page that has other languages isn't simply the same thing written out once in each language start to finish. It's four lines, with a bit of space between the first and the other three. The first two words of the fourth line are the only ones in the Voynich alphabet. How they relate to the rest of that page is unknown. The first one matches the word for "juniper". The second is something that recurs many times throughout the book, often more than once on the same page.

since no Voynichese has been recovered from either the BGL text or any other part of the book, it is hard to see how any decipherment can be said to have been achieved at all... I don't think it can be shown that any progress whatsoever has been made.

These sentences are pretty similar, but with one spot occupied by "decipherment" in one case and by "progress" in the other.

If you meant the same thing both times, then you must be equating those two words, in which case that's the problem right there. Suddenly entirely deciphering the whole thing all at once is not the only kind of progress. It's not even a kind of progress that actually even happens.

If you meant two different things by those two word choices, then I'd agree with one and not with the other: there's progress, but not decipherment, because the progress that's happened so far is like with hieroglyphics between 1802 and 1822, the stuff that must happen before decipherment. I still don't get the source of the dismissiveness of the progress that leads up to deciphering as if it were not nothing at all. Could it be caused by an impression that the names of plants are supposed to be coming from the letter-sound associations (in which case the letter-sound associations would have come from nothing)? They're what led to the letter-sound associations; they're the "Ptolemy" and "Cleopatra" of this book, because plant names, like the names of famous people & places, tend to be very similar across multiple languages.

What does capturing the phonetics do for us when the ultimate goal is to decipher meaning?

Um... sounds carry meanings in languages. In languages, meanings are carried by sounds.

My skeptical bone is telling me one may not be able to determine the difference between nonsense and a sufficiently unknowable language. How far off is my bone?

Bull's eye. One statistician runs some algorithm and says it can't be a real language, another runs a different one and says it is. What that means is that they don't have a reliable method of getting an actual answer on this subject either way... which is no surprise given how few precedents there are to base such a method on in the first place.

But when symbols are found repeatedly showing up in the right places to represent the same sounds each time, like P, T, & L in Ptolemy and Cleopatra, there's no need to resort to those kinds of indirect inferences. Then the phonetics are just a plain fact right in front of our eyes, so still calling it random/fake instead of a true alphabetic system becomes a case of desperate clinging to a pre-evidence idea (no matter how reasonable it was to speculate either way before when speculation was all that could be done).

It would help me if you could draw a parallel between what might be happening here and, for example, "decoding" whale song. (Aside from the fact that we have living animals to interact with.)

I don't know of anything comparable about it in any way at all. What whales do probably isn't even a language, nevermind a written one, and we have no prior experience with any other whale-song-like thing (whereas with human spoken & written languages we can base our procedures on prior experience with other such languages).

 

[Craig B]

... there's progress, but not decipherment, because the progress that's happened so far is like with hieroglyphics between 1802 and 1822, the stuff that must happen before decipherment. I still don't get the source of the dismissiveness of the progress that leads up to deciphering as if it were not nothing at all.

There's activity, indeed. But it will be shown to be progress only retrospectively. Because all decipherment is preceded by activity, it doesn't follow that all activity is followed by decipherment. I don't think the particular activity currently in hand is likely to lead to decipherment.

I have mentioned Athanasius Kircher in the context of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Retrospectively his proposal that they might be deciphered through later Coptic turned out to be correct. But if it had been wrong, it wouldn't have been progress, however much time and energy he spent on the problem. Kircher is also a former owner of the VM. Did he work on it? Very probably. Did he make progress? Seemingly not. Neither, from what I can see, has Bax made much headway. Here is what he claims in his latest report.

If the analyses above are to be considered valid, they must demonstrably assist us in reading the first words of other VM plant pages convincingly as the names of the plants depicted on those pages. In other words, the test which this analysis must pass, if it is to be convincing, is whether or not we can now use the signs we have so far analysed to identify more Voynich plants with appropriate plant names as the first word of the page.

To which it may be added that the identified signs should assist in the reading of the text in general, as we have discussed.

If we can do this, then the signs we have identified will be more credible, and the analysis as a whole is more likely to be accurate.

Exactly so. Can he do it? Let's see.

This is difficult, as many of the Voynich signs are still unknown. Furthermore the plant names could well be in an obscure non-European language, given the fact that we already have one name possibly borrowed from Arabic/Hebrew (Arar for Juniper), and another also apparently in Abjad and non-European form (KNT/ə/RON for Centaurea); in addition, if the marginal addition to the ‘Coriander’ page (f41v) does represent the more European version of ‘coriander’ as suggested above, this implies that the undeciphered first word of that same page might be a very different, possibly obscure name for the same plant. This combination of unknown letters and still obscure underlying language means that the task is still a difficult one.

So, multiple languages, unidentifiable plants, abjads ... I can't see much progress getting made here. No language is emerging. It looks like another failed attempt on this intractable problem. And the strange repetitive character of the text still defies explanation, except that it may indicate a hoax.

 

[Delvo]

I don't think the particular activity currently in hand is likely to lead to decipherment.

Why not, when it's exactly what has worked before?

I have mentioned Athanasius Kircher in the context of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Retrospectively his proposal that they might be deciphered through later Coptic turned out to be correct. But if it had been wrong, it wouldn't have been progress, however much time and energy he spent on the problem.

It's also not equivalent to the process of working out the sound system. It would be equivalent to me speculating that Voynichese was early Khalaj or Uyghur. A guess like that eventually ends up as right or wrong but isn't part of the process of finding the sounds in names, at least not until enough sounds are established for someone who speaks Khalaj to recognize certain sound-strings as Khalaj words. What's being done with the Voynich Manuscript is equivalent not to that but to what was happening with hieroglyphics for twenty years before Coptic words were recognized in them: purely developing the phonetics no matter what language they might turn out to be, so that there would be usable pronunciations for someone to recognize when the time came.

