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

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Welcome, Wayne!

Wayne Durden wrote:

> 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.  

	An interesting idea!  Dana Scott is our botanist, and is 
much more competent to comment.

>   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). 

	Stolfi's Ignorant Scribe theory, in a more extreme form.

> 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).

	I doubt this.  There would be less consistency, hence more 
entropy.

> What about FRENCH, my candidate for this imagined distant
> territory?]  

	Why do you think that?  I have often thought it might be 
French.  It is a plausible natural language for the time and 
era.  It divides up into syllables much more easily than 
other languages would, thus the "words" might actually be 
source syllables in a verbose cipher of some sort.  Jacques 
doesn't agree, saying he doesn't see the evidence.  I see 
various pros and cons.  Bear in mind that Old French, as 
with La Chanson de Roland or Les Serments de Strasbourg, did 
not work that way; it had a strong syllabic stress, thus 
words would not split into syllables like that.  The change 
occurred with Medieval French.

> Such a captured text could likely have several repeated
> phonemes where the scribe and the dictator exchanged questions about the
> soundŠ, 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.  

	I rather like this idea.

>  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.

	This has long been noted.  Others can quantify it better 
than I.  Prescott Currier's work is classic:

http://www.voynich.net/reeds/currier.html

> 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.  

	I don't think I had heard of that.  Can someone else confirm?

	The lines between joking, crankery, and possible truth are 
not always clear with the VMs, as you have obviously noticed.

Dennis
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list