From rand.org!jim Wed Jan  4 08:54 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Date: Wed, 4 Jan 95 08:54 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich article
Status: OR


I draw your attention to an article in the Jan 1995 issue of CRYPTOLOGIA,
about the VMS.

Very interesting & well illustrated, in my biased opinion.

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Sun Jan  8 15:45:24 0500 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Notes on the VMS Part 21
Status: OR

Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 21
-----------------------------------------

First, a Happy New Year to all members of Team Voynich!  We've been
dormant for quite a while, so how about a resolution: that we'll be
able to wish each other the next HNY in Voynichese?

As a suggestion to restart us: suppose we each write a short note
saying what we're reasonably sure of, based on the story so far.
I'm preparing one on sort of "global" Voynich issues, and as you
might guess my number one is

1. The Voynich Manuscript is not cypher text.

Then we can collate and maybe see where the consensus falls.

Meanwhile:

	Observations on the Orthography of the Voynich Manuscript
	---------------------------------------------------------

These are opinions, not certainties.  But they are, I think,
supportable from the text.

First, the Voynich script was invented.  Its inventor had good
knowledge of contemporary Mediterranean script styles, but made
up most of the Voynich characters afresh.  And they were made up
specifically to allow them easily to be written with a quill pen.

For example, while most modern "joined up letters" cursive scripts
are designed so you lift the pen from the paper as little as possible,
the Voynich script was designed so you lift the pen often.  Look at
the "o" and "a".  That's because you want to make as many downward
strokes as possible, and would prefer two downward half-moons to
one complete circle.  And you also need a lot of places to lift the
pen, because it doesn't hold much ink and needs to be refilled after
every few letters, as you can see from the density in the photocopies.

Secondly, as I think most investigators have discovered, each Voynich
symbol is not a separate letter.  Some letters take two or even three
symbols.  That's one reason our vowel/consonant ratios go wrong, and
also why there seem to be too few consonants.  For instance, if in
English we wrote "m" as "nn", and "w" as "uu", then the actual set
of phonemes would be unchanged, but a statistical analysis of written
text would reveal two fewer consonantal letters, and a biased vowel
to consonant ratio ("mew" would not count as 2C 1V but as 2C 3V).

Here are my specific suspicions.

1.  The symbol "4" stands for 'and'.  But it does not spell the word;
    it is an idiograph with the same function as the "&" of our keyboards.

2.  The letter "o" starts (the most common form of) the definite article.
    But I suspect the full article ends with a consonant that is elided
    in the written text.

3.  Long vowels are represented by reduplication, thus "c c" is long "c".
    This is one reason our vowel counts are off.

4.  Some consonants are made of several symbols, and among them are
    "iv" and "iiv".  This is another reason why both our vowel counts,
    and our lists of consonantal letters, are off.

5.  I believe there is at least one systematically elided consonant
    in the Voynich orthography.  For example, I don't think final "9"
    is just a variant of "a".  I think it stands for "a" plus a final
    consonant.  My current candidates for possible elided consonants
    are L (anywhere), N (anywhere) and S (final).

    As a real example, consider these orthgographic changes:

	"sancto" (latin) => "santo" (Castilian) => "sa~o" (Portuguese)

    Hmm... and wouldn't the spelling rules for Portuguese also work
    pretty well with Catalan?

6.  The letters "cc" (ligatured) and "ct" have some relationship.  I
    once thought they reflected a dialectical difference, like that
    between P- and Q- celtic, but now I'm not so sure.

And one final point.  If even a little of the above is true, then no way,
no how, could the VMS have been forged by John Dee.

Robert Firth

PS: The gremlins from Qlippoth have been haunting my dreams again.  Their
latest suggestion is that the VMS originated in the city of Srinagar, in
the Vale of Kashmir.  This time, I don't believe them.  But that did
remind me of the Sanskrit orthography, with its systematic elision of
the vowel "a".


From rand.org!jim Mon Jan  9 14:44:26 0500 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Notes, Part 22
Status: OR

Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 22
-----------------------------------------

The Nature of the Voynich Manuscript, Revisited
-----------------------------------------------

1. A Preliminary Observation

Look at the MS.  It was written fluently and at speed.  This is
proven, in my view, by the elegance of the hands, and by the
length of text between successive refills of the pen, which can
be inferred from the density of the ink.  It is written in a
script that I have argued elsewhere was devised explicitly to
promote a fast, cursive hand.

If the text contains meaning, then, that meaning could be encoded
very quickly, or at least copied very quickly.  And I believe the
copyist was not transcribing opaque cypher text, but understood
the meaning, and the evidence for this is the vanishingly small
number of seeming transcription errors we have found in the corpus.
Contrast, for instance, Brumbaugh's numerous transcription errors,
which, by the way, are to me clear proof that his alleged deciperment
is bogus.

2. Possible Cyphers

So, if the VMS is a cypher text, the cypher must be very simple.  It
must be readable virtually at sight.  Of the set of "dense" cyphers
- those where most of the encoded text is signal - I think that rules
out anything more complex than a "gold bug" substitution cypher.  Not
to mention, of course, that nothing more complex was even known in
the fourteenth century.

Indeed, even that is too difficult for most "secret" communications,
especially those of occult or secret societies, who are a desperately
verbose bunch and therefore tend to adopt simple cyphers.  One obvious
example is the Caesar cypher, based not on a random substitution but
on a simple cyclic shift of the alphabet.  Another are the Masonic
cyphers, most of which are based on a rectangular grid, populated
by letters, and with each cypher symbol a glyph designating a part
of the grid.  You can learn such a cypher in half an hour, and
become fluent in it in an afternoon.

The point being, of course, that if this were the nature of the text,
we could have cracked it long ago.

That leaves, then, the "sparse" cyphers, where the trick is to
submerge the signal in noise.  Typically, a Trithemian cypher.
But they are harder to use than commonly imagined, and I invite
you to test this.  Here is my encoding rule: a word beginning with
a vowel stands for digit "0"; a word beginning with a consonant
stands for digit "1".  If you please, encode the first hundred
digits of the binary representation of pi in a plain english cover
text.  G'wan, I dare yaz!

You can't do it.  You run out of words too soon, and get repetitious,
and the entropy of the text soon increases beyond the point of
plausibility.  So, use a dictionary and a random-number generator?
Sorry: that generates a text in which all words are equally likely,
so "the" will occur with the same frequency as "nephelococcygia".

Well, sort the dictionary in descending order of frequency and use
a generator that yields the integers in negative-binomial distribution.
I could do that, though I doubt John Dee could - but the result would
lack any of the grammatical regularities of natural language.

No: there is exactly one way to generate a plausible cover text for
a Trithemian cypher, and that is to start from a real text.  Take a book,
any book, and enter it by some rule, and find the first word after
the entry point that meets the constraints.  The simplest rule, of
course, is to go through the book front to back.

So, to generate 50 pages of the VMS, take a few thousand bits of pi,
take a copy of "Moby Dick", and if the message begins "11,0..." then
the cover text begins "Call me Ishmael".  Wrap up the result in a
gold bug cypher to make assurance double sure.

But, friends, we could reverse that entire process.  First, we could
break the second cypher, and recover the mangled cover text.  Then,
I bet, we could *identify* that text, since any book accessible to a
mediaeval monk or renaissance con man would be accessible to us.  And
finally, by setting the original text alongside the mangled copy, we
would have a good chance of determining the rule by which it was
mangled, and that breaks the supposedly unbreakable part of the code.

Repeated attempts at decipherment have failed because there is no
cypher to break.  The opacity of the text was not part of its authors'
intention; it is due to a false assumption we are making.  For the
life of me, I cannot find that assumption.

3. Is it Gibberish?

No, it isn't.  We have applied to this demon-haunted document the
best and most powerful quantitative tests of twentieth-century
linguistics, and they all tell us the same thing: there is meaning
in the MS; *it is language*.

As little as a hundred years ago, nobody could have constructed a
gibberish text that would have fooled our investigative apparatus;
a fortiori, nobody before us in the history of Western Europe could
have done it.  Indeed, I believe there is only one group in existence
with the expertise and resources to forge the MS: Team Voynich; us.
And we didn't do it, officer, honest!

4. The Roebuck in the Thicket

Or, the secret that eludes discovery, in Robert Graves' metaphor.
Or, perhaps better, Borges story about Ibn Rushd's commentary on
Aristotle's Poetics, which could not be written because its author
had no understanding of the concept of the theatre.  What are we
missing?  Or, more likely, what are we assuming that causes us to
look at the text in exactly the wrong way?  That we see as in a
glass, darkly? [I Corinthians xiii:12 - "Blepomen gar arti di'
esoptrou en ainigmati" - why do I still have the crazy notion that
the base language of the MS is Greek?]

Again, I suggest we list our assumptions.  And I've here reiterated
my primary assumption, along with the reasoning that leads to it.
If you can overturn that assumption, please do so.

Robert Firth

From rand.org!jim Thu Jan 12 08:02:29 0500 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Today's Wild Conjecture
Status: OR


Folks

A long time ago, or so it seems, I wrote, concerning the A and B
variants in the VMS

  If two
  dialects diverge that much in respect of grammar, there should be
  at least a vowel shift in the roots as well - compare german and
  dutch to see an example.

And, of course, the meticulous Mr Guy later duly found that vowel
shift, the "o" / "c" parallel words, which he conjectured were
analogous to the o/e dialectical variants in English and Scottish.

Finallt, last night, it occurred to me that there is another example
of exactly this difference, but much closer to "home", if we have
guessed aright about the home of the MS.

So, today's wild conjecture: however much simplified or abbreviated,
the underlying natural languages of the Voynich A and B corpora are
dialects of, respectively, Italian and Spanish.

Yours

Robert

From rand.org!jim Thu Jan 12 09:46 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199501121529.HAA29551@rand.org>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 95 09:46 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich di di dit dah
Status: OR


In his "Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 22" Robert Firth
posed a challenge, whose imposibility of fulfillment proved somehow
that a Trithemian concealment cipher was not at work in the VMS.

>That leaves, then, the "sparse" cyphers, where the trick is to
>submerge the signal in noise.  Typically, a Trithemian cypher.
>But they are harder to use than commonly imagined, and I invite
>you to test this.  Here is my encoding rule: a word beginning with
>a vowel stands for digit "0"; a word beginning with a consonant
>stands for digit "1".  If you please, encode the first hundred
>digits of the binary representation of pi in a plain english cover
>text.  G'wan, I dare yaz!

My computer says the first 100 bits or so of pi are:
	11.0010010000111111011010101000
	   1000100001011010001100001000
	   1101001100010011000110011000
	   10100010111000
which means
	cc.vvcvvcvvvvccccccvccvcvcvcvvv
	   cvvvcvvvvcvccvcvvvccvvvvcvvv
	   ccvcvvccvvvcvvccvvvccvvccvvv
	   cvcvvvcvcccvvv

Here goes:

	c	Goodness
	c	gracious
	.	!
	v	Our
	v	opionion,
	c	that
	v	anyone
	v	attemting
	c	to
	v	elucidate
	v	anything
	v	obscure
	v	about
	c	the
	c	Voynich
	c	Manuscript
	c	must
	c	be
	c	crazy,
	v	is
	c	simply
	c	snobbish
	v	arrogance.
	c	When
	v	I
	c	first
	v	examined
	c	the
	v	elegant
	v	enigma
	v	(as
	c	D'
	v	Imperio
	v	insists
	v	on
	c	calling
	v	it)
	v	I
	v	immediately
	v	understood
	c	that
	v	it
	c	was,
	c	simply,
	v	a
	c	corker!
	v	Answering
	v	an
	v	ill
	c	considered
	c	challenge
	v	issued
	v	on
	v	an
	v	instant's
	c	whim,
	v	I
	v	immediately
	v	observed
	c	that
	c	consonants
	v	and
	c	vowels
	v	occasionally
	v	alternate,
	c	providing	
	c	sufficient
	v	entropy
	v	and
	v	allowing
	c	prolix
	v	unpattered,
	v	(albeit
	c	vaguely
	c	gramatical
	v	English)
	v	overlaying
	v	a
	c	sub
	c	text
	v	of
	v	encoded
	c	PI.
	c	Whoever
	v	attempts
	v	an
	v	astonishing
	c	feat
	v	of
	c	linguistic
	v	abuse
	v	or
	v	any
	c	such
	v	other
	c	pointless
	c	pursuit
	c	must
	v	expect
	v	absurd
	v	utterances!

>You can't do it.  You run out of words too soon, and get repetitious,
>and the entropy of the text soon increases beyond the point of
>plausibility.  So, use a dictionary and a random-number generator?

I don't follow this at all.  I agree that my 100 words are pretty
silly, but I didn't spend much time on the task. I just wrote the
words down, one by one, backtracking only 2 or 3 times to the begining
of the sentence.  I think that this task is similar to, but far easier
than,  writing in meter.  My wife (much better than I at word games)
says it is partway in difficulty between writing acrostics and writing
verse.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Jan 12 09:46 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199501121529.HAA29563@rand.org>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 95 09:46 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich Status Report
Status: OR


Robert's idea of a round of status reports seems good to me.

So here is mine.

What I think I know about the VMS
---------------------------------

The writing system was invented for the purpose, and was not 
preceeded by centuries of use by some obscure sect, school or tribe.
[Reason: it has too much geometric regularity; it looks like a just-
invented secret alphabet.]

The VMS text is utterable, and was perhaps uttered as it was being
written.
[Reason: we see syllable-like v/c alternation.  The statistics are consistent
with phonetic patterning.]

The VMS text is most unlikely to be a straightforwardly written text
in any language.
[Reason: there is not enough repeated multi-word sequences.  The Zipf-law
curve looks wrong.  There are not enough different mid-frequency words.]

The VMS text might be gibberish (a written form of glossolalia, say),
or what Firth calls a "sparse" cipher, such as Trithemius's concealment,
or the output of a "word play" transformation.  I find Robert's arguments
against gibberish and Trithemian concealment absolutely unconvincing.

The useful problems & tasks:
1. We must get a grip on the transcription.  We now have several partial
or complete transcriptions, in varying transcription alphabets, with varying
degrees of accuracy.  Which are to be trusted more?  Can we edit the differing
transcriptions into one, more-or-less trustable "consensus"?  Alas, I am
tired of this kind of work, and know that my biases on these points have 
become so strong that I think I should take a rest from them.

2. We must figure out how to distinguish between gibberish, Trithemian con-
cealment, and word play output.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Jan 12 15:48:04 0500 1995
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Message-Id: <199501122048.PAA08060@ts4a.sei.cmu.edu>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Yet another note
Status: OR

Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 23
-----------------------------------------


More Data on Regularities Suggestive of Grammar

I'm not sure whether anyone's done this before, and can't
find it in the (enormous) mail file, so here it is.

I took the entire VMS, A and B together, and counted every
instance I could find of what seems the most common regularity.

The groups have the form <prefix> <suffix>, and the four suffixes
are -AJ -AM -AN -AR.  In other words, what would be a declension
if the Voynich groups were words, if they declined, and if they
declined by changing an end inflection.  All of which, of course,
are big IFs, so I invite alternative explanations for these
regularities.

These are, I believe, all the prefixes for which we have a
complete "declension", ie at least one instance of every form.
There are numerous instances of incomplete "declensions".

Prefix	-AJ	-AM	-AN	-AR
-----------------------------------

2	  4	 74	 30	 31
4O8	  1	 11	  2	  4
4OF	  9	114	155	 69
4OP	  2	 26	 22	 21
4OPS	  1	  2	  1	  3

8	 58	509	135	159
8AR	  4	  2	  1	  3
8S	  1	  4	  1	  4
9F	  3	 19	  7	 16
9P	  6	 16	  4	  5

O8	  4	 28	  6	  7
OE	  1	 11	  8	  3
OE8	  5	  3	  1	  4
OEF	  3	 12	 24	  7	** anomaly alert
OP	 14	 42	 29	 43

OR	  1	 14	 10	  4
P	  4	 15	  5	 12
Q	  6	  2	  0	 45	** I broke a rule, for the anomaly
R	  3	 16	  9	  7
S	 14	 38	 16	 33

S8	  4	  3	  4	  6
SC	  2	  2	  2	 21	**
SCF	  1	  3	  3	  4
SO8	  1	 22	  3	  3
X	  3	  4	  1	  1

ZC8	  2	  6	  1	  1
null	 18	 92	 24	 73

-----------------------------------

Now, some of these are probably bogus, but the commonly occurring
ones show a very regular frequency pattern.  If they are not
inflections, then perhaps each Voynich group is a syllable, and
these endings are the four main vowels?  Or perhaps the language
is Mandarin, after all, and these endings represent the four tones?

Well, numerous fanciful hypotheses are possible, but tell me, by
what simple rules could you write gibberish with such a pattern?

And what is to be made of 8AJ 8AM 8AN 8AR?  Scanning the text, it
seems to occur quite often after another word with the same ending,
so perhaps it's a possessive, like meus meum mei meo?

Further observations: the "prefixes" 2, OE, OR also occur very often
as complete groups.  Most of the others also occur with -9 as the
"suffix", which is another tiny bit of evidence that 9 is either
plain A or A with a consonant.

Not sure how helpful this is... I did it mostly so as to get my
brain back in gear on Voynich.  But I guess any hard data are of
some use.

Robert

From rand.org!jim Thu Jan 12 17:19 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199501122227.OAA16550@rand.org>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 95 17:19 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich gibberish from New Jersey
Status: OR


Robert Firth asks by
> what simple rules could you write gibberish with such a pattern?

On a sheet of paper write some "roots" and some suffixes.  Continually
pick root+suffix by eye.  Thus:

mult, meg, met hapl, super, hyper can be the "roots" and -us, -ae, -arum,
-ibus can be the suffixes.  Here is some generated text, typed in as fast
as I can:

Multibus megae metarum multarum haparum suprus metae megibus metarum hyperae
mulibus megae haplus.  Megae multae haplae haplarum metibus multibus superarum.

I could go on for a long time, and would, if there were any money in it.
>From time to time I could change my stock of roots and suffixes by adding
or deleting a few items.  You know those cardboard wheels one uses to
dial up declensions and the like?  You could "mechanize" the process by
putting roots and suffixes in haphazard profusion on inner & outer rings,
and read off a few combinations before juxtaposing the wheels differently.

That's just one way.  In fact one needs no apparatus or lists.  The following
is just typed away off the top of my head, without artificial help:  quaboo
traladoo binuk padaboo binoo tralim quabuk traloo tabinoo tabim todooloo
tralimboo dee doo di doo limuk.  But yet we see "declensions", because we
have -doo, -uk, -lim, -loo combining with various "stems": tra, quab, and so
on.  

Trithemius's book has lots of such stuff in it, filler text for his concealment
ciphers.  I would not be suprised if he used some such method to compose it.

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Jan 16 20:54 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Date: Mon, 16 Jan 95 20:54 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: mythology quickie
Status: OR


Just a quick question about world mythology:  does anyone know of any
3 or 4-faced mythological figures, anywhere?  Janus, of course, has 2 faces;
I am looking for anyone similar, but with more.

Thanks in advance.
Jim

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Wed Jan 18 16:12:09 0800 1995
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From: <kornai@almaden.ibm.com> (Andras Kornai)
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Subject: Manyfaced gods
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(Sorry for sending to the whole list, I can't find where the query came
from.) Anyway at the beginning only Vishnu existed and he was asleep.
A lotus flower has grown from his navel, and Brahma sat in there. Brahma
was meditating and has grown faces in every direction rather than looking
around.            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

PS. It is also my understanding that Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva are sometimes
referred to as the "three-faced one" and this has all sorts of connections
to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity...

Andras Kornai




From rand.org!jim Wed Jan 18 20:46:16 0800 1995
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From: dalford@s1.csuhayward.edu (Dan Alford)
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: manyfaced gods > trinity
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Status: OR


Given Andras Kornai's recent comment, it may be appropos to mention a
paper I heard last year at the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness.
Since we are talking about the Indo- side of Indo-European, let's look at
the other side. This paper was called "The Legend of Jesus in PreChristian
Greek and Roman Mythology", but I can't remember the author's name. In
working from documents of known age and authenticity, all before 25 BC,
we find a much older story of Jesus dating back to the ancient Greeks,
when Zeus impregnated the virgin Elektra producing Jasos -- born of a
virgin, a miracle worker and spiritual teacher, executed and rose three
days later; it's calculated that about 80% of the red letters in the
red letter edition come from this earlier tradition. Conversely, the
Jews never expected their messiah to be named Jesus (Emmanuel!), nor to
be born of a hymen-intacta virgin (two words for virgin in Hebrew, and
Isaiah used the other one, more like womb-intacta (not having issued 
forth a firstborn) -- and like English, Greek only had one, parthenos),
nor to heal people, nor to rise after three days -- these were not
Jewish beliefs about their messiah. All that came later after the
political pact between Rome and Jerusalem, and that dastartly joining
of Jewish and Greek Testaments that allowed Christians to preach love
yet appeal for vengeance when that was needed. To put a finer point
on it: Christianity is and always was a European religion; therefore,
it is not implausible to look for religious connections beyond the
simple Skt 'deva' Engl 'divine' -- perhaps even including the trinity!

							-- Moonhawk (%->)
    <"The fool on the hill sees the sun going down and> 
    <the eyes in his head see the world spinning round">
				 <-- McCartney/Lennon>

From rand.org!jim Mon Feb  6 15:08:27 0500 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Notes Part 24
Status: OR

Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 24
-----------------------------------------

Well, my previous conjectures seem to have evoked widespread
incredulity.  This leads me to one of two conclusions:

(a) You're all wrong

(b) There may, just possibly, be some minor flaws in my
    lucid and scintillating reasoning (which is cypher
    text for "I'm all wrong").

In pursuance of the second alternative, then

	The Voynich Manuscript as a Trithemian Cypher
	---------------------------------------------

Incidentally, this 'Trithemius' isn't somebody with three themes;
his vernacular name is Trittheim, ie tritt-heim.  Language is funny.

Anyway, I'm using the term loosely, to mean any sparse cypher that is
locally decodable: sparse means that a small piece of plain text becomes
a substantially larger piece of cypher text, and locally decodable means
that each piece of cypher text is independently decodable, we don't
need to look at the surrounding context or propagate state forwards
during the decode.  That's a big assumption, but I think defensible
given the probable time and manner of production of the VMS.

Well, the next step is simple in principle:  what are the units of
cypher text, and what units of plain text do they encode?  That
gives us the mapping in terms of sets, eg from the set of letters
to the set of "words"; the rest is a matter of insanely tedious
detail.

Cypher Units
------------

The most obvious choice for the cypher unit is the "group": the sequence
of symbols separated by spaces.  That doesn't mean it's right; it does
mean that I'd be foolish to look first at the less obvious.  So let's
run with that, and I advise the reader that this thread does indeed run
to the end of the note.

The next question is, what does each group encode?  And the simplest way
to get some insight into that question is to ask, how many different
groups are there?  For, clearly, if a cypher text contains 26 unique
components, be they letters, groups, or words, it's pretty obvious what
each component encodes.

In the entire Voynich A corpus, there are about 2300 unique groups.  But
over half of them occur once only, and many of those are pretty strange
in other ways, such as looking like two normal groups run together.  If
we exclude those, we have about 1000 groups.  That's too few for natural
language - Ogden's "Basic English" contains 1600 words and it's a fright.
So this is either not language or some highly stylised or synthetic
language, as has often been suspected.

But, you know, the reduced list *still* doesn't look right, because
about half of it consists of groups that occur only twice.  That's
again pretty strange.  Eventually, I decided to set the cutoff at
four occurrences: any group that occurs 4 or more times is probably
genuine.  This removes about 20% of the text, but it removes over
85% of the unique groups, and most of the remainder look plausible.

What is Encoded?

So, we have some 280 groups in the Voynich A, that occur 4 or more times,
with the record being 355 for '8AM'.  If we assume (pace Brumbaugh) that
every group has a single decode, then that sets an upper bound at 280
for the number of different plaintext units.  So they're not words.

Do we have a lower bound?  Well, we mustn't assume that every plain text
has a unique encoding; there may be multiple encodings.  So, whereas 24
unique cypher symbols imply an encoded alphabet, 24,000 *might* imply an
encoded alphabet with 1000 alternatives for each letter.

And that, I think, is one way to reach a lower bound: through arguments
of practicality.  A 24,000 symbol alphabet seems impracticable - is the
scribe really going to throw 3d10 for every letter?  No, the alternatives
should really be sufficiently few that one can hold them in memory and
cycle through them pretty well, which suggests to me about 5.  That gives
me a lower bound of about 56 plaintext symbols; reasoning the other way,
if each Voynich group is a Trithemian letter, we have about 12 alternatives
for each, which seems too many.

The next obvious alternative is that each group is a syllable, which would
imply from about 60 to about 200 symbols depending on language.  But, again,
that seems impractical.  Indo-European languages aren't syllabic, and all
attempts to write them in syllabic script lead to serious problems, like
the Japanese writing "futobaru" for "football", and the Mycenaeans writing
"iqo" for "hippos".

The Conjecture

Well before this point, I made the conjecture, but I've written it up as
linear argument, in the best revisionist scientific tradition.  Lying
abed, brooding, I asked myself:  "Robert, if you set out to create the
VMS - if you wanted to generate a cypher text with the superficial
regularities we observe - how would you do it?"

And the answer was pretty clear, though of course it may be quite wrong.

I would start from the plaintext alphabet, and create two alternative
encodings, one for the odd letters and one for the even.  A pair of
letters would be a "group", but the spaces around groups are for the
convenience of the scribes; they add no information.

Further, I would create the encodings so that the odd set looked like
typical roots, and the even set looked like typical inflections, in
a language such as latin or italian, much simplified.  Each letter
pair would then appear to be a word, and from my niche in the Empyrean
I would laugh myself silly at future generations of would-be decipherers
who exclaimed at "the statistical regularities in the text".

The Possible Voynich Alphabets

Do the Voynich groups break up in that way?  Again, from the A corpus,
taking only groups that occur 4 or more times, here is my conjecture:

Odd Letters	Even Letters

	2		89
	4O		8AE
	4OF		8AM
	4OP		AE
	8		AJ
	9F		AM
	9P		AN
	F		AR
	O		C9
	OF		CC9
	OP		COE
	P		OE
	Q		OM
	S		OR
	SF		S9
	SP		SC9
	SQ		SO
	SW		SOE
	SX		SOR
	W		Z9
	X		9 (maybe)
	Z
	ZO

This is a rough guess, and will surely have errors - but that's two
alphabets of 21 and 23 symbols, and with the exception of that silly
letter '9' almost any combination of symbols is locally decodable.
(Something's wrong with 8 or AM or 8AM; otherwise, it's rigorous.)

Comments, anyone?

Robert Firth

From rand.org!jim Thu Feb 16 10:11 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Date: Thu, 16 Feb 95 10:11 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich Trithemian?
Status: OR


Robert Firth's "Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 24" proposes
a line of attack much to my taste.  He identifies about 2 dozen V-letter
sequences, which might plausibly be thought syllables or morphemes, and
supposes that they represent letters.  Let me call these "cipher syllables"
for ease of reference.  Each plain text letter is represented by two 
different such cipher syllables; the resulting cipher system is what 
pedants might call "multiliteral homophonic" meaning each plain text 
letter has several cipher equivalents (that's the homophonic part) and 
the cipher equivalents -- the syllables -- are more than one letter long 
(that's the multiliteral part).

This is not at all inconsistent with Bennett's entropy calculations,
which, if I recall right, said that the VMS's letter pair entropy was
like that of honest languages's single letter entropy.  (Pacific languages
aside, pace Guy.)

Firth's list of syllables seems to have been chosen with 2 principles in
mind:  it should be easy to parse the cipher text into its constituent
cipher syllables (that is, the code should be "uniquely decodable"), and
there should be an alternation between actual use of "odd" and "even"
syllables.  The first of these is just plain sound common sense in a real
cipher system.  The second is aimed at reproducing the "root+suffix" structure
observed in the VMS.

So it only remains to take a wadge of VMS text, divide into syllables, decide
on plain text letter equivalents for the syllables and on the language,
and decode the VMS.  If we are stumped, we can tinker with the list of
syllables.

As a very first step, we should see how much of the text is actually covered
by Firth's syllables.  I mean, how much of the text can be parsed into
sequences of his syllables, without (much) ambiguity & without (much)
leftover glop?

Jim

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Mar  7 22:11 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Date: Tue, 7 Mar 95 22:11 EST
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich similarity
Status: OR


Hi!  While browsing through Jean Seznec's "Survival of the Pagan Gods"
(various editions; mine is Princeton, 1972) I saw a picture which reminded
me of the VMS pictures.  It is figure 32 on page 107, taken from a ms. 
of the "Fungentius metaforalis", Vatican, Palat. lat. 1726.   It is
labeled "Venus-Luxuria", and shows the goddess swimming in a pool with
some fish.  She looks to me very like the VMS ladies, but maybe I'm
misled by the natatorial subject matter.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Sun Apr 23 09:34:24 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9504222334.AA23793@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: Not quite the Voynich this time, but...
To: voynich@rand.org
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...could be.

   The publisher of the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics asks me
to drum up interest among colleagues. It seems to me that the
VMS would be an ideal topic.  So, grab your quills and write us
up a few articles on this or that statistical property of the VMS.
As the title of the journal indicates, it is after everything and
anything to do with quantitative properties of language, any language,
including Voynichese -- even Enochian!

From rand.org!jim Mon May  1 10:18 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Date: Mon, 1 May 95 10:18 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich pronounciation
Status: OR


I have a quick favor to ask.  In a few days I will meet a person from a
TV production company, who is gathering material for a possible show about
the Voynich manuscript.  I thought it would be nice to have my computer's
speech synthesizer read some VMS text out loud to her, according to each of
several different assignments of phonetic values.  So, can you supply your
favorite such maps?

Here is what I have so far: an old one of Jacques's (from 27 Jan 92):

>	For those who feel so inclined, here are the rules for
>	translating from Currier's notation into pronounceable
>	Voynich using my program TRANSLIT. What good is it? I find
>	that looking at something that seems easily pronounceable
>	helps at recognizing patterns. Here:
>	4=h
>	8=b
>	9=a
>	2=s
>	E=m
>	R=y
>	S=r
...
>	Q=tir
>	W=pir
>	X=kir
>	Y=fir

and so on, and a partial one of my own, from about the same time:

>	tr "OA9SCZ84MDFRQPE2J/\-\#"\
>		    "oaeuilrhtpdgvxfny "

Thanks in advance!

Jim Reeds


From cl.cam.ac.uk!Michael.Roe Mon May 01 16:03:23 +0100 1995
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To: reeds@research.att.com
cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich pronounciation
In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 01 May 1995 10:18:00 -0400. <199505011425.HAA26012@rand.org>
Date: Mon, 01 May 1995 16:03:23 +0100
From: Mike Roe <Michael.Roe@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <"swan.cl.cam.:203780:950501150345"@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Status: OR

> 
> I have a quick favor to ask.  In a few days I will meet a person from a
> TV production company, who is gathering material for a possible show about
> the Voynich manuscript.  I thought it would be nice to have my computer's
> speech synthesizer read some VMS text out loud to her, according to each of
> several different assignments of phonetic values.  So, can you supply your
> favorite such maps?

Jim,

I don't really have a favourite pronounciation for the VMS, but one thing you
might try is treating the gallows letters (P, B, F, V etc) as silent. (I still
believe that their function has something to do with punctuation or 
demarcating units of ciphertext). Also, it's useful to make -AE, -AR, -AJ
sound like a plausible verb or noun declension.

Mike

From trl.OZ.AU!j.guy Tue May  2 09:53:41 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9505012353.AA13930@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: Re: Voynich pronounciation
To: reeds@research.att.com
Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 09:53:41 +1000 (EST)
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I had forgotten about my "voicenich", and it took me a while, and much
swearing, to find it on my hard disk. I discovered that I had two
"voiceniches". But I could not work out the rules for the first one,
they went AWOL. For your amusement only, then:


Date: Mon, 6 Jan 92 09:05:49 EST
From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9201052205.AA05392@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Pronounceable Voynich


Hark, O Mortals, the Divine Sound of the Most Mysterious Language
in the World:

praitusox complam as aclavii istem istesus iclotesusox cum ples istendus
oxesus iplotas e s cum plavi istclavii istas as* iclotas iclotas dai
oxusaor istiplus es complavii istedo icloteasus iclot*s dasavii oxus
revii ecluus eclies oxemeclus iclot*as davii eplavii em eplai
oxais cum itias iclotavii icrotas iprotavii
condasaiiste
* edas *us istem icroteus eusdas ist* ox iproteavii istedaxus
*istus itedus epliteus eclitem iteiclotus ex itus davi istes plex
davii istex iprotem istedus
davi *ecliedus
* condavi icrotixavii em ox icrotius conclavi isteistus icrotedam ix
epliste plisteus eclaiui ecliem eplai istedavi oxiplotus davii
isteus iplotius pledavii icrotus icrotedaumox iclotius iste endavi do
davi evii item edavii itedavi itdus eplavi d*i iclotus pledo
davii istiplotius iplotes ites istius plem item item ples item
iste item ist edai plistus plitus des itedavii iste pluatur
comite clitius itiplavi istiecristem diordusdo iclotus daiclotus


And what is this Noble Language called? Why, Voicenich of course.

