VMs: re: a new and fanciful idea (Not involving Atlanteans, nor Isis)

[Wayne Durden <wdurden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Allow me to throw out an original theme for the VMS and a method for the
creation of the text in a fanciful suggestion for your amusement during the
holiday.  Let me make the suggestion that the entire Voynich manuscript has
a subject matter principally relating to the Aster flower and its plant
family (Greek Astraia ­ Latinized Astraea bearing a relation to star).  It
covers the plant from a herbal, mythological, plant culture (seasonal
presence and growth) and other use (fragrance, etc.) standpoint.  It covers
the Greek mythological story of the plant which is developed in many places
on the web, as well as herbal uses such as the belief that burning the
leaves would ward off snakes, and feeding crushed preparations would heal
bees.  The approach is not esoteric in the sense of a cult or religious in
terms of a sect, but more in the vein of ³A Compleat Guide To The Aster
Plant Family, Its Uses and History.²  It covers decoctions of perfume as
well as the creation of wine and recipes.  Items nearly universally referred
to as stars in the quire references are actually often aster flowers as
shown by their faces and stems.  The Aster (Michaelmas Daisy) or starwort
flower takes on many forms in the flower, plant and root, and using the
google image capability will turn up examples of surprising variety of form
that will greatly reduce the imaginative quotient generally believed to
exist in the plant illustrations.  There are arrow leaf varieties and many
leaf forms which appear quite different on initial examination.

  As to the making of the text, I suggest that the text was probably taken
down by an intelligent, diligent and careful person (possibly two) actually
illiterate (meaning he did not read or write his native tongue, nor that
which he transcribed). This person was taught a phonetic psuedo alphabet by
a master enthralled by the plant.  He was to use this alphabet to take down
carefully and to document all he could find on the plant in a distant
foreign locale.  He captured information in the foreign language
phonetically as it was relayed to him, which he took down in the reduced
phonetic alphabet.  The text therefore is not a cipher in the sense of
hiding information, but rather it is a phonetic transcription in the plain
with a made up alphabet which captures the flow of sounds.  As a phonetic
transcription where the scriber does not understand the language taken down,
it does not accurately capture word breaks and is not entirely self
consistent in that the same words conveyed to the scribe are transferred to
a different phonetic form on occasion, but a form which the transcriber
would read back to sound essentially the same.  The alphabet of glyphs
borrows from the master¹s existing alphabet with some characters stylized to
aid the servant¹s retention of the alphabet (³You will hang from the gallows
if you can¹t remember this letter makes a ³t² sound or ³If² you forget). The
master schooled the servant until he was confident he could take down
dictation in a format they would equally pronounce upon review.  The psuedo
alphabet had the advantage that it was much faster to teach than teaching
the servant to read and write the native tongue in correct form. I suspect
the word aster appears on folio 100 by the flowered form of the plant on
that page.  My recollection is that it is item 2-2 or 2-3 although at the
moment I am away from my copy of that folio. It appears elsewhere in the
text in that form (although not as frequently as I would expect off hand)
but I have not yet collected the examples quantitatively and hope the
concordance in the substantially different EVA alpha will nevertheless be
useful in doing this.

  In other words, imagine you are a wealthy master with a strong fondness
for the Aster plant.   You have an Aster mania that predates the coming
Tulip mania. You understand there may be many wonderful varieties of them as
well as interesting uses in the distant territories.  It is too dangerous
for you to go, or otherwise you must maintain your business, but you have a
very bright and loyal servant that you might send.  The servant neither
reads nor writes your language, nor the language of the territory to which
he will be traveling.  You decide on a simplified alphabet you believe can
be used to capture the full stream of phonetic sound and teach your servant
to transcribe it carefully, legibly and diligently.  The servant will
capture the native language by sound and you will consult someone to
translate the sounds for you in your location at a later date.

  Thus, we have a system of notetaking where the transcriber captures what
sounds he experiences.  In a modern analogue showing a partial similarity,
imagine an American student with no prior linguistic studies thrown into an
intensive conversational Chinese class where there is no writing methodology
provided to the student.  The student is presented only conversation, and
the student takes notes in any fashion she can.  The student may write in
her notes using her vocabulary of English words and syllables text such as
³Knee how ah?² Althernatively, the next day the same phrase is spoken and he
may take it down ³Ni howaaah?²  On the whole, the same dictated phrases will
appear similarly in the student¹s notes, but by no means necessarily
identical, especially at first, as the student will not even accurately
distinguish word breaks in sentences.  I had such an experience in just such
a conversational Chinese course taught in a four week intensive class in an
³interim² semester my college had each January ­ one course, many hours all
day for four weeks with only an oral presentation made to us.  I recall
virtually nothing of the language now 20 years later, but I recall that my
phonetic notes over the period captured the same phrase with surprising
variety over the period, although I could consistently translate to the same
sounds from the various ways the notes were written.

