Another Voynich manuscript deciphering claim

A Dr Gerard Cheshire claims the manuscript is written in proto-Romance, a missing link between Latin and the Romance languages, that supposedly arose during the early Medieval period after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

the manuscript is a compendium of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings concerning matters of the female mind, of the body, of reproduction, of parenting and of the heart
...
was compiled by a Dominican nun as a source of reference for the female royal court to which her monastery was affiliated

Check out the paper if you want to know more:
www.tandfonline.com...

Numerous experts have questioned his interpretation though and University he is associated with quickly distanced itself, as it often happens with such extraordinary claims.

Just going by the drawings in the manuscript, the medical angle makes sense imho. So it will be interesting to see where this latest deciphering attempt leads.

a reply to: moebius

IF he has broken the code he would not be the first to make that claim, however many have tried and many have failed.
The best code is often a code within a code - he may crack on cipher only to find another made up of veiled meaning's behind what is supposedly written therein.
But if he has cracked the first code than that is certainly more than anyone else we know of has done so far so bravo to the man.

I read an article about this a few days ago. Not sure why you guys are skeptical- it seems solved, and there were several pages that were translated and it all fit together and worked on every page they worked on.

a reply to: moebius

when I came across the article... the explanation of Nuns doing the Tome, seemed the best likely solution to this mystery

thanks for posting a thread

(the Nun clergy were decidedly leaning towards the mystical & Gnostic areas...instead of being solely 'Married-to-Christ'... this might have profound re-interpretations regarding the Catholic Church, the Papal Church of Rome, the Anti-Popes in history, Etcetera>>

especially now with Pope Francis currently being held up as holding Heretical notions in the RCC

BUSTED

-- Arstechnica: No, someone hasn’t cracked the code of the mysterious Voynich manuscript

-- University of Bristol published the story originally and removed it yesterday

As with most would-be Voynich interpreters, the logic of this proposal is circular and aspirational: he starts with a theory about what a particular series of glyphs might mean, usually because of the word's proximity to an image that he believes he can interpret. He then investigates any number of medieval Romance-language dictionaries until he finds a word that seems to suit his theory. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-language word that fits his hypothesis, his hypothesis must be right. His "translations" from what is essentially gibberish, an amalgam of multiple languages, are themselves aspirational rather than being actual translations.

In addition, the fundamental underlying argument—that there is such a thing as one 'proto-Romance language'—is completely unsubstantiated and at odds with paleolinguistics. Finally, his association of particular glyphs with particular Latin letters is equally unsubstantiated. His work has never received true peer review, and its publication in this particular journal is no sign of peer confidence.

Case closed, author did a dupe. And that is not my opinion but of far better informed people in this matter.

a reply to: ManFromEurope

Not so fast Buster!

Not only false things get retracted.
Also: Escaped and or unforseen things.
Especially when "people better informed as you are" are involved.

PS what happened to the old Turkisch translation?

That Book belongs to my Family and should be repatriated.

Ever wonder where the ideas for Wonder Woman came from?....

What if it's always been a science fiction story>

a reply to: moebius

Be nice to see the recipes being deciphered, what they do, and if they work.

Think there are some claims to alchemical information contained within the text.

One has to wonder is the recipe for the fabled Philosophers Stone on any a page?

Dr Gerard Cheshire really seems to have a handle on it. It is not anything cipher, but the mixture of many Med. near-extinct tounges.

Truly amazing. An extinct language re-constructed from utilizing excellent lexical skills. He should be proud.

On /r/voynich there is about once every month another "spectatular NEW TRANSLATION" which goes down even faster.

This was just another one of those. If my sources did not convince you, you do not want to be convinced.

So let's see a quote from it and an explanation as to how it was deciphered from the original. That's what's missing in this story. Women's health book? Duh. I can see that from the illustrations. But what does it actually say?

originally posted by: Blue Shift
So let's see a quote from it and an explanation as to how it was deciphered from the original. That's what's missing in this story. Women's health book? Duh. I can see that from the illustrations. But what does it actually say?

It is a Commisioned work,it is a Secret Coded book,it is part of an emancipation effort.It was a Convent if you will of the Womens Libbers back in the day pushing for independance and trying to save the World as usual.You can see what it says and the illustrations give you the medicinal applications of plants,which gives you the pattern behind the manuscript.Back in the day Herbalist medicine was PURE POWER....if you could cure disease and manage the Human Condition you were worth ten times your weight in gold.So valuable that Kings would send Armies for you if they required your services.Today TPTB farm us like animals lieing to us about what Cancer really is and about how we get all of the diseases and illnesses that are common . Plants cure all disease.easily,Cancer is a pleomorphic bacteria not a mystery.We now know who the book was commissioned for ,so it should be returned to the possession of the Family that paid to have it written.