How did I do it? I took my skrying glass, and called upon the
Angels. Neboniel appeared and spake unto me, saying: "Prepend
thou a dot to indicate the start of each and every line, where
only a space shews now, and take thou under my dictation this
translation file which thou shalt use with TRANSLIT. Call thou
the output file VOYNICH.VOI, and edit it forthwith, replacing
each and every dot with a space."

All of you Dee fans and Kelley diggers, can you figure out what
Neboniel dictated to me?

(The Angel also suggested an improvement to TRANSLIT)

----------end quote-----------------------------------------

As we say in French, "quand on crache en l'air ca vous retombe
sur la figure". *I* for one cannot figure out any longer what
Neboniel dictated to me!  This voicenich sounds somewhat like
Enochian, too.

Here is a sample of my second voicenich, the rules for which
have not gone AWOL:


Date: Sun, 26 Jan 92 16:35:15 EST
From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9201260535.AA26937@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Pronounceable Voynich

[rules deleted]

Sample of Language A:

<00101A> l;act92.9lpax.aS.aqpaiiv.c'tox.c'toS9.cqptoS92.9.lpoS.c'tox89=
         f a ray ak am as at an u  l om  l osa  tirosay a k os  l omba

<00102A> 2oS9.clptaS.o.S.9.lpaiv.c'tqpaiiv.c'taS.aS*.cqptaS.cqptaS.8av=
         yosa  kiras o s a  kaiu  l t a nu  l as as?  tiras  tiras bau

<00103A> 29aii2.c'tclp9.oS.9lpaiiv.c'to8.cqptoaS9.cqpt*S.8aSaiiv.29=
         yaan y  l ek a os a kanu   l ob  tiroasa  tir?s basanu  ya

<00104A> 4oiiv.oqpcc9.oqpcoS.2oxoqp9.cqpt*aS.8aiiv.olpaiiv.ox.olpav=
         honu  ot a a ot eos yomota   tir?as banu  o ka nu om ok au

<00105A> 2ai2.9.ctcaS.cqptaiiv.cq;taS.cl;taiiv#
         yaiy a  reas  tiran u  piras  piran u


Well, well, well, listen to that

Faraya kamasa tanu lomlosa tiro saya kos lomba
Yo saki rasosa kaiul tanu lasas[a] tiras-tiras bau
Ya any lekao sakanulob tiroasa tir[a]s basanu ya
Honuota a oteosy omota tir[o]as banu o kanu o mokau
Yai yareasti ranu piras-piranu.



Let's see some Language B:

<04901B>
q;c'tcolp9.o8aii2.4o9=ol;c'to8.ct9q;ctc9.9q;ctc89aiv=ctol;o=ctcq;ct89=
p l eok a oban y hoa of  l ob  ra p rea a p rebaaiu  rof o  le p rba

<04902B> 8ctc9.2aiiv.a&cco89.9lpceqptc9.ctc89.9qpc89.89=ctceqptc89.x2=
         br ea yan u angaoba ake tir ea  reba a teba ba  re tireba my

<04903B> oaiiv.c'teqpt9.eqptc89.oxo9.9lpc't89.oxctc89.89x=9c'tcc9.2aiiv.2=
         oan u  l  tira  tireba omoa ak  l ba om reba bam a l a a yan u y

<04904B> 4olpc89.ctco2.9qpc89.4olpc89.9qpc89.ctclpc89.8aiiv.o8aig.2ax89=
         hok eba  reoy a teba hok eba at eba r e keba ban u obang yamba

<04905B> 2aiiv.c'tc89.cc89.cc89.2ct9.8aiiv.eqptc89=4olpcc89.4olpc89.eqptc9=
         yanu   leba   aba  aba yr a ban u  tireba hok a ba hok eba  tirea

<04906B> Sctc89.4olpc89#
         s reba hok eba

<04907B>
q;cco.4olpc89.8aS.c'tco.9q;ct2c82.2=aiiv=c'taq;ctc89.l;ct9.8ax.ctc89.2aS=
 p ao hok eba bas  l eo a pr yeby y an u  l a p reba  f ra bam  reba yas

<04908B>
8aiiv.c'tc89.4olpcc89.4oqpcc8aS.2=olpox.9qpc89.4olpcc89.4iiivlpc89=
ba nu   leba hok  aba ho ta bas y o kom a teba hok  aba hin u k eba

<04909B>
qpctcoc't9.8c't89.olpc89.ctclpt9.2=89=89=9lpccct9.olpcc89.ctclp9=
 tr eo l a b l ba ok eba l  kira y ba ba a k a ra o k aba  rek a

So:

Pleo kao bany ho a oflobra prea a preba aiu rofo le pr(i)ba
Brea yanu angaoba ake tire areba ate babare tire bamy
Oanul tira-tireba omoa akl(i)baom rebaba mala ayanuy
Ho kebare oyateba ho keba ate barekeba banu obang yamba
Yanule baabaabayra banu tire bahoka-bahoke ba tirea
Sreba ho keba
Pao ho keba basleo apryeby yanula preba frabam rebayas
Banu leba ho kaba ho taba syoko mateba ho kaba hi nukeba
Tre olabl(i)ba o kebalkiray baba akarao kabareka


Uh? Those two languages sound utterly different! What a
surprise.... This "pronounceable Voynich" bit *is* quite
useful after all. Peering at frequency tables, I would never
have realized how different A and B were. The mystery
thickens....

-----------------------end quote------------------------

Yes, I remember now how surprised I was at the striking
difference between the two languages. Which leads me
now to this thought: there ought to be a pronunciation
scheme which minimizes the phonetic distance between
the two dialects of Voynichese, and (at the top of my
voice now) THAT PRONUNCIATION SCHEME IS LIKELY TO 
REFLECT THE TRUE PRONUNCIATION! (much softer now)...
if Voynichese is a true language, that is....


From rand.org!jim Mon Jun 19 15:55 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199506191957.MAA08279@rand.org>
Date: Mon, 19 Jun 95 15:55 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich Study Group member dies
Status: OR


I just heard that one of the members of the original 1944-46 "First
Study Group" died, aged about 87 or 88.  Arnold Dumey served at Arlington
Hall, Virginia, as an army cryptanalyst during World War II, working 
with William F. Friedman.  He had two connections with the Voynich 
manuscript:  he belonged to Friedman's Voynich study group, and he 
was Robert Brumbaugh's boss.  He might well have been the last surviving
member of the FSG.

He practiced law before becoming a cryptanalyst.  Some time in the late
1930's or early 1940's he took private code-breaking lessons from Rosario
Candella, the New York cryptomane and collector.  He was then recruited
(by Friedman, I suppose) and spent the war at Arlington Hall.  Somewhere
along the way he lost interest in the law, although he was often called 
on to sit on courts martial.  (Because of these duties he was issued extra
gasoline ration coupons, and could explore more of the Virginia countryside
than otherwise possible.)  He stayed on as a cryptanalyst after the war
for a few years, but in the early 1950's went to the early computer company
ERA and then into practice as a computing consultant.  His most famous 
invention is "hashing", a technique so widely used nowadays in all kinds of
programming that it comes as a shock to know that it was actually invented 
by somebody.  (He used it to solve a subscription list problem for Time-Life!)
An old colleague of his told me that he was also the inventor of the 
"Dumey microsecond".  When some new computer hardware is being designed, the
potential users want to know exactly what features will be implemented, and
exactly how they will be used.  The designers give this answer:  "Oh, don't
bother us; those specification details will be decided later."  When the 
hardware is delivered and it is found that the wrong features are implemented,
or are implemented in an inconvenient way, the designers say "Well, that's what 
was in the specification." Dumey's discovery: the time gap between these 
two states of affairs, during which users can have a meaningful influence 
on the design, lasts one millionth of a second.

I met Dumey last autumn.  I have never met a more lively or a kinder person,
and after spending an afternoon with him, wished I had known him all my life.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Jun 22 09:03:26 PDT 1995
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Message-Id: <199506221603.JAA17960@mycroft.rand.org>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich Study Group member dies 
In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 19 Jun 95 15:55:00 -0400.
             <199506191957.MAA08279@rand.org> 
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>
Reply-To: jim@rand.org
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 95 09:03:26 PDT
Sender: jim@rand.org
Status: OR

Here's the NYT's obituary for Mr. Dumey.  I just missed him when he visited
Santa Monica for the last time; he was taken ill the day we were to meet.

	Jim Gillogly
	Midyear's Day S.R. 1995, 16:02
____________________________________________________________________________

   The New York Times, June 22, 1995, p. B6.


   Arnold L Dumey, 88, Long a Leading Cyrptographer for the
   U.S.


   By Wolfgang Saxon


   Arnold I. Dumey, an expert in the deciphering of codes who
   served the Government throughout World War II and the cold
   war, died on Sunday at the Medical Center in Princeton,
   N.J. He was 88 and lived most recently at the Clearbrook
   Retirement Village in the nearby town of Cranbury.


   The cause was heart failure, according to the Institute for
   Defense Analyses, a Government-financed agency for which
   Mr. Dumey had worked as a consulting cryptanalyst for 25
   years.


   The Institute for Defense Analyses is based in Alexandria,
   Va., and its sole client is the Government. It serves the
   Defense Department and the National Security Agency, and
   draws much of its expertise from the nation's universities.
   Mr. Dumey (pronounced DOO-mee) was attached to its Center
   for Communications Research in Princeton.


   A witty man who was sometimes frustrated by bureaucracy,
   Mr. Dumey once contrived what came to be known as the
   "Dumey microsecond," the fleeting moment between the point
   at which a good idea is dismissed as ahead of its time and
   the point at which it is dismissed as too late. His
   colleagues at the Princeton center say the phrase is now
   part of the institute's lexicon.


   Mr. Dumey was a message decoder for the Army Security
   Agency in World War II and retired from the Signal Corps as
   a lieutenant colonel in 1946. He was part of an elite group
   that saw cryptography evolve profoundly with the growth of
   computer technology.


   After the war, Mr. Dumey, who as a young man had obtained
   a law degree at Columbia University, worked for a time as
   a lawyer but continued to be a cryptography consultant. To
   take advantage of the field's vast technological advances
   the National Security Agency in 1958 tapped the expertise
   of the academic and industrial communities by creating an
   arm called the Scientific Advisory Board, and Mr. Dumey was
   an original member. He served on the board for the next 20
   years.


   Writing about the National Security Agency in "The Puzzle
   Palace" (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), James Bamford described
   the board's 10 members as "science wizards plucked from
   ivy-covered campuses, corporate research labs and
   sheepskin-lined think tanks." The board met twice yearly
   with the agency's top scientists to discuss the latest in
   science and technology as they applied to eavesdropping and
   cryptography, Mr. Bamford wrote.


   Mr. Dumey was born in the Bronx and grew up in Brooklyn. He
   graduated from Columbia College in 1926 with a dual major
   in Latin and mathematics -- two disciplines, he liked to
   point out, that allow one to express thoughts with
   precision. He earned his law degree at Columbia in 1929.


   He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Dorothy Kammerer
   Dumey; a daughter, Glenna Dumey of Santa Monica, Calif.,
   and a sister, Eleanor Dumey of Brooklyn.
____________________________________________________________________________

From rand.org!jim Fri Jul 14 08:45 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199507141250.FAA26485@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 95 08:45 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich netnews query
Status: OR


Hey gang, FYI, I saw this item on netnews today (slightly edited):

	Article: 25146 of sci.crypt
	Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,sci.crypt
	From: snopes@netcom.com (snopes)
	Subject: Voynich manuscript
	Organization: San Fernando Valley Folklore Society
	Lines: 18

	  Does anyone have information about the Voynich manuscript, a work 
	believed to have been written by a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk 
	named Roger Bacon?  The 102-page manuscript, embellished with several 
	hundred multicolored drawings, was supposedly handwritten in an unknown 
	alphabet, in cipher, and has never been deciphered.

	  I would tend to wonder how someone could know that a manuscript written 
	in an unknown alphabet was also written in cipher, but I'm assuming that 
	skilled cryptologists have ways of discerning this.

	 - snopes
	 ...

to which I replied


	Subject: Voynich

	There was an active emailing list on the Voynich Manuscript, run by Jim
	Gillogly (jim@rand.org), but it has been moribund in the last year or two.
	There are two ftp sites with Voynich stuff:  rand.org:/pub/voynich
	and netlib.att.com:/netlib/att/math/reeds (the latter can be reached
	via http://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/index.html  but the 
	visual effects are stupid).

	There are 2 worthwhile books by Robert Brumbaugh and Mary D'Imperio, both
	published in about 1977; the latter one has been reprinted by Aegean Park
	Press.  And (though I should blush to tell of it) there is a paper in the
	Jan 1995 issue of CRYPTOLOGIA on the subject.

	As to your implied question  
   
	   I would tend to wonder how someone could know that a manuscript written 
	   in an unknown alphabet was also written in cipher, but I'm assuming that 
           skilled cryptologists have ways of discerning this.

	Not yet they haven't, not in this case!

	Good luck; let me know if I can help at all.

	Jim Reeds


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Fri Jul 14 20:42:13 0400 1995
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From: bgrant@umcc.umich.edu (Bruce Grant)
Subject: Re: Voynich Internet Query
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 20:42:13 -0400 (EDT)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Length: 555       
Status: OR

Jim:
	I see a query about the VM in Usenet every couple of months - one
Voynich "hotspot" is alt.horror.cthulhu, mostly people who confuse the
Voynich manuscript with the Necronomicon.
	I think the Internet is crying out for a Voynich FAQ (or FAQlet
anyway) to send to these guys.  Anyone got a candidate document?
	What I sent the last guy was:
		where the VM is and how to order a copy
		where to see a sample (_Codebreakers_)
		what it's like in general terms
		the address of the mailing list
	Maybe that would be enough.

Bruce Grant (umcc.ais.org)


From rand.org!jim Fri Jul 14 20:48:06 0400 1995
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From: bgrant@umcc.umich.edu (Bruce Grant)
Subject: SETI
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 1995 20:48:06 -0400 (EDT)
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Status: OR

It has always seemed to me that one way to increase interest in the
Voynich manuscript (and get a lot more high-powered people looking at it)
would be to disguise it as a message from Alpha Centauri - say, transcribe
it into some new character set and feed it covertly into one of the SETI
radiotelescopes (in short bursts of course, so it looks like it's coming
from a fixed point in the sky.)

By the time they figure out it's about alchemy or cabbala instead of some
high-tech topic, the task will be done!

Bruce Grant (bgrant@umcc.ais.org)

From rand.org!jim Fri Jul 14 21:04 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199507150108.SAA22834@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 95 21:04 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich FAQ
Status: OR


I like Bruce's idea for a Voynich FAQ, and think his short list of topics
is just about right.  I am about to go away on a 2 week trip, so cannot
whip up a draft.  Bruce, would you care to take this job on?  (I would
like to see a short bibliography, too.)


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Fri Jul 14 21:08 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199507150112.SAA22897@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 95 21:08 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich MS solved
Status: OR


I talked with David Kahn the other day, & he said that somebody recently
got in touch with him, claiming to have solved the VMS.  It is in Welsh,
is all Kahn said.   

(Does anyone know if either of Kelley alias Talbot or John Dee knew Welsh?)


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Sat Jul 15 15:17:07 MDT 1995
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From: nelson@santafe.edu (Nelson Minar)
Sender: nelson@santafe.edu
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich Internet Query
In-Reply-To: <m0sWvJA-001ErJC@umcc.umich.edu>
References: <m0sWvJA-001ErJC@umcc.umich.edu>
Status: OR

>I think the Internet is crying out for a Voynich FAQ (or FAQlet
>anyway) to send to these guys.  Anyone got a candidate document?

I submitted a tiny something for the sci.crypt FAQ about a year and a
half ago. Considering how much I know about the Voynich (a smidgen
more than zero), someone could definitely do a better job. Your list
sounds good. It would be easy to add a lot more detail, but also a lot
of work :-)

From rand.org!jim Sun Jul 16 02:02:52 0400 1995
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From: bgrant@umcc.umcc.umich.edu (Bruce Grant)
Subject: Tentative Mini-FAQ
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 02:02:52 -0400 (EDT)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 5831      
Status: OR

The following is a tentative "mini-FAQ" about the Voynich manuscript as
a response for Internet queries about it.  Please send me any suggestions
you have for stuff to include in it, corrections, etc. at
bgrant@umcc.ais.org.  (For example, it might be nice to include the
VM alphabet somehow, though I haven't been able to come up with a good-
looking "ASCII art" version.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Voynich Manuscript "Mini-FAQ"
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  What is the Voynich manuscript?

A:  This manuscript, which has been called "the most mysterious manuscript 
    in the world", is a quarto volume of about 170 pages, handwritten in
    an unknown alphabet and illustrated with drawings in several colors.  
    The name "Voynich" refers to Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered it (in a
    collection) in Italy in 1912.  

    The authorship and date of origin of the manuscript are unknown.
    It has been variously ascribed to the Roger Bacon and to Dr. John Dee
    among others.  Different writers have suggested dates of origin anywhere
    from the 13th to the 16th century based on various features of the 
    manuscript.
    
    The manuscript is believed to have been present at the court of Emperor 
    Rudolph II of Bohemia in the early 1600's, and its whereabouts are
    known at a few later dates. 
    
    It was purchased by Hans P. Kraus, an antiquarian bookseller, in 1961,
    and was later donated by him to Yale University.

    [This information is primarily from the D'Imperio monograph cited 
    below.]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  Where is the manuscript now?

A:  It is located in the Beineke Library at Yale University (New Haven, CT)
    and can be seen there.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  Has it been translated or deciphered?

A:  No. Although several purported translations have been put forward, 
    no one has convincingly established whether the manuscript is written
    in a known language (e.g. Latin, English), in some artificial or
    occult language, in a code or cipher of some form, or even whether
    it is meaningful or just a hoax.
                           
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  Where can I get a copy?

A:  The manuscript has not been published to date, but photocopies are
    (or at least have been) available from the Beinecke Library, subject
    to an agreement not to re-copy or publish the text without the Library's
    permission.    
                          Beinecke Library
                          P.O. Box 208240
                          New Haven, CT 06520-8240

                          (203) 432-2977

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  Tell me more about the manuscript.  What does it look like?

A:  A sample page is reproduced in: 

        Kahn, David, _The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing_,
        (New York: Macmillan, 1967)

    The text appears to have been written from left to right,
    top to bottom, in an alphabet of approximately 36 symbols.  The alphabet
    is very attractive but is not known to appear in any other manuscript.
    It has some resemblances to Arabic script and to medieval Latin and
    Greek abbreviations, but has not been identified as a version of any
    known script.

    The illustrations are intermingled with the text and appear to include
    male and female human figures (naked and clothed), stars, signs of the 
    Zodiac, flowers, pipes and vats, and many other curious figures.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  What's available on the net?

A:  There is an Internet mailing list for people interested in the
    Voynich Manuscript, run by Jim Gillogly (jim@rand.org).  
    
        To subscribe:      [TBS]

        To post:           send mail to voynich@rand.org

        To unsubscribe:    [TBS]

        (Lately this has been a low-volume mailing list, however.)

     There is no Usenet newsgroup.
     
     There are two ftp sites with Voynich stuff:  

                rand.org:/pub/voynich

                netlib.att.com:/netlib/att/math/reeds 
                 (also reachable as 
                  http://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/index.html) 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q:  Where can I get more information?

A:  The most extensive document about the Voynich Manuscript appears to be
    a monograph written by M.E. D'Imperio in the late 1970's:
    
        M.E. D'Imperio, _The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma_

    Reprints of this intriguing, 137-page book are available from:

                         Aegean Park Press
                         P.O. Box 2837
                         Laguna Hills, CA 92653

                         (714) 586-8811

    The monograph also includes a bibliography of over 300 books and
    articles either about the manuscript or about possibly related 
    subjects (e.g. secret languages, alchemy, botany, Cabbala, Roger
    Bacon, Dr. Dee, etc.)

    An article by Jim Reeds on the Voynich Manuscript appeared in the 
    January 1995 issue of _Cryptologia_ magazine.  This magazine is
    published by:

                          Rose-Hulman Institute
                          5500 Wabash
                          Terre Haute, IN 47803

                          (812) 877-1511                 
               
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Compiled by Bruce Grant (bgrant@umcc.ais.org)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

From rand.org!jim Sat Jul 29 13:35 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199507291738.KAA02991@rand.org>
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 95 13:35 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich expert dies
Status: OR


I learned last week that Prescott Currier, a member of the 1960's "Voynich
Manuscript Study Group" and discoverer of the A and B hands, has recently
died.

Unfortunately, I have no further details.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Wed Aug 09 17:30:40 +0100 1995
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cc: Michael.Roe@cl.cam.ac.uk
Subject: Voynich MS progress report
Date: Wed, 09 Aug 1995 17:30:40 +0100
From: Mike Roe <Michael.Roe@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <"swan.cl.cam.:106120:950809163106"@cl.cam.ac.uk>
Status: OR



Voynich Manuscript Progress Report
==================================

Michael Roe,
9th August 1995

A while back, Jacques Guy suggested that we write up what we've beeen doing
on the Voynich manuscript. Well, I've mostly been doing other things (like
real work ...) but this is what I've been up to Voynich-wise.

1. Comparison with the decoding of other scripts

There are published accounts of the procedures that were used to decipher
other scripts, particular Linear B and Mayan:

  ``The Decipherment of Linear B''
   John Chadwick
   Cambridge University Press, 1958

   ``Breaking the Maya Code''
   Michael D Coe                                    [no relation! even though
   Published by Thames and Hudson, 1992             [our names differ in only
                                                    [one character...

The Mayan script and calendar system is a very interesting distraction,
even if it isn't particularly relevant to the Voynich MS.

Both of these books explain that you can estimate whether a script is
alphabetic, syllabic or logographic from the number of symbols it uses.
Based on the small number of symbols it uses, the Voynich MS appears to be
an alphabetic script. Linear B is syllabic, while Mayan is partly logographic 
and partly syllabic. Many of the specific techniques used in deciphering 
Linear B or Mayan aren't applicable to alphabetic scripts (which we hypothesize
the Voynich MS to be).


It is worth noting that the decipherment of both Linear B and Mayan depended
on the decipherers knowing a relative or descendant of the underlying language. 
(Greek and Yucatec respectively). As far as I know, no combination of
unknown script + unknown language has *ever* been solved.

2, Comparison with other texts

A knowledge of likely word-patterns in the Voynich MS may help us solve it.
To this end, it's worth looking at other (deciphered!) texts that may be
in a similar style and subject matter. On the basis that the Voynich MS
is most likely from Western Europe, and on a medicinal/herbal subject matter,
I took a look at the Greek text of Dioscorides' De Materia Medica. 

Again, this is a very interesting distraction. The main useful results
Voynich-wise are:

(a) I now know how to display and type in accented Greek text on a Unix
    machine running X Windows...

(b) Many of the technical terms in Dioscorides are virtually identical to
    the modern English word. This is, of course, because English borrows these
    words from greek.  It occurs to me that whatever language the Voynich MS
    is in, it may use a large number of Greek technical terms (because the
    main underlying language doesn't have equivalent words).

(c) Dioscorides uses lithos (excuse the Romanisation: lambda-iota-theta-omicron
    sigma), with a qualifying phrase, for almost every mineral substance.
    This sort of stuff is good known-plaintext material!

3. Cryptanalytical Results

3.1 Optimising the techniques

I noticed that most of the cryptanalytical operations I was doing were
of the general form select-sort-count-tabulate. I started out doing this
will a collection of Unix programs; the Unix 'sort' and 'uniq' programs
are particularly useful for this kind of thing. I wondered if I could do
this more efficiently using a relational database, and tried it out.

It turns out that using a relational database does give a considerable
speed improvement in the cryptanalytical calculations; it's also a lot
easier to write SQL queries than messing about with Unix commands.
The penalty is a loss of flexibility; you need to have a good idea of
the type of tabulations you want to do before you can design the relational
database structure. However, given the results I had previously obtained
using Unix commands, I had a fair idea of which items of information were
interesting.

[ There is a passage in Michael Coe's book on the Mayan script where he
  scorns the use of computers. In the case he talks about, I think he was right
  not to use computers.  Computer databases are only useful once you know what
  information you're interested in, and you can't know that until you've made 
  at least some progress on the decipherment.
]

3.2 Morpology

I'm trying to use word-frequency counts (tabulated and sorted by substrings
of the word) to unravel the morphology of Voynich ``words'', The idea is that
once I have an idea of how the words are constructed, I can then attack the
grammar by identifying common sequences of word-classes (rather than common
sequences of words).

3.3 Pronunciation

In Michael Coe's book, he observes that all known human scripts (including
Chinese) have a strong phonetic element, even if the script is mainly
logographic. (Friedman conjectured that the Voynich MS was in an artificial
language of the "a priori" type. The impression I got from the introductory
chapters of Coe's book on Mayan is that "a priori" languages don't, and can't, 
exist)

>From this we might conclude the the Voynich script (assuming it isn't nonsense)
contains phonetic information. In support of the conjecture, observe that
it's easy to assign phonemes to Voynich glyphs in such a way that the text
is pronouncable.

The problem is, you don't get a unique solution this way. There are many ways
to pronounce the text, and you can only decide which is ``right'' by
using some other pieces of information.

However, I believe that attempting to pronounce the text (even if the
pronounciation turns out to be completely wrong) gives some useful clues
to the structure of the language.

The Voynich script appears to have slightly more vowels and far fewer 
consonants  than modern English. On this basis, I convert Voynich symbols
into the Greek alphabet and then pronounce the result (It's useful to have
an extra vowel, and words with vowel clusters like oo:ion (omega-
iota_subscript-omicron-nu) look far more reasonable when written in Greek).
When you do this to the Voynich MS, the result looks *absolutely nothing* like 
the Greek language, even though it is pronouncable.

3.4 Repeated Phrases

In most texts, there is are one or more sequences of words that occur 
repeatedly. Identifying these can give be a help in decipherment.

[ There is an amusing example of this in the Mayan script. There is a sequence
  of glyphs commonly found on ceramic drinking vessels. When the script was
  deciphered, a subsequence of this sequence turned out to mean (approximately)
  ``painted drinking vessel'' ...]

So, what are the common subsequences in the Voynich MS?

When looking for repeated sequences, there is a danger of missing them,
because the repeats aren't exactly the same. This can arise in several ways:

(a) Transcription errors. It's hard to transcribe a script you can't read,
    and the machine-readable transcription is bound to contain quite a few
    errors. This can lead to repeats being missed because the second
    occurance is mangled during transcription.
(b) Glyph variants. If the same character can be written several different
    ways, and the author of the text knows this (but we don't) then we can
    miss repeats because the second occurance is written in a visually 
    different but functionally identical way.
(c) The rules of the language may permit the same thing to be said in
    several different ways. Writers in most languages vary the form of
    expression of common phrases to make the text more interesting for
    the reader. [The notable exception to this is ISO International Standards,
    which try very hard to always use the same expression for the same
    concept, in order to minimise the risk of errors in translation. This is 
    one of the reasons why International Standards are so awful to read :-) ]

In view of this, I use the following algorithm for finding text repeats:

(a) The text is reduced to a ``fingerprint'' of the text. This is an
    information-loosing transformation that tries to make likely transcription
    errors or glyph variants of a text have the same fingerprint as the
    original text. This increases the chance of finding repeats, at the
    penalty of false positives: different texts that have the same fingerprint
    by chance.

    The ``fingerprint'' algorithm is designed taking into account the written
    form of the glyphs (and hence likely reading errors); known likely
    transcription errors (data obtained by comparing independent transcriptions
    of the same sections of the manuscript, e.g. First Study Group vs
    D'Imperio); possible sound-alike writings of a word (homophones) (using
    information from the phonetic anlaysis); possible equivalent-meaning
    words (from the morphological analysis). 

(b) For every glyph in the text, a context record is created, containing the
    fingerprint for that glyph and the following 30 or so glyphs. [NB The
    fingerprint algorithm does not necessarily work on a glyph-by-glyph basis,
    it may take into account adjoining glyphs] If necessary,  read the following
    lines of text to get enough context. (This avoids missing repeats that
    are broken across line boundaries).

(c) The entire set of context records is sorted into alphabetical order.
    We don't know what the true collation order of the Voynich script is, but
    for this purpose it doesn't matter. The idea is that records that start
    in the same way will be sorted together.

(d) Scan through the sorted records and find pairs of records which are the
    same in the first N characters. (N being 20 or so). These are easy to
    find, as pairs will be next to each other in the sorted sequence.

(e) From the context records of the matched pairs, go back to the original
    transcribed text to see whether this is really a match or a ``false
    drop'', If necessary, re-transcribe the lines in question from the
    microfilm to resolve this question.

Preliminary results:

The text contains a sequence which is repeated not just twice, but four
or more times. Significantly, all of the occurances are in ``Author B''
text:

(The following lines are longer than 80 characters, and so may get mangled
by some peoples terminals/e-mail systems. Sorry if this happens!)

                                       **************************
<f84r.10>          4OPS*89.9FCC89.4OFAEOE.ZC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.4OFCC89.SC89.RAM.SC9.OPAR.8
<f43r.12>                   8OR.ZOE.4OFOE.ZC89.4OPC89.4OFCC89.4OFO89.OFCC89.OPC89.ZC89.UP9.9P9.89.
<f75v.21>       4OFAN.OEZC*9.4OFAN.8AR.OE.ZC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.4OPAR.OEZC89.OE89-
<f84r.3>                       4OFCC9.8AR.ZC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.4OFC89.SC89.OFAM.SC9.4OFC89.8AR.OEAO89-
                                           ***********************
<f84r.3>                       4OFCC9.8AR.ZC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.4OFC89.SC89.OFAM.SC9.4OFC89.8AR.OEAO89-
<f79v.12>                           BZ89.OVS89.4OFC89.4OPCC89.4OFC89.4OEPC89.4OPC89.OF9-
<f77r.34>                              4OFCC89.4OPC89.4OFCC89.4OFCC89.4OFCC9.RAM.AE-8SCCOE.SCC89.4OPAM.4OPCC89.4OPC89.RAM-
<f83r.7> 2OEZC8.EZCC89.4CCC89.4OF9.O4OE.RZCC89.4OFC89.4OPCC89.4OPCC89-
<f84r.10>          4OPS*89.9FCC89.4OFAEOE.ZC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.4OFCC89.SC89.RAM.SC9.OPAR.8

There are also a few twice-only repeats:

                                               *********************** 
<f112v.33>                                 OR.SCCOR.OFCC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.SC8AM.OFCCC89.OPAM.SCCFC9.SOE-
<f82v.5> 2OESC89.ESC89.8OEZC89.4OFAE.ZCX9.ZC9.PCCOE.OPCC89.4OFC89-4OPC9.4OFAE.ZCF9.4OFAE.SC89.4OPAESC89-


                       ***********************
<f26r.4> 4OFC89.SCO2.9PC89.4OFC89.9PC89.SCFC89.8AM.O8AJ.2AE89-
<f81v.12>  4OE.OE.S89.ZC89.4OFC89.9PC89.SCPC89.EFC8C9.9PC89-

                                                 *******************************
<f77r.8> 2ZC89.4OPAM.SC89.4OFAM.ZC89.4OESCC89.4OFCC89.EOE-4OPCC89.4OPCC89.4OFC89.ZCC8.4CC9.2AM.ZCCP9.4OFCC89.EOE-
<f75r.37>     4OFC89.89.ZCCP9.4OFC89.4OFCC89.4OFCCC89.EOE-4OPCC89.4OFCC89.4OFC89.4OFC89.4OFCC89.E89-


4. Possible Future Experiments

4.1 Sukhotin's Algorithm

I'd like to see the results of running Sukhotin's algorithm on classical Greek,
Yucatec and Nahuatl. I don't particularly believe that the Voynich MS is
written in any of these languages, but is would be it would be useful to
get a better idea of the natural variation in vowel-consonant patterns across
real human languages. 

4.2 Word-list analysis

One possible theory is that Voynich '4' means 'and'. If this is the case, some
passages in the MS are long ingredient lists separated by 'and' . (With some
ingredients repeated, which is a bit of a blow for this theory), It would
be interesting to build a database of all such '4' groups, and then analyse
them for their similarities, differences, and common patterns.

==============================================================================

From rand.org!jim Fri Aug 11 12:54 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199508111656.JAA13412@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 95 12:54 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich essay by M. Roe
Status: OR

Long live Roe, & his recent essay!

> In Michael Coe's book, he observes that all known human scripts (including
> Chinese) have a strong phonetic element, even if the script is mainly
> logographic. (Friedman conjectured that the Voynich MS was in an artificial
> language of the "a priori" type. The impression I got from the introductory
> chapters of Coe's book on Mayan is that "a priori" languages don't, and can't, 
> exist)

I think Coe and Friedman are talking at cross purposes.  Friedman meant
"languages" like Wilkins's and Dalgarno's.  These things certainly existed;
whether they are languages is another question.

I agree with Coe on the phonetic element of all scripts.  A related point
concerns the state of linguistic knowledge of the VMS authors.  If written
in 1575 or 1600, before the popularization of logographic scripts that
took place in the next century (by, say, Kircher) all the authors would have
as models of exotic writing would be funny alphabets:  Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
& so on, which can be all regarded as simply supplying funny shapes for 
familiar sounds.  This no matter whether the VMS is forgery or serious.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Aug 21 14:31:27 BST 1995
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Date:         Mon, 21 Aug 95 14:31:27 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Hello &...
To: voynich@rand.org
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi,
My first posting on this list.
I would be interested in anybody who has done (or knows of) word
transition probabilities in the VMS.
I am thinking of a method to highlight possible errors in the
transcription.
Thanks for any info.

