Re: VMs: Faces at the roots

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 01:23 25/04/2005 -0400, Luis Velez wrote:
> [Wayne's] point is very interesting, regarding the labels/nulloes
> hypothesis. I'd like to see what comments Nick may have, considering
> that he has spent some time on the subject of numeric codes.

Voynichese labels could be a numeric code: but as (to my eyes at least) 
they don't seem sufficiently different from the rest of the text, then all 
Voynichese would have to be a numeric code. And I haven't found any 
systematic evidence for that, despite looking fairly hard.

As you probably already know :-), when I see everyone's favourite label 
"otolal", I parse it as a set of rigidly defined digraphs - "ot-ol-al" - 
each of which occurs with high frequency, which would seem to point to 
"otolal" actually expressing three tokens (and, if my guess is right, are 
probably all consonants). Errrm... meaning what, exactly? Well - that's the 
question! :-)

But that's just an aside: my real point is that Wayne seems to be (a) 
presuming that labels function in the way he'd expect them to behave, and 
then (b) looking for support for that idea. Methodologically, the problem 
with this is that, given sufficient persistence, you can find correlative 
support for just about any VMs-related hypothesis you like (though somewhat 
superficial, that's also basically how most economics seems to work) - but 
as correlation isn't causation, no-one moves forward.

Essentially, I think we're still a long way from being able to prove that 
(emendations aside) even a single penstroke of the VMs is unintentional, 
never mind anything more systematic (like nulls or even the hoax theory). 
On the contrary, I would say that the more I grasp the VMs, the more subtle 
and intentional it becomes - inferring meaninglessness to fit a partial 
hypothesis (whether locally like nulls, or globally like hoax theories) is 
an easy (but probably wrong) answer.

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

PS: a high-ranking link on Google...
        http://encyc.bmezine.com/?Nullo
...from BME (body modification ezine) gives a very, errrrm, 
non-cryptographic description for "nullo". Colourful, though! :-) Perhaps 
"null" is what was intended? :-o 


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