Re: VMs: some thoughts/observations

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi William,

At 14:16 20/02/2004 +0000, William Edmondson wrote:
> > You also ask why many of us are dismissive of Kelley-as-hoaxer theories: 
> > my own opinion is simply that it is hard to explain why a hoaxer would go 
> > to the trouble of producing an ms with structure at every level - stroke 
> > adjacency, letter adjacency, letter pairs, word structure, word-initial, 
> > word-final, Neal keys, line-beginning, line-end, paragraph, page, 
> > language. The question also arises as to why they would use a character 
> > set which is unsuited to fast writing with a quill (this would seem to be 
> > a very poor decision), and non-flamboyant content (as opposed to alchemy 
> > or obscure religious symbols). Furthermore, even if you accept that they 
> > would be bothered to take all those on as design aims, what was their 
> > methodology - ie, how did they achieve them?
> > SNIP
>
> I'm not convinced that the effort required to produce VMs indicates 
> genuineness at the expense of fake.  Fakers will surely go to enormous 
> lengths, if they think it will pay off (that could be an erroneous 
> assumption).  Complexity of structure?  Why not, if both Kelley and Dee 
> found such things as Enochian easy enough to perpetrate then why not VMs???
>
> Go on - try to convince me!

:-)

While there are many on-list who have far greater knowledge of Enochian 
than I do, it does seem quite evident to me that, when comparing it to the 
VMs, the two are really quite different beasts. I'm happy to trust Jacques 
Guy on this one: exactly a year ago today, he posted:
> Voynichese is entirely unlike Enochian. Laycock had had a close look at
> the VMS. He'd obtained a microfilm from Yale, and I'd printed perhaps
> sixty enlargements.
        http://www.voynich.net/Arch/2003/02/msg00156.html

What I'm saying is that the real question isn't "why not", but "how". Sure, 
we can always play "Conspiracy Top Trumps", guessing which historical 
figure would have been most likely to fake the VMs - but the entire hoax 
argument falls over if you can't figure out how it was done. Again, if you 
think that explaining the complexity of structure isn't a problem, you're 
in the same boat as Gordon Rugg (and possibly sinking fast). :-o

Finally: while I *can* imagine someone constructing a composite cipher 
system (out of numerous simpler parts) to produce what we see in the VMs, I 
find it extremely difficult to imagine an artificial language maker wasting 
space on verbose-cipher-like characters (qo, or, ol, dy, etc) - and I find 
it even harder to imagine a faker using a barely-writable character set 
(AIUI, each glyph can take up to 6 or 7 strokes to form) for a 200+ page 
hoax, let alone one with so many layers of structure.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

PS: FWIW, what's the biggest fake you know of? (Please nobody say "WMD"). :-p 


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