Gabriel  G.Landini@bham.ac.uk





From rand.org!jim Mon Aug 21 11:18:55 PDT 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich: Administrivia
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 95 11:18:55 PDT
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>
Status: OR

I've just done some long-needed list updating on the Voynich Ms mailing list,
and added a bunch of new members.  Feel free to post updates that may be
redundant with what you've sent before, since there's a new audience.

For the new members, check the ftp archive at rand.org:pub/voynich -- the
"Welcome" message there is a bit out of date, but still perhaps useful.
The file "mini-faq" is an introduction by Bruce Grant that points to Jim
Reeds' ftp archive, among other resources.

If you've forgotten why you wanted to be on the Voynich list and want to be
off again, let me know at "voynich-request@rand.org".

	Jim Gillogly
	Trewesday, 29 Wedmath S.R. 1995, 18:18

From rand.org!jim Mon Aug 21 15:22 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199508211923.MAA22964@rand.org>
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 95 15:22 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich Administrivia
Status: OR


Jim Gillogly, would it be possible to see a geographical breakdown of
the list members, or at least have a count of members?  Or even to see
the list itself?

Jim Reeds

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Aug 21 13:06:50 PDT 1995
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Message-Id: <199508212006.NAA20633@mycroft.rand.org>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich Administrivia 
In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 21 Aug 95 15:22:00 -0400.
             <199508211923.MAA22964@rand.org> 
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>
Reply-To: jim@rand.org
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 95 13:06:50 PDT
Sender: jim@rand.org
Status: OR


> reeds@research.att.com writes:
> Jim Gillogly, would it be possible to see a geographical breakdown of
> the list members, or at least have a count of members?  Or even to see
> the list itself?

There are 92 people on the list at the moment; the domain breakdown is:

	37: edu          2: ch
	18: com          2: ca
	 7: uk           2: bitnet
	 4: gov          1: se
	 4: au           1: nz
	 3: us           1: no
	 3: org          1: il
	 2: net          1: ie
	 2: de           1: fr

I'm pleased to see that we have a strong non-US contingent.

Rather than list the members, I'd prefer to encourage everyone speak up or
lurk as you feel moved.  If you're motivated to find out the True Names,
though, feel free to do an "expn" to our mail daemon at rand.org --
that'll list everybody.  I really ought to move it to Majordomo one of
these days... seems to be the standard.  On the other hand, we're one of
the few mailing lists that haven't been hit by some advertising spam
lately; the perps of the most recent one interrograted all the Majordomo
servers they could find to do their business.

Judging from the comments of people on joining, they/you are hoping for
many different kinds of gratification from the list: linguistic,
cryptological, alchemistic, New Age enlightenment, and probably a number
of others.  My own interest is cryptological, but this is everybody's list --
feel free to bring up whatever you think may shed light on the mystery.

A bit of info -- I spoke recently with a British TV producer who was
trying to find someone who believed (for the record) that the Voynich Ms.
actually says something sensible; I kept suggesting names and she kept
telling me that person had died.  Perhaps it's safest to stay skeptical...

	Jim Gillogly
	Trewesday, 29 Wedmath S.R. 1995, 19:55

From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 13:55:20 BST 1995
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Date:         Tue, 22 Aug 95 13:55:20 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      About "B" and "J" in VMS
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi all,
I've just run a character frequency programme in the VMS
files. (here I am assuming that my programme works ok ;-)
I found that there are only one "B" and one "J".
Are these "real" characters?
Only 1 appearance makes me feel that these may be other symbols
misslabelled. Any comments?

I was about to write a font substituion for the pc in msdos, so
I can "see" the VMS as near as I can to the original, but I am
realising that the only font translation I have (from VMS character
to ASCII) are from Bennett's book. Is there a table or something
in which I can look what each character appearing in the FSG.NEW
should lool like?
Thanks to any pointers.
Best wishes to all

64BR1EL


From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 10:41 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199508221507.IAA28789@rand.org>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 95 10:41 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich transcription alphabets
Status: OR


Gabriel Landini writes

> I've just run a character frequency programme in the VMS
> files. (here I am assuming that my programme works ok ;-)
> I found that there are only one "B" and one "J".
> Are these "real" characters?

He is working from 

	netlib.att.com:/netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/FSG.new

which is in the "First Study Group" transcription alphabet, which does not
have B or J.  These are typos.  This alphabet is illustrated on page 97
of D'Imperio's book, in my Cryptologia paper, and (in Postscript form)
in a draft of my paper, in
	
	netlib.att.com:/netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/wff.ps

There are other transcription alphabets.  The voynich.orig and voynich.now
files in rand.org:pub/voynich are in the "Currier" alphabet, also illustrated
in D'Imperio's book.  Jacques Guy has another, which we call "Frogguy",
in many ways more rational than the other two.  Jacques has a voynich editor
for IBM compatibles, rand.org:pub/voynich/voyedit.zip, which might be of great
use to you.



Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 15:55:17 BST 1995
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Date:         Tue, 22 Aug 95 15:55:17 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Re:This is only partly a test
Reply-To: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR


Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@DE.ESA.ESOC.VMPROFS> said:
[...]
>For what it's worth, I am not convinced it's a hoax or 'just'
>a piece of art. This opinion is based on the word frequency count
>which is very realistic.
[...]
Where is the information on the word frequency count?
(At this very moment I ma runing my own word frequency cont as well!)
Thanks

Gabriel


From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 10:33:35 EST 1995
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Date: Tue, 22 Aug 95 10:33:35 EST
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject: This is only partly a test
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello anybody who can read this......

Since I got some mail from Jim Gillogly and Jim Reeds, I decided
to try and send out a message myself.
For what it's worth, I am not convinced it's a hoax or 'just'
a piece of art. This opinion is based on the word frequency count
which is very realistic.
Since I haven't read Mary d'Imperio's book yet, I won't say too
much. I'm now waiting for it from the library (which could take
weeks).
If anybody has some good suggestions on how I can  get my own copy,
I would be very interested....

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 16:47:19 BST 1995
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Date:         Tue, 22 Aug 95 16:47:19 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Voynich transcription alphabets
Reply-To: reeds@research.att.com
To: voynich@rand.org
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

reeds@com.att.research said:
>> I've just run a character frequency programme in the VMS
>> files. (here I am assuming that my programme works ok ;-)
>> I found that there are only one "B" and one "J".
>> Are these "real" characters?
>
>He is working from
>
>	netlib.att.com:/netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/FSG.new
>which is in the "First Study Group" transcription alphabet, which does not
>have B or J.  These are typos.  This alphabet is illustrated on page 97
>of D'Imperio's book, in my Cryptologia paper, and (in Postscript form)
>in a draft of my paper, in
>
>netlib.att.com:/netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/wff.ps
>
Well, I thought that this was the most up-to-date version :-(
Is it, then?
What is everybody else working with? the voynich.now or the FSG.NEW?
Shouldn't we all concentrate on one version and try to update it?

Gabriel



From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 17:02:58 BST 1995
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Date:         Tue, 22 Aug 95 17:02:58 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Word frequency count
Reply-To: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
To: voynich@rand.org
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi Rene (and all the rest voynichers)
Yes, as Jim said, I am working on the FSG.NEW version of the VMS.

I just finished a preliminary run of the word frequency.
I follows Zipf's law (roughly) not very good fit at the most common
words range (but so are many other English texts).

My run reports 33442 words. Counted as "word" are all the words (of course)
and the ones which are labelled with brackets, or group of words labelled
within brackets i.e.: ADE(,|EFA,EFA9,ETTA) this example would count as one
word in my analysis.

I am willing to post my results here (but the file is relatively large) and
see somebody else's word counts.
Any info on how/where to upload greately appreciated.

Cheers,

64BR1EL


From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 17:11:46 EST 1995
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Date:         Tue, 22 Aug 95 17:11:46 EST
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      Word frequency count
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

In reply to Gabriel Landini:

I have made my own word frequency count, starting with the
file 'voynich.now' from rand.org and removing comments and
other embellishments.
The count was done entirely using UNIX csh scripts. I get the
impression I do not have the complete MS, but I have a large
enough chunk to come up with some significant numbers.
There is some information in the rec.games.puzzles FAQ
about this. This FAQ, by the way, has a lot of interesting
information. That and what is in rand.org is what I have
read so far.

A URL for this FAQ is:

 gopher://gopher.cs.ttu.edu:70/00/Entertainment/Games/Puzzles/cryptology

I will gladly send you the statistics I have so far.

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Wed Aug 23 09:25:06 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
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Subject: Voynich transcription alphabets
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 09:25:06 +1000 (EST)
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I am putting the final touches to a much improved
program to translate from any one transcription
system into another. At the moment, I am sweating
over the documentation, and a couple of examples
(it will be able, given the right translation rules,
to translate from pinyin into Giles-Wade for Chinese
for instance, not a trivial task).  

From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 22 23:21:02 0400 1995
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From: bgrant@umcc.umcc.umich.edu (Bruce Grant)
Subject: Currier alphabet .BMP
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 1995 23:21:02 -0400 (EDT)
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Content-Length: 3113      
Status: OR

For anyone does not have access to a copy of the Currier
transcription alphabet, the attached is an image of it as a
Windows .BMP (compressed and uuencoded).  To extract it, 
remove everything up to and including the "cut here" line,
uudecode the rest and unZIP the resulting file to get the
.BMP file, viewable with Windows PaintBrush.

Bruce Grant (bgrant@umcc.ais.org)
-----------------------cut here------------------------------
begin 664 voyalph1.zip
M4$L#!!0````(`)1F[QZ/SCT7!P<``/8H`@`,````5D]904Q02#$N0DU0[=U-
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M>-5__?W?]S^FS3_KU_?UZV/]WW^_3=.WZ<]IW\?M[_3Q<?]G^[--6O_SX\>/
M=<IR^SLMR_V?[<\V:?M_````````````````````````````````````````
M``````````````````````````````#@C4W+,SUWZ>/G-[?E/?.;P_2I+1K@
M(QN86DYG((,TP-B<5F'^<OH4`IE#NYSKQ;]>*POM8&[U]DVAH:7\0MQQ^C!'
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M4^7>_5#\H#;Y/2&_-/\PZ1V4WQOT"!QS'!S_RA\``'B*V!V5+C-2-]42KW[#
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MK/(X!_7\*8\I_N`ZYY>?_';FS^-*U"ONG?^Z^[^;]OC^[S/S/SX.2IK_NO7X
M]0OY]Q;US]_W>Y$N^KC6D_/+XV*%YU7C<^COF5]<?O5AWPLJS7^VL_++\\<G
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MFSJ_=%J=.@/2`6<;<:)8U-I_5<Y?AWV%]E?&]/3VE_.K5S!Z?JG=Y./0M@=\
M/+]RYNOFMW?\3??-PO++Y=S/=XJW3$L=U.CY[4P_(K_MFRR7?_[A(^[XT_RM
MG-[*1U?R_+>_O[RTS5TOYYJ/KP$``````!YY>Y]MSF'$^S@=^<5E?&+AY]Y7
M.F=+3OJQ#9/?*`TP%TNEQ_9"@>1]_)*EH_"I6LJVG/J%;?G5XF]U8.>5"J3\
MPG>[I._V5LW6]8AM6F]ZJK)^4.)>17=>`SPMO]!FYOHQAMOW6=;'MBF]9>S\
MPH<][07N.;5Z>M>.X_#ZZ9/RB\NORZJW]18K_KG>$X\@L>W'%_*#/.]8\M59
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MX?[1:^47OX$\T/TQ?2\YOWJ7_'+YQ?OJ0?<!)+:_KD+OZ[:_>O84:V_7Z<[G
M]Y#ABD[/KV__UUU<OY-?^9-[O?SB\;$>_JK_L:46IH]Q_,CMH.<^_"?R"\,F
M7S2_<`(_3?7S)CO#=52+^<SU1WDFGJ\_ZJ4`````````O%_Y8)J>G\NJ[V_?
M1W*X_'J_Z/G=9]?OITW>&8^A?,O/\0].<]3W>Y_^>$.0G_Q.S>^D_<87CG_U
MY/KIL]8[2GZ'+O[$!BB_5\POC.*V\^#P9]YRXOAU\43V,V\9.+_X_.:3AR\Y
M<O%G/H0ZRF$0``"^9/3$^JQ^JTY+=6A5$=PGQM^HKR=2@5TJ4#R[_BT-@-!"
M_66K*R&GW@K65&<9"[3K>LU3.Y_WZD);G#ZU\I7N\0_Z!EA(XZ:<?=$XA2UO
MH7VLG2`'Y9>#&CR_N=S&WAU@[HP:)+^IWO^%_+KKSV/]=)C_U?+;<JJF3_>O
MW^V[2OO==\VOMPMXH/SJ_5PX(PGYU<>4_O5N^X86YJ^F7R"_^AL(Y\^WPT1Q
M9/G,^!M'Y'?V^=_.]4<8_Z_58?5??Y3OF//X@F%<K&HB`````$"__P%02P$"
M%``4````"`"49N\>C\X]%P<'``#V*`(`#````````````"``````````5D]9
?04Q02#$N0DU04$L%!@`````!``$`.@```#$'````````
`
end

From rand.org!jim Wed Aug 23 09:26:51 GMT 1995
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Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 09:26:51 GMT
From: MParry@mertcplc.demon.co.uk (Mark Parry)
Reply-To: MParry@mertcplc.demon.co.uk
Message-Id: <2339@mertcplc.demon.co.uk>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Dr John Dee
X-Mailer: PCElm 1.09
Lines: 82
Status: OR

Hi Guys,

I've just read one of Jim's posts asking people to come out
of the closet and introduce themselves.

I'm Mark Parry, I live in Swansea, South Wales, UK.

I'm a computer programmer and enjoy messing around with codes
and ciphers.

Although the VMS fascinates me, I have a copy of the Levitov book
I have for some time had a much bigger interest in Dr John Dee and
his cohort Edward Kelly.

If any of you have research Dee's life you will know that when
Kelly introduced himself to Dee he did so via a coded manuscript
that he claimed to have found buried at Glastonbury, although
there are other reports that say it was found somewhere in Wales.

For some time I though that this may have been related to the VMS,
however over a year ago I obtained photostat copies of a large
section of Dee's journal from the British Library, although a
very expensive service just owning copies of Dee's manuscripts
is weird in itself. They contain a lot of hand written text, mostly
in Latin (I think), however they also contain copies of the document
that Kelly broght to Dee.

If any of you are doing any form of handwriting analysis on the VMS
then you may be interested in copies of these documents as the main
text is certainly in Dee's handwriting and if Kelly was attempting
to dupe Dee the coded section maybe in Kelly's.

I can scan them as most format files and UUENCODE them for transmission
please mail me if you are interested.

The coded manuscript which Dee successfully managed to decode purports
to be information related to 10 treasure sites in England.

There is a lovely graphic which shows 10 circles each containing
a small picture that I presume is some form of location device
for finding the exact treasure location along with a coded version
of the site location.

The thing that I find very strange is that there is no reference to
Dee ever visiting the sites or deciding that the documents were
a forgery.

Derek Wilsons book "The World of Treasure" mentions the documents
which was how I managed to locate them in the British Library, but
compared to the original he appears to have some textual inaccuracies
was this deliberate.

There is a small reference in Charlotte Fell Smith's book "John Dee"
(1527-1608) but tht is all I have found.

If these doucments were genuine then why is there no other refereces
to people lookg for the treasure.

If they were fake then surely someone would have written it up in
one of the many books on Dee.

If any of you know of any other references and are willing to pass
them on I would be very grateful.

Be in touch.

Mark

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
+--+--+--+--+
| 9|13|16|99| Mark Parry - Mparry@mertcplc.demon.co.uk
+--+--+--+--+
| 7| 8|92|92|
+--+--+--+--+
|90|53| 7|19| The best of men is only a man at best,
+--+--+--+--+
|47|18|53| 7| And a hare, as everyone knows, is only a hare.
+--+--+--+--+                                        KW 1979
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Check out The Armchair Treasure Hunt Home Page at
http://sunacm.swan.ac.uk/~milamber/treasure
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

From rand.org!jim Wed Aug 23 11:09:02 BST 1995
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          Wed, 23 Aug 95 11:10:26 BST
Date:         Wed, 23 Aug 95 11:09:02 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      some "_" in FGS.NEW
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi all,
Working with the FSG.NEW file, I found a series of "_" in words:

    word        page     folio   line  word
1)  4ODAE_TOE   134      70r2     11     3
2)  PT_8G       149      76r      25     7
3)  T_G         159      81r      23     1
4)  _4ODCG      166      84v      30     1
5)  SC_OE       212     103r      40     2
6)  OHAM_O8AEG  213     103v      15    10
7)  8_M         234     116r      27     1
8)  ESC8G_ORAM  234     116r      27     3


I've been able to track 2) 3) & 4) in voinich.now and it seems that they
should be:
2) PT_8G  -> PTC8G
3) T_G    -> TCG
4) _4ODCG -> 4ODCG

If anybody has any comments, please let me know.

Gabriel











From rand.org!jim Wed Aug 23 16:30 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199508232040.NAA00707@rand.org>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 16:30 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich transcriptions with _ in them
Status: OR


Gabriel points out that the First Study Group transcription file
has a number of _ characters in it, which are not legal.  The actual
FSG transcription had blanks in these places, also illegal.  It seemed
safer to me to record them as '_' than as ' ' when going from 50 year
old printout paper to modern disk.

Gabriel identifies C as the correct value in a few places.  Maybe the
keypunch machines used in 1944 had keyboard layouts making this a likely
mistake? 

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Aug 24 09:01:32 +0930 1995
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Subject: Re: Dr John Dee
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Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <2339@mertcplc.demon.co.uk> from "Mark Parry" at Aug 23, 95 09:26:51 am
X-Face: ?W06YYQ22a;-Q&-70]HUGz2fu0$X>f<:?R#T(PLvOY'EY^w:_C^uZm3qiIaKy=HYvt">.%q}O/UWBT$j(b)+:%rS>LKiGb\Keo&?3FkM[n`<|_vBxKG2(HuKW(vEqg@JE"@42/4tuOYSO2%Sea@vnOA
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Mark Parry:
 If any of you have research Dee's life you will know that when
 Kelly introduced himself to Dee he did so via a coded manuscript
 that he claimed to have found buried at Glastonbury, although
 there are other reports that say it was found somewhere in Wales.

	Other faqs etc that I have read, indicated that EK obtained a similar
	manuscript from Jacob Eliezer while in Prague (rumoured to be the almost
	mythical Necronomicon)...

 For some time I though that this may have been related to the VMS,
 however over a year ago I obtained photostat copies of a large
 section of Dee's journal from the British Library, although a
 very expensive service just owning copies of Dee's manuscripts
 is weird in itself. They contain a lot of hand written text, mostly
 in Latin (I think), however they also contain copies of the document
 that Kelly broght to Dee.

	This wasn't his Liber Logaeth, perchance?

 I can scan them as most format files and UUENCODE them for transmission
 please mail me if you are interested.

	Please do, I would be greatly interested.

(A personal intro is coming later, promise)

	John Brazel

From rand.org!jim Sun Aug 27 09:39 BST 1995
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Date: Sun, 27 Aug 95 09:39 BST-1
From: jkozak@cix.compulink.co.uk (John Kozak  Acecomp Ltd)
Subject: Voynich tourism
To: voynich@rand.org
Reply-To: jkozak@cix.compulink.co.uk
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Status: OR

I'll have a few free days in Prague next week.  It occurs to me there 
should be some VM relevant material to peruse (a Rudolph II museum, for 
example?).  Any recommendations: or any requests for errands, for that  
matter?

John                                       jkozak@cix.compulink.co.uk


From rand.org!jim Mon Aug 28 12:12:25 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
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Subject: Transliteration program ready, but...
To: voynich@rand.org
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... the ftp connection to rand.org is unbelievably slow at
my end.  So I gave up. The whole thing, zipped, uuencoded, is
just 50K long. It includes:

Executable code, compiled using Turbo Pascal 5.5
Source code.
Documentation (12 pages)
A bit of Voynich.
A file containing the rules to translate that piece
  of Voynich from the First Study Group's system
  into one of mine.
A short text in Chinese, written in the pinyin system.
A file containing the rules to translate from pinyin
  into the Giles-Wade system.

I am going to try to upload that at garbo.uwasa.fi if
our ftp link will let me.

Meanwhile, if you want it in your mailbox, e-mail me:

j.guy@trl.oz.au



From rand.org!jim Sun Aug 27 19:23:54 PDT 1995
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From: jpeterso@kasson.cfa.org
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Date: Sun, 27 Aug 1995 19:23:54 PDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Dr John Dee
Status: OR

>From jim@rand.org Wed Aug 23 04:13:26 1995

On Aug 23, Mark Perry wrote,

> Although the VMS fascinates me, I have a copy of the Levitov book
> I have for some time had a much bigger interest in Dr John Dee and
> his cohort Edward Kelly.

> If any of you have research Dee's life you will know that when
> Kelly introduced himself to Dee he did so via a coded manuscript
> that he claimed to have found buried at Glastonbury, although
> there are other reports that say it was found somewhere in Wales.

I don't think this is correct.  Kelley introduced himself to Dee
on March 8, 1582 (old calendar) under the assumed name of Edward
Talbot.  He gave Dee his real name prior to November 15 after
an apparent falling out of 6 months duration.  The treasure map was
delivered to Dee on March 22, 1583.  Kelley told Dee (see pg 125 of my
1985 edition) that he had found it in Northwil Hill along with a boke (Book of St.
Dunstan) and an alchemical powder.  Dee was very worried about getting into
trouble with the law if he went around digging for the treasures,
and was therefore instructed by the spirits to bring back samples of earth
from the locations revealed in the scroll, wherewith they would produce the
treasures magically.  Kelley went off on this errand on May 10 and returned May 22.  However, the spirits never did produce the promised treasure.

Note also that one of Dee's first questions of the spirits at their March 1st
session ("action") was how he read a mysterious book he had come to possess.  This line of query continued and remained unsatisfied as far as I can tell from his manuscripts.  He called this mysterious manuscript Soyga and told the spirits,
   "Oh, my great and long desyre hath byn to be hable to read those
   Tables of Soyga." (pg 12 of my 1985 edition)

It has been suggested that this book Soyga may have been the Voynich Manuscript,
but I think this unlikely, since the VM isn't a book of tables.

> If any of you are doing any form of handwriting analysis on the VMS
> then you may be interested in copies of these documents as the main
> text is certainly in Dee's handwriting and if Kelly was attempting
> to dupe Dee the coded section maybe in Kelly's.

I have studied firsthand many samples of both Dee's and Kelley's handwriting,
and don't believe either of them were responsible for the VM.  It might
be possible that the VM was the model for _Liber Logaeth_, but I
haven't found any obvious evidence of this.


Joseph H. Peterson
  Hamazor hama asho bet
  http::
//kasson.cfa.org/~jpeterso/welcome.html

From rand.org!jim Tue Aug 29 10:58:43 BST 1995
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Date:         Tue, 29 Aug 95 10:58:43 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      FSG illegal characters
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi all,
I did a character frequency of the FSG.NEW file and found that there are
some illegal characters there.
I assumed that these must correspond to some others in the voynich.now
and therefore suggest the correction.
The first 8 are the same I mailed last week, the other are new.
I would be interested in any comments, whether these corrections should be
included or not.
Thanks

Gabriel  G.Landini@bham.ac.uk


Inconsistencies in the FSG.NEW file based on voynich.now

#   word         page  folio line word  found in        proposed
                                        voynich.now     correction
Character "_"
1)  4ODAE_TOE    134   70r2   11   3
2)  PT_8G        149   76r    25   7   BSC89 <f76r.26>    PTC8G
3)  T_G          159   81r    23   1   SC9   <f81r.23>    TCG
4)  _4ODCG       166   84v    30   1   4OFC9 <f84.v.28>   4ODCG
5)  SC_OE        212  103r    40   2
6)  OHAM_O8AEG   213  103v    15  10
7)  8_M          234  116r    27   1
8)  ESC8G_ORAM   234  116r    27   3

Character "B"
9)  DZC(G|B)      99  51r      7   4   XC9 <f51r.8>      DZCG

Character "1"
10) DZO1         105  54r     10   2   XO2 <f54.r>       DZO2
11) GDCO1        111  57r     14   2   9FCO2 <f57r.10>   GDCO2
12) 1CHG         128  68v3     2   3   4CP9  <f68v.2>    4CHG

Character "3"
13) 6H36E        184  89r2     4   9
14) 3C6E         184  89r2     4  10
15) 6H6EF3G      184  89r2     4  11

Character "6" (in addition to previous 3 cases)
16) 6H6E         184  89r2     4   5
17) 2C69         184  89r2     4   6
18) 269          184  89r2     4   7
19) 6EHA4        184  89r2     4   8

Character "7"
20) 4OESC7G      154  78v      3   3   4OEZC89 <f78v.3>  4OESC8G
21) 4OE,HC7G     156  79v     12   7   4OEPC89 <f79v.12> 4OEHC8G or 4OE,HC8G
22) 7SCG         156  79v     21   1   8ZC9 <f79v.21>    8SCG
23) TC7G         156  79v     24   5   SC89 <f79v.24>    TC8G
24) 4ODCC7G      157  80r      1   6   4OFCC89 <f80r.1>  4ODCC8G
25) TC7AR        158  80v     17   8   SC89R <f80v.17>   TC8AR or TC8GR
26) DOES7        158  80v     24   8   FOEZ8 <f80v.23>   DOES8
27) SC7G         159  81r     18   2   ZC89 <f81R.18>    SC8G
28) TC7G         163  83r     22   5   SC89 <f83r.22>    TC8G
29) 7SCO         232  115r    30   1

Character "9" (in addition to #17 and #18)
30) 9G           205  101r2    7  21
31) GHC9AR       215  104v    37   2
32) A9           216  105r    16  10

Character "J"
33) TCDCJR       118  66v      8   3

Character "W"
34) ODAEAW       202  99v     10   7

Character "X"
35) HZX            8  4v       5   3     ** <f4v.5>
36) HXG          169  85/86v6 22   2


[end]

From rand.org!jim Wed Aug 30 09:47:15 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9508292347.AA12847@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: Transliteration program available now
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 09:47:15 +1000 (EST)
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The slow connection was a fault at our end. I managed to upload
the program and the examples to the anonymous ftp site
garbo.uwasa.fi (yes, it's in Finland! Why not? They make
hi-tech TV sets and mobile phones!), where you can find
it in directory pc/linguistics under the name bitrans1.zip
It just 40K long. To get it, do 
ftp garbo.uwasa.fi
When asked for your name, say:
anonymous
When asked for your password, give your real e-mail address
(they carry out an automatic check)
Then do:
cd pc/linguistics
Don't forget to set the connection to binary (say: bin)
And finally, do:
get bitrans1.zip
Then have a look at other things there if you please
before you log out (bye).
Here is the description of the contents of bitrans1.zip:

File: bitrans1.zip
One line description: Bidirectional transliteration translator
Suggested Garbo directory: /pc/linguistics
Replaces:
Uploader name & email: Jacques B.M. Guy -- j.guy@trl.oz.au
Author or company: Jacques B.M. Guy
Email address: j.guy@trl.oz.au
Surface address: Telstra Research Laboratories, PO Box 249, Clayton 3168 Australia
Special requirement: nil
Shareware payment from private users: no
Shareware payment required from corporate users: no
Distribution limitations: gnu-like
Demo: no
Nagware: no
Self-documenting: no
External documentation included: yes (12 pages)
Source included: yes (Turbo Pascal)
Size: 36k compressed, 97k expanded

10-line description:

BiTrans will translate a text written in any transliteration system
(e.g. Chinese written in pinyin) into almost any other system (e.g. the
Giles-Wade system), provided that it is given the necessary translation
rules. BiTrans can also be used to simulate simple cases of phonological
evolution.

One of the example files provided contains the rules for translating
from pinyin into Giles-Wade. Those rules are fully commented and
can be used as a practical tutorial.

----------------------------------------------------------

By the way, the twelve-page doc contains a plug for the
Voynich interest group.

From rand.org!jim Fri Sep  1 12:34:46 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9509010234.AA23466@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: fsg2frog: a translator for voyedit
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 1995 12:34:46 +1000 (EST)
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These rules (fsg2frog), for use with bitrans, translate the FSG system into
the WYSIEWILL fonts of file voynich.fnt which is the default font
provided with voyedit. (WYSIEWILL: what you see is exactly what
it looks like... well, almost exactly).

You don't even have to use voyedit to see what the VMS looks
like. Just issue the command 

loadfnt voynich

Then, using your favourite textmode editor (edit will do, qedit 
will do, the built-in editor of Borland Pascal and C(++) will
do, the inbuilt editor of XTree will do), just view the
translated file. 

Then, when you are finished, to restore the standard character
set, say:

mode co80

I have uuencoded fsg2frog because it contains extended ASCII character. 
Here we go:

------------cut here----------------------------------------

begin 666 fsg2frog
M>RAC;VUM96YT*7T@>RAC;VUM96YT*7T-"B,H8V]M;65N="D@(RAC;VUM96YT
M*0T*.RAC;VUM96YT*2 [*&-O;6UE;G0I#0I0(-+5#0I&(-#5#0I((,;,#0I$
M(-?,#0I'((0-"D$@B T*4B" #0I+((: #0HR((D-"D\@APT*3"#;#0I.((;;
M#0I-((:&VPT*.""##0HT(,(-"D4@C T*0R"-#0I4(,C)#0I3(,_)#0I)((8-
M"E!:(,C3ULD-"D9:(,C1ULD-"DA:(,C'S<D-"D1:(,C8S<D-"E8@(($-"ED@
*((4-"C @("H-"D9:
 
end

From rand.org!jim Mon Sep  4 17:28:23 +0200 1995
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Date: Mon, 4 Sep 1995 17:28:23 +0200 (IST)
From: Giddy Landan <landan@ccsg.tau.ac.il>
To: Voynich group <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Introduction & FAQs
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.91-heb-2.05.950904172716.4902B-100000@ccsg.tau.ac.il>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Status: OR


Hi all,

I've been a silent member of the Voynich mailing list for about three years
now, and it's high time that I'll introduce myself. I'm a Ph.D. student
in Molecular Evolution at the zoology department at Tel-Aviv University.
Though I'm affiliated with the Life Sciences Faculty here, my training is
mainly in statistics and computer sciences. I also work in a software
firm (pure research won't bring the gravy home :-( ).

And to the promised FAQs:
	   
* I once had a pointer to the mailing list archive (I believe it was called
  "digest"). Does it still exists? Where can I get it?
* The Ultimate VMS FAQ: How/Where can one get a photocopy of the ms ?????
  Would  some good soul duplicate his/her copy for other list
  members (for cost) ?? I vaguely remember some talk about creating a
  depository for limited duplication for list members, and of a scheme
  to coordinate transcription of the untranscribed folios.

Ciao,
Giddy


-----------------------+ "Of all decades in our history, a wise man would
Giddy Landan           |  choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in."
landan@ccsg.tau.ac.il  | -  G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age.


From rand.org!jim Mon Sep  4 22:07:03 0700 1995
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	Mon, 4 Sep 95 22:07:03 -0700
Date: Mon, 4 Sep 95 22:07:03 -0700
From: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
Message-Id: <9509050507.AA07378@saul6.u.washington.edu>
X-Sender: kkt@saul6.u.washington.edu
To: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.3.91-heb-2.05.950904172716.4902B-100000@ccsg.tau.ac.il> (message from Giddy Landan on Mon, 4 Sep 1995 17:28:23 +0200 (IST))
Subject: Re: Introduction & FAQs
Status: OR

Hi, Giddy,

I've introduced myself before but not recently, so I'll go again:

I'm a staff member of the University of Washington Libraries, in
Seattle.  I work in Acquisitions and Cataloging.  I have modest
knowledge of computer programming -- enough for small projects but not
large ones.  And, for anyone else who lives in the Seattle area, I
have a pretty good collection of photocopies of Voynich sources;
nothing that's unique or anything, but useful if you want to get an
idea what's in them.  Mostly they're the items from the D'Imperio
bibliography.

As for getting ahold of a photocopy of the manuscript, the legal and
proper way is to write to 

	Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
	Public Services Department
	Yale University
	P.O. Box 208240
	New Haven, CT 06520-8240
	U.S.A.

Refer to MS 408, their catalog number for the Voynich Manuscript.
They will send you a form for you to specify what use you will make of
the photocopy, and promising not to reproduce it, and an amount to
prepay.  When I did this, about a year ago, it cost $35.00 for a
microfilm and $45.00 for a photocopy made from the microfilm.  (I
decided to just get the film, since that's one less step of
photography to blurr the images.)  It's too bad that means you'd have
wait for their first reply and then write a second time, but that
seems to be the way it works.  They answered pretty promply, at least
when I did it.
	