Such a notation, especially in a volume of limited subject matter should
exhibit lower entropy than the actual language being transcribed serving in
a sense as a regression (from the full language to a sonic notation).
However, because it actually captured real information, it must display
order when analyzed.  [Is there data on what novice English
speakers¹phonetic capture of Chinese would analyze to as far as word
entropy?  What about FRENCH, my candidate for this imagined distant
territory?]  Such a captured text could likely have several repeated
phonemes where the scribe and the dictator exchanged questions about the
sound?, i.e. the scribe questioned ³BA?² and the dictator replays shaking
his head in the affirmative ³BA BA².  In this fashion duplicates and
triplicates could enter the stream of text via simple confusion over whether
the word was BA or BA BA.  On occasion the scribe might be unsure of an end
sound and purposely capture two versions.  Such a transcription method also
would naturally generate very few markouts  or errors other than duplicates
because once the scribe ensures he has accurately heard the sound, he is
creating the phonetic spelling on the fly, he isn¹t going to make spelling
errors, because from his standpoint there isn¹t any other correct way to
spell the sound, or at least one that is necessarily MORE correct. If the
sound can be reproduced two ways in the made up alphabet, what does it
matter using one over the other?  Such a transcription would also tend to
appear to lack written articles as they would be run together with the
subject in the transcription as a newcomer to a romance language might run
together the dictation "La Vida" into "laveda", not able to distinguish
articles from subject.

I came to look at the VM via the recent popular article about Gordan Rugg in
Wired magazine (pause for collective groan here).  However, to my eye the
Gordan Rugg  Cardan grille method fails to produce text with positional
structural order that seems apparent with qualitative viewing of the actual
folios.  There is a remarkable degree of positional order not only in the
first postions in the text (which has been raised and counter argued), but
there appears to be a rhyming scheme on line endings in certain sections.
Most apparently, in sections related to herbal uses of the plant sentence
and sectional endings there is an obvious order to large phrasal groups
which defy creation on a Cardan Grille structure like that used by Rugg as
described on his website.  Specifically, as only one small example, it
appears that last two lines on folio 10 and folio 3 are capturing many of
the same words in the phonetic method outlined above, although the precise
word breaks are not maintained.  Indeed, the frequency of the second to last
word (as delineated by the spacing) appears much more regularly quite near
the end of folios with a large plant illustration than it does in the text
at large (often the third or fourth word from the end) on such a folio,
despite the text on such folios being widely varied in length and line
number.  This arrangement by chance would not be possible using a grille
(unless the grille included phrases much larger than ever proposed and shown
in photos of the Rugg setup, and in which case such large structure
self-similarity should also appear elsewhere in the folios; [ unless there
were complicated sub rules such as rather than always advance the grill x
amount, on the last sentence always use this section of the grille]). Nor
does this ³larger chunk self-similarity² appear in any of Rugg¹s published
text to the eye of this commentator.  In other words, an  examination of the
text on the plant folios identified in the VMS  seems to enable one to
conclude that it is saying something similar at the end of Folio 3 and Folio
10 (even if we can¹t say what it is they are saying, while we don¹t see such
positional examples in the Rugg grilled text).  If the text were not grille
hoaxed, but was attempting to communicate actual herbal information, we
might expect such self similarity in a usage section.  In example, a
directive as for x condition ³boil two roots and drink hot and you will feel
better² and for y condition ³boil 4 roots and drink and you will feel
better² Of course, if the self-similarity is quantitatively proven and
extensive it might not preclude a fraudulent quack book, but it would
preclude one generated ³as randomly² with as ³small chunks² as the Rugg
grilles demonstrated to date.

There you have it, just two cents worth of a newcomers observations which
may or may not bring something original and useful to the table.  I hope not
to go mad as I delve in deeper.  Enjoy rolling it around and blowing it up
for me before I invest a great deal of time and extensive computational
effort pursuing these fanciful suppositions.

WLD

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