Re: Oh no, someone else has been at the Voynich manuscript ... but wait ...

[context follows]

Interesting stuff!

I think the Ars Technica counterblast is a little wobbly, but then so is the original article. Many a person would argue that proto-Romance is or was “a thing”, in the teeth of the Ars Technica piece. But its time would have been something like a thousand years before the Voynich MS, and it seems weird that Cheshire doesn’t show knowledge of that.

Still (as I wrote elsewhere; apologies for cross posting): if the MS was written in an extinct dialect of Romance, not otherwhere attested, one would expect decoding to be slow and laborious. Reproducibility is the main issue at the moment. If other people can use this reconstructed alphabet to read parts of the MS, there's something to it. If not, then not.

JM(“Mediocritas Aurea”)P

On May 15, 2019 at 11:56:21 PM, Farley P. Katz ([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) wrote:

And it only took him 2 weeks to figure all this out! And he doesn't offer
the transcription or translation of a long passage or even a full
sentence. See

[link to an an Ars Technica piece by Jennifer Ouellette]

where
you will find --No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious
Voynich manuscriptMedieval scholar: "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language'
is not a thing."



On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 9:32 PM Ralph Hancock <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Yet another interpretation of the notorious Voynich manuscript:
>
[link to Gerard Cheshire’s piece at Taylor and Francis Online]
>
> This is strangely convincing. I had always thought that the manuscript was
> a huge and laborious hoax. But I will have to have another look at the
> article in the cold light of day and see if I was carried away by a
> persuasive interpretation.
>
> RH
>