Hope this helps,

-- Patrick Scheible

From rand.org!jim Tue Sep  5 15:56 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199509052032.NAA21792@rand.org>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 95 15:56 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich book to be reprinted
Status: OR


Just a quick note:  Last week I met Wayne Barker, the publisher of
Aegean Park Press.  He told me that he will be reissiuing M. E. 
D'Imperio's book, "The Voynich Manuscript - an Elegant Enigma," 
which I consider the very best book on the subject.  It should be
ready very soon: next month, perhaps?  He said he had been getting
a very large number of requests, presumably from readers of this list.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Sep  5 16:39:05 0400 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Response to Micvhael Roe
Status: OR


Folks

My thanks to Michael Roe for his writeup of 1995 August 9.
Here are a few of my own comments on his comments.

a. IF the VMS is language written in a script, then I agree
   the script is alphabetic, for the reasons he cites, and
   based likewise on Ventris' reasoning about Linear B.

b. No, to the best of my knowledge, "unknown script + unknown
   language" has never been solved.  If Linear B had not
   encoded greek, it is an open question how far Ventris'
   decipherment would have gone, but the experience with
   Linear A suggests it wouldn't have gone very far.

   However, what Linear B does prove is that you *can*
   crack the problem of unknown script + pretty much
   arbitrary language, provided a reasonable dialect
   or cognate of the language is known.  Is it reasonable
   to assume that the underlying language of the VMS is
   a known language?  If unknown, how was it lost?

c. Again, Roe's point that the technical terms in the VMS
   may be crackable independently is a good one; if we use
   mostly greek and arabic loan words in our technical books
   it's not impossible the hypothetical Utopians who wrote the
   VMS did so too.

d. We can assign sounds to the Voynich script in such a way
   that the result is pronounceable.  Unfortunately, we can
   do the same to the notes of the diatonic scale, so this
   is not a proof that the VMS script is indeed largely
   phonetic, though it is strong evidence.  The comments about
   the strangeness of the vowel/consonant ratios and patterns
   accord with my observations.

   And yes, there are many, many problems with getting the
   "right" pronunciation or spelling.  To elaborate using a
   language with which I'm tolerably familiar - the Egyptian
   hieroglyphic script provides numerous ways to write any
   word, with various combinations of consonantal, syllabic,
   and ideographic signs.

   Take the word 'ntr' - 'neter' if you want to pronounce it
   badly - which means "god".  A scribe pressed for time or
   space can write this as one sign, an axe, read "neter".
   More often, he would write it as an axe (the first syllable),
   a cake (consonant 't') and an open mouth (consonant 'r').

   To either form, he could append a "determinative" - an
   unpronounced ideographic sign that acts as a classificatory
   suffix - in this case, a picture of a seated man with a
   beard, which classifies the preceding word as having
   something to do with deity.  Likewise the word 'rn',
   meaning "name", might or might not be followed by the
   determinative indicating speech, a seated man holding a
   finger to his lips.

   (By the way, they're not logographs.  A determinative isn't
    a word, it's a semantic category.  A really useful concept,
    in my opinion.)

   As you might expect, these features play havoc with any
   simple vowel/consonant discrimination algorithm, and also
   create patterns of preferred word-initial and word-final
   symbols.

e. Errors in transcription.  I confess to losing about zero
   nights' sleep over this.  There is enough redundancy in
   any natural language to cope with a lot of noise, misspellings,
   transcription errors &c, and a few % of bad data shouldn't in
   any way impede our ability to decode the text.  The VMS is not,
   after all, the inerrant word of Rex Mundi.

f. Yes, if '4' means anything, it means "and".  But I'm not too
   worried about repeated ingredients in lists, for several reasons

   - maybe they're repeated operations?  "knead & let rise & knead
     & let rise" is how I bake my bread

   - maybe the ingredients have to be added in a specific order?
     "add pasta, cheese, sauce, pasta, cheese, sauce, breadcrumbs"

   - maybe each item represents one unit of an ingredient, and the
     herbalist repeated the name to indicate more than one unit?

   By the way, how many scripts have evolved a contraction for
   the word "and"?  I count english, german, latin, greek, and
   arabic.  How many artificial languages came with one ready
   made?  There, I haven't a clue.

Robert


From rand.org!jim Tue Sep  5 20:05 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199509060006.RAA00733@rand.org>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 95 20:05 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich transcription errors in FSG.new
Status: OR

Gabriel Landini has found a list of illegal characters in the 
file netlib.att.com:/netlib/att/math/reeds/FSG.new.  All 36 instances
he found are present in the original FSG transcription.  That is, they 
are mistakes by Friedman and company, not by Reeds and Guy.  Let me add 
to his list:  on page 117 there is an illegal '2Z', on page 134 there is
an illegal 'OZ', and on p 234 there is a 'CZ'.  I think the OZ is actually
my mistake: on relooking at the FSG printout, I now see a very over-inked
DZ.  I think the CZ should be CA.  I have not looked to see what the 2Z
should be.

FSG.new is meant to be the Reeds-Guy edition of the FSG transcription of
the VMS, and does not purport to be more accurate than the FSG itself.

Gabriel is taking first steps towards fixing the mistakes in the FSG
transcription, filling in the proportion

	voynich.orig	:	voynich.now
			::
	FSG.new		:	FSG.landini

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 06 14:57:04 BST 1995
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Date:         Wed, 06 Sep 95 14:57:04 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Comparing versions of the VMS
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi,
I am curious about how well the transcriptions of the VMS agree.
Regardless that looking in the photocopies would solve the problem
(I haven't got the photocopies), a great deal could be
done by matching common parts and looking for the "non matching" ones.
After all and regardless of which version is better than the other,
the fact that they were transcribed independently gives some start
point to "consider right" (many of you may not think so) what both groups
transcribed equally.

For instance, thanks to Jacques Guy we have a very nice translation
programme which allows to write you own set of rules.
I thought of writing a Currier-to-FSG set of rules, so then I could
compare the FSG.new with the (incomplete) voynich.now.
This set of rules is quite straightforward since Jim Reeds kindly
sent some time ago the transcription alphabets to this mail list.
>From that is evident that there are 2 letters from the FSG that
do not map to anything in Currier's. These are V and Y. I found in
voynich.now a "nu - new character" and "picnic table" which seem to correspond
to the Y an V respectively. Some Y's in FSG do not correspond to
anything in voynich.now.

Now, a more complicated issue are the 6 and 7 characters in Currier's.
I searched for all the 6's occurring in voynich.now and of those (total 50):
42 are K in FSG
1  is  G  "  "
1  is  R  "  "
1  is  O  "  "
4  are 8  "  "
1  is  DZ "  "
(I may have missed a couple, but a more detailed list will be done later).
so, for the sake of translation, 6=K seems reasonable -although any difference
between J and 6 in Currier's is lost.

For character 7 in Currier's, 13 of those correspond to "K" in FSG and
9 "7"'s correspond to "8".

Apart from these, the translation should pose no problem.
Any thoughts on how to treat the "7" from voynich.now?
Regards,

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Thu Sep  7 15:42:04 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9509070542.AA29482@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: Silly mistake in bitrans
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 1995 15:42:04 +1000 (EST)
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Status: OR

It had to happen... I must have zipped one of the earlier (wrong)
versions that litter my hard disk.

Line 838 of the Pascal source code:

if Overwrite then Rewrite(Outtext) else Append(Outtext);

This causes an error when the output file to be appended to
does not exist.

Should be:

if Overwrite then Rewrite(Outtext)
else begin if not FileExists(Outfile) then Rewrite(Outtext);
	   Append(Outtext)
end;

Change it as above, and recompile it if you have Turbo Pascal.
If not, use the "Overwrite" option when writing to a new file.

I will fix it and upload the program again, but only after
I have added a few features. (Better preservation of
lower and uppercase distinctions, and easier input of
ascii characters below 32 and above 127, for instance)



From rand.org!jim Fri Sep  8 20:43:58 +0200 1995
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Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 20:43:58 +0200 (IST)
From: Giddy Landan <landan@ccsg.tau.ac.il>
To: Voynich group <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Mailing Digest
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.91-heb-2.05.950908195714.1468A-100000@ccsg.tau.ac.il>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: OR

Hi,

I've just salvaged a copy of the list's digest file - from a backup two 
disk crashes old :-( - alas, the latest item in that file is from '92.
Does anybody out there (read: Jim G.) have an up to date archive/digest 
of the list traffic? Could it be placed on the FTP site? (one of the 
posting in my salvaged digest lists the files on rand.org/voynich, and at 
that time it contained the  "digest" file).
I'll be happy to mail my outdated version of the digest to all and 
sundry, it is about 400k gzipped. It makes a great reading, and should be 
read by anybody starting on the VMS.

Looking at the interlinear ps files (great idea BTW), I noticed that in 
two of the four folios on the net, 4v and 22r, the last word on many 
lines is preceded by a relatively larger space. Do you know of other 
folios which display that feature? Off hand, I can think of several 
interpretations: 
* a cipher control/key group (f4v lines 1-5 are approximately the same length)
* some sort of tabular list:
  + table of contents (the last words on lines 1-5 f4v seems to lengthen...
  + index / directory
  + abbreviation list / glossary / dictionary
  + recipe / ingredient list
  + statistics 
  + etc.

Any comments?
Giddy. 
 
-----------------------+ "Of all decades in our history, a wise man would
Giddy Landan           |  choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in."
landan@ccsg.tau.ac.il  | -  G.M. Young, Portrait of an Age.



From rand.org!jim Fri Sep  8 15:35 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199509081936.MAA11736@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 95 15:35 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich digest
Status: OR

 
Giddy Landen asked for an ftp-able digest of this mailing list's
traffic.  In July 1994 I went through my old email files and pulled
out all Voynich stuff I would be willing to share with the general
public.  This has almost all posts to voynich@rand.org made up to that
time.  I will put a copy in netlib.att.com:/netlib/att/math/reeds,
under the name BIG.zip.


Jim Reeds


From almaden.ibm.com!kornai Fri Sep  8 13:49:08 0700 1995
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From: <kornai@almaden.ibm.com> (Andras Kornai)
Message-Id: <9509082049.AA21184@sevengill.almaden.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: Voynich digest
To: reeds@research.att.com
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 1995 13:49:08 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <199509081936.MAA11736@rand.org> from "reeds@research.att.com" at Sep 8, 95 03:35:00 pm
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Status: OR

Jim,

I believe I have nearly complete archives of what happened on the
mailing list, totaling over 2.5Mbytes. Unfortunately they are in
different styles of mail files (some in mm/cmm some in mailbox format)
but if someone is willing to turn these into a uniform resource I'd be
glad to share this stuff, provided other participants on the list
don't object.

Andras

From rand.org!jim Fri Sep  8 17:34 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199509082148.OAA16726@rand.org>
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 95 17:34 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich interlinear edition
Status: OR


Giddy Landan comments that the in the interlinear ps files, the last word
on many lines is separated by a big space from the others, esp. on f4v and
f22r.

Let me point out that the interlinear stuff is from Petersen's hand copy of
the VMS, not from the VMS itself.  That is, I scanned a few pages of the
Xerox of Petersen, electronically scissor & pasted the FSG transcription
into it, & so on. 

My photos of the VMS are all at home, so I cannot check f22r, but I know
that f4r has a plant picture on it, running right through the writing.
The gap before the last word is to accomodate the plant.  I suspect the
same might be true of f22r.

It's nice to get feedback on the interlinear files, which I prepared to see
how they looked.  If ever we get permission to take a high quality scan
of the VMS itself, I think we should prepare a complete interlinear edition
in this format.  Printed, such an edition would allow judging between variant
transcriptions, etc, as Landini advocates.  It would be just the thing to
do on long airplane rides.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Sep 11 09:22:54 BST 1995
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Date:         Mon, 11 Sep 95 09:22:54 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Voynich interlinear edition
Reply-To: g.landini@bham.ac.uk
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hello,
Jim Reeds said:
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/Original message\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
[...]  Printed, such an edition would allow judging between variant
transcriptions, etc, as Landini advocates.  It would be just the thing to
do on long airplane rides.
\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Yes, yes!
By the way, I already translated the voynich.now into FSG alphabet and
merged the 2 versions in one "interlinear" mix. (Yes it was a busy week end ;-)

It needs some cleaning up, and then a "synchronisation" of the lines since
there are so many mismatches between versions. This may take SOME time.
I'll post when it's ready and upload it (where? att, rand or both?)
regards,

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Mon Sep 11 23:24 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199509120325.UAA08662@rand.org>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 95 23:24 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich Manuscript, Solution of the
Status: OR


I bought a copy of Lev Levitov's "The Solution of the Voynich
Manuscript" the other day.  The only good thing I can say about
it is that the illustrations are very clear.  They are redrawn
from the Yale xerox, and the Voynich letter copying seems to be
very clear; I have not checked the accuracy.

Here is a list of the illustrations:
(Lf = Levitov's figure number, Lp = Levitov's page number,
Vf = folio/side in the VMS, in D'Imperio's notation, and Vp =
"Voynich page number", in the sense of the FSG transcription and
of rand:pub/voynich/voynich.orig.)

	Lf	Lp	Vf	Vp

	2	6	f.68r2	126	U
	3	10	f.7v	14	U
	5	16	f.79v	156
	6	17	f.80v	158	U
	7	23	f.66r	117
	8	24	f.81r	159
	9	43	f.80r	157
	10	45	f.50r	97	U
	11	51	f.86v4	168	U
	12	57	f.14r	25	U
	13	62	f.25r	47	U
	14	66	f.28r	53	U
	15	72	f.70r1	133	U
	17	93	f.1r	1	U
	18	103	f.56r	109
	19	109	f.22v	42	U
	20	146	f.27v	52	U
	21	151	f.85r2	171	U
	22	158	f.68v1	130	U
	24	164	f.70v1	136	U
	25	169	f.72r1	139	u?
		170	f.104r	214	U
	26	172	f.70v2	135

I put a U next to those pages whose images seem not to have been published.
(Skipped figure numbers are of non VMS images.)

I have entered this data into my Voynich image checklist, the latest
version of which will be available by ftp:

	netlib.att.com:/netlib/att/math/reeds/checklist.Z

(As always, if you have any additions or corrections to my 'checklist',
let me know.)

I would not recommend buying this book to any but the most rabid hook,
line, & sinker Voynomane.



Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Sep 14 21:51:21 MDT 1995
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From: nelson@santafe.edu (Nelson Minar)
Sender: nelson@santafe.edu
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Interesting alphabet book: Voynich reported solved!
Status: OR

I just got ahold of a new book, "The Alphabetic Labyrinth", by Johanna
Drucker, ISBN 0-500-01608-9. It seems to be a sort of survey of (some
of) the history of writing systems, I think with an emphasis on the
way people perceive the alphabet. The table of contents is:

 1  The Alphabet in Context
 2  Origins and Historians
 3  The Alphabet in Classical History, Philosophy, and Divination
 4  Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, and Neo-Pythagorianism: The
      Alphabet in the Hellensitic and Early Christian Era
 5  Calligraphy, Alchemy, and Ars Combinatoria in the Medieval Period
 6  The Kabbalah
 7  Rationalizing the Alphabet: Construction, Real Character and
      Philosophical Languages in the Renaissance
 8  The Social Contract, Primitivism and Nationalism: The Alphabet in
      the 18th Century.
 9  The Alphabet in the 9th Centyry; Advertising, Visible Speech and
      Narratives of History
10  20th Century: Eclecticism, Technology and teh Idiosyncratic Imagination

I've only read the first two chapters, which I can't say I was
terribly impressed by: the prose is difficult to read and things
are presented in a somewhat random order. But her research seems
pretty broad, and it's a nice collection of images of various
scripts. I'm hoping chapters 5, 6, and 7 will present some useful
Voynich background: I saw some references to Alchemical codes
(including a reproduction of an Enochian table). I think it'll be fun
to read through.


As for the Voynich... I skipped ahead and found a reference in the
index, and was somewhat bemused to read that Joseph Martin Feely
deciphered the manuscript in 1944. I forget the details of Feely, but
Kahn dismisses it in one sentence in the Codebreakers. Oh well.

Her main point about the Voynich, though, is a discussion of Newbold's
attempt at translation. She describes it in a few paragraphs and
remarks "What was remarkable about Newbold's work was his conviction
that the alchemical character of the treatise justifed such an
[extremely complicated] interpretation".

From rand.org!jim Thu Sep 14 23:59 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 95 23:59 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com, @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich MS mentioned in alphabet book
Status: OR


Nelson Minar reports
>a new book, "The Alphabetic Labyrinth", by Johanna
>Drucker, ISBN 0-500-01608-9.

This look fascinating; I'll have to read it.  Does the book say anything
about Drucker's background?  Price, publisher?


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Sep 14 22:26:43 MDT 1995
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From: nelson@santafe.edu (Nelson Minar)
Sender: nelson@santafe.edu
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich MS mentioned in alphabet book
In-Reply-To: <199509150412.VAA02764@rand.org>
References: <199509150412.VAA02764@rand.org>
Status: OR

>>"The Alphabetic Labyrinth", by Johanna Drucker, ISBN 0-500-01608-9.
>This look fascinating; I'll have to read it.  Does the book say anything
>about Drucker's background?  Price, publisher?

That'll teach me to be lazy. Or to rely on ISBNs being useful.. when
is the URN stuff going to hit the Web?

The book is published by Thames and Hudson, 1995. I couldn't find a
price (I got it from the local library), but I'd expect to pay around
$40-$50 in hardback.

The back flap says 
  Johanna Drucker has both a scholarly and creative interest in the
  history of the alphabet, printing and book arts. In 1986 she
  received a Ph.D. in "Ecriture: Writing as the Visual Representation
  of Language" from the University of California at Berkeley, and her
  research has included work on experimental typography, and work on
  the development of artists' books as a modern art form. She has been
  printing letterpress artists' books since 1972, frequently making
  use of innovative typographic formats. Curretnly teaching art
  history at Yale Universtiiy, she has written several other books on
  the subject, including "The Visible Word", "Otherspace: Martian
  Ty/opography" and "History of the/my Wor(l)d".

From rand.org!jim Thu Sep 14 22:47:26 0700 1995
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   Date: Thu, 14 Sep 95 21:51:21 MDT
   From: nelson@santafe.edu (Nelson Minar)
   Sender: nelson@santafe.edu

   As for the Voynich... I skipped ahead and found a reference in the
   index, and was somewhat bemused to read that Joseph Martin Feely
   deciphered the manuscript in 1944. I forget the details of Feely, but
   Kahn dismisses it in one sentence in the Codebreakers. Oh well.

Quite bemused indeed, since Feely's book says it was published in
1943.

-- Patrick

From rand.org!jim Mon Sep 18 10:20:44 EST 1995
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Date:         Mon, 18 Sep 95 10:20:44 EST
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      Some questions from a relative newbie
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello everyone!

I've just read (OK browsed) through the entire archived mail
of the mailing list (all 2.4 Mb of them) and there are lots
of interesting ideas in there! Still many loose ends too.
Now I'm hesitant to post any ideas here, since I have not got
my copy of Mary D'Imerio's Elegant Enigma yet, but after
having gone through all this, there are a lot of things on
my mind so here goes:

- About the hands/languages: wouldn't it be possible that
  the clear, open writing is from the less experienced writer
  (e.g. a scribe) whereas the more cramped, slanted text is from
  the more experienced one, who was writing faster. I don't know
  if I explained it well because I've never seen the differences.
  (Anybody wants to sell me his/her Ms. copies?). I'm imagining
  this scenario where someone is composing the document as a draft
  and a scribe is then copying from this. He is a bit slow, and
  when the draft is finished, the originator joins in, writing
  faster. If the language is one where writing vowels is optional,
  the experienced one could also be leaving them out more frequently
  in his haste, also using more abbreviations, hence the differences
  between languages A and B. This is probably only a slight alteration
  of existing ideas, but I thought usually the writer of A was
  assumed to be the more experienced one?

- Is there any 'pronounceable Voynich' scheme that works for
  the entire document yet? Or one that works for just A or B?
  I think it is an extremely important tool!

- Has the possibility of the underlying language being Arabic
  been completely refuted? I don't know any Arabic, but do know it
  has more consonants than the Germanic/Romance languages
  and vowels are not always written. Also, word initial characters
  do not have the same statistics as 'all characters'

- What's come of the 'Bathery' idea? It sounded promising to me.
  The writer could have heard of the story and included it in
  this document. This would give a word (the name of the woman)
  to search for in the text.

- Could the 'picnic table' be a currency symbol? I know the Romans
  used HS but have no idea about the middle ages.

But my main point is:

- all the ideas put forward by the people from this list
  (including the ones apparently not leading anywhere) should
  really be categorised or summarised, so that they are not
  lost. I hereby volunteer to put them in a kind of FAQ.
  My qualifications for this are absolutely minimal - in fact the
  only one is that I'm willing to do it (OK, I can also type
  pretty fast). I would submit the result to all of you
  so that the errors / missing parts can be corrected / added
  with relatively little additional effort (I hope).
  What do you all think?

Looking forward to any replies,

Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 20 01:27:04 0700 1995
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Subject: Re: The group's name?
To: RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE (Rene Zandbergen)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 01:27:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@RAND.ORG
In-Reply-To: <199509200759.AAA19954@rand.org> from "Rene Zandbergen" at Sep 20, 95 09:46:54 am
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> 
> In the past, the International Voynich Study Group was proposed,
> and I think I have also seen: Third Study Group.
> Another option (a bit cheesy maybe) would be the Internet Voynich
> Study Group.

I like the last one. The first one sounds like we've got an institute
building somewhere in The Hague and the second sounds like a school of
architechture. :)

I don't think saying we're on the Net is cheesy, just don't use the
"Superhighway" word.

-Adams Douglas
 San Diego, CA
 (my delurk post, hi everyone)



From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 20 09:46:54 EST 1995
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Date:         Wed, 20 Sep 95 09:46:54 EST
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      The group's name?
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello all,

is there any agreement on how the 'group of people who are on
the mainling list or have been there in the recent past' can
be referred to?

In the past, the International Voynich Study Group was proposed,
and I think I have also seen: Third Study Group.
Another option (a bit cheesy maybe) would be the Internet Voynich
Study Group.

Any thoughts? (I would use this in the FAQ).

Cheers, Rene

From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 20 10:49:30 0700 1995
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From: davidmm@kerner.com (David Manos Morris)
Message-Id: <199509201749.KAA22482@marcus>
Subject: re: The group's name?
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:49:30 -0700 (PDT)
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        (De-lurking now) Howdy, from Northern California!
	 
	 I agree that it needs the word "Internet" in the name...
	 The term "study group" conjurs up images of 
	 "cramming for exam week."

		 How about ...
		  
	Internet Voynich Investigators
	Internet Voynich Code Investigators
	Voynich Investigators on the Internet
	Voynich Decipherers of the Internet
	Voynich Decoders of the Internet
	Internet Investigators of the Voynich Code
	Raiders of the Voynich Manuscript  :)

	One must also think about the abrevation. "VII" does
	look like a Roman numeral. :)

	Feedback?

	davidmm@kerner.com
	


From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 20 13:57:45 0700 1995
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Subject: Self-introduction and a few musings
To: RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE (Rene Zandbergen)
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 13:57:45 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@RAND.ORG
In-Reply-To: <199509180828.BAA19175@rand.org> from "Rene Zandbergen" at Sep 18, 95 10:20:44 am
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Status: OR

Hello all,

now that I've delurked, I thought I would introduce myself and give my
background and also throw out a few ideas I have had since I began to
study the Voynich material on the Net.

I'm a software developer and consultant. My interests include most of the
sciences but especially astrophysics and linguistics. I am not, however,
much of a linguist--I speak a little Russian and as much Spanish as any
WASP kid growing up in Southern California does. Mostly I'm fascinated by
language structure and by different writing systems, which of course
intensifies my interest in Voynich.

I first heard about the VMs through Khan's _The_Codebreakers_ which I read
way back in 1967 (is it still in print?). I then found the material in
Poundstone and thence searched the Web and Net for additional material. I
have read much of the archived documents and some of the past email but not
all of it so please excuse me if this material has been covered already.

- What are the chances of getting the VMs rephotographed with modern
cameras in several spectral bands? There exist Remote Sensing cameras which
have selectable bands for different applications. I'm particularly
interested in seeing what results we could get from the faded parts of the
document in the near-infrared. I suggest RS cameras because you could get
high-quality monochrome pictures in several spectral bands of choice with
only one pass through the document. These could then be examined at leisure
and combined into color and false-color imagery which might provide a lot
of additional information. It would then also be possible to generate
datafiles from these images which could be examined with digital techniques
and even, dare I suggest it, used to procude a CD-ROM with all of the other
info on the text included?

- How much has been considered about languages which now use a Romanized
writing system but may not have during the possible eras when the
document was written? For example, how long has Basque had a written
form? The scenario which occurs to me is a group of very knowledgeable
people who were native speakers of such a language making up their own
writing system, either because they were not literate in other languages
(trained orally, in other words) or because they felt that the other
available alphabets were too cumbersome or just sub-optimal for their
needs.

- As a college student, I became enamored of J.R.R. Tolkien's Tengwar
writing system for his invented Elvish language. I modified it to work
phonetically for English and kept a private journal for about a year using
the system. I noticed I adapted very quickly to the system and could write
at reasonable speed (but slowly enough to preserve the attractive style of
the calligraphy). This experience gives me two intuitions about the VMs:

	1. I don't believe the Ms is a code. I believe it is a phonetic
	shorthand of some sort--possibly for some particular discipline.
	Some of the variation in the writing (and, yes, I have read
	Currier regarding multiple writers) done by a particular scribe
	resembles my own variation of Tengwar as I review my old writing
	(a lot of which I now take a while to figure out, as my old
	phonetic choices were not those I would make now).

	2. I don't think the VMs had any "copyists" as such. I feel that
	the authors of the text were the actual people who wrote in the
	folios. They may have discussed beforehand what they wished to
	put down and worked from notes, but something about the writing
	makes me feel that there was no middleman in the writing
	process. The amateurish quality of the artwork reinforces this
	opinion.

- Finally, I wish to heartily agree with Rene on the need for a central
archive of different ideas about the VMs organized in some abbreviated and
easily reviewable manner. Naturally, we don't wish to poison some people's
new way of testing some aspect of the Ms by meking them feel it's "already
been done" but we also want to avoid people having to reinvent the wheel.

Glad to be here,
-Adams Douglas
====================================================
Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   adamsd@crash.cts.com
UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235
   - PGP Public Keys available via =finger= -


From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 20 14:44:39 0700 1995
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Subject: Re: The group's name?
To: rkennedy@ednet1.osl.or.gov
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 1995 14:44:39 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
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> 
> 
> 
> Voynich Voyeurs?
> 
> --
>  
	HAHAHAHHAHhahhhahhaaa!!! :)

	How about, "The V-Files"?


From rand.org!jim Wed Sep 20 14:45:33 0700 1995
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From: rkennedy@ednet1.osl.or.gov (Richard J Kennedy)
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: name
Reply-To: rkennedy@ednet1.osl.or.gov
Status: OR



Voynich voyagers?
Voynich voyeurs
Voynich Votaries

Voynich Vultures
Voynich Visitors    and stick in Internet where you will


--
 

From rand.org!jim Thu Sep 21 07:44:06 0700 1995
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Subject: Name
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From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
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Tiger Team Voynich, Internet Division :)

Team Voynich _does_ have a nice ring to it.
-Adams

====================================================
Adams Douglas, San Diego, CA   adamsd@crash.cts.com
UTM:11S0487200 3623500 MGRS-2:11SMS872235
   - PGP Public Keys available via =finger= -


From rand.org!jim Thu Sep 21 16:08:52 EST 1995
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Date:         Thu, 21 Sep 95 16:08:52 EST
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      A medieval Ms. in Occitan
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello all,

Today I was browsing through a book in a bookstore. It was about
the middle ages (I was looking for pictures of manuscripts to see
what they look like). Anyway, there was only one interesting one
and I would like to know if anyone has seen this.

It was one 'page' from a Medieval bible in Occitan. The Ms. is
kept in a museum in Lyon, France. The figure caption said
that it belonged to a Cathar group (so why was it not burnt?).

One thing I found interesting is the occurrence of a character
which was the same as Currier '8'. But I read that quite a few
Voynich characters are in fact similar to Latin abbreviation forms.
Anyway, the figure was so small that I could not make out much
of the text.

Has anyone seen more of this manuscript? Does it bring any clues?
(I hope a message containing the word Cathar is not automatically
discarded by all of you. No I don't believe in Levitov's
solution, but that's because of the translation, not his theory).

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Fri Sep 22 09:32:47 BST 1995
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Date:         Fri, 22 Sep 95 09:32:47 BST
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      Interesting reference
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi,
I talked to a friend of mine about the VMS and he sent to me a
copy of a paper in Computing in Musicology, 1992, p 11-18 by Sandra Pinegar
entitled THEMA. It's about a "textual database presently comprising
transcriptions from 37 13th and 14th century manuscripts copies of Latin
treatises dealing with the topic of 'measurable music'."
Apparenlty the database is about 2 MB and works in MS-DOS.

I thought that the most extreme Voynich fanatics :-) would like to check
it out since it talks about encoded scribal abbreviations and mentions
Cappelli's dictionary of Latin abbreviations.
Several descriptions in the paper called my attention:
9 as inital syllabe co-, con-, comm-
9 as terminal syllabe = -us when follwing letters b,t,i,m,e,d,c,p, or l.

4 as -rum
~ as -ur

It also has an example of a letter that looks like a "q" and a "P" over
imposed which means "pro":

    xxx
       xxxxxx
       x      x
       x       x
       x      x
   xxxxxxxxxxx
  x    x
  x    x
   xxxxx
       x
       x
       x
       x

Does it ring any bells?
and this other one"/p" meaning per, por, or par:


    xxx
       xxxxxx
       x      x
       x       x
       x      x
       xxxxxxx
       x
       x
   xxxxxxxxxxx
       x
       x
       x
       x

also some combinations:  /pfc = perfect
and:

9ueit~  (with a horzontal bar over the "e") = conuenitur

Apparently the work relates to the author thesis in Columbia University.
Cheers,


Gabriel












From rand.org!jim Thu Oct  5 20:13:15 0700 1995
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From: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 20:13:15 -0700
Message-ID: <951005201314_16078531@hp1.online.apple.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Hello, is anyone still out there.
Status: OR


I have had a copy of the Bennett book for about 18 or so years. Every now an
then I open it up and look at the plates and coding of the VMS.  Recently
someone made a post to sci.archeogy which some email inquires pointed me to
this list.
My primary intersest are Watchmaking and Historical costuming, the latter
lead me into a local Renassance Fair. I have had fun over the years
discussing things with various Dr Dee's this mscpt being one thing.
I have a bit of experience with postscript. I have often thought it would be
interesting to encode the VMS alphabet into one of the multibyte language
formats.
Now in the last two weeks, with the help of the WWW. I have found a thousand
or more pages of commentaion on the VMS. I am sorry to have missed the active
days of this list. I get the impression that there is some fustration that
this document makes no sense.
I know almost nothing about cryptograpy which seems to be to math based in
the wrong direction for my interests. I am aware of the simple subst cyphers
such as found in Sherlock Holmes (I used to attend BSI meetings).
The only code (cypher) that has ever intrigied me is the Dorthy Sayers one
from the _9 Taylors_ the first part of which I paraphrase "I thought to see
the faries in the field ..." I wonder how someone who has not read the book
would go about decoding it.
Back to VMS. I found the file on Reed which I printed out (over 1000 pages)
this seems to abruptly end in 1994.  A year and a half ago. I see that there
are later dates of files (some last month) on rand. There is supposed to be a
digest on rand but I do not see it.

From rand.org!jim Thu Oct  5 20:32:51 0700 1995
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From: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 20:32:51 -0700
Message-ID: <951005203244_16079568@hp1.online.apple.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: something for the neophye.
Status: OR

I would be interested in seeing a roadmap to the different attempts to
analyze the VMS. Some of this would be biblographal ie when did the different
names that pop up live. 
I have been able to come up with some idea of who the different players are.
Dr Dee I know, I have had Bennent for 18 or so years. after skiming the
digest from Reed and some documents I learned about the FSG. I was suprised
that Currier was a person and not a mispelled font name (I at first thought
someone hacked the courier font in PS) From context I figured out who
D'Imperio is. Then I run across Peterson??.

It might be nice to list the order in which the documents on rand and reed
should be read. reading them out of order is probably good preparation for
what is to come though.


From rand.org!jim Thu Oct  5 20:46:47 0700 1995
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From: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
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Date: Thu, 5 Oct 1995 20:46:47 -0700
Message-ID: <951005204643_16080561@hp1.online.apple.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Who I am.
Status: OR

In looking at the old post there are a number of intros.
>From my header you can tell that my name is Julie. I have a passing interest
in the VMS & Dr Dee. I work for apple as a postscript person (i hate to use
words like expert, or guru). I have always been intrigied with the desc in
the Bennent book. (the only two pages I have seen). 
I doubt if I can do much with the transcription, however I can be of
assistance in things like fonts and such. Given the dynamic nature of
hardware I hate to list systems, let us just say that I have access to what
was formerly  large amounts of storage and moderately fast consumer
equipment.
I was never very good at arithmetik, however if the subject interests me I
will often puzzle it out. Although I get lost in the higher maths when it
comes to the makework proofs. Just give me an algorythim that I can code.
While I am primaraly interested in fashion and mechanics  which there do not
seem to be any of in the VMS, The Glyphs facinate me to no end. Even if the
whole thing be nonsence the charcaters are much more facinating than the
psuedorunic on sees in the psuedoromanic fantasy popular a few years back.
I am also interested in random processes and am in search of the ultamet
random number generator, that will generate static noise of a given color.



