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

[Ronald Lorenzo <rlorenzomba@xxxxxxxxx>]

Or maybe the Voynich Manuscript is just the
phonetically transcribed lyrics of Jandek taken back
in time by a time traveller fluent in Etruscan.

But your reading of the manuscript seems plausible to
me also.

- R. L. 

--- Wayne Durden <wdurden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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 
=== message truncated ===



		
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