I can't see much progress getting made here.

So you're saying the associations between letters and sounds so far are wrong. What's the basis for that?

So, multiple languages, unidentifiable plants, abjads ...

I don't know how you think any of these three things means no progress. Yes, the plant names appear to be cognates with plant names in various languages, but all languages' plant name inventories look mixed like that, including ours, because plant names tend to cross language barriers like names of famous people & places do. Yes, the plants are hard to identify, some more so than others, but not having identified some yet doesn't prevent people from working with the others that have been (or from eventually identifying the ones that hadn't been identified before). Yes, many writing systems, particularly in the region in question, are abjads, but so what? How does it mean that someone who's working on the sound system of an abjad is bound to fail, especially when it's exactly what's been done several times before with other abjads including hieroglyphics?

And the strange repetitive character of the text still defies explanation...

Not at all. Repeating words or phrases can add emphasis or slightly shift meanings, more so in some languages (like Mongolian and ancient Hebrew) than others, and more so in text (especially before the invention of boldface, italics, or underlining, and in an alphabet that lacks capital/lowercase division) than speech (because even a writing system that has other emphasizers lacks tone of voice and variable volume). And in non-spoken transmission of words without punctuation, "punctuating words" can become very frequent.

No language is emerging.

Again, we're back to the demands for an instantaneous jump straight to the end of a long gradual process as if the intermediate steps just weren't there. It's simply not how reality works.

 

[luchog]

I have mentioned Athanasius Kircher in the context of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Retrospectively his proposal that they might be deciphered through later Coptic turned out to be correct. But if it had been wrong, it wouldn't have been progress, however much time and energy he spent on the problem.

I strongly disagree with that. Progress is achieved as much by ruling things out as by ruling them in. Eliminating possibilities to narrow the focus. Had it not turned out to be related to Coptic, then it would have been progress by ruling out a blind alley. Would it have been as much progress? No, but progress in small increments is still progress.

That is how much of scientific investigation and discovery works, ruling out the things that don't fit, to narrow the range of possible things that do fit.

 

[Craig B]

I strongly disagree with that. Progress is achieved as much by ruling things out as by ruling them in. Eliminating possibilities to narrow the focus. Had it not turned out to be related to Coptic, then it would have been progress by ruling out a blind alley. Would it have been as much progress? No, but progress in small increments is still progress.

That is how much of scientific investigation and discovery works, ruling out the things that don't fit, to narrow the range of possible things that do fit.

I mean, Kircher would have been proposing a false theory. Many of these have been proposed as regards the VM. And I don't think Bax has ruled anything out, because I don't think he's really found anything substantial.

 

[Craig B]

Some comments on the Bax "decipherment" of the VM here. http://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/20...n-a-proposed-voynich-manuscript-decipherment/

http://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/applying-the-bax-proposed-solution/ This makes a good point. Plugging Bax's proposed phonetic values into the main body of the text--an obvious exercise that Bax doesn't describe in any detail in his 2012 or 2014 reports--doesn't produce anything that looks like an authentic language, known or not. Gordon Rugg relates the result of this procedure.

Stephen Bax’s article provides provisional “real” transliterations for over half the commonly used letters in the Voynich Manuscript’s alphabet. If his transliteration is even approximately correct, that should be enough to give some useful insights when applied to a page from the manuscript.
( ... )
I’ve tried plugging Bax’s letter values into one of the pages he analysed, folio 3v ... If his transliteration is correct, then about half the words in the body text end with the letter “r” and most of the rest end in the letter “n”. Just two letters accounting for the endings of most of the words in a real language? If that’s correct, then just about every known language could be excluded as a candidate for the language of the manuscript, which would be extremely useful to researchers.

 

[Craig B]

My skeptical bone is telling me one may not be able to determine the difference between nonsense and a sufficiently unknowable language. How far off is my bone?

Your bone might be interested in this study. http://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/20...anuscript-in-an-unidentified-language-part-2/

 

[luchog]

I mean, Kircher would have been proposing a false theory. Many of these have been proposed as regards the VM. And I don't think Bax has ruled anything out, because I don't think he's really found anything substantial.

http://hydeandrugg.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/applying-the-bax-proposed-solution/ This makes a good point. Plugging Bax's proposed phonetic values into the main body of the text--an obvious exercise that Bax doesn't describe in any detail in his 2012 or 2014 reports--doesn't produce anything that looks like an authentic language, known or not. Gordon Rugg relates the result of this procedure.

This comment contradicts your first one. If his findings are accurate, and he effectively rules out a natural (authentic is a useless value judgement) language, then that leaves the possibility that it is in code, a mix of languages, or some sort of manufactured language; quite possibly a mix of all three. Hardly unlikely for the time, since many alchemists, occultists, and such tended to use codes, both to protect their "intellectual property", and to avoid persecution from religious authorities. The writings of Nostradamus are a classic case in point. Though less obscure than some, they're still enough of a mess that any kind of clear interpretation of what he actually meant is difficult at best (and in many cases, appears to have been thinly veiled attacks on and satires of his religious and political opponents). That would mean that deciphering the manuscript would be practically impossible without discovering the key.

 

[Craig B]

This comment contradicts your first one. If his findings are accurate, and he effectively rules out a natural (authentic is a useless value judgement)

I mean by authentic "not a hoax"

language, then that leaves the possibility that it is in code, a mix of languages, or some sort of manufactured language; quite possibly a mix of all three.

Then there has been no "decipherment" at all.