Re: Cipher vs Language

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>It would be helpful if these many arguments that
>the VMs is not language could be presented.
>The only one I am aware of is that the language
>in question (if it is one) has not been
identified.
>But there are many that are in favour of the MS
>being plain language, written in some
ideosyncratic
>script.

To me the first thing to consider is the source of
the manuscript.  Everything points to a western
country as a source.  The plants are not Chinese
plants, and the astrological signs are not Chinese
astrology, so it's highly doubtful that the author
was hiding Chinese secrets of some sort.  Barring
alien abduction or out-of-body astral projection,
I feel extremely comfortable in asserting that the
author was a westerner.  And with nothing to go on
in the drawings or script to indicate that the
author had knowledge of anything other than Latin
and Greek, I'd have to venture that he was western
educated as well.

The next question would be, what is the probable
content and why would the author find it necessary
to write something like this in a strange script?
It obviously contains some information the author
wanted to keep secret, either for personal or
professional purposes.

Reason dictates that our search be limited to the
western christian world, and this for numerous
reasons.  There were of course western languages
even from the 15th and 16th century for which no
example exists.  One I can think of is one
supposedly used by the traders who bordered
England and Wales.  One Welshman describes this as
a ignorant mix of the two languages.  There's no
reason however to believe that this language
required its own alphabet, since the Latin
alphabet was a universal feature of christianity.
We're down to two things then, artificial language
or cipher.

In considering whether it is artificial language
or cipher, the use of the script must be taken
into account.  Inventing your own language simply
to encode an herbal is possible, but a bit
farfetched.  Then there's that nasty problem is
teaching someone else to read your language so
they can understand what you've written.  Cipher
on the other hand is described in a few minutes,
or by a table, and much more economical on
development time than the extensive language
necessary to explain plant virtues and
astrological calculations.  If the system is
simple enough, it may even be committed to memory
fairly quickly, where it can be written almost as
fluidly as natural language.

The choice of alphabets is also a fairly good
indicator, as Nick has stated.  Latin shorthand,
mirrored Latin shorthand, and that very odd 4o.  I
found this symbol on some old astrological charts.
I thought it meant Sun in Jupiter, or something
like that, but I think Nick nailed it down.  I
don't exactly remember what Nick said it was, but
it's clearly astrological.  Whoever the author
was, he had seen a few cipher alphabets, and made
up a few things of his own.  The alphabet itself
points more to cipher than to artificial language.
Cryptography was also very popular during this
time, a time when it is said that every educated
person had their own personal cipher.  The vast
majority of these fall into simple systems that
were easily remembered, but the point is made that
cipher was not a nearly as arcane a pursuit as
artificial language, and they could be found in
abundance around universities.  This guy got his
education in some western university, and probably
got his cipher there as well.

Then there's that nasty little habit the author
has of grouping things in three, four or five.
It's almost like the system forces him to write in
groups of three, and the characters many times
seem jammed into these groups, even when there's
ample space to write at length.  It's the feel and
the texture, something difficult to quantify, that
gives me this notion that the author's system
forced him to write in small groups.  The
handwriting doesn't flow like language, even much
later when a copyist or scribe would have known
enough of the script to be able to visualize a
word at a time when writing.  (Also my favorite
reason for thinking this is an original and not a
copy.)

I'm really not trying to convince the Language
camp that this is cipher, rather convince the
cipher camp that much more needs to be done on
quantifying the script so real numbers can be
extracted from it.  If you've made up your mind
that this is Language, then to you it is language.
If you're on the border between the two and
haven't made up your mind, I encourage you to go
back and consider what we know before travelling
to the far east in search of an answer.  The Dhali
Llama is just going to tell you it's a Tibetan
mystery, so save yourself the airfare!

Meanwhile, we have much to work with at the
moment.  Several plant identifications and
possible meanings for astrological drawings.
Somewhere in here are a few choice matchups for
probable words.  Trying to match up 57v with an
astronomical instrument may also prove a very
worthy effort.  We have several avenues to travel
at the moment that have the promise of making real
progress in the Voynich cipher.

I'm working on my chart of character usage, and
even some disagreement on what a character is will
not change the numbers much, so we're still within
a 23 or 24 character alphabet which varies only
slightly from page to page.  Those variations
could be caused by changes in the system, for
instance choosing an alphabet that has a character
in it for one page, and using a different one on
another page that does not have the character.
Pages need to be grouped together by what they do
and do not include, which is the purpose of my
chart.  I'm also staying within the herbal section
at present, since the other sections have obvious
variances from this section.  I don't believe the
two sections were composed within the same time
frame.

GC