From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 08:56:31 0700 1995
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X-Sender: kkt@saul6.u.washington.edu
From: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
To: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <951005204643_16080561@hp1.online.apple.com>
	(JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com)
Subject: Re: Who I am.
Status: OR

Hi, Julie!  Welcome to this list.

You said you are interested in historical costuming.  Have you looked
at the illustrations in the VMs?  Can you tell anything about what
period and region the costumes are from?

A first-class Voynich font would be a big help.  It'd be great to just
edit Voynich text with a word processor, just like any other script.

-- Patrick


From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 12:30 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199510061633.JAA12147@rand.org>
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Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 12:30 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich book by D'Imperio
Status: OR

I just spoke with Aegean Park Press.  They are indeed printing more
copies of D'Imperio's book, and expect to ship within 10 days.  I don't
know how much they will charge.

	Aegean Park Press
	P. O.  Box 2837
	Laguna Hills CA 92654-0837
	800-736-3587
	714-586-8811.

And as far as I know copies of the original edition are still available
from

	Center for Cryptologic History
	National Security Agency (E322/APS 13)
	Ft. Meade, MD 20755-6000
	410-859-4502.

Jim Reeds


From kerner.com!davidmm Fri Oct  6 10:06:34 0700 1995
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From: davidmm@kerner.com (David Manos Morris)
Message-Id: <199510061706.KAA23931@marcus>
Subject: Re: Voynich book by D'Imperio
To: reeds@research.att.com
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 10:06:34 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org, davidmm@kerner.com (David Manos Morris)
In-Reply-To: <199510061633.JAA12147@rand.org> from "reeds@research.att.com" at Oct 6, 95 12:30:00 pm
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Status: OR


	Yeah!!! Excellent!! Thanks for the info!
	As soon as someone calls and finds out the price,
	please post it with ordering info!

	THanks!

	davidmm
> 
> I just spoke with Aegean Park Press.  They are indeed printing more
> copies of D'Imperio's book, and expect to ship within 10 days.  I don't
> know how much they will charge.
> 
> 	Aegean Park Press
> 	P. O.  Box 2837
> 	Laguna Hills CA 92654-0837
> 	800-736-3587
> 	714-586-8811.
> 
> And as far as I know copies of the original edition are still available
> from
> 
> 	Center for Cryptologic History
> 	National Security Agency (E322/APS 13)
> 	Ft. Meade, MD 20755-6000
> 	410-859-4502.
> 
> Jim Reeds
> 
> 



From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 10:44:57 0700 1995
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From: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
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Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 10:44:57 -0700
Message-ID: <951006104348_16107234@hp1.online.apple.com>
To: kkt@u.washington.edu
cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Who I am.
Status: OR

>You said you are interested in historical costuming.  Have you
>looked
>at the illustrations in the VMs?  Can you tell anything about what
>period and region the costumes are from?

I have only seen the plates in Bennent. [79v 80r] pp 188/189 and his fig 4-21
on pp191. These figures are not draped so there is not much that I can tell.
Does yale still sell copys of VMS? If so I would probably want to order one.

>A first-class Voynich font would be a big help.  It'd be great to just
>edit Voynich text with a word processor, just like any other script.

One of my goals in life is to create a scriptable Type 1 font that I can do
just that. Of cource this usually precludes letter order an position
behavior. I have learned a lot in the last few weeks.

>-- Patrick




From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 15:14 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199510061923.MAA19403@rand.org>
Received: by research.att.com; Fri Oct  6 15:15 EDT 1995
Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 15:14 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich mail archive
Status: OR


I put a collection of the last year's or so mail to voynich@rand.org into
the pipe-line to show up as netlib.att.com:/netlib/att/math/reeds/BIG2.Z
It should be visible to the world in 24 hours or so.  Let me know if you 
have problems.

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 15:36 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 15:36 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich on TV
Status: OR


I talked today with the English TV producers who are making a short VMS
segment on a show about the VMS, the Vinland Map, & the Beale ciphers.
The VMS portion will be about 10 minutes.  They got some nice shots of
the VMS at Yale, & an interview with the children of R. Brumbaugh.  Alas,
they decided not to interview me.  It will show in about a year (I think)
on Discover.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 15:52 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Received: by research.att.com; Fri Oct  6 15:52 EDT 1995
Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 15:52 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich intro
Status: OR


Prompted by Julie's (1) a personal "who am I" introduction and (2) a very
brief sketch of previous work on the VMS.  D'Imperio's book remains the 
best source for this kind of information.

1.  I work in the Mathematics Research Center at AT&T Bell Laboratories
in Murray Hill. My academic training is in mathematics and statistics.
Part of my work involves cryptography (design of authentication codes for
cellular telephones, and so on).  In fact I have long been fascinated by
cryptography, cryptanalysis, and the history of cryptography, and consider
myself lucky to have a job where I get paid to practice my hobby.  I first
got interested in the VMS by reading about it in Fletcher Pratt's history
of cryptography in the late 1950's.  I joined this mailing list soon after
it was created in response to a flurry of netnews posts and email exchanges
started by John Baez of UC Riverside.  Early this year a paper of mine on
the VMS appeared in CRYPTOLOGIA.

2.  Most of the VMS scholarship fits into two categories.  First, which we
might call the "solution" category, produces about 1 or 2 solutions a year,
often published in books or privately printed pampflets.  Notable among these
are Newbold's 1928 "Roger Bacon" theory and L. Levitov's recent "Cathar"
theory.  These solutions are occasionally accepted by at least one reputable
scholar for a brief period of time and then, after mature reflection, are
forgotten.  One can see a (negative) echo of Newbold's theory in a footnote
in Thorndyke; just the other day this list carried word that at least one
recent author still had not gotten the word that Feely's 1940's decoding
is generally considered bogus.

The second main category of VMS scholarship might be called the "intelligence
community" branch.  For some odd reason, for more than 60 years members of
the cryptographic branches of the American secret intelligence agencies 
have been interested in the VMS.  Maybe it is because these people are at
once very clever and highly educated, yet because of their jobs are removed
from the academic institutions they ought to belong to and hence are more 
susceptible to becoming interested in unconventional subjects?  Here is a
brief list of names:

	John Manly,	U of Chicago Chaucer expert; debunked Newbold
			in 1930's.  (He was a World War I code breaker
			and friend of Friedman's; hence on this list.)

	W. F. Friedman,	became interested in VMS in 1930's, worked on it 
			off & on the rest of his life (into the 1960's)
			Started the "First Study Group" 1944-46 and the
			"Second Study Group", 1962.

	John Tiltman,	British code breaking friend of Friedman, seduced
			in the 1950's; wrote a survey paper in the late 
			1960's.

	Prescott Currier, 1930's-1960's navy code breaker, member of Second
			Study Group, discovered "hand A" and "hand B" in
			1970's; main speaker at 1976 symposium.

	M. E. D'Imperio, National Security Agency, organized 1976 symposium
			on VMS, wrote a book in 1976 surveying all known
			progress to date.

	The next 2 names are on this list by guilt by association.

	R. Brumbaugh,	1940's Army code breaker, might have heard about
			VMS from members of First Study Group, later history
			professor at Yale; wrote a "the solution is that there
			is no solution" book in 1976.  (I spoke with his
			World War 2 boss, who was a member of the FSG; he
			could not recall if Brumbaugh was a FSG member.)

	Bennett,	friend of Brumbaugh's; engineering professor at Yale,
			used VMS as an example in a textbook.


Outside these two categories we have:

Father T. Petersen, a Catholic priest, who worked on the VMS between the 
1930's and 1960's, who became friends with Friedman and Tiltman.  He made a
complete transcription and index of words of the VMS; alas that he lived
before the era of personal computers!

And the current mailing list, which might, because of the inspiration it
has recieved from D'Imperio's book and from Currier's papers, be called
a branch offshoot of the "intelligence community" thread.  And (stretching
the already-tenuous) because Jacques Guy, who is a major contributor to
this list, got a few of his earliest VMS ideas from Bennett.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 19:15:36 0700 1995
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From: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
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Date: Fri, 6 Oct 1995 19:15:36 -0700
Message-ID: <951006191534_16134839@hp1.online.apple.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
cc: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU
Subject: Re: Hello, is anyone still out there.
Status: OR

>  Yes, yes, yes. If only... I have been looking for a utility to design
>  TrueType fonts, in vain. I would like to team up with someone who
>  knows enough Postscript, and expand on my Voynich editor program,
>  so that you can translate the files into Postscript format.
>  Do you feel up to it? (* hope *)

My idea is to start with say a type 1 font.  Probably a stroked font like
courier (the font not the person). There exist utilities to go from T1 to TT.
 However this is not a 1:1 correspondense. Mostly realating to hinting and
font quality over a wide range of HW and platforms.
 I work at the lowest leval of PS.  So I do not use utilities (although I do
use illustrator and photoshop to generate primitives) per say.  Most Utils
are designed for proffesionals with large budgets and do not consider the one
or two crumbs they could sweep up.
The best tools IMO are the two mentioned above.  I have been investigating a
header that is stuck on top of voynich.now & parses it to an anotated page.
With the comments and stuff in color. PS L2 has some extreamly powerful
parsing capabilities. The latest generation iof printers are quite
impressive.

I like my data raw.  I find GIF a bit limiting.  I have Tiff rippers written
in PS.
What I really want is a tunnel effect scan of the surface of each page in
FITS format on CD. Which would probably work out to one CD per page. Or would
that be per line.
Barring that I would settle for Illustrator traces of the MS. simular to what
Peterson? did for the British Museum. I would really like to see placement
marks for the cuts. Say offset from a given line of text.  More on these
ideas later if there is interest.

>  I could perhaps even write a new editor for Windows, a real GUI.
Why do I feel a foul taste in my mouth. Winblech?  You did read my posting
host.
I have been toying with the idea of Quickdraw GX and worldscript. Much can be
done with MickeyWord which allows imbedded PS. so you can do your interliner
xlation that way also. Just type in the text in courrier or froguy prepend it
with a little PS macro & view it with GhostView (or print it). You would be
able to have a lowres Say PICT line imbedded in the samae document. It would
look something like:
<Pict line of bitmap>
%PS-Macro xxxxx  // set in the ps imbead font
CTZ WCoB9t89 PVsQj7 // also set in ps imbead font.
^^^^^^^^ --- this line would be formatted to match the pictspacing 

> A lot of frustration.
>  But me, I do not feel frustrated about it (I know, I'm weird).
 > I am interested in the analysis, regardless of whether we
>  can decipher it, ever.

I have owned Bennentt for 18 years, I can relate.  If this thing ever does
get decipherd there will still be a lot of controaversy. I doubt if it would
ever be done in my lifetime. which is hard to comprehend. I imagine I will go
through phases, like I have in the past of just staring at the thing.  It is
interesting to see that some of the older invesigators D'Imperio, Currier
sending in there comments to the mail archives. That really does make one
sense the scope of things.
-jP


From rand.org!jim Fri Oct  6 23:06 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199510070308.UAA04291@rand.org>
Received: by research.att.com; Fri Oct  6 23:07 EDT 1995
Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 23:06 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich typesetting
Status: OR

Ah, Julie, where were you 3 years ago when I was sweating out my T3 PS
font?  It would have been wonderful for a real PostScript expert to step
in & to do everything right.

What help can I give you for your T1 project?

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Sat Oct  7 20:17 EDT 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199510080021.RAA00276@rand.org>
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Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Sat, 7 Oct 95 20:17 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich email collection
Status: OR


The file /netlib/att/math/reeds/BIG2.Z, available by anonymous ftp from
netlib.att.com, contains the voynich@rand.org list traffic from 4 July 1994
though 4 October 1995.  It is not nearly as big as the collection BIG.Z
of all email up to 4 July 1994.

Enjoy!


Jim Reeds


From nyx10.cs.du.edu!rcarter Sun Oct  8 14:49:06 0600 1995
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X-Disclaimer: Nyx is a public access Unix system run by the University
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	responsibility for the opinions or correct identity of users.
Subject: Re: Voynich on TV
To: reeds@research.att.com
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 1995 14:49:06 -0600 (MDT)
Cc: proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <199510061944.MAA20111@rand.org> from "reeds@research.att.com" at Oct 6, 95 03:36:00 pm
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Status: OR

Jim Reeds (reeds@research.att.com) writes:

> I talked today with the English TV producers who are making a short VMS
> segment on a show about the VMS, the Vinland Map, & the Beale ciphers.

And for those that get the Jones Computer Network on cable, you might 
actually see me speaking on the VMs and "Team Voynich" in general.

Just a short spot, but still...

-- 
Looking forward, Ron | rcarter@nyx.cs.du.edu | Denver, Colorado, USA

From rand.org!jim Mon Oct  9 14:15:56 0600 1995
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Subject: Intro, etc.
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 14:15:56 -0600 (MDT)
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Name is Ronald Lee Carter (Ron to you all) born 12/29/54 in rural
Illinois, USA; now in Denver, Colorado, USA since July 1, 1980.
Pieces of crypto experience in the past; probby first exposed by
Sherlock Holmes "...Dancing Men" to the whole thing.

Been interested in the VMs for a long time; been with this group
since early on; came up with the casual name of "Team Voynich" for
us all; am trying off and on to work the herbal drawings with
corresponding drawings in other herbals, especially the "worm"
plate (think it probably is a poor rendition of snake "cure" herbal
found other places).

I also subscribe to the "VMs was dictated" school; also think that
Latin abbreviations might play a role; perhaps a phonetic version
of them.  Don't believe that Dee (although one -real- interesting
person) had anything to do with it.

-- 
Looking Forward, Ron | rcarter@nyx.cs.du.edu | Denver, Colorado, USA

From rand.org!jim Mon Oct  9 16:59 EDT 1995
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Subject: Voynich worm plate
Status: OR


Ron (rcarter@nyx10.cs.du.edu) writes:

> am trying off and on to work the herbal drawings with
> corresponding drawings in other herbals, especially the "worm"
> plate (think it probably is a poor rendition of snake "cure" herbal
> found other places).

What folio number is this, Ron? 


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Oct  9 21:29:00 0600 1995
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Date: Mon, 9 Oct 1995 21:29:00 -0600 (MDT)
From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: manuscript
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Mime-Version: 1.0
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Status: OR

being new to the voynich ms biz, I need to get an example of the best 
available copy of the Real Thing.  Can anybody out there steer me right? 
And Thanks 


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Tue Oct 10 09:45 EDT 1995
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Original-From: rice!reeds
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 09:45 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich in outer space
Status: OR

I came across this on the web.  (http://www.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/cgi-bin/srchftr)

--- begin ---
Voynich

   Type : CRATER 
   Latitude range : 35.4N- 35.4N 
   Longitude range : 56.0E - 56.0E 
   Approval : IAU-APPROVED 

List of detected files 

10 files were detected.

   MG_0016 : C1-MIDR.30N063 : 001 : LEFT : 22.5N-37.5N : 55.5E- 70.5E 
   MG_0033 : C2-MIDR.30N078 : 001 : LEFT : 7.5N-52.5N : 55.5E-100.5E 
   MG_0078 : C3-MIDR.14N060 : 001 : LEFT : 26.0S-54.0N : 0.0E-120.0E 
   MG_0083 : C2-MIDR.30N078 : 201 : LEFT : 7.5N-52.5N : 55.5E-100.5E 
   MG_0084 : C2-MIDR.30N078 : 202 : RIGHT : 7.5N-52.5N : 55.5E-100.5E 
   MG_0085 : C3-MIDR.14N060 : 201 : RIGHT : 26.0S-54.0N : 0.0E-120.0E 
   MG_0113 : C1-MIDR.30N063 : 301 : STEREO : 22.5N-37.5N : 55.5E-
   70.5E 
   MG_0119 : C2-MIDR.30N078 : 301 : STEREO : 7.5N-52.5N :
   55.5E-100.5E 
   MG_0119 : C3-MIDR.14N060 : 301 : MIXED : 26.0S-54.0N : 0.0E-120.0E 
   MG_0126 : C3-MIDR.14N060 : 202 : LEFT : 26.0S-54.0N : 0.0E-120.0E 


NOTE: Field representation is as follows. 

   Volume : File name : Orbit cycle : Beam direction : Latitude range :
   Longitude range 

--- end ---

There is, evidently, a crater on Venus called Voynich.  I looked at some of the
snap shots (such as http://www.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/wakusei/venus/MG_images/MG_0016.gif,
and so on) and felt a proud feeling of ownership.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Oct 10 11:48 EDT 1995
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 11:48 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich on Venus
Status: OR


About my recent posting about a crater named Voynich on Venus.  A planetary
scientist friend of mine says that almost all Venusian features are named
after women, so the crater in question is most likely named after Ethyl
Voynich.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Oct 10 09:19:41 PDT 1995
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Message-Id: <199510101619.JAA06021@mycroft.rand.org>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich in outer space 
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 10 Oct 95 09:45:00 -0400.
             <199510101517.IAA03610@rand.org> 
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>
Reply-To: jim@rand.org
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 09:19:41 PDT
Sender: jim@rand.org
Status: OR


Fascinating -- a Voynich Crater on Venus, eh?

I suspect it's named after Wilfred's wife Ethel, whose novel "The Gadfly"
was very popular in the Soviet Union.

	Jim Gillogly
	Hevensday, 19 Winterfilth S.R. 1995, 16:18

From rand.org!jim Tue Oct 10 22:54 EDT 1995
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 22:54 EDT
To: @proxy.research.att.com:voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich aficionado at Yale?
Status: OR


Can anyone verify that the William R. Bennett, Jr. who is currently
a professor at Yale is the author of the 1976 Prentice-Hall book 
"Scientific and engineering problem-solving with the computer", 
which introduced the VMS problem to more than one list member?

The Yale WWW thingie lists

--- excerpt begin ---

William R. Bennett, Jr.

C. Baldwin Sawyer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and of Physics
Ph.D. 1959, Columbia University
E-mail: ap207@biomed.med.yale.edu
Phone: 203/4316
Fax: 293/432-2797

My research interests include laser noise and instability, short-range violations of the Equivalence
Principle, computer-based spectral phonocardiography, and biological interactions with
low-frequency electromagnetic fields.

--- excerpt end ---

Jim Reeds


From u.washington.edu!kkt Wed Oct 11 09:22:26 0700 1995
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From: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
To: reeds@research.att.com
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In-Reply-To: <199510110356.UAA01968@rand.org> (reeds@research.att.com)
Subject: Re: Voynich aficionado at Yale?
Status: OR

Yes, I can confirm that.  According to the Library of Congress's
personal names file (used for making sure the same author gets used as
a name heading in the same way on all their books), he is William
Ralph Bennett, born 1930, author of Health and low-frequency magnetic
fields, published in 1994, and Scientific and engineering problem
solving with the computer, in 1976.  He's also coinventor of the gas
laser.  He's the son of William Ralph Bennett, born 1904 and died
1983, who was author of Electrical noise, published in 1960.

While we're at it, are you the James Alexander Reeds, whose 1976
thesis at Harvard was On the definition of von Mises functionals?

-- Patrick

From rand.org!jim Mon Oct 23 23:53:15 0600 1995
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Date: Mon, 23 Oct 1995 23:53:15 -0600 (MDT)
From: Don Latham <djl@montana.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: The MS
Message-Id: <Pine.SOL.3.91.951023234823.9144A-100000@paw>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Status: OR

Has there been or is there currently a request to Yale to provide a few 
small bits of the MS for carbon dating? Seems to me if it's good enough 
for the Shroud of Turin, It's good enough for the ms.  At least the q 
about a "recent" forgery or 13th century could be definitively answered. 
Also, Jim would yopu please change my address from @selway.umt.edu to 
djl@montana.com ? thanks much.
Don Latham

From rand.org!jim Fri Oct 27 07:36:47 +1000 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9510262136.AA10361@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: Bitrans version 2 available at garbo.uwasa.fi
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 1995 07:36:47 +1000 (EST)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20]
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Status: OR

With four bugs corrected, and many improvements. (See below
my upload notice)

File: bitrans2.zip
One line description: Bidirectional transliteration translator
Garbo directory: /pc/linguistics
Replaces: bitrans1.zip
Uploader name & email: Jacques B.M. Guy -- j.guy@trl.oz.au
Author or company: Jacques B.M. Guy
Email address: j.guy@trl.oz.au
Surface address: Telstra Research Laboratories, PO Box 249, 
		 Clayton 3168 Australia
Special requirement: nil
Shareware payment from private users: no
Shareware payment required from corporate users: no
Distribution limitations: gnu-like
Demo: no
Nagware: no
Self-documenting: no
External documentation included: yes (18 pages)
Source included: yes (Turbo Pascal 5.5)
Size: 72k compressed, 196k expanded

10-line description:

BiTrans will translate a text written in any transliteration system
(e.g. Chinese written in pinyin) into almost any other system (e.g. 
the Giles-Wade system), provided that it is given the necessary 
translation rules. One of the example files provided contains the 
rules for translating from pinyin into Giles-Wade. Those rules are 
fully commented and can be used as a practical tutorial. BiTrans
can be used to simulate phonological change, but does not allow
for metathesis.


Long Description:

Differences between this version and the previous one:

 1. Four bugs corrected.
 2. A new option reformats the translation before writing it to 
    file.
 3. Version 1 was limited to 255-character Pascal strings, this 
    version uses strings automatically redimensioned, up to 64K-
    characters long.
 4. Strings to be substituted can contain spaces and control 
    characters (except CR, LF and Ctrl-Z).
 5. Easier lower and upper-case definition: you can add to the 
    current alphabet instead of having to redefine it in its
    entirety.
 6. Control characters and extended ASCII characters can be input
    symbolically (e.g. \C or \3 for Ctrl-C) instead of having to
    be typed from the numeric keypad.
 7. Debugging mode shows the translation process on the screen 
    instead of sending its intermediate results to a file.
 8. Better and faster algorithms for context-sensitive substitutions 
    at word boundaries, and for preserving upper and lower-case
    distinctions.
 9. Preprocessing commands: Prepend, Append, Collapse (reduces 
    multiple spaces to single).
10. Context-sensitive rules at line boundaries.
11. Search for the translator file in the path when not in the current
    directory.
12. Statistics. When exiting normally BiTrans now gives you three
    statistics: time spent on input/ouput, time spent reading and
    building the translator, and time spent translating.



From rand.org!jim Tue Oct 31 16:15:24 0700 1995
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From: rcarter@nyx10.cs.du.edu (Ron Carter)
Message-Id: <9510312315.AA07202@nyx10.cs.du.edu>
X-Disclaimer: Nyx is a public access Unix system run by the University
	of Denver.  The University has neither control over nor
	responsibility for the opinions or correct identity of users.
Subject: COMDEX attendees?
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 16:15:24 -0700 (MST)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21]
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Status: OR

Any others from the Voynich mailer going to be at COMDEX?

If so, would like to meet up with any and all...

I will be there Monday and Tuesday night.

-- 
Looking forward, Ron | rcarter@nyx.cs.du.edu | Denver, Colorado, USA

From rand.org!jim Fri Nov 24 10:46:25 GMT 1995
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          Fri, 24 Nov 95 11:08:32 GMT
Date:         Fri, 24 Nov 95 10:46:25 GMT
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Subject:      One finding and one question
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Sender: LANDINIG@ibm3090.bham.ac.uk
Status: OR

Hi everybody,
Some of you may remember that I started to build a version of the VMS
which is "synchronised" between the D'Imperio and the FSG versions.
I am interested to see to what extent the two versions agree and how.
So I translated the D'Imperio version into FSG alphabet and made an
"interline" text, so you see character by character what the two groups
read. Of course there are missing/extra characters, non-coding characters, etc.
but I took care of those too.

Now the interesting bit.
I am about to finish it, probably this week end (yes I am proud that I READ
the entire vms TWICE ;-)
I have realised that the D'Imperio version seems to be EXACTLY the
FSG version from the 1613 item of the Friedman collection for the folios
111v onwards.  I still have the last 3 or 4 folios to finish, but there seems
to be not a single character in disagreement.
I cannot think of any other option that during the D'Imperio transcription
(or should this be the Currier's?) they knew of the item 1613. It is hard
to believe that both teams transcribed EXACTLY the same considering the
amount of discrepancies between all the other folios.
Any comments?

And finally the question:
I am willing to upload this "interlinear" file to the ftp sites of the vms,
but I need to knwo how to do it. Can I just log in and upload the file?
Please let me know where and how to upload it (only if there is any interest
on having this file on line, of course!). The file is just smaller than 400KB.

cheers,
Gabriel  G.Landini@bham.ac.uk


From rand.org!jim Fri Nov 24 10:29 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199511241532.HAA07486@rand.org>
Received: from rice by ns
Date: Fri, 24 Nov 95 10:29 EST
To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich Re: One finding and one question
Status: OR

Gabriel Landini writes of his interlinear version of the D'Imperio and
FSG transcriptions:

> Now the interesting bit.
> I am about to finish it, probably this week end (yes I am proud that I READ
> the entire vms TWICE ;-)
> I have realised that the D'Imperio version seems to be EXACTLY the
> FSG version from the 1613 item of the Friedman collection for the folios
> 111v onwards.  I still have the last 3 or 4 folios to finish, but there seems
> to be not a single character in disagreement.
> I cannot think of any other option that during the D'Imperio transcription
> (or should this be the Currier's?) they knew of the item 1613. It is hard
> to believe that both teams transcribed EXACTLY the same considering the
> amount of discrepancies between all the other folios.
> Any comments?

The comment in voynich.now explains most of what's going on:

{ ff. 111v - 114r, First Study Group, transliterated into Currier
by J. Reeds 10-13 Sept 93.  From 20 keypunch coding sheets in
Friedman Collection, Marshall Library, Lexington, VA, item 1613.
(I fixed up the line numbers as well as I could, but did not proofread
the actual Voynich transliteraion.)
}

In September 1993 we treated the file voynich.now as the repository of
all voynich transcriptions, regardless of origin.  Most of the 
stuff there came from voynich.orig, which came off of a tape that D'Imperio
gave to Jim Gillogly in the late 1970's.  Most of the other stuff in 
voynich.now was contributed piecemeal by members of this list as they 
transcribed a few pages from published VMS images.  When I found the FSG
stuff I thought it could be merged into voynich.now, but the problems of
proofreading, transliteration alphabet shifting, etc, such a mass of
material proved too daunting for me to handle; I'm very glad you have
taken on this job.

As to the provenance of the original voynich.old file:  Jim G and I thought
the transcription had been done by D'Imperio, but a recent letter from her
seemed to indicate that it was Currier's work.  (But her sentence was a
bit ambiguious: she MIGHT have meant that Currier's transcription alphabet
was used, rather than D'Imperio's.)

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Nov 27 15:41 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199511272042.MAA26449@rand.org>
Received: from rice by ns
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 95 15:41 EST
To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich transcription announcement
Status: OR

Gabriel Landini's merge of the voynich.now and the FSG transcriptions
is available for public consumption.  The file name is interlin.vms.Z
and can be found via www under

	http://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/reeds/index.html
	
and via ftp on netlib.att.com in directory /netlib/att/math/reeds.


Gabriel's header reads:

# INTERLIN.VMS
#
# file version 1.0  produced by Gabriel Landini, 27 November 1995.
#
# Interlinear synchronised version of the common transcription segments in:
# a) the D'Imperio + new additions
# and
# b) the First Study Group (Friedman) versions of the Voynich manuscript.
#
# Please report any problems to: G.Landini@bham.ac.uk so I can maintain
# this file updated/corrected.
#
# All credits and thanks to the Voynich team who put the original versions
# on line.
#
# This document is based on the files:
# voynich.now and FSG.NEW with some small corrections (see below).
# This file only contains the common parts from the two versions since
# it's main purpose is to compare the two transcriptions.
# The D'Imperio version was originally coded in Currier's alphabet.
# I translated it to FSG alphabet using Jacques Guy's BITRANS program
# and a set of rules CURR2FSG based on Jim Reeds posting in the
# Voynich mailing list. If required, I can mail the CURR2FSG file, just
# let me know at the e-mail address above.
# I added a few "end of line" - where missing to keep the same length in
# both versions. Same with "end of paragraph" = symbols.
# Also double spaces ",," were replaced with single spaces.
#


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Wed Nov 29 14:13:25 +1100 1995
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From: j.guy@trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9511290313.AA18832@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: I am still there
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 14:13:25 +1100 (EST)
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Status: OR

... but you won't hear from me until late January. 
I am going on holidays tomorrow, and to France on
December 11, until January 20. Since there is
so little traffic on this list, I am keeping
subscribed to it.  

j.guy@trl.oz.au

From rand.org!jim Tue Nov 28 21:23:25 0600 1995
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Date: Tue, 28 Nov 1995 21:23:25 -0600 (CST)
From: Heidi Green <hagreen@rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
To: Jacques Guy <j.guy@trl.OZ.AU>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: I am still there
In-Reply-To: <9511290313.AA18832@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
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Status: OR

i'd like to unsubscribe from this list.
please help me.
sorry for the inconvenience, 
-heidi.


*-------------------------------------*
| We can do no great things,          |
| only small things, with great love. |
*-------------------------------------*



From rand.org!jim Tue Nov 28 23:12 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199511290417.UAA02820@rand.org>
Received: from rice by ns
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 95 23:12 EST
To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich bibliography
Status: OR


I would like to assemble an updated VMS bibliography.  Send me your
favorite references, especially those not mentioned in the file 
pub/voynich/biblio  on rand.org.

Thanks!


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Nov 30 23:11 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199512010417.UAA00474@rand.org>
Received: from rice by ns
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 95 23:11 EST
To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich in the popular media
Status: OR


I just clicked my netscape thingie at this URL:

     http://dialin.ind.net/~msjohnso/novel.html

which describes how the VMS figures in a new work of fiction.

Can't wait till I can get my hands on it!

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Sun Dec  3 21:03 EST 1995
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Date: 03 Dec 95 20:51:31 EST
From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Why no scientific dating?
Message-ID: <951204015130_100716.75_EHU20-1@CompuServe.COM>
Status: OR

I am amazed that no scientific dating of the Voynich MS has been done (that I
know of).
The FIRST question (regarding its origin) is to decide whether it's a 12th, 15th
or 20th Century creation.  In fact, the official denial that scientific dating
tests
have been peformed is (to me) implausible, and is evidence in favor of the
hypothesis 
that it is a 20th C. creation (by Voynich himself, as others have suggested
here).

It's all very well to conduct statistical analyses, etc., but a determination
of the century of its origin would reduce the number of hypotheses (as to its
nature) considerably.  If the Shroud of Turin can be dated accurately then the 
Voynich MS can also be dated.  This being so, why hasn't it been done already 
(unless it has, and the answer reveals that it is not in fact an antique object
at all)?



From rand.org!jim Sun Dec  3 23:09:47 0800 1995
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Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
To: 100716.75@compuserve.com (Peter Meyer)
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 1995 23:09:47 -0800 (PST)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <951204015130_100716.75_EHU20-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Peter Meyer" at Dec 3, 95 08:51:31 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23]
Content-Type: text
Status: OR

As has been discussed before, the C-14 curve from 1600 to 1950 is
essentially flat. If the Voynich MS was produced during that period no more
accurate date could be provided than it originated somewhere in that
period. Medieval dates are easier to verify, and I think it's more of a
matter of getting Yale to sacrifice a piece of the MS for dating than any
grand conspiracy. Remember, the VMS has been more of an academic hobby for
people with other jobs and other interests than a topic of serious directed
study. Perhaps this mailing list can help change that.

-Adams


From rand.org!jim Mon Dec  4 07:06 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Message-Id: <199512041207.EAA00586@rand.org>
Received: from rice by ns
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 95 07:06 EST
To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich archive at AT&T
Status: OR

I have moved the location of the Voynich files at netlib.att.com and
have created a Voynich WEB page.  Because my site administrators are
paranoid penny pinchers (and more power to them) most of the files
there are in Lempel-Ziv .Z compressed form; you will have to download
them and decompress them yourself, which makes browsing awkward.

So: the URL is http://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/people/reeds/voynich.html

The files are available via ftp, on machine netlib.att.com in directory
/netlib/att/math/people/reeds/voynich.

Of course I invite comments and suggestions about my Voynich page.

Jim Reeds


From hermetica.com!descarte Mon Dec  4 21:08:52 +0000 1995
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From: Alligator Descartes <descarte@hermetica.com>
Message-Id: <199512042108.VAA06294@fruitbat.mcqueen.com>
Subject: Re: Voynich archive at AT&T
To: reeds@research.att.com
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 21:08:52 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <199512041207.EAA00586@rand.org> from "reeds@research.att.com" at Dec 4, 95 07:06:00 am
X-Pants: ** The return address of this email should be: descarte@hermetica.com
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Content-Length: 1356      
Status: OR


> I have moved the location of the Voynich files at netlib.att.com and
> have created a Voynich WEB page.  Because my site administrators are
> paranoid penny pinchers (and more power to them) most of the files
> there are in Lempel-Ziv .Z compressed form; you will have to download
> them and decompress them yourself, which makes browsing awkward.
> 
> So: the URL is http://netlib.att.com/netlib/att/math/people/reeds/voynich.html
> 
> The files are available via ftp, on machine netlib.att.com in directory
> /netlib/att/math/people/reeds/voynich.
> 
> Of course I invite comments and suggestions about my Voynich page.

Very handy. Thanks.

It had the fortunate side-effect of kicking me back into action on my
interest in the VM. So, the online searchable one should be available in
the next few days......

