Re: VMs: some thoughts/observations

[William Edmondson <w.h.edmondson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Nick et al.

I misrepresented my position, I suspect.

Re VMs there are three options.

1/ complete gibberish - fails the structure assessment 
uncontroverisally; I'm not convinced it's gibberish and reasonably 
convinced it's not.

2/ completely genuine by an alchemist, or whomever, trying to 
protect/hide their discoveries/beliefs..... for their own 
use/posterity.... and the key(knowledge) is lost until it is 
deciphered.  I'm really unconvinced by this possibility.

3/ forgery/fake in the sense that it is readable if you know the key, 
but probably banal/meaningless in actual content.  It is trying to look 
important/significant to convince someone, and might even be readable 
aloud by the author..... but is actually content free other than 
pastiche of alchemical stuff at the time.

I favour 3.

I am really puzzled that its form is not bothering more people.  But it 
does present a decipherment challenge.

Does that appeal to anyone else?

William

On 20 Feb 2004, at 15:55, Nick Pelling wrote:

> 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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Dr William Edmondson
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston B15 2TT
UK

Voice: +44-121-414-4763
email: w.h.edmondson@xxxxxxxxxx

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