The book is written in Pig Latin catalysed from several different languages from several different regions and eras,it was intentionally coded,back then it was considered unbreakable ,but the work was not Professional by todays standards,it is no enigma machine but the principal is the same in key manners.It would have been very difficult for anyone anywhere back in those days to break this code without the help of a Universal Translator...or the cipher list,today we have that in terms of basic computer power and programs.Language/symbol recognition is no different than facial recognition,you really think no one has deciphered the book yet?...of course they have.It simply is not being shared.Anyone with additional coded books which they can read in their home library can begin to piece together a Rosetta Stone decipher method.

originally posted by: charlyv
Dr Gerard Cheshire really seems to have a handle on it. It is not anything cipher, but the mixture of many Med. near-extinct tounges.

Truly amazing. An extinct language re-constructed from utilizing excellent lexical skills. He should be proud.

Its not an extinct language....it is tactically coded intentionally....education was NOT given to the masses back in the day....knowing how to read and write in multiple languages put you in a position of greater power.No 2 books coded this way will read the same way.

He should keep working.

originally posted by: Blue Shift
So let's see a quote from it and an explanation as to how it was deciphered from the original. That's what's missing in this story. Women's health book? Duh. I can see that from the illustrations. But what does it actually say?

For me it's pretty clear, now. Look at the pictures (pregnant women) and at the text (omor nena = kill baby). It's a compendium for witches practicing abortions in middle age. You would never write it in a way someone could understand it and put you naked on the fire for this. Therefore they used a language and a script nobody could understand without knowing the code.

originally posted by: charlyv
Dr Gerard Cheshire really seems to have a handle on it. It is not anything cipher, but the mixture of many Med. near-extinct tounges.

Truly amazing. An extinct language re-constructed from utilizing excellent lexical skills. He should be proud.

There's really no reason to think it was written in any kind of secret code. The primary stumbling block to deciphering the Voynich Manuscript is simply that nobody knows what language it was written in.

originally posted by: doggersland

originally posted by: Blue Shift
So let's see a quote from it and an explanation as to how it was deciphered from the original. That's what's missing in this story. Women's health book? Duh. I can see that from the illustrations. But what does it actually say?

For me it's pretty clear, now. Look at the pictures (pregnant women) and at the text (omor nena = kill baby). It's a compendium for witches practicing abortions in middle age. You would never write it in a way someone could understand it and put you naked on the fire for this. Therefore they used a language and a script nobody could understand without knowing the code.

The problem with this theory is, your typical peasant woman would have been illiterate. Only the elite, or people whose trades required literacy, would know how to read.

a reply to: AndyFromMichigan

well, in fact, I don't know who wrote this book and why. This remains a mystery. But I think you know how much money you can do with illegal practices. When abortion was illegal, people made a lot of money with it. So, do you think they were only illiterate peasant women doing this?

But anyhow, is there someone who already transliterated the full book? This book is for me interesting enough to try to read the full content of it. I would try to create a text file with a transliteration of it, if no one did it already (but of course this would save me a lot of precious time)

a reply to: doggersland

In the meanwhile I tried to transliterate one page of the book to our standard latin characters, as explained by Dr. Cheshire.

Posos osesea eeous nmetos opetosna
totos os oso saus epta quaus sas
tmtos naus domos oleos olaus
nous etola eton dola dometos
omeeos etos eeas ametos emeas
dometia eeoma maus ometa saus
eos etous ...

(here the original manuscript, the text refers to page 30. www.holybooks.com...)

I don't think we can read this, it just doesn't make any sense to me. What do you think about that?

so, in the end I think that Dr. Cheshire didn't really find anything new. He gives us just a way to transliterate the text, but we don't either know if it is true or if it is better than any other transliteration we could have done without him.
If you try to de-cypher something which is more complex than a picture with two words below, it is clear to everybody that this is no romance language what we read. Words are repeating a lot of time with just small differences (posos-totos-tmtos, or nmetos-opetos-ametos-dometos-dometia).

There are two hypotheses then:
1. the book is just a joke, it doesn't contain anything at all
2. there is code to read it. But there must be an algorithm to decode it, it is not a natural language what we see here