I've loaded the VM, word by word, from the various transriptions available
into an RDBMS, and I'm in the process of sticking a search engine on the
front of it.

If anyone has any suggestions on stuff they'd like to see, please send me 
them ASAP and I'll try and get them written in.

A transcription of John Dee's Libri Mysteriorum should also be available too,
once I get the graphics from that scanned in.

> Jim Reeds

Regards.

-- 
Alligator Descartes	| PGP key available on request!
descarte@hermetica.com	| http://www.hermetica.com 

From rand.org!jim Mon Dec  4 21:59:21 0700 1995
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Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 21:59:21 -0700 (MST)
From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
cc: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
In-Reply-To: <951204015130_100716.75_EHU20-1@CompuServe.COM>
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MIME-Version: 1.0
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Status: OR


Just sent a msg to the list about the same topic.  Perhaps the library 
would give a small piece to be dated.  U of Arizona might do a carbon 
dating for the publicity? have to convince the lib. first.  Maybe you are 
right and they just don't want it done...
best to all


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 10:08:04 0800 1995
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From: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
To: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.ULT.3.91.951204215612.23192A-100000@selway.umt.edu>
	(message from Don J Lathams on Mon, 4 Dec 1995 21:59:21 -0700 (MST))
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
Status: OR

How much does it actually cost to do scientific dating?  Does anyone
know?

-- Patrick

From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 11:03:18 0800 1995
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Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
To: kkt@u.washington.edu (Patrick Scheible)
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 11:03:18 -0800 (PST)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <9512051808.AA11271@saul3.u.washington.edu> from "Patrick Scheible" at Dec 5, 95 10:08:04 am
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Content-Type: text
Status: OR

> How much does it actually cost to do scientific dating?  Does anyone
> know?
> 
> -- Patrick

By "scientific" dating, are you referring to a battery of tests or simply
to Carbon-14 dating? 

From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 11:35:53 0800 1995
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Date: Tue, 5 Dec 95 11:35:53 -0800
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From: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
To: adamsd@cts.com
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <m0tN2e6-0001c0C@crash.cts.com> (adamsd@cts.com)
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
Status: OR

   Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 11:03:18 -0800 (PST)
   From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
   Cc: voynich@rand.org

   > How much does it actually cost to do scientific dating?  Does anyone
   > know?
   > 
   > -- Patrick

   By "scientific" dating, are you referring to a battery of tests or simply
   to Carbon-14 dating? 

Even Carbon-14 would tell us if it was a 13th-century product (Roger
Bacon?), so maybe it would be worth doing.  Are there tests that would
reliably distinguish 16th century from an early 20th-century fake?

-- Patrick

From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 13:26:33 MST 1995
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	id AA28521; Tue, 5 Dec 95 13:26:31 MST
From: nelson@santafe.edu (Nelson Minar)
To: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
Cc: adamsd@cts.com, voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
In-Reply-To: <9512051935.AA13526@saul3.u.washington.edu>
References: <m0tN2e6-0001c0C@crash.cts.com>
	<9512051935.AA13526@saul3.u.washington.edu>
Status: OR

Last time this discussion came up, I remember hearing a couple of
persuasive arguments about why it might not be in Yale's best
interests to allow the manuscript to be dated. It'd be embarassing to
find out they're holding a Shroud of Turin.

Anyone know the politics involved?
-- 
                                __                      
nelson@santafe.edu              \/              http://www.santafe.edu/~nelson/
PGP key 9D719FAD   Fingerprint 3B 9B 8E 58 1C 90 57 3E  B7 99 ED 13 65 2E 0B 24

From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 16:46:00 0800 1995
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Date: Tue, 5 Dec 95 16:46:00 -0800
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From: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
To: nelson@santafe.edu
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <9512052026.AA03717@sfi.santafe.edu> (nelson@santafe.edu)
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
Status: OR

I'm a little skeptical that there's some grand conspiracy to avoid
dating the ms.  The Beinecke Library has plenty of undoubted treasures
and one more or less wouldn't make much difference to their
reputation.  They didn't even have to buy the ms.

More likely, it's hard to justify spending money on expensive
analytical tests when there's a good chance the results would be
inconclusive or uninteresting.  I'm sure there are plenty of medieval
projects competing for funds with near certainty of producing
interesting results.

-- Patrick

   Date: Tue, 5 Dec 95 13:26:33 MST
   From: nelson@santafe.edu (Nelson Minar)
   Cc: adamsd@cts.com, voynich@rand.org
   References: <m0tN2e6-0001c0C@crash.cts.com>
	   <9512051935.AA13526@saul3.u.washington.edu>

   Last time this discussion came up, I remember hearing a couple of
   persuasive arguments about why it might not be in Yale's best
   interests to allow the manuscript to be dated. It'd be embarassing to
   find out they're holding a Shroud of Turin.

   Anyone know the politics involved?
   -- 
				   __                      
   nelson@santafe.edu              \/              http://www.santafe.edu/~nelson/
   PGP key 9D719FAD   Fingerprint 3B 9B 8E 58 1C 90 57 3E  B7 99 ED 13 65 2E 0B 24


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 19:25:35 0800 1995
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From: JPorterEMond/Apple@eworld.com
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Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 19:25:35 -0800
Message-ID: <951205192255_19912526@hp1.online.apple.com>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: A simple PS Type 1 Voynich font.
Status: OR

Several months ago I mentioned that I was interested in making a
Postscript Type 1 font of the Voynich Character set. Using the existing
Type 3 font as a guide, I have created the following font.
This font is basically a skeleton with no hinting.  Only the Courier
characters
are encoded, although a few of the froguy lower case fragments that are
subsets of the larger characters are included. I have not included any
of the characters that begin with x. I have encoded some witdth data
into some of the eol characters, however these do not mark on the page.
I have only minamally tested the font with a few level 2 printers 
 and Ghostscript.  I have not made any screen fonts from it yet either.
I do not reccomend that when using ghostscript to use less than 18pt as there
is no hinting;  on the paper 10 point looks quite good though.
I plan on creating a screen version and hints sometime in the next few
months, until then enjoy.

The proper Machine independent name for this font is (VoySma.pfa)
----------------------Cut Here ---------------------------------------
%!FontType1-1.0: Voynich-Small 001.001
%%CreationDate: Sun Oct 22 1995
%%VMUsage: -1 -1
% Copyright (c) 1995 Julie S. Porter
% and James A. Reeds. All rights reserved.
11 dict begin
/FontInfo 8 dict dup begin
/version(001.001) readonly def
/FullName (Voynich-Small) readonly def
/FamilyName (Voynich) readonly def
/Weight (Small) readonly def
/ItalicAngle 0 def
/isFIxedPitch false def
/UnderlinePosition 200 def
/UnderlineThickness 54 def
end readonly def
/FontName /Voynich-Small def
/PaintType 0 def
/FontType 1 def
/FontMatrix[0.001 0 0 0.001 0 0] readonly def
/Encoding 256 array
0 1 255 {1 index exch /.notdef put} for
dup 09 /fdash put

dup 32 /fspace put

dup 38 /f7 put
dup 39 /fprime put

dup 42 /fsplat put

dup 44 /fhalf put
dup 45 /fdash put
dup 46 /fslash put
dup 47 /fslash put


dup 48 /f0 put
dup 49 /f1 put
dup 50 /f2 put
dup 51 /f3 put
dup 52 /f4 put
dup 53 /f5 put
dup 54 /f6 put
dup 55 /f7 put
dup 56 /f8 put
dup 57 /f9 put

dup 65 /fA put
dup 66 /fB put
dup 67 /fC put
dup 68 /fD put
dup 69 /fE put
dup 70 /fF put
dup 71 /fG put
dup 72 /fH put
dup 73 /fI put
dup 74 /fJ put
dup 75 /fK put
dup 76 /fL put
dup 77 /fM put
dup 78 /fN put
dup 79 /fO put
dup 80 /fP put
dup 81 /fQ put
dup 82 /fR put
dup 83 /fS put
dup 84 /fT put
dup 85 /fU put
dup 86 /fV put
dup 87 /fW put
dup 88 /fX put
dup 89 /fY put
dup 90 /fZ put

%dup 94 /X49 put

dup 97 /fA put

dup 99 /fC put

dup 103 /fg put

dup 105 /fi put

dup 108 /fl put

dup 111 /fO put

dup 112 /fp put
dup 113 /fq put

dup 115 /f2 put
dup 116 /ft put

dup 118 /fD put

dup 120 /fE put
%dup 121 /X48 put

%dup 121 /X49 put
%dup 121 /X50 put
%dup 121 /X51 put
%dup 121 /X52 put
%dup 121 /X53 put

readonly def
/FontBBox {-445 -402 1095 1176} readonly def
/UniqueID 4019910 def
currentdict end
currentfile eexec
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AD82EEB0EE08B2D46C911BE4AB62128F05EC6D3A3DE6A10B9C4CE4DDCBD9FFD11ED7
4533C521423E6820BB234503BACF399EB34347DC41CDDE756C2127D671A4FB39F827
7B61CC02B6BA9D64EEE3E28E6DD31ACBE909646DD67A9D4E707A7E43AB33556260BC
2FE01145F8A9E82DE135F8BD9DB6920E86F2E4BF58378C28FC6B8F1259FD537D6EEC
24B4C3EAC5FE76078AAABEB2C5DE9A1E427BB63287830B8CD4F2C0319650BB1CCF01
E24604C097EDD0825BB471DBE663C18491439E7501F1CDC194DF7541D34DF4D72E93
0954D59F1C51799FE882CE7AD692FE93D273B89DC5D8E004A83B9546E1D2BB3FD8E3
B4906E9362154CA532C73EC0D67F993705A6F69393351E00EAB2C47E84ED0C6BF55B
F7D74EB75A1F2F29FAAF851233AE230C7376B8BCC3A4A192EBD2D7E8D6F7FAC24D4E
5C43C01360159FA793BC86569CCF942C12D73C9AD146DD4C26C97878AD81F580D3A5
2768448FDA9D49EE68F61BA36273D42A8B3B01860189E3A40E9252F346317AE206F4
86A35E15B2F76FBB3B2CAAE0667A9CE8206A453F12FABD7648C733F107AF51B88931
57EFC6A2E74936F8300F1E246C6DAC402040929CBB5E6B3EFC082339FA96FA33670B
A5B6A8CC861ECF88B7D98EBF028898ED8AF15244E8940C2F9B64AF26C650904C186C
4FCB22B041D06CB131DCD78D676E71B6C59AB32FBEF9ADAA0EFBFC82415647E61FC2
6D9C2BC0DE6516B6C9719F6FDD3051512D78D19ECF98B3B891F9DA0EE4FFF69593AA
74A6D522F6D1289C1B1CA1BDC2804B220C256B7EC994DB70C0614066F5C24CB9461E
98BB1083DC0CBDC0F78ED56490A1830EDFD24896FF4BF14DC312220020177E0E1CEF
0FAF18FDB312E97A696F3D206EEAB500731845F6E3A30391C6CEDD34CCD04E0DDC51
41C2689BF8CF
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
cleartomark
------------------------- Cut Here ------------------------------------------
A short modification of the existing Font test that will use the above font
when the font is downloaded first using a font dowload tool. For Ghostscript
Add the line
/Voynich-Small (VoySma.pfa) ;
to the Fontmap file.
------------------------- Cut Here ------------------------------------------
%!PS-Anything
% Does not support DSC
% Modified test to display the voynich font
% Document Needed fonts: VoynichSmall.
/f 3 array def
26 26 translate
/Helvetica  findfont 
6 scalefont 
f exch 0 exch put

/Voynich-Small findfont 
%/Times-Roman findfont 
22 scalefont 
f exch 1 exch put

f 1 get /Encoding get f exch 2 exch put


0 setlinewidth
newpath
0 1 16 {   % r
 35 mul   % q 
 dup  
 dup 
 dup  % q q q q
 0 moveto
 35 16 mul lineto 
 0 exch moveto
 35 16 mul exch lineto 
 stroke
} for

/st  { 1 string dup 3 2 roll 0 exch put} def

/x 2 array def

0 1 15 {    % r
 x exch    % /x r
 0 exch    % /x 0 r
 put
 
 0 1 15 {   % c
  dup   % c c
  15 x 0 get   % c c 15 r
  sub   % c c 15-r
  35 mul exch  % c 35(15-r) c
  35 mul exch  % c x y
  
  3 copy   % c x y  c x y
  % 3 copy   % c x y  c x y  c x y
  
  12 add
  exch 6 add exch
  moveto   % c
  x 0 get 16   % c r 16
  mul add   % c + 16r
  f 1 get setfont
  st   % s
  show

  f 0 get setfont
  2 add
  exch 2 add exch
  moveto   % c
  x 0 get 16   % c r 16
  mul add   % x = c+16r
  f 2 get   % x e
  exch get  % name
  dup /.notdef ne {
   20 string cvs
   show
  }{pop} ifelse
  
  %2 add
  %exch 28 add exch
  %moveto   % c
  %x 0 get 16   % c r 16
  %mul add   % x = c+16r
  %st show
 } for
} for

showpage


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 23:24 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich font
Status: OR


Great stuff!  Congratulations to Julie Porter for her font; I can hardly
wait to see the screen font, etc.

Jim

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec  5 23:22:05 0700 1995
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Date: Tue, 5 Dec 1995 23:22:05 -0700 (MST)
From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
cc: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>, voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
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right.  Such a date would at least test the Bacon theory of origin. 


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 06 14:52:23 EWT 1995
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Date: Wed, 06 Dec 95 14:52:23 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject: My opinions
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello all!

This in reply to Gabriel Landini's invitation for all to express
their opinions. I'll give you mine, with the immediate warning
that it may not be worth the electrons by which it was composed.

I cannot believe it is a hoax (a deliberate creation of garbage).
For this, some of its statistical properties are too 'real'.
When I first saw a list of word frequencies I thought: how could there
be so many words that are used only once? I then ran such a count
on a text in vulgate (Latin) of about the same length (the Acts of
the Apostles from somewhere on the net) and was amazed by the
good correspondence. I did not know about Zipf law for word frequencies,
but for a text of non-infinite length this could be followed only
approximately anyway. Plus the language does play a role: I took a
piece from Nostradamus and this fitted much worse.

If it were a plain text in any language, with just character
substitution, we would have known by now, although, if it is from
the 12th century......
The low entropy (does everyone know what this means?) points against
this theory as well. This was made most clear to me when I tried
to massage an existing text in order to turn it into Voynichese.
I'll admit it: I wanted to do that and post the result to this
list in order for you all to try and crack it. I just failed
totally. (I think this is an interesting experiment though.....:-))
Enough diversion already. In my opinion it is a cipher, and maybe
not even a difficult one. But what would a Medieval cipher look like?
The difference between languages A and B could be different
applications of the cipher. Without knowing the underlying language,
I think even a simple cipher would be difficult to crack.
But then eminent cryptologists have apparently ruled this out...

I have seen pictures of medieval documents, and in comparison the
VMs is extremely crude (the drawings). I once saw a picture of something
Icelandic from that time which matched much better, but here the
text was much more crude.
I don't like the pictures at all, especially the nude women in
the plumbing (for what I've seen of it), because they seem to
point towards the hoax theory. This would just be too good a thing
for Rudolph II not to buy. Was 600 ducats a lot of money?
Was it even a small fortune? A forger might go to some lengths...

My pet theory comes from the fact that I had just finished The Name
of the Rose when I learned more about the VMs. Just imagine this
scribe stumbling on some amazing piece of writing (forbidden too).
In his spare time, he copies it, but to make sure noone else
understands it he uses the cipher/script. He cannot draw very well
(or maybe the plant figures are better?). The original is lost.

OK, that's just a romanticised theory.....

What else? I find the average word length a bit short, but it's not
extreme. And I don't like the Levitov solution. I'm Dutch but this
does not seem like any Dutch/Germanic dialect I've ever seen (not an
expert though). His idea of a remaining Cathar document is
fascinating though.

I think I'll go through the trouble of ordering a photocopy and have
a better look at it (still nobody wants to sell me his/hers?).

Sorry to have rumbled on like this,
Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec  6 08:03:52 0800 1995
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Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
To: G.Landini@bham.ac.uk (Gabriel Landini)
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 08:03:52 -0800 (PST)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <30C602F0.3D84@bham.ac.uk> from "Gabriel Landini" at Dec 6, 95 12:54:08 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23]
Content-Type: text
Status: OR

> I find amazing that poeple decoded cuneiform writing but the MS with diagrams is 
> still so difficult to crack!

Cuneiform was decodable partially because there was a much greater sample
of text (thousands of clay tablets), partially because much of the
documents were very ordered material (accounting records, astronomical
tables, etc.) and partially because scholars had a reasonable idea of what
languages were descendant from Babylonian (which gave clues to the language
structure). Also, some of the tablets _did_ have diagrams. There were also
enough of the tablets from different ages so one could track the evolution
of cuneiform signs from a representative pictographic style to a stylized,
shorthand style. We have no such advantages with the VMS.

Note that no one was able to decode Egyptian Heiroglyphics until the
Rosetta stone was discovered, which provided a Greek translation of a
Heiroglyphic text, and also a Coptic version which essentially provided the
Egyptian in another (partially known) writing system.

Personally I think the VMS is a simplified notation or shorthand for some
specific discipline, or set of disciplines. I gravitate towards the idea of
an herbal or recipie book of some sort.

Cheers,
-Adams

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 06 11:59:53 0500 1995
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To: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
cc: nelson@santafe.edu, voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 05 Dec 1995 16:46:00 EST."
             <9512060046.AA27816@saul2.u.washington.edu> 
Date: Wed, 06 Dec 1995 11:59:53 -0500
From: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>
Status: OR


Picking up on Pat and Nelson's discussion: 

First Carbon-14 date is not very useful for precise short term dating but
other isotopic tests apparently can date up to 100 years or so. I am thinking of
the ones which proved that the alledged Vermeer 'Disciples at Emaus' is
a vanMegereen forgery. Paint contains metallic isotopes which can be used
for this. Manuscript ink may also be a good bet.      

My question is: why date the VMS?  What exactly would it prove? We know that
the Bacon letter is apocryphal and besides Bacon's cypher is known and different
from the VMS. Also what would make a XIX century VMS less intriguing or more
decyphrable than a XV or XVI century one? Even if dating ends up establishing 
that the VMS is a "forgery" it remains unclear what it would be a "forgery" of! 

Sorry to be so negative but this seems to me a marginal issue not worth
bothering the Beinecke about. I am all for persuading them to allow a set
of decent color reproductions be placed on the Web, though.

-Joao 

---------
Joao Leao
leao@physics.bu.edu
http://physics.bu.edu/~leao/leao.html
Office Phone: (617)353-3931
Home Phone:   (617)247-2670
Boston University - Physics Department
Director of Computer Research Facility
 
"Let this be a lesson: never give a monster the job of a mad scientist...
 ...now be a good bunny and let me have your brain! "
-----------------------------------------------------

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 06 12:54:08 0800 1995
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Date: Wed, 06 Dec 1995 12:54:08 -0800
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, U.K.
X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0b3 (Win16; I)
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
References: <Pine.ULT.3.91.951205232117.8042A-100000@selway.umt.edu>
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Status: OR

Don J Lathams wrote:
> 
> right.  Such a date would at least test the Bacon theory of origin.

Only on the dating of the vellum. This does not discard at all the theory of using 
a very old vellum to create a hoax (which I do not think is the case anyway).
And if it's found that it's from Bacon's days, this does not solve too
much either. It is still possible to be a hoax of those days (by Kelly
or whoever using old vellum).

I can't remember exactly, but wasn't there a movie/novel called "The Word" about 
somebody doing this sort of thing?

Now that the list is getting a bit more active, what does everybody
think it is coded in the MS. and why to code it in such a way?
Is it difficult to crack because of the code itself ?
because the transcriptions are not accurate ?
because of the "pig latin" (or not properly written?) possibility?
because it is encoded in a non reversible way?

I find amazing that poeple decoded cuneiform writing but the MS with diagrams is 
still so difficult to crack!

cheers,

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec  6 22:28:19 0500 1995
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Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 22:28:19 -0500
To: voynich@rand.org
From: Sulla@Globaldialog.com (M. Sulla)
Subject: Observations
Status: OR

Just a couple observations:  I have just begun to attack this problem.
a. The mirror image of a Voynich page looks different.  It looks like the
double LL character is the actual word separator and the writing is read
backwards.  The spaces are null.
b. Using my Cappelli Dizionario di Abbreviature Latine ed Italiane, I can
get some direct correspondances of the script to Latin inflections if the
words are read backwards and the LL is a space.
c. A Latin short hand could explain the some the repetitions.  A single
abbreviation could be used for several words or endings.
d. Considering that there are several hands involved in the writing of the
manuscript, my intuition tells me that it was meant to read, if you know
the secret.


M. Sulla   Sulla@globaldialog.com

Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.



From rand.org!jim Wed Dec  6 18:11:41 1000 1995
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Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 18:11:41 -1000
To: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>
From: syzygy@ilhawaii.net (Terence McKenna)
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Status: OR

It isn't even a question of carbon-14 etc.  No one has ever apparently
examined and made a judgement on the Voy. MS based on the ususal criteria
used to access incunibles.  Professional people at Christies and Southebys
can tell the difference between a 13th century (Bacon) and a 16th century
(Dee) item. So can hundreds of other experts.  Why a purely physical
accessment of the Voy. has not been done is as mysterious as the rest of
the story.

Best,

T

Terence McKenna                                 e mail:  syzygy@ilhawaii.net
P O Box 677                                              or HCE@well.com
Honaunau, HI 96726
                            ph/fx 808-937-0464

        Perplexed?     Checkout URL:  http://www.levity.com/eschaton/



From rand.org!jim Wed Dec  6 22:51:16 0700 1995
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Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 22:51:16 -0700 (MST)
From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating?
In-Reply-To: <30C602F0.3D84@bham.ac.uk>
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MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Status: OR


On Wed, 6 Dec 1995, Gabriel Landini wrote:

> Don J Lathams wrote:
> > 
> > right.  Such a date would at least test the Bacon theory of origin.
> 
> Only on the dating of the vellum. This does not discard at all the theory of using 
> a very old vellum to create a hoax (which I do not think is the case anyway).
> And if it's found that it's from Bacon's days, this does not solve too
> much either. It is still possible to be a hoax of those days (by Kelly
> or whoever using old vellum).

yes, that's so.  Perhaps the ink could be dated as well? I don't know.> 
> 


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Wed Dec  6 23:02:02 0700 1995
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Date: Wed, 6 Dec 1995 23:02:02 -0700 (MST)
From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>
cc: Patrick Scheible <kkt@u.washington.edu>, nelson@santafe.edu,
        voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why no scientific dating? 
In-Reply-To: <199512061659.LAA16645@buphy0.bu.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.ULT.3.91.951206225652.198B-100000@selway.umt.edu>
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Status: OR


Joao:  I think you have a point about the age of the ms.  I guess that 
it's really curiosity and thirst for knowledge that is the reason for my 
own feelings about dating.  I <definitely> echo your statements about 
either a really good printed version (I'd rather have that) or a set of 
good electronic "plates". The latter would be easier to get if a video 
and frame-grabber were used.  Anyone in the Yale area? Anyone "know" the 
folks at the library? 
Don


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec 07 10:54:58 EWT 1995
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Date: Thu, 07 Dec 95 10:54:58 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject: Some thoughts
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

There are a couple of things in recent posts I'd like to add
a small remark to.

About the need for dating: I too would really like to know if
it is from the 12-13C, the 16C or the 20C, although it may
indeed not help much in the decipherment. But quite a few people
might become less interested in it if they knew it was a deliberate
hoax, especially if it is a modern one.

About the possibility of someone (W.Voynich) using old vellum
in a modern fogery: I would not think this is very likely.
Where would one find 200 folios of unused vellum and ruin it like
this? Or is this material easily accessible?  By the way, I only
recently found out what vellum is, on the following web site:
 http://acs1.byu.edu/~hurlbutj/dscriptorium.html
(a twiddle before hurl may have been stripped off by my mailer)
Very interesting reading! (I found).

About the Cathar connection: this is Levitov's proposed
translation which is generally rejected. The best information on
this (in my opinion) is a piece written by Jacques Guy, which can
be found in many places on the net, for example anonymous ftp
from rand.org, file pub/voynich/levitov
or: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mrr/voynich/documents/levitov.html

About nobody actually having done even a qualitative analysis of
the document: it is not that bad. Let me dig something up from the
archives of the mailing list:
----------------<begin included text>------------------------------

>From reeds Fri Apr 15 13:24 EDT 1994
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From: reeds@research.att.com
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 94 13:24 EDT
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich questions for Prof. Pan.

Karl Kluge justly complains:

>  Jim, you're such a tease. Was there anything of interest in the answers to
>  the 15 questions in terms of opinions on the imagery, dating, etc?

Here are the questions and answers, again paraphrased.  In time I will
type it in exactly, but for now the following will serve:

Q1: Have you examined the VMS itself.
A:	1931

Q2:  What is it written on; with what writing tool?
A:	Parchment of some sort, not sure if vellum in the strict sense.
	Quill pen; coloring done with "wash".

Q3:  What's the date?
A:	But for the sunflower, would have guessed 1470.  "However,
	since the style of the drawings is fairly provincial, a
	somewhat later date, even the first years of the sixteenth
	century, would not seem to be excluded.  I should not go
	lower than ca. 1510-1520 because no influence of the Italian
	Renaissance style is evident."

Q4:  Why do you think so?
A:	Character of the script, style of drawing, such costumes as are
	in evidence on certain pages, for example folio 72 recto.

Q5:  What's it about?
A:	"...first, a general cosmological philoshopy explaining the medicinal propert
	of terrestrial objects, particularly plants, bu celestial influences
	tranmitted by astral radiation and those "spirits" which were
	frequently believed to transmit the occult power of the stars to
	the earth; second, a kind of herbal describing the individual
	plants used for medical and, conceivably, for magic purposes;
	third, a description of such compundfs as may be produced by combining
	individual plants in various ways."


Q6:  Are there any plain text books sort of like the VMS?
A:	Herbals, cosmological and astorlogical treatises, medical
	treatises in the narrower sense of the term, and 4th, alchemy
	books.  See Charles Singer, Richard Salomon, ...

Q7:  What plain text have you found in the VMS?
A:	folio 70 ff in zodiac signs, f 66, and on f 116 v.  On
	f. 66, R. Salomon says "der mus del" which is the same as
	"der Mussteil" which means the stock of household goods which
	cannot be withheld from a mans widow on his death.
	On f 116v, "so nim geismi[l]ch o", meaning, "... take
	goats milk, or..."

Q8:  What plants, astonomical, etc, things have you recognized?
A:	Only sunflower.

Q9:  Is it all in the same hand?
A:	Except for last page, all in same hand, but not 100% sure.

Q10:  Why was it written?
A:	Doctor or quack imparting secret knowledge to son or heir.

Q11:  Where & when?
A:	Germany.

Q12:  What do you think of the Roger Bacon theory.
A:	Quatsch.  "At variance with all the available facts..."

Q13:  Full title of the Dictionary of Abbreviations.  Title of
Hans Titze's book on forgeries, & of Mibillon's history of diplomatics.
A:	Adriano Cappelli, Diziionario delle Abbreviature Latine ed Italiane.
	Titze, Genuine and False: Copies, Imitations, and Forgeries, New York,
	1948.  Mabillon, De re Diplomatica, 1681.

Q14:  What other scholars are interested in the VMS?
A:	Only Richard Salomon.

Q15:  What do you think of the artificial language theory?
A:	Not much: dates are wrong.  Maybe Alberti's interest in heiroglyphics
	was relevant.


----------------<end   included text>------------------------------
Don't know what it's worth though.

One last completely irrelevant thing: I wonder if Tycho Brahe or
Johannes Kepler ever saw the VMs.

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 06:24 EST 1995
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Date: 07 Dec 95 05:57:49 EST
From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Why dating of the MS is important
Message-ID: <951207105748_100716.75_EHU74-1@CompuServe.COM>
Status: OR

>From: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>

> Paint contains metallic isotopes which can be used
>for this. Manuscript ink may also be a good bet. 

There was a case in living memory where some
document was shown to be a 20th C. creation because the ink contained some
compound that was not used in pre-20th C. inks.  Anyone remember the details?


>My question is: why date the VMS?  What exactly would it prove?

Cryptanalysts and linguists know well that information about the context of 
some ciphertext or text in an unknown language
can be decisive in deciphering it.  If physical examination
revealed that it was probably written in Provencal in the 13th C. then
linguists would think about it differently than if they knew it were written
 in Bohemia in the 15th C.

However, I think the main reason for dating is to decide whether or not
it is 19th or 20th C., since if it is then I think decipherment becomes
less interesting.

If it's 18th C. or later then the whole Dee/Kelly/Rudolph_II hypothesis can
be rejected.  If it's later than the 18th C. it is probably a hoax and probably 
does not contain any intrinsically interesting information.  

This is, I think, the essential question here: 
If the ms is a text written in some language,
and if it were translated into English, would it be interesting reading?
If it's a collection of 16th C. Provencal recipes then I think it would hardly
be worth the trouble (except for historians of French cooking).
But if the ms was written (or dictated) by the wife of
 the commander of the Sirian expedition to Earth in 1232 (beats knitting)
and describes the inhabitants of her home planet then we might have
some compelling reading.  But again if Wilfred Voynich put it together 
in 1913 as a joke on his antiquarian bookseller friends then I doubt we
 would learn much from it even if it could be translated.

In brief, the most interesting question is not so much how the ms was created
but what, if anything, it says, and dating could give us a major clue
as to whether it is likely to say anything of interest.

> this seems to me a marginal issue not worth
>bothering the Beinecke about.

It seems to me that only when the ms has been dated accurately
will there be any significant progress toward solving this enigma.

Thus I think what we need to do is to ascertain which tests would
give us an answer (perhaps as simple, as just now suggested,
as having an expert from Sotheby's take a look at it), and formally
request the Beinecke to allow such tests to take place.

However, Andras Kornai tells me that he wrote to the Beinecke and
" tried to get at least UV and infrared scanning arranged. Sent them 
a letter -- they never bothered to reply."


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 03:45:24 0800 1995
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Subject: Re: Why dating of the MS is important
To: 100716.75@compuserve.com (Peter Meyer)
Date: Thu, 7 Dec 1995 03:45:24 -0800 (PST)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <951207105748_100716.75_EHU74-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Peter Meyer" at Dec 7, 95 05:57:49 am
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> However, Andras Kornai tells me that he wrote to the Beinecke and
> " tried to get at least UV and infrared scanning arranged. Sent them 
> a letter -- they never bothered to reply."

Anybody ever heard of this thing called a telephone? Who, specifically
would one speak to at the Beinecke? The way to proceed, I feel, would be
to make enough phone calls that you reach whoever has authority for
granting such tests, and then reach agreement with them that you are
going to send a formal request for documentation purposes. That way,
everybody is happy and knowledgeable about what's going to happen.

Is anyone in or near New Haven? I've gotten a lot of results in my
career by simply walking into the place in question and finding out who
to talk to, and then walking into their office. You usually don't get
_closure_ the same day this way, but you get the dialogue rolling.

I'll reiterate at this point that it would be highly useful to use a
decent thematic-mapping camera if such a scan was arranged of the VMS.
I'm sure if someone talked nicely to the right people at Itek
Corporation, or other remote-sensing manufacturer, they might even be
willing to donate the use of a camera and the necessary film for this
academic project in these days of shrinking defense budgets. 

Also, a rephotographing of the MS with a specialized camera sounds a _lot_
less threatening to a rare-book librarian than cutting off samples for C-14
tests--that's as easy to get cooperation on as persuading a mother to let
you do exploratory biopsies with large-bore needles on her child.

Suggestion: borrow a negotiating technique from the motion-picture
industry. Get agreement from _someone_ about this process and use it for
leverage in negotiating with the others; "Well, Ames has a camera all ready
to fly out to New Haven, what's the best date to set up a room to shoot
the MS?"

-Adams

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec 07 13:31:37 EWT 1995
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Date: Thu, 07 Dec 95 13:31:37 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject: Re: why dating the VMs is important
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello again!

Apart from the Voynich Ms itself, it might also be interesting to
get a date on the Marci letter. For example: if this is clearly
from the time it's supposed to be, the VMs has to be for real.
If it was written with the same kind of pen/ink on the same
kind of parchment as the VMs, well, that would be very
suspicious indeed. (OK, just kidding)
For this letter there seem to be only two options: either from
the 17th century or from the 20th, so the test could probably (?)
be simpler.

Has anyone actually seen the Marci letter? Are there other
extant writings of Marci?

Does anyone know what else W.Voynich found with the VMs and the
letter? Does Mary D'Imperio's book say anything about that?

More questions than answers I'm afraid....
Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 14:30:48 +0000 1995
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From: Alligator Descartes <descarte@hermetica.com>
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Subject: Frequencies, analysis &c
To: voynich@rand.org
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Hi.

I've got a small database with the VM loaded into it from the transcriptions
on the various ftp sites which, if people think it may be useful, I could
spend a bit of time putting a WWW front-end onto it.

Anyone support the idea?

It allows you to query the VM, including word frequencies, common word
endings, common word beginnings and all that stuff.

