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Voynich manuscript decoded?

This was very interesting. One of the better attempts at a translation, I think. It will be interesting to see if it goes anywhere. But there seems to be good reasons to remain skeptical.

1.He seems to ignore a lot of the analysis that has been done of the characters and words and is starting from some of the guesswork done about the images. While a fresh approach can sometimes prove enlightening, I think he needs to address how his approach is going to coincide with previous statistical analysis.

2. Many of the paragraphs begin with what he identifies as the “K” sound. Most paragraphs begin with EVA k, t, or p. All of the plants he identifies happen to begin with the letter “C” (or, more precisely, the “k” sound). But with the frequency of k at the start of a paragraph, are almost all of the plants going to coincidentally begin with a “k” sound? We could, perhaps, imagine this is “Volume K” of a larger encyclopedia, but the astrological section suggests a more general single volume (it doesn’t just cover “Cancer” and “Capricorn”, for instance). Also, not every paragraph begins with k, and when it does not it is usually t or p. If these beginning-paragraph symbols are simply sign-to-sound symbols, wouldn’t we expect a greater variance even if this is “Volume K”?

3. He identified sounds for 14 symbols, but he ends up with 2 “a” type sounds, 5 “r” type sounds, plus “t/d” “k” and “ch” (as well as “n” “o” “oo” and a speculative “s”). Of the 20 characters that appear with frequency, this is very much limiting the amount of sounds that could be indicated. Of course the language could have limited sounds, but plugging in his translation to EVA it looks like he is going to end up with some odd words to try to translate.

4. He does not address how he is going to approach the many words that are very similar, often times following one another. If these word-sets represent some type of spelling variant or emphasis or grammatical indicator, then that could throw the whole sign-to-sound concept out the window.

Nevertheless, he has done some interesting work. It may be possible that he is heading in the right direction even if he is not exactly on the right path. The big trick, of course, is to translate a few more words using the same method because once that is done it should open a watershed to translate the whole thing (at least the non-astrological Language A sections). I won’t hold my breath, but I’ll keep an eye on his progress.
 
All those K sounds can only be extraterrestrial.
Cite: nearly every sci-fi book or movie.
 
There have been several topics on this subject on the Graham Hancock message board, over the past year or so. I have not looked at any of them but will see if I can find the links tomorrow.
 
Craig B said:
No, according to your link, he seems to have the phonetic values of the characters comprising these proper names. If he has identified 14 characters, he'll have no trouble cracking the whole thing, if the report is correct (which I doubt) and if the text is in a known language.
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Yes. I agree with you. If he had phonetic values and the names were repeated in the ciphered text, then he should be almost home unless it is a made up language that just happened to use the real phonetic names of locations. I will sit and wait for this story to develop.
 
Bax was on Coast to Coast 03/23/2014. With a bunch of ifs, an unlikely progression for translation, and most Voynich/cipher sites calling bunk, it looks like this puts the hypothesis over the woo shark.

Any C2C listeners heard the program?
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
Bax was on Coast to Coast 03/23/2014. With a bunch of ifs, an unlikely progression for translation, and most Voynich/cipher sites calling bunk, it looks like this puts the hypothesis over the woo shark.

Any C2C listeners heard the program?
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Aw dammit...
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
a bunch of ifs
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Nothing wrong with that

DevilsAdvocate said:
an unlikely progression for translation
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Nothing wrong there either; an unidentified language which might not have any other written forms or any spoken form which still exists or even any spoken relatives which still exist is bound to be extremely difficult to translate, even if every single sound were spelled out so we could pronounce the whole thing out loud. So any series of events leading to translation is bound to be an unlikely series of events.

DevilsAdvocate said:
most Voynich/cipher sites calling bunk
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Like what/who, where? And for what reasons?
 
I'd really like to know how many nonsense words the manuscript generates as compared to sensible words. If he can decode 14 of the ~30 characters, it seems odd that he can only decode 10 words...

With a sufficiently long string of characters just about any decoding technique will generate the occasional sensible word, particularly if we allow very sloppy matches (as the second article that was linked indicates, with "centaury" = "kantarion".) I'd love it if this were real, but it remains to be seen.
 
Delvo said:
... an unidentified language which might not have any other written forms or any spoken form which still exists or even any spoken relatives which still exist is bound to be extremely difficult to translate, even if every single sound were spelled out so we could pronounce the whole thing out loud.
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That is really improbable. The document isn't that old, so the likelihood that the language in which it is written is entirely extinct and moreover has no spoken relatives is very small indeed. When scholars were translating ancient Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian in the nineteenth century and Hittite in the twentieth, they found known relatives. But where there are no known relatives the problem is indeed serious, as Etruscan attests.
 