-- 
Alligator Descartes	| PGP key available on request!
descarte@hermetica.com	| http://www.hermetica.com 

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 10:20 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich dating, etc
Status: OR


In reponse to Terence McKenna's desire for a connoisseur's dating of
the VMS (as opposed to a C-14 dating) Rene Zandbergen quoted an old post
of mine, which cites a Q&A dialogue:

>Q3:  What's the date?
>A:	But for the sunflower, would have guessed 1470.  "However,
>	since the style of the drawings is fairly provincial, a
>	somewhat later date, even the first years of the sixteenth
>	century, would not seem to be excluded.  I should not go
>	lower than ca. 1510-1520 because no influence of the Italian
>	Renaissance style is evident."

What Rene did not mention was the fact that "A" in this case is Erwin
Panofsky, who was THE expert on the Northern Rennaissance, author of the
definitive study of Durer, etc.  What Berenson was for Italian Rennaissance
scholarship Panofsky was for the German.  Definitely up there with the
Sotheby's and Christie's experts.


In a later post, Zandbergen asked if anyone has seen the Marci letter.
I have.  It is written in an italic hand on paper, as was customary
with letters between scholars in the 1600's.  The Beinecke Library 
collection has several document boxes full of VMS-related items in
its holdings.  The Marci letter is one such item.  One box is full of
stuff related to the purchase of the VMS, including lists of other
books purchased at the same time as the VMS, and Christmas cards from
the middle man who set up the purchase, etc.  I do not know of any
other items that came with the VMS when it was bought by Voynich.

One thing I have been meaning to do to reread Kraus's autobiography,
which has some slight discussion of the VMS and the circumstances of
its purchase and some reference to the VMS in some Italian library 
catalogue.  I should have taken a Xerox.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec 07 11:04:43 0500 1995
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To: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
cc: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Why dating of the MS is important 
In-reply-to: Your message of "07 Dec 1995 05:57:49 EST."
             <951207105748_100716.75_EHU74-1@CompuServe.COM> 
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 1995 11:04:43 -0500
From: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>
Status: OR


I am glad my question -- which was intended to be provocative -- generated 
such good responses! Thanks Terence, Don, Rene, Peter, Doug and Gabriel.
Not to belabor the point I think it is worth distinguishing between
the historical and the cryptographic interest of the VMS though I agree 
that the two are not entriely disparate. I am sure a well established 
historical context could help to suggest what the VMS is about and that
may in turn help to decypher it. I fully agree with Terence that it is
quite uncanny that no one has done a "stylistic" analysis of the VMS
comparing it with other known cyphered manuscripts but I cannot agree 
with Peter's statement:
 
> However, I think the main reason for dating is to decide whether or not
> it is 19th or 20th C., since if it is then I think decipherment becomes
> less interesting.
> 
etc..

Why a 19th or 20th century "forgery" would be less interesting than a "true"
15th or 16th century omnium? Seems to me this involves a value judgement on
the contents of the manuscript, which are unknown! On the other hand the
qualities of the cypher (if that is what it is) seem to me much better
established! Given the prodigies of codebreaking which this century 
has witnessed anything that defies them so consistently deserves credit! 

By the same token knowing from which century it comes from is no policy
insurance on the interest of its contents, as Peter also points out. 
Ultimately what I am advocating is that a facsimile of the VMS should
be published either on-line or in book form. We have learned from
Seraphini that it would make a very nice coffee-table piece as is and the
chances of falling under general scrutiny may increase its chances of
gaining meaning. No? Maybe Beinecke will react better to such a proposal
than carbon dating...

By the way: Terence in his lovely article which was my introduction to 
the VMS mentions the Kirchner connection which I don't remember ever
being addressed in this list. Kirchner has a spot in the history of
egyptian hieroglyphic decypherement though his contributions are
judged today completely worthless (except for his influence on the
young Leibnitz). Maybe a collection of pet theories about the VMS
will turn out to be more interesting than the VMS contents themselves!
  
Just playing devil's advocate...
-Joao

---------
Joao Leao
leao@physics.bu.edu
http://physics.bu.edu/~leao/leao.html
Office Phone: (617)353-3931
Home Phone:   (617)247-2670
Boston University - Physics Department
Director of Computer Research Facility
 
"Let this be a lesson: never give a monster the job of a mad scientist...
 ...now be a good bunny and let me have your brain! "
-----------------------------------------------------

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 12:09 EST 1995
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Date: 07 Dec 95 11:31:38 EST
From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: nice glossy coffee table book
Message-ID: <951207163138_100716.75_EHU96-1@CompuServe.COM>
Status: OR

>From: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>

>Ultimately what I am advocating is that a facsimile of the VMS should
>be published either on-line or in book form. We have learned from
>Seraphini that it would make a very nice coffee-table piece as is

Excellent idea, and if the proposal can be shown to be likely to
make money for the publisher (after some is handed over to the
Beinecke in return for their cooperation) then presumably 
publishers will be falling all over each other to do it.

Anyone here with access to the ear of some likely acquisitions editor?


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 12:41 EST 1995
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        "@proxy.research.att.com":reeds@rci.rutgers.edu,
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Subject: Voynich coffee table book
Status: OR


Peter Meyer asks

> Anyone here with access to the ear of some likely acquisitions editor?

I am married to an acquisitions editor.  She is interested in the VMS,
and helps me in every way she can.  Since her scholarly background is
in the history of medieval & rennaissance science, especially botany
and herbals she has lots of contacts that are potentially useful to us.
Of course I have asked her about publishing a nice glossy coffee table book
edition of the VMS.  Her answer is always the same:  "Without a solution
to go with it, I won't touch it."

Other editors might not react as my wife does.  But they will do the
arithmetic the same way: production of coffee table books is quite expensive;
the fixed costs for high quality color reproductions are enormous, and are
recoverable only with large sales, which in turn are possible only with
appropriate marketing.  Or an author or publisher can seek outside funding:
a wealthy sponsor, an academic research grant, some other way of covering
the costs without needed large sales.  Landini suggested UNESCO.  It is
hard to imagine the American NEH funding such a project, given what I've
been reading in the papers this year about the arttitudes of our current
Congress.  Maybe UNESCO is better funded than the USA.  Maybe if we asked
Bill Gates nicely he would fork out?  Maybe after the VMS is seen on the
Discovery Channel the search for sugar daddies will be easier...
Maybe the Cornish Foundation in Toronto would be willing to help out...

Of course I feel we are in a bind:  the one thing that will make solution
most likely is, in my opinion, publication of a facsimile edition.


Jim

PS.  I hope Peter Meyer and Gabriel Landini don't take this sarcasm
as being aimed at them.  I rail instead against the fates, who have 
stacked the deck against us so.


Jim Reeds


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To: reeds@research.att.com
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From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
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> Of course I feel we are in a bind:  the one thing that will make solution
> most likely is, in my opinion, publication of a facsimile edition.

It is, sadly, also likely to produce 1,000 bogus solutions from every
corner of the crackpot fringe who had not heard of the MS before but who
suddenly see a chance to be listened to. :)

-Adams


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 16:01 EST 1995
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From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: book/video
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Jim Reeds writes:

>Of course I have asked her about publishing a nice glossy coffee table book
>edition of the VMS.  Her answer is always the same:  "Without a solution
>to go with it, I won't touch it."

By now, is not part of the interest of the book the fact that it has defied
solution
for so long?  It has withstood the attacks not only of academic linguists
but also of the NSA and the best and brightest of
the American military intelligence community since Wild Bill left the scene
(well, that's what the blurb on the book could say, though I'm not sure these 
good folks would want it known generally that they can't read this book).

> Maybe after the VMS is seen on the
>Discovery Channel the search for sugar daddies will be easier...

Would the Beinecke actually let a video cameraman get at the ms?

>PS.  I hope Peter Meyer and Gabriel Landini don't take this sarcasm
>as being aimed at them.  I rail instead against the fates, who have 
>stacked the deck against us so.

Not enough sarcasm for me at least to notice.  And those fates
can be moved.


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec 07 13:20:46 0800 1995
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Date: Thu, 07 Dec 1995 13:20:46 -0800
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Adams Douglas wrote:

> I'll reiterate at this point that it would be highly useful to use a
> decent thematic-mapping camera if such a scan was arranged of the VMS.
> I'm sure if someone talked nicely to the right people at Itek
> Corporation, or other remote-sensing manufacturer, they might even be
> willing to donate the use of a camera and the necessary film for this
> academic project in these days of shrinking defense budgets.

The best thing would be to get the support from the UNESCO or
something similar (Project Gutmeberg, any ideas?) and an
image processing lab from Harvard Uni. to carry it on.
Probably the Beinecke would be much in favour to allow the same
university to carry it out rather than other (us?).

Who did the work on the Dead Sea rolls? (is this the correct name?)
The methodology they used may be published somewhere...
I'll do a search & report later.

cheers,

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec 07 13:32:12 0800 1995
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Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> 
> Hello all!

> When I first saw a list of word frequencies I thought: how could there
> be so many words that are used only once? I then ran such a count
> on a text in vulgate (Latin) of about the same length (the Acts of
> the Apostles from somewhere on the net) and was amazed by the
> good correspondence. Rene:
Is there any chance of getting the address from where you get the
text in Latin? It could be a good sample to do further comparisons.

>I did not know about Zipf law for word frequencies,
> but for a text of non-infinite length this could be followed only
> approximately anyway. Plus the language does play a role: I took a
> piece from Nostradamus and this fitted much worse.

I did a Zipf's plot on the entire FSG and it follows somewhat the first law
I have not tried the 2nd Zipf's law, but will do it soon.
One problem is that we are not absolutely sure that the transcriptions
are correct, and if a word is mispelled then it's a new word of frequency 1.
Having done the interlin.vms, I did not have any time left to do 
any analysis of it (!), but as far as I rememeber there are is large
number or inconsistence between D'Imperio and Friedman's transcriptions.
Those can fool any letter/word frequency counts and we could be talking
nonsense.

cheers,

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 14:38:30 0800 1995
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From: <kornai@almaden.ibm.com> (Andras Kornai)
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Subject: Re: Why dating of the MS is important
To: adamsd@cts.com (Adams Douglas)
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Cc: 100716.75@compuserve.com, voynich@rand.org
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Adams Douglas writes:
> > However, Andras Kornai tells me that he wrote to the Beinecke and
> > " tried to get at least UV and infrared scanning arranged. Sent them
> > a letter -- they never bothered to reply."
> Anybody ever heard of this thing called a telephone? Who, specifically
> would one speak to at the Beinecke? The way to proceed, I feel, would be
> to make enough phone calls that you reach whoever has authority for
> granting such tests, and then reach agreement with them that you are
> going to send a formal request for documentation purposes. That way,
> everybody is happy and knowledgeable about what's going to happen.
Guess what, I started by calling them (the name and number of the right person
was provided by Jim Reeds, who can probably dig it out more easily than I can).
They wanted a written request. I complied, and got nowhere.

On another note, from the pages I've seen the VMS is not really striking enough
to make a nice coffee table book. It is striking enough for us, since we are
interested in the text. But there aren't enough nekkid broads and nothing like
the cute stuff in Codex Seraph. that would really sell it.

On yet another note, don't for a minute believe that obeying Zipf's law proves
anything about the VMS. A classic paper by Mandelbrot shows that text typed by
monkeys who use the spacebar just as randomly as the other keys will obey
Zipf's law:

%T On the theory of word frequencies and on related Markovian models of discourse
%A Benoit Mandelbrot
%P 190-219
%D 1961
%I American Mathematical Society
%B Structure of language and its mathematical aspects
%S Proceedings of symposia in applied mathematics
%V 12

Andras Kornai

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 18:56:01 0700 1995
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From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: Adams Douglas <adamsd@cts.com>
cc: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>, voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Why dating of the MS is important
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Adams:  I called the Beinicke library a couple of weeks ago, and got a 
frosty lady who simply said "we don't deal over the telephone-write a 
letter" and did not bother to tell me to whom I should write!  I'm going 
to call again. What we <really> need is a professor (the older and 
crustier the better) in history or languages who can deal with the 
library folks as our amicus (that's all the Latin I know) at best and 
someone who can go there in person and persevere at least.  I don't think 
letter writing will do much good ( although should not be eschewed).
Don


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 19:05:35 0700 1995
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From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
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YES! a coffee table quality repro with sufficient resolution to use a 
lens on is JUST the thing.  Maybe there is a market.  After all, people 
have paid good (and bad) money for rocks!
Don


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Thu Dec  7 22:36:54 0500 1995
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Subject: Re: Why dating of the MS is important
Status: OR


> There was a case in living memory where some document was shown to be a 20th
> C. creation because the ink contained some compound that was not used in
> pre-20th C. inks.  Anyone remember the details?

Yes. It was the Vinland Map. Owned by Yale. The same folks who own the
Voynich. Someone named McCrone made the claim that the ink contained a
titanium compound only used in modern inks. Other analytic examination
of the ink (mass spectroscopy, I believe) has disputed that conclusion.

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 08 09:02:58 EWT 1995
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Date: Fri, 08 Dec 95 09:02:58 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject: Professor needed
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello all,

this has already failed in the past (i.e. searching for a Professor
to get some leverage on Beinecke), but that should be no reason not
to try again.

How about Umberto Eco? He's a professor in symbology (or something like
that). I would not be at all surprised if he'd be interested.
And one can say he's sufficiently famous (not to mention rich).

OK, I have no idea what to do with that suggestion. Probably
the most useless one in the last year or so.

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 08 10:06:16 0800 1995
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Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 10:06:16 -0800
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kornai (Andras Kornai) wrote:
> On yet another note, don't for a minute believe that obeying Zipf's law proves
> anything about the VMS. A classic paper by Mandelbrot shows that text typed by
> monkeys who use the spacebar just as randomly as the other keys will obey
> Zipf's law:

Not only that, but also if you have a text and scramble the sequence of
words, the Zipf's law is preserved while the text looses all the information.

Yes, you are right, it does not prove anything, but it's interesting that
some documents do not follow Zipf's law. I did one plot from a thesaurus
and it does not follow it. How about encripted text? Does it follow Zipf's law?


Jim Reeds said:
>PS.  I hope Peter Meyer and Gabriel Landini don't take this sarcasm
>as being aimed at them.  I rail instead against the fates, who have
>stacked the deck against us so.

Not at all, Jim!

cheers,

Gabriel

PS: Any news on the reprinting of the D'Imperio book?

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 08 10:15:06 0800 1995
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From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Alligator Descartes wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I've got a small database with the VM loaded into it from the transcriptions
> on the various ftp sites which, if people think it may be useful, I could
> spend a bit of time putting a WWW front-end onto it.
> 
> Anyone support the idea?
> 
> It allows you to query the VM, including word frequencies, common word
> endings, common word beginnings and all that stuff.

I support it!
What I am interested to know is the transition probabilities of the
words in the VMS.
I have downloaded from somewhere a small program called Mark V Shaney
(for Markov Chain) that does exactly that and produces back another
text with the same statistical properties. When you use the probability
of the 3rd word depending on the 2 previous (is that order 2 or 3?)
then the text shows some kind of "sense". It's quite interesting and
it can make funny texts.
Unfortunately the program does not show the transition matrix in a
readable way (although you can save those).

reagrds

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 08 14:43:19 0500 1995
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To: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
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Subject: Re: Professor needed 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 08 Dec 1995 09:02:58 EST."
             <199512081843.KAA13936@rand.org> 
Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 14:43:19 -0500
From: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>
Status: OR

> Hello all,
> 
> this has already failed in the past (i.e. searching for a Professor
> to get some leverage on Beinecke), but that should be no reason not
> to try again.
> 
> How about Umberto Eco? He's a professor in symbology (or something like
> that). I would not be at all surprised if he'd be interested.
> And one can say he's sufficiently famous (not to mention rich).
> 
> OK, I have no idea what to do with that suggestion. Probably
> the most useless one in the last year or so.
> 
> Cheers, Rene Zandbergen
> 

Rene,
I know Umberto Eco but my opinion about him is that he is not a scholar
on anything but his own self-promotion! That is the alternate meaning of
rich and famous. Eco is really a clever diletant who made a name for 
himself by pontificating on tidbits of someone else's scholarship and
appropriating them for his best-selling 'novels'! I am sure he had the
VMS targeted for inclusion on an upcoming one  but Indiana Jones might 
have gotten to it before he does...

We would be a lot better without him, IMHO
 
-Joao

---------
Joao Leao
leao@physics.bu.edu
http://physics.bu.edu/~leao/leao.html
Office Phone: (617)353-3931
Home Phone:   (617)247-2670
Boston University - Physics Department
Director of Computer Research Facility
 
"Let this be a lesson: never give a monster the job of a mad scientist...
 ...now be a good bunny and let me have your brain! "
-----------------------------------------------------

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 08 14:07:57 0800 1995
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Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 14:07:57 -0800 (PST)
From: RJB@u.washington.edu
Subject: VMS and Eco
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Amusing enough ration of spleen (or is it bile)  there --



   ".   .    .  . Eco is really a clever diletant who made a
   name for himself by pontificating on tidbits of someone else's 
   scholarship and appropriating them for his best-selling 'novels'! "


You for got to put quotation marks around "best-selling" -- might
as well doubt that, since you seem to doubt that they're novels, eh?
And on general (or General Semantic) principles, you might have done 
the same with "is".  Why allow one's vituperation to be stained
with moderation?

But all kidding aside -- this sounds like exactly the kind of
person who would make the Great VMS Coffee Table Book and CD Rom
with Cryptographic Tools and Contest Included a commercially
viable proposition.

LeGrand Cinq-Mars
rjb@u.washington.edu


From rand.org!jim Fri Dec  8 17:09 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich book gamble
Status: OR

I showed Joao's comment to my wife. Joao wrote:

> Not to discount your wive's savy but I have to agree with Peter that the
> charm of the VMS is exactly its inacessibility! Once decyphered ...
> ...
> would pay a premium to the reader who figured them out, cut out of the
> book sales! The VMS promises a type of notoriety that no money can buy...

My wife replied:

> The point about Voymich ms's mysteriousness as a selling point is well
> taken. But you'll have to find a real gambler of a publisher to take it on.
> As for the other book--there was an established  right answer, and a
> monetary prize if I remember right, to encourage people to try their hands.
> With VMS, you already know that there will be cryptocrackpots (none of you
> guys of course) who will insist that they have the right answer because no
> one else can produce something better. Maybe the Beinecke would let you set
> up a nonprofit Voynichiana business to make T-shirts and ties etc to sell
> to finance the book to finance the deciphering?


Jim Reeds


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Subject: Re: VMS and Eco
To: RJB@u.washington.edu
Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 14:32:13 -0800 (PST)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <01HYKFPD59HU94JIZW@MAX.U.WASHINGTON.EDU.L> from "RJB@u.washington.edu" at Dec 8, 95 02:07:57 pm
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> But all kidding aside -- this sounds like exactly the kind of
> person who would make the Great VMS Coffee Table Book and CD Rom
> with Cryptographic Tools and Contest Included a commercially
> viable proposition.

Agreed, great title too! I can see the ads now: "Secret for Centuries! Can
YOU solve the mystery?" :)

I'm sure the NSA would just _love_ real cryptanalysis to become a
pop-culture hobby. (not!) That's reason enough to market such a thing.

-Adams




From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 08 16:44:41 0800 1995
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Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 16:44:41 -0800 (PST)
From: RJB@u.washington.edu
Subject: VMS Coffee Table with CD ROM Cryptographic Tools
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If J Guy's VMS editor (souped up for Windows 95 and Netscape 2.0)
were included, one could drive the various security types even
wilder ...  

     Is it Crypto or is it Voynich?  Only the authors know for sure.

... but that would be unkind.

LeGrand Cinq-Mars
rjb@u.wasgington.edu

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec  8 23:32:55 0700 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
From: djl@montana.com (Don Latham)
Subject: the great coffee table book and contest
Status: OR

Just down the road apiece from me is Kessinger Publishing.  He puts out a
catalog of reprints of esoterica.  
Kessinger Publishing, POB 160, Kila, MT 59920.   406.756.0167
I've talked to him on the phone and he seems a nice feller.  Although Aegean
Press has done the Voynich stuff 'til now, Kessinger would have a larger
built-in audience and might be more inclined to take a chance.  If I bought
a microfilm from the Beinecke, could it be reproduced? that is, does
ownership of the MS automatically confer a copyright? I know Kessinger has
published a lot of stuff that is direct photocopy of things long in the
public domain...

Note change of address, I'm on a commercial hookup now.

Don
Don Latham
pob 460134
Huson, MT 59846
djl@montana.com


From rand.org!jim Fri Dec  8 23:49:01 0700 1995
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Date: Fri, 8 Dec 1995 23:49:01 -0700 (MST)
From: Don J Lathams <fo__djl@selway.umt.edu>
To: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
cc: Voynich list <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Re: Professor needed
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On Fri, 8 Dec 1995, Rene Zandbergen wrote:

> 
> How about Umberto Eco? He's a professor in symbology (or something like
> that). I would not be at all surprised if he'd be interested.
> And one can say he's sufficiently famous (not to mention rich).


Hey, why not.  any port in a storm, says I.  But how to insist that the 
publication is untainted in publication.  
Heck, there are lots of printers and perfect binders around. Let's form a 
consortium and publish it as a group?  Anyone know the costs of doing 
this? Hint: JR's wife...

Don

PS note my address change to djl@montana.com  It's been changed in the list.


   ********************************************************
        Don Latham            work: IFSL
        POB 460134                  POB 8089
        Huson, MT 59846             Missoula, MT 59807
        fo__djl@selway.umt.edu      d.latham:S22L01A
        406-626-4304                406-329-4848
   ********************************************************


From rand.org!jim Sat Dec  9 11:24 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich coffee table book
Status: OR

The question of what a coffee-table edition would cost comes up every
year or so.

Costs vary, of course, depending on who does the work, and on how good you
want the end result to be.  Color separations cost in the $500-$1000 range
a plate, my wife says.  (This is the fixed cost associated getting a photograph
ready for printing.)  Then there are the costs of editing, printing, 
warehousing, distribution, and marketing, which I will totally ignore here.
Suppose you want to print a plate per Voynich page.  That is $235,000 for the
color separations, which you have to pay up front.  If you plan on selling 
2,000 copies, you will have to let each book cost at least $100.

CD-ROMS have got to be cheaper.  I have heard $10,000 up-front money
for a run of 1,000 disks.

The question of copyright also arises every year.  There is no copyright to
the VMS, because the book was written too long ago.   Modern photographs of
the book ARE copyright.  The owner of the book will not sell you a photograph
or even let you look at it unless you sign a contract, one of the terms of 
which prevents you from publishing the photographs.  Of course they grant
permission in particular cases, upon payment of a fee.  (My Cryptologia 
paper, for instance, has two Yale-supplied photographs, for which I had
to pay a tidy sum.)

One person suggested taking a copy of the Yale microfilm and just going ahead
and publishing it.  This is unwise on two counts:  One, Yale can sue you,
(they own the copyright to the microfilm) and two, the photographic quality
of the film is terrible.  


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Sat Dec 09 11:29:08 0500 1995
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To: RJB@u.washington.edu
cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: VMS and Eco 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 08 Dec 1995 14:07:57 EST."
             <01HYKFPD59HU94JIZW@MAX.U.WASHINGTON.EDU.L> 
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 1995 11:29:08 -0500
From: Joao Leao <leao@buphy0.bu.edu>
Status: OR

Dear Le(Peut-Etre Pas Si Grand)Cinq-Mars:

> Amusing enough ration of spleen (or is it bile)  there --
> 
It seems you have not been much acquainted with visceral fluids as of
late! I was only exhibiting a modicum of revulsion in my opinion of 
the character.  There are much more shameless self-promoters and Eco 
is moderately entertaining, I had grant him that.
				     |
>    ".   .    .  . Eco is really a clever diletant who made a
>    name for himself by pontificating on tidbits of someone else's 
>    scholarship and appropriating them for his best-selling 'novels'! "
> 
> You for got to put quotation marks around "best-selling" -- might
> as well doubt that, since you seem to doubt that they're novels, eh?
> And on general (or General Semantic) principles, you might have done 
> the same with "is".  Why allow one's vituperation to be stained
> with moderation?
> 

No. That was intended. I have no doubts about how well is 'novels' sell. 
Neither does he, otherwise he would still be writing semiotics 'treatises'. I
would hardly hold my quotes to either set of his superficial displays of 
tea-party eloquence. On the other hand Eco has wrote a few amusing essays
(How to write a thesis, Travels in Hyperreality...) which lead me to think
that he is a character of his own making which would ultimately be his best
excuse, if irony is any paliative for intellectual dishonesty.   

> But all kidding aside -- this sounds like exactly the kind of
> person who would make the Great VMS Coffee Table Book and CD Rom
> with Cryptographic Tools and Contest Included a commercially
> viable proposition.
> 

In any case my point is that he is exactly the kind of character who 
would banalize the VMS and turn it into his own money making device.
I believe the VMS deserves better even if it turns out to be a manual
on hot tub contruction. There is enough and genuinely fascinating 
scholarship on the VMS to bend most coffee tables as it is. I think
we should not try and engage Eco or any of the minions or self-professed
luminaries which will surely be all too ready to dispense wit  and
suck profit from it. 

-Joao

>
> LeGrand Cinq-Mars
> rjb@u.washington.edu
> 
---------
Joao Leao
leao@physics.bu.edu
http://physics.bu.edu/~leao/leao.html
Office Phone: (617)353-3931
Home Phone:   (617)247-2670
Boston University - Physics Department
Director of Computer Research Facility
 
"Let this be a lesson: never give a monster the job of a mad scientist...
 ...now be a good bunny and let me have your brain! "
-----------------------------------------------------

From rand.org!jim Sat Dec 09 20:38:29 EST 1995
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Date:         Sat, 09 Dec 95 20:38:29 EST
From: Margo <ST002958@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Why no scientific dating?
To: voynich@RAND.ORG
Status: OR


>Re: Why no scientific dating?
>
>Date: Wed, 06 Dec 1995 12:54:08 -0800
>From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
>Organization: The University of Birmingham, U.K.
>
>Don J Lathams wrote:
>>
>> right.  Such a date would at least test the Bacon theory of origin.
>
>Only on the dating of the vellum. This does not discard at all the theory of us
>ng
>a very old vellum to create a hoax (which I do not think is the case anyway).
>And if it's found that it's from Bacon's days, this does not solve too
>much either. It is still possible to be a hoax of those days (by Kelly
>or whoever using old vellum).
>
>I can't remember exactly, but wasn't there a movie/novel called "The Word" abou
>somebody doing this sort of thing?
>
I don't know about that, but there was a famous case in Czechoslovakia.
A scholar composed original poetry in an archaic style, then wrote it
on old paper and claimed to have found it.  (This was around the time
of Ossian, when such hoaxes were something of the rage.)
His "songs" were a smash hit and helped re-invigorate the country's
literature.  It was many decades later when chemical tests of the ink
conclusively revealed his work to be a forgery.
At that time there was still no  carbon dating technology.
I can't quite remember the man's name.  It began with H and was
five letters long, so the name Hasek is blocking me from remembering.
No, I think I've got it.  Hanka.
He was a pupil of Josef Dobrovsky's.  Roman Jakobson wrote an article
defending him for his forgery on the grounds of its beneficial effect
on Czech literature.  The article is reprinted in _Language in
Literature_.

Margo Ballou

From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 10 09:59:03 PST 1995
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To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Publishing the VMs (from Henry Casson)
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 95 09:59:03 PST
From: Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>
Status: OR


Reminder -- you can post directly to the Voynich Ms. mailing list
by sending mail to voynich@rand.org.

To unsubscribe, send mail to voynich-request@rand.org.

	Jim Gillogly
	20 Foreyule S.R. 1995, 17:58


------- Forwarded Message

Date: Sat, 9 Dec 1995 21:22:55 -0800 (PST)
From: Henry Casson <casson@ohsu.EDU>
X-Sender: casson@steele
To: jim@rand.org
Subject: the manuscript
Message-Id: <Pine.SOL.3.91.951209211518.28812A@steele>

Jim.. Please post. I have been enjoying the traffic. Let me put in a vote in 
favor of the position that there is no actual content. If, which I am willing 
to concede, the document is several hundred years old, then I would argue that 
any cipher of that age would be breakable by the professionals who have tried. 
The document has too much "structure" to be an encryption, and too little to be 
an unknown language. An example of output with something like that degree of 
intermediate complexity is the "speaking in tongues", pseudo foreign language 
produced under the influence of religious ecstasy. As a medical student a long 
time ago I saw in textbooks examples of diagrams and writings produced by 
schizophrenics which had a superficially similar appearance. This is a lot of 
material to be produced that way, but such obsessive behavior is associated, 
for instance, with autism. I am not an expert, or even well read on such 
subjects. There is a science (or possibly pseudoscience) called 
psycholinguistics which must deal with such statistics. 
I borrowed Serafini from our long suffering inter library loan service. I read 
about him in a magazine in my opticianUs waiting room. He is a general purpose 
artist, architect, designer. There is a fantastic amount of stuff there. It 
must have taken him years. The letters are too squiggly and variable to 
tempt anyone to believe they had a content , except the page numbering, which
 I think is internally consistent. The existence of this work at least
 demolishes the argument that no-one would produce hundreds of pages of
 meaningless material. 
It would be useful to contact him, to see if he was influenced by the 
Voynich, and just to hear his thoughts on why he did it.
If the moves towards a CD-ROM or book advance, I'll subscribe. 
					Henry Casson MD

------- End of Forwarded Message


From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 10 14:50 EST 1995
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Date: 10 Dec 95 14:31:09 EST
From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Content
Message-ID: <951210193109_100716.75_EHU124-1@CompuServe.COM>
Status: OR

Henry Casson <casson@ohsu.EDU> writes:

> Let me put in a vote in 
>favor of the position that there is no actual content. If, which I am willing 
>to concede, the document is several hundred years old, then I would argue that 
>any cipher of that age would be breakable by the professionals who have tried. 

I agree with this, unless we wish to entertain scientifically disreputable
hypotheses
such as that it was left by extraterrestrials on a visit or was transported
through time.

>The document has too much "structure" to be an encryption, and too little to be

>an unknown language. 

An important point.  From what I hear (I'll leave it to the linguists here to
substantiate this) it seems to lack the variation of a natural language, yet
 to look enough like a natural language to make many think it is. 

 It is a bit like the following:

"The president's astrologer says former revenue agents usually wonder at
happy drinkers and happy revenue agents sometimes scheme with abandon but
mendacious Texas oil men hardly ever disbelieve spendthrift generals. The
president believes conniving stock brokers once in a while drink with witty
doctors and conniving drinkers rarely dance with abandon but former Texas
oil men sometimes wonder at witty revenue agents - which is why nobody
votes anymore except government workers. Did you know old lawyers
occasionally ridicule old lawyers and spendthrift government workers
usually debate with abandon but happy doctors frequently sleep with old
stock brokers - which is why the deficit is so large. Everyone knows happy
lawyers always cheat incorrigible clerics and conniving bankers hardly ever
debate interminably but witty bankers hardly ever wonder at confused
lawyers. The stars say incorrigible Texas oil men usually sleep with
mendacious drinkers and incorrigible soldiers sometimes party like there
was no tomorrow but confused used-car salesmen frequently imitate 
confused drinkers!"

Unlimited amounts of this are available, generated, of course, mechanically
by a computer following some fairly simple rules.  The "structure" here
approaches that of ordinary English text, but anyone understanding English
and studying the above passage (or at most another 10K or 20K from the
same source) should suspect that it was not written by a human but
 in some way mechanically.  Because it was generated mechanically,
 it lacks content, or meaning, since there is no intention to communicate.

>An example of output with something like that degree of 
>intermediate complexity is the "speaking in tongues", pseudo foreign language 
>produced under the influence of religious ecstasy.

Yes, and so we might look for the author(s) of the ms to someone known to
speak in tongues, or similar.  And the obvious suspect is none other than our
old friend Edward Kelly, skryer for Dr John Dee.  As is well known, Kelly 
communicated with angels, observing them in the shrewstone, facilitating
the transmission of documents in the Enochian language by reading to Dee
the letters shown to him sequentially by the angel(s) (which letters were
delivered backwards, so that Dee either wrote them backwards, or
rewrote them in reverse order, before he was able to read the Enochian text).

Kelly was clearly the sort of person to whom it would not be out of the
question to attribute a capacity for glyptoglossia.  He might even have
written the ms by taking dictation from an angel, an occurrence not all
that unusual in former times (and persisting even into the 20th C., 
e.g. A. Crowley, Cairo, 1904).  If the Voynich ms is a product of glyptoglossia
(and its "intermediate complexity" is at least evidence that it is) then this 
would cohere well with the plausible hypothesis that Rudolph II acquired 
it from Dee and Kelly.

>If the [scil. group] moves towards a CD-ROM or book advance, I'll subscribe. 
>					Henry Casson MD

Me too.

Peter Meyer


From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 10 14:11:48 0800 1995
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From: <kornai@almaden.ibm.com> (Andras Kornai)
Message-Id: <9512102211.AA16097@sun.almaden.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: Publishing the VMs (from Henry Casson)
To: jim@rand.org (Jim Gillogly)
Date: Sun, 10 Dec 1995 14:11:48 -0800 (PST)
Cc: voynich@rand.org
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Jim Gillogly writes:
> subjects. There is a science (or possibly pseudoscience) called
> psycholinguistics which must deal with such statistics.
No, psycholinguistics concerns itself primarily with the
experimental investigation of linguistic processing (measuring
reaction times, that sort of thing) and also with the process
of language development of infants. It is a solid, boring subvariety
of let's race the rats in the maze type behaviorist psychology for
the most part, nothing pseudoscientific about it.
Andras Kornai

From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 10 18:10 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich observations
Status: OR

I just spent a couple of hours with my friend Sergio Toresella, an
expert on manuscript herbals visiting this country from Italy.
He has been making a tour of American libraries and while at the 
Beinecke spent a little time with the VMS.  He knows about my interest,
and about our group.  Here is a sketch of some of his comments
about the VMS:

The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake.  It was manufactured
in the period 1450-1460.  It was in France for a while: the month names
on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting.  The book
itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round 
humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's.
There are similarities between the organization of the VMS (including 
the balneological section!) and that of other Italian herbals of the 1400s.
(He has a lot more to say on this account.)  The author of the VMS was a
madman, obsessed by sex.

He plans to write up his observations in a paper, possibly with help from 
me.

Jim Reeds


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wow.
Don

----------
From: 	reeds@research.att.com[SMTP:reeds@research.att.com]
Sent: 	Sunday, December 10, 1995 16:10 PM
To: 	"@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: 	Voynich observations

I just spent a couple of hours with my friend Sergio Toresella, an
expert on manuscript herbals visiting this country from Italy.
He has been making a tour of American libraries and while at the 
Beinecke spent a little time with the VMS.  He knows about my interest,
and about our group.  Here is a sketch of some of his comments
about the VMS:

The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake.  It was manufactured
in the period 1450-1460.  It was in France for a while: the month names
on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting.  The book
itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round 
humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's.
There are similarities between the organization of the VMS (including 
the balneological section!) and that of other Italian herbals of the 1400s.
(He has a lot more to say on this account.)  The author of the VMS was a
madman, obsessed by sex.

He plans to write up his observations in a paper, possibly with help from 
me.

Jim Reeds




From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 10 22:33 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich observations
Status: OR


Chuck Lee asks for the logic behind Toresella's conclusion that the VMS
was

> written by a madman, obsessed by sex.

Clearly this is not based on his expert knowledge of manuscript herbals,
but instead on his common sense.  He mentioned similarities with exhibits
he has seen in the Lombroso collection in Turin of the obsessive artistic
and literary products of the schizophrenic, which characteristically 
display the outward form of communication or representation, often of
some complex private system, but which on closer analysis show meaningless
content, scribbled detail, repetitious drivel, what have you.  I think this
is the same conclusion expressed in Henry Casson's post earlier today.  
And it was shared by Martin Joos, a distinguished linguist and cryptanalyst
member of the First Study Group.

I think it is a very tenable hypothesis.  To evaluate it one would want
to know more about obsessive writing.  I do not know how one would actually
prove it.

(Maybe "obsessed by naked women" would be more precise than "obsessed by
sex." The basis here is simply the very large number of unclothed female
figures.  Although not at all unknown in 15th century art, unclothed female
figures were not common, certainly not in such profusion.)

I hesitate to spell out more detail without his permission.  (My earlier 
letter had his OK.)  He returns to Italy in a few days; then we will trade
letters.  Email does not work well for him yet; when it does I am sure he
will join this group and take care of defending his own conclusions.

Ciao!

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Mon Dec 11 10:07:29 EWT 1995
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Date: Mon, 11 Dec 95 10:07:29 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject: Some more observations
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Sorry about yet another 'few observations' message.

Last week two independent people came up with the
idea that the writer of the Ms may have had a mental aberration:
autistic, schizophrenic or even 'a madman'. It does make a kind
of sense. The two hands/languages have so far pointed against a
single author theory, unless we do have a medieval (early-renaissance)
Jeckill/Hyde (sp?) on our hands. I do not know what this will
do for our CD-ROM marketing though :-)

I am quite impressed that another expert has had a look at the VMs.
Was that his own (private) initiative, or part of a larger study?
Or was he persuaded by you Jim?
A pity E-mail is a problem for him. He would have made a fine
member of this list. Anyway, looking forward to whatever more
comes out of this.
The date (1450+) seems to be contradicting with the Sunflower. Is it
true that at this time no European could have known what a Sunflower looks
like? Could the picture be something else? Would a 50-year shift
in the origin of the document be possible? We'll hopefully hear more
once the article is out.

About finding an editor for any kind of publication of the VMs, I
remember reading that Beinecke has already once reacted rather
strongly against anybody beside themselves trying to arrange this.
They do not want anybody to negotiate with editors on their behalf
so one should be careful.

OK, let's not go into a debate about Eco's character. I do not
know him well apart from some TV interviews where he clearly
shows to have a sizeable ego. His latest novel (according to some)
was mostly written to display his intellect. Anyway, this was a bit of
a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, but if you're looking for someone
famous... I was mainly thinking of him, because, with his (true or
false) specialism, he should already have heard about the VMs.

Cheers, for now, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Mon Dec 11 09:56:19 0800 1995
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As a side note to the recent discussion, I've just taken a cursory glance
through Eco's  _Search for the Perfect Language_, and didn't see any
reference to the VMS.  He may well, however, have counted it in the
category of things that were outside his topic (like Hildegard of
Bingen's lingua ignota).

LeGrand Cinq-Mars
rjb@u.washington.edu

From rand.org!jim Mon Dec 11 10:30:42 0800 1995
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Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 10:30:42 -0800
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
Organization: The University of Birmingham, U.K.
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To: ANDREW BARSS <BARSS@CCIT.ARIZONA.EDU>
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ANDREW BARSS wrote:
> 
> Be careful in using Markov chains for language analysis --
> it's formally impossble to characterize natural (human)
> langauges with them.
> 
> --Andrew Barss, Assoc. Prof of Linguistics
> 
> (don't mean to discurage you, just suggest you should
> be aware of the limitations of such formal devices).

Yes, thanks for the suggestion.
I am still curious about encripted code measures? Anybody
know about entropy, zipf's laws, frequencies and 
transition probabilities in coded messages?
Cheers,

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Mon Dec 11 23:28:03 0800 1995
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From: <kornai@almaden.ibm.com> (Andras Kornai)
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Subject: Re: Voynich observations
To: reeds@research.att.com
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reeds@research.att.com writes: {that the VMS was written by a madman}
> I think it is a very tenable hypothesis

Tenable, perhaps too tenable in the sense that it can be said of nearly
anything. As a working hypothesis, I find "surely the work of a madman" about
as unattractive as "superintelligent beings from outer space did it" because
they are both stock explanations for anything extraordinary.  Aside from a
general methodological resistance to such theories, I think the two hands
provide rather strong counterevidence. You need to invoke a folie a deux here
or even worse, multple personality disorder.

Andras Kornai

From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 06:34 EST 1995
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To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich furor
Status: OR

Rene Zandbergen asks

> I am quite impressed that another expert has had a look at the VMs.
> Was that his own (private) initiative, or part of a larger study?
> Or was he persuaded by you Jim?

He is an independent scholar; his has been working on manuscript herbals
for a long time.  He had heard of the Voynich MS but knew very little:
all the printed sources are American, and not found in Italian libraries.
He was going to Yale anyway (they do own other books, you know) so it
took no convincing at all for him to look at the VMS, too.

He also asks

> The date (1450+) seems to be contradicting with the Sunflower. Is it
> true that at this time no European could have known what a Sunflower looks
> like? Could the picture be something else? Would a 50-year shift
> in the origin of the document be possible? 

I don't think a 50 year shift in the date is possible.  I think the
picture must be something else.  Experts have told me, that just because
a picture in a medieval herbal reminds us of such-and-such a plant we should
by no means conclude that the artist saw the same plant.  The best one can
usually hope for is for the plant to be identified in the text, then one
can work oneself into a state of belief that the plant depicted is possibly
the plant named.  (This is for herbals, mind you, a specialized genre.
There are many perfectly recognizable naturalistically drawn plants in 
other forms of medieval art, esp. miniatures in books of hours.)

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 08:12 EST 1995
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To: "@proxy.research.att.com":voynich@rand.org
Subject: Voynich furor, contd.
Status: OR

Here is an attempt to answer a flurry of questions raised by my report
of Toresella's report:

Gabriel Landini asks about the sunflower:

> Well, if the sunflower is there it should be after 1492 or otherwise
> sunflowers were brought to Europe in "nonofficial" :-) trips to America
> by the vikings as it has been stated so many times. In that case
> would the sunflower remain a rare plant only known to herbalists?
> Why would the sunflower take an entire page it it was not important?

The sunflower identification is far from certain.  At any rate one plant
per page was the norm in illustrated herbals, and in the herbal section 
of the VMS.

And about the French writing:

> Is that part transcribed? If so, where in the FSGS/voynich files?

In the center of each of the zodiac diagrams is a conventional symbol
(Taurus, Virgo, etc.)  The FSG people seem to have confined their attention
to text in paragraphs, hence didn't transcribe those pages.  The comments
in voynich.now for f70v2 and f71v mention two such month labels.  D'Imperio's
Figure 10 (page 88) reproduces all these zodiac centers, but I don't think
you have your D'Imp yet.

And about the madness theory

> Is this a serious remark or kind of "on the fly" comment?
> Can we come to this conclusion without even knowing what is written?

where he is joined by Andras Kornai

> Tenable, perhaps too tenable in the sense that it can be said of nearly
> anything. As a working hypothesis, I find "surely the work of a madman" about
> as unattractive as "superintelligent beings from outer space did it" because
> they are both stock explanations for anything extraordinary.  

The madness theory is, as I explained in an earlier post, separate from his
dating of the MS by handwriting.  The one is a layman's guess, the other
is a scholar's conclusion.  And Toresella is conscious of the unsatisfying
nature of this explanation which is not really an explanation at all.
(But let me point out that one difference between schizophrenics and 
superintelligent beings from outer space is that we know the former exist,
and we have seem vaguely similar such items in museums.)  
 
Gabriel asked of the madness claims

> ... or are the remarks done within the context of other herbals?

Zillions of unclothed women are not found in other herbals.  There might
be one or two pictures showing human figues, either a formal scene with
Dioscorides instructing the author, or a physician instructing a druggist,
or else a plant gatherer using a hoe to dig up a plant.  All figures clothed
appropriate to their station.

Kornai worries about A & B:

> Aside from a
> general methodological resistance to such theories, I think the two hands
> provide rather strong counterevidence. You need to invoke a folie a deux here
> or even worse, multple personality disorder.

Toresella saw one person's handwriting, as did Panofsky.  I suppose the A
and B styles represent the same person writing at different times.  Maybe
in winter his fingers were stiffer than in summer.  Maybe he had an illness
and felt weak when writing the B portion.  Maybe he was 10 years older when
he wrote the B section.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 09:04 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich book
Status: OR


I just saw this home page for Aegean Park Press:

	http://www.halcyon.com/barker/

and found D'Imperio listed in the 1996 catalogue.

Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 14:59:44 +0000 1995
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From: Gabriel Landini <landinig@sun1.bham.ac.uk>
To: voynich@rand.org
Subject: VMS in French
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Jim Reeds mentioned that according to his friend, the vms is in French 
(the names of the months). Could he actually read those names or is it 
just a "guess"?
Could he read any other parts?
Is the solution any near?
cheers,
Gabriel



From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 07:29:19 0800 1995
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Subject: Re: VMS in French
To: landinig@sun1.bham.ac.uk (Gabriel Landini)
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 07:29:19 -0800 (PST)
From: "Adams Douglas" <adamsd@cts.com>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
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> Jim Reeds mentioned that according to his friend, the vms is in French 
> (the names of the months). Could he actually read those names or is it 
> just a "guess"?

I believe what he meant was that the french names were written in _later_ by
one of the subsequent owners of the VMS. Yes?


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 10:43 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich has a wee bit of French in it
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Gabriel wonders about the bits of French in the VMS:

>  according to his friend, the vms is in French
> (the names of the months). Could he actually read those names
> just a "guess"?

There are a few words in French, all month names, written on the zodiac
diagrams.  The handwriting is a French late 1400's handwriting.  That a
few month names are present in the VMS is well known; that they are in
French is new. (Month names look pretty much the same in most European
languages, I guess, so one can read them without knowing what language
they are.)  They were not written by the VMS author, who had a different
handwriting.  They might have been written by our first colleague, the
first person who tried to puzzle out what the VMS was all about.  The
zodiac diagrams are, after all, just about the only things one can
identify in the VMS: Libra, Scorpio, etc.


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 12 09:51:24 0800 1995
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reeds@research.att.com wrote:
> 
> I just spent a couple of hours with my friend Sergio Toresella, an
> expert on manuscript herbals visiting this country from Italy.I found this very interesting.
> 
> The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake.  It was manufactured
> in the period 1450-1460.Well, if the sunflower is there it should be after 1492 or otherwise
sunflowers were brought to Europe in "nonofficial" :-) trips to America
by the vikings as it has been stated so many times. In that case
would the sunflower remain a rare plant only known to herbalists?
Why would the sunflower take an entire page it it was not important?

>  It was in France for a while: the month names
> on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting.Is that part transcribed? If so, where in the FSGS/voynich files?

>  The book
> itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round
> humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's.
> There are similarities between the organization of the VMS (including
> the balneological section!) Sorry what is the "balneological section"?

>and that of other Italian herbals of the 1400s.
> (He has a lot more to say on this account.)  The author of the VMS was a
> madman, obsessed by sex.

Is this a serious remark or kind of "on the fly" comment?
Can we come to this conclusion without even knowing what is written?
Much of classical Japanese painting is full of sex scenes, does this also
include Japanes madmen obsessed by sex :-) or are the remarks done within the
context of other herbals? Please, I do not want to sound pedantic, I am really
curious.



> He plans to write up his observations in a paper, possibly with help from
> me.I look forward to ANY comments! Please Jim, keep us informed!

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 13 10:21:17 0800 1995
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From: Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@s1.csuhayward.edu>
To: Jim Gillogly <jim@rand.org>
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Publishing the VMs (from Henry Casson)
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On Sun, 10 Dec 1995, Henry Casson wrote:

> The document has too much "structure" to be an encryption, and too little to be 
> an unknown language. An example of output with something like that degree of 
> intermediate complexity is the "speaking in tongues", pseudo foreign language 
> produced under the influence of religious ecstasy. 

By this analogy, glossolalia (speaking in tongues) has a lot of structure 
but not enough to be an unknown language? I'm not exactly sure how a 
spoken language can be compared to a written one in this way. Glossolalia 
occurs globally, not just in Christian sects, and seems to have the same 
characteristic everywhere: a phonology not different from the phonology 
of the daily spoken language (no different sounds, clusters, etc). If 
this same principle were true with the Voynich, we'd probably know it by 
now and what language it was most like.

--Moonhawk

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 13 14:49 EST 1995
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Subject: Voynich glossolalia?
Status: OR

Moonhawk asserts

> ... Glossolalia
> occurs globally, not just in Christian sects, and seems to have the same 
> characteristic everywhere: a phonology not different from the phonology 
> of the daily spoken language (no different sounds, clusters, etc). ...

Can you give us some literature references for glossolalia, a survey
paper, say?


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 13 17:52 EST 1995
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Date: 13 Dec 95 16:33:04 EST
From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Netscape glossolalia citations
Message-ID: <951213213303_100716.75_EHU93-1@CompuServe.COM>
Status: OR

Jim Reeds asked of Mohawk:

>Can you give us some literature references for glossolalia, a survey
>paper, say?

A quick search on "glossolalia" using Netscape's NetSearch produced
only one item devoted to the subject and several others that mention it.
(Other web searchers would likely return additional, possibly more
interesting, citations.)

1.  Walk Away

http://apocalypse.berkshire.net/~ifas/wa/glossolalia.html

Glossolalia: the gift of gibberish . By D. James Janes . Strolling through
the television one day, I encountered one of the many televangelists
available for video perusal. Normally, the image of a TV preacher would
grace my screen for ...

2. Review

http://www.lake.de/sonst/homepages/s2442/hydra.html

Peter Krapp . Hydri serpentes sunt aquatici, qui fluvios ac stagna colunt,
sicut de aliquibus Indorum vermibus describitur, quos ibi genus quoddam,
Oceano propinquum, ab amne Ocduba sibi victum humano femore crassiores
traxisse et cocco ...

3.  DEUTERONOMY COMIX

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.193/review-1.193

by STUART MOULTHROP School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology sm51@prism.gatech.edu _Postmodern Culture_
v.3 n.2 (January, 1993) Copyright (c) 1993 by Stuart Moulthrop, all rights
reserved.

4.  PMC:Sharples.594

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.594/sharples.594.html

Clockwork Education: . The Persistence of the Arnoldian Ideal . by .
Geoffrey Sharpless . Department of English . University of Pennsylvania .
Postmodern Culture v.4 n.3 (May, 1994) . pmc@unity.ncsu.edu . Copyright (c)
1994 by Geoffrey ...

5.  POSTMODERNISM, ETHNICITY AND UNDERGROUND REVISIONISM ...

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.591/mikics-1.591

IN ISHMAEL REED by DAVID MIKICS University of Houston _Postmodern Culture_
v.1 n.3 (May, 1991) Copyright (c) 1991 by David Mikics

6.  SJCPL's Info File Database

http://sjcpl.lib.in.us/InfoFileIntro.html

SJCPL's Info File database contains answers to unusual and interesting
questions that were collected over many years at the library. Currently it
contains over 700 records . It is provided by the Reference Department of
the St. Joseph County ...

7.  READING BEYOND MEANING

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.593/aichele.593

by GEORGE AICHELE Dept. of Philosophy and Religion, Adrian College
470-5237@mcimail.com _Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.3 (May, 1993)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu Copyright (c) 1993 by George Aichele

8.  Journal of Mind and Behavior

http://kramer.ume.maine.edu/~jmb/jmb10.html

Contents of Back Issues . NEWSFLASH! We have almost all the abstracts
online and hope to have it totally up-to-date by the first of December. The
full article abstracts are available for viewing by clicking on the article
title



From s1.csuhayward.edu!dalford Wed Dec 13 14:57:31 0800 1995
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From: Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@s1.csuhayward.edu>
To: reeds@research.att.com
Cc: voynich@rand.org
Subject: Re: Voynich glossolalia?
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Best I know is a book by Felicitas Goodman, called, I believe, 
_Glosslolalia_, or perhaps _Speaking in Tongues_, from which I drew the 
information in the previous reply. An early '80s book, I believe. Having 
grown up in a speaking-in-tongues home, I was interested in how a 
linguist treated this phenomenon. 

My best guess as a linguist who works on consciousness issues (introduced 
to the VMs by Terence McKenna) is that the speaking systems of the brain, 
during glossolalia, instead of receiving input from the normal thinking 
pathways in the cortext, receive 'ecstatic' input from the limbic system 
and are then processed the same way as normal speech, with the same 
phonological entities, habits and constraints as the daily speech.

And "gift of gibberish" makes it sound pointless and wondering why it 
would be called a gift, whereas the authentic (no cameras on) glossolalia 
I endured on a weekly basis for nearly 20 years was nothing less than an 
ecstatic alternative state of language along with an ecstatic alternative 
state of consciousness. I say endured because I never did it, but my mom 
and dad both did, and a large number of people in the church.

In public mode, the speaking in tongues is often followed by a second 
ritual called the interpretation of tongues, done by sometimes the same 
and sometimes another person led by the Spirit to do it; and 
interpretation is, indeed, a better word to use than say translation, 
usually dressed up with lots of yeas and verilys. The second part is not 
generally invoked when one is speaking in tongues 'privately' (as 
sometimes when my mom was driving the car. "MOM!! Watch out!").

Of course it was only when I was able to liberate myself from AofG and 
actually (gasp!) talk to Catholics and others about religion that I found 
out that the entire 'speaking in tongues' phenomenon of Charismatic 
churches, with their firm Biblical foundation in Acts, has always been 
seen by Catholics as a miracle more like 'hearing in ears' from their 
reading of the same text.

Of course, the fact that it does appear in many other religions around 
the world as well just brings it all back around in a circle.

Cheers,
   		--Moonhawk

On Wed, 13 Dec 1995 reeds@research.att.com wrote:

> Moonhawk asserts
> 
> > ... Glossolalia
> > occurs globally, not just in Christian sects, and seems to have the same 
> > characteristic everywhere: a phonology not different from the phonology 
> > of the daily spoken language (no different sounds, clusters, etc). ...
> 
> Can you give us some literature references for glossolalia, a survey
> paper, say?
> 
> 
> Jim Reeds
> 
> 

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 15 09:43:49 0800 1995
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From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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Hi, 
I mentioned before transition probabilities of words.
Are you ready for a random text?
Ok, here it is: It is a mixture of Currier's text and
Guy's text on Levitov's solution, produced by Mark V Shaney
version 1.3.
The 2 texts are read in sequence and the transition probability
(order 2) calculated. The text is random but has somewhat
a statistical resemblance to the original sources. The funny
thing is that some parts have some sort or readibility.
Enjoy the nonsense!

Gabriel


First thing I noted a difference was the pharmaceutical section, 
two "languages" and two hands. The recipe section at the end 
of the time in each of the first batch did more of the zodiac 
signs of Capricorn and Aquarius; maybe that was somebody's 
horoscope? Question (Speaker unidentified): Are you convinced 
that the other might be "zero" in "Herbal A," the writing is 
consistent throughout, and is obviously the work of one word 
being changed by neighboring sounds, at the end of one man. 
On folios 25 to 65, it was done. The folios were taken, one 
a t a time, off the beautiful pictures! Currier: Then he left 
a lot that are exactly two long. (Examples from "Herbal A" 
material, about 6500 words, 1000 lines, averaging seven words 
per line: "word"-initial total frequency expected in actual, 
in symbols as "word"-initial any "word" first "word" symbol 
initials of line <cqpt> 326 3 <cq;t> 67 1 <clpt> 82 0 <cl;t> 
14 0 These "ligatures" seem to behave almost, but not quite, 
like <ct>, <c't>. In contrast, whether or not followed by the 
way. All this indicates to me that the writing in the same 
sort of phenomenon, not if we are in fact in the folio gathering 
-- the numbers in the manuscript, I was emphasizing was that 
this can't be, as far as I call finals, although they can also 
occur elsewhere) are in the herbal section. So we now have, 
in the same characters internally. There are, of course, tests 
for "psychological random" characteristics of various sorts, 
which would provide some strong support for a hypothesis that 
the writing is consistent throughout, and is obviously in one 
section of these letters under a magnifying glass, so I think 
this is the way through the second part of the time in each 
of the next; not one. This is almost 25,000 "words," there 
is a hoax. But no details have been taken from these other 
alphabets. You can pick out resemblances between Latin abbreviations 
and other alphabets for most symbols except for the zodiac 
signs of Capricorn and Aquarius; maybe that was somebody's 
horoscope?

Mark V Shaney v1.3

From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 17 05:35 EST 1995
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From: Peter Meyer <100716.75@compuserve.com>
To: Voynich List <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: Hungarian connection?
Message-ID: <951217101213_100716.75_EHU30-1@CompuServe.COM>
Status: OR

This short article appears in the 14-20 December 1995 issue of The European's
MagAZine.  (The European is an excellent newspaper published weekly in Europe
and obtainable at many bookstores in the U.S.)  The article appears on page 15,
and the author is John Nadler.

        Do aliens speak Hungarian?

According to evidence uncovered by an American UFO researcher Glenn Campbell,
Hungarian may be the mother tongue of alien visitors to the earth.

Campbell is investigating the notion that Hungarian, a language of Asiatic
origins, is related to an extra-terrestrial mystery he is studying in the US
where a grey-skinned four-fingered alien called Jarod is purportedly advising a
top-secret government agency in the construction of a working flying saucer.
According to Campbell's source, the native language of Jarod the alien is a
higher form of Hungarian.

What's the evidence? Well, when answering a question Jarod always impersonates
the person who asked it.  "Whenever addressed, it will answer in your own
voice," explained Campbell.  Furthermore, Jarod constructs its English sentences
using Hungarian word order - which is convenient because, according to
Campbell's source, Hungarian is the special code language of the top-security
research operation.  Furthermore, Campbell's source claims that the programme
hires Hungarian scientists in preference to all other nationalities.

Does this mean that the first Hungarians were aliens?  Were Hungarians the
occupants of the first flying saucers to reach the earth?  Campbell doesn't know
the answers and concedes that a Hungarian-speaking alien is a far-fetched notion
but he is still convinced that Hungary is an enigmatic component in an
international UFO mystery.

You could test Campbell's hypothesis quite easily for yourself.  The next time
you encounter an alien, try saying: ET menj haza - the Hungarian for 'ET go
home'.  You may just make contact.

[End of article.]

According to Grolier's 1995 Multimedia Encyclopedia, Hungarian belongs to the
Uralic subgroup of the Ural-Altaic group of languages.  The oldest significant
text written in a Uralic language is a funeral sermon in Hungarian from about
1195. 

Perhaps the linguists in the group could comment on any indication that the
Voynich MS may be written in a kind of shorthand Hungarian.


From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 17 11:54:28 0800 1995
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To: 100716.75@compuserve.com (Peter Meyer)
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Cc: voynich@rand.org
In-Reply-To: <951217101213_100716.75_EHU30-1@CompuServe.COM> from "Peter Meyer" at Dec 17, 95 05:12:14 am
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Peter Meyer writes:
> According to Grolier's 1995 Multimedia Encyclopedia, Hungarian belongs to the
> Uralic subgroup of the Ural-Altaic group of languages.  The oldest significant
> text written in a Uralic language is a funeral sermon in Hungarian from about
> 1195.
Yes, quite true.

> Perhaps the linguists in the group could comment on any indication that the
> Voynich MS may be written in a kind of shorthand Hungarian.
Well, one intriguing notion came up in 1991 in Robert Firth's
"Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 2" where he writes:

>what seem to be grammatical endings are also words in their own right:
>
>       AM      [70]    AN      [24]    AR      [58]
>
>as if latin had words "us", "um", "os" to match its endings.  That
>may have been the case in proto-indo-european, but it's not the
>case with greek, latin or most modern european languages.  It would
>also be surprising in a synthetic language devised by a european;
>such languages tend to follow the same patterns as the natural
>languages known to the devisor: as examples I cite Volapu"k and
>Esperanto.

To which I replied:

|While I agree with the reasoning I must dispute the facts.  At least
|one european language, namely Hungarian (which is of course not
|indo-european but for the purposes of this discussion is definitely
|"european") manifests this phenomenon very clearly: case suffixes
|such as bAn or nAk (the capital A sands for an archiphoneme that gets
|realized as a or e depending on vowel harmony) appear as stems. When
|paronouns are case-marked they appear as the case-sufix (root or stem)
|followed by person/number marking (suffixes) rather than the
|pronoun+case_suff that would be expected. I understand this
|phenomenon is not peculiar to Hungarian (though I don't at the
|moment have access to grammars of languages (Finnish?) that would
|provide similar examples).
|
|But on the whole I totally agree with Mr. Firth that the most
|reasonable working hypothesis about the Voynich ms. is that it is
|plain text (perhaps heavily abbreviated, but still plain, as opposed
|to encrypted) written in a natural or natural-like language in an
|unusual script. Rather than Chinese brought back to Europe by Marco
|Polo, the authors could be Hungarian university students -- there
|were quite a few at all major medeival centers of learning. This
|hypothesis is of course offered with tounge firmly in cheek, but
|the larger point that languages outside the indo-eoropean family
|should also be considered, is quite serious.

Later (Jan 92) Jacques Guy felt the MS. was "monosyllabic" (meaning
that most morphemes are just one syllable long) which, if true, would
rule out (among many other hypotheses) Hungarian. Just to make it
clear where I stand, as a linguist (and a native speaker of Hungarian)
I see no compelling reason to believe the underlying language of the
VMS to be Hungarian. It's a possibility, in fact a more serious
possibility than the context (Hungarian as the Ur-language of BEMs)
suggests, but not a prime candidate so far.

Andras Kornai

From rand.org!jim Sun Dec 17 23:10:20 0500 1995
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From: bgrant@umcc.umcc.umich.edu (Bruce Grant)
Subject: A VM observation
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Has anyone noticed how many pages and paragraphs start with one of the tall
letters (in Currier's alphabet, the letters P/F/V/B).  For example, in the
sample I have been working with, 130 of 149 pages start with one of these
four characters.  Also, toward the end of the manuscript there are several
pages of short paragraphs where practically every paragraph starts with
one of these characters.

A couple of other observations:

1)  The letter P is frequently written with the left loop somewhat
    triangular and the right loop rounded.

2)  The combination 4o- is very common, but only as a prefix.

One explanation for the large number of tall letters at the beginning of
sentences would be that they are "elaborated" forms of some other letter(s),
similar to the larger initials in illuminated manuscripts.

If this is the case, perhaps P is a fancier version of 4o.

This idea of embellished letters might also explain the letters which
occur mostly as finals - perhaps the VM alphabet is really smaller but
has initial, medial, and final forms as in the Arabic alphabet.

Bruce Grant (bgrant@umcc.ais.org)

From rand.org!jim Tue Dec 19 23:04 EST 1995
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From: reeds@research.att.com
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Subject: Voynich novel: The Gadfly
Status: OR


Back in 24 Jan 92, some joker asked

> Just as a matter of curiosity, has anyone read The Gadfly?

At last I got a copy of this book.  I have just now finished it.  I can see
why it was a Soviet favorite.  It owes a lot to The Count of Monte Cristo.
I enjoyed it, & think it is a lot better than I was afraid it might be.
It is, for instance, better than Gillogly's 

> like a Gone With the Wind for the working people or something

led me to believe.

Changing subject completely, has anyone read "Picciola, or, The Prisonor
of Fennestrella"?


Jim Reeds


From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 20 22:49:21 +0000 1995
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From: Alligator Descartes <descarte@hermetica.com>
Message-Id: <199512202249.WAA15127@fruitbat.mcqueen.com>
Subject: Voynich MS parser
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 1995 22:49:21 +0000 (GMT)
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Hi there. After an announcement I made a fortnight back concerning putting
a WWW search engine on top of the VM in a database, I find I don't have the
time to do it.

If anyone wants my scripts for mangling the stuff into a database ( Oracle,
mSQL or Informix ), let me know and I'll distribute them out...........

Regards.

-- 
Alligator Descartes	 | "...Nil posse creari De nilo"
descarte@hermetica.com	 |		-- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura I, l.155
http://www.hermetica.com | 

From rand.org!jim Thu Dec 21 12:25:32 +0000 1995
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Subject: Please remove me from this list.
To: voynich@rand.org
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 1995 12:25:32 +0000 (GMT)
From: Jon Morgan <jlm10@leicester.ac.uk>
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Please can you remove me from this mailing list. I'm probably listed
as JLM4@LEICESTER.AC.UK, but I no longer have access to that account
and have been given this one instead. 

Please acknowledge disconnection from this list as this account and
email address will cease to exist at the end of this month.

-- 
Jon Morgan						<jlm4@le.ac.uk>
Department of Maths and Computer Science
University of Leicester
                              ____________________

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 22 15:57:56 EWT 1995
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Date:         Fri, 22 Dec 95 15:57:56 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      Languages A and B
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hello all,
I've started to look a bit into the differences between
'languages' A and B. Capt. Currier has given some rules
for detecting which language each page is in, and these
have been verified by Jim Gillogly. Also, in the experiments
of making the VMs pronounceable, the difference showed up
very clearly (J.Guy).

My working assumption is that each Voynich 'word' means
one thing (leaving room for synonyms and homonyms), and that
a word for word translation into something meaningful is
possible. This may very well not be true, but it does cover
a number of possibilities for the meaning of the VMs:
- a lost language
- an artificial language (my favourite)
- a normal language with word-for-word encryption

I have made a colour-coded plot of the nr. of common words for
each pair of 'pages' (page in the Petersen sense of the word).
Since the nr. of words (from Friedman item 1609) per page varies
a lot I normalised the nr. of common words by the square root
of the product of the nr.of words on each page. I can't prove it
but I feel this is right.
In any case: it showed up clearly that the most homogeneous piece
of text is the biological stuff, all in language B.
Also the 'stars' pages are consistent internally, and with the
biological text. These are also in language B. In fact, the
first folio (f103) of stars text seems to belong more with the
biol. text than with the rest of the stars.
Rather interesting are the words SC89 and ZC89 (Currier). I have found
exactly one occurrance of them on pages identifed as 'A' language.
But this could be a subject-matter thing. The biological section
is riddled with these words, so maybe they mean man and woman,
or blood or life.
Other common words seem to occur in both languages: 8AM more in A
than B but still quite common there.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has done similar experiments
and what the results were.
My main problem is the source text. The Friedman transcription is
rather complete, but contains a few known errors. Plus I am not
too fond of the way the gallows letters were done. Added to
that is my problem that statistics on words and word frequencies
are marginal, to say the least. For that the text should have been
100 times larger :-)
I know that Gabriel Landini has done a lot of work on this.
Would you (Gabriel) have a copy of the Friedman transcription,
converted to Currier, and with the lines corresponding to
lines on the VMs? The interlinear file only has the parts
common with D'Imperio's. I am looking for all.

One completely different thing: is it worth buying the Levitov
book just for the pictures? Just about every 5th page seems to
be copied (slight exaggeration). Or is the quality of the
Yale copies not that much worse? (I finally ordered mine)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you
(don't know if it's St.Oladabas day yet).
Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 22 16:13:54 0800 1995
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Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 16:13:54 -0800
From: Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@bham.ac.uk>
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To: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
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Subject: Re: Languages A and B
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Status: OR

Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> I know that Gabriel Landini has done a lot