Blue Mountain said:
I note that although Linear B has been deciphered, Linear A still resists attempts to decode it.
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The underlying language of B turned out to be Greek. The language of A is unknown and in this case it may be entirely extinct, along with all its relatives. But the Voynich material is very recent in comparison, was presumably written as a cipher in one of the current European languages, and is a very long sample. The language ought not to be a problem once the phonetic values of the characters have been determined. That is, if it is a genuine enciphered text and not some kind of mad hoax.
 
Craig B said:
The underlying language of B turned out to be Greek. The language of A is unknown and in this case it may be entirely extinct, along with all its relatives. But the Voynich material is very recent in comparison, was presumably written as a cipher in one of the current European languages, and is a very long sample. The language ought not to be a problem once the phonetic values of the characters have been determined. That is, if it is a genuine enciphered text and not some kind of mad hoax.
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All true. The explanation I would like to be true is that it's a document using an invented alphabet for a real language. If it was a European language, I think it would have been deciphered long ago. The letter frequencies seem to match those found in some Asian languages, but even that line of inquiry seems to resist analysis. Perhaps up to now the wrong people have been looking at it; that is, Europeans instead of experts in East Asian or other languages.

Overall, I'm afraid the most probable explanation is elaborate hoax.
 
Delvo said:
an unidentified language which might not have any other written forms or any spoken form which still exists or even any spoken relatives which still exist is bound to be extremely difficult to translate, even if every single sound were spelled out so we could pronounce the whole thing out loud.
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Craig B said:
That is really improbable. The document isn't that old, so the likelihood that the language in which it is written is entirely extinct and moreover has no spoken relatives is very small indeed.
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Sherman Bay said:
Nil, even.
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Even without that part, the rest is still a problem:

Delvo said:
an unidentified language... is bound to be extremely difficult to translate, even if every single sound were spelled out so we could pronounce the whole thing out loud.
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With every sound figured out, the next step is either of two things:

1. Transcribe it into a more familiar alphabet and compare it to contemporary nearby written languages,

or, if no written match is found that way,

2. Find people who speak the language it was written in, recite it to them or play them a recording of someone reciting it, and ask them what what's being said means.

Either way, as long as it was written in a language that lives in or pretty close to Italy, that's probably not a big deal, because there aren't many languages to pick from there, they've been written for ages, and linguists have studied how they've evolved and how to account for the changes with time.

But it could well be associated with western or central Asia, which significantly adds to the challenges. There are a lot more languages to choose from, from multiple separate language families, many with little or no prior writing or known/studied evolutionary history, and they often have rather few speakers in hard-to-contact places. And even if the book's language does continue to exist in spoken form today, which is no guarantee there, option #2 will now be the equivalent of asking a modern English speaker who's never heard of Middle English for the meaning of a spoken recitation of something by Chaucer (or even asking them whether it's English at all)... dozens of times with dozens of languages... just waiting for a "hit" on one of them.
 
PS: and that's with every sound figured out, which can't possibly happen til after identification & translation have been done anyway...
 
Dammit, I hate not being able to link to articles I've read. I've bookmarked the New Scientist article in regards to this but I'll paraphrase some here until I've posted enough to put a link in.

"He selected a few words, which appear to label drawings, judging by their position or prominence. He then compared the symbols in these words with the name of the pictured item in other languages. Bax likens this to techniques used in decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs that homed in on the names of pharaohs.

The first word he tackled was a label that appears near a drawing of a plant that might be juniper (below, right). The word looks a lot like "oror", as written in the Roman alphabet. Bax wondered if it might be linked to the Arabic name for juniper – which is pronounced "a'ra'r".

He then examined a label next to an illustration of a constellation of seven stars (pictured, above right). Some have suggested this drawing represents the Pleiades, seven stars in the Taurus constellation. The second and fourth letters of the label resemble the o-like symbol and r-like symbol from the juniper page – which would fit with the label spelling out a word sounding similar to "Taurus". Taking this to be true, Bax was able to assign sounds to the other three letters in this word.

He is also exploring what it would mean if his alphabet is correct. Similarities with Latin, Greek and Arabic letters, and other linguistic and historical details, lead him to speculate that it originated in the Caucasus region of western Asia. He believes it might be the written form of an otherwise unwritten dialect. That would be in stark contrast to another recent analysis that used plant drawings in the manuscript to conclude that it may have been written in an extinct Mexican language."

It really does look promising but if you want to try and find it, it's called Mystery Voynich Manuscript Gets Preliminary Alphabet. I'm pretty much checking up on his site every couple of weeks to see if there's any progress, and there's a link to it in that article (stephen bax dot net).
 
Is this the article?

My interpretation of the article, having read only a synopsis of it, is that the author is doing what so many others have done, using wishful thinking to substitute for real analysis.

What does it mean to have not a single other manuscript like this? Even if you find supposed similarities in characters, drawings, words and layouts with something else, you are faced with that fact, and that fact supports perfectly the idea of an invented, one of a kind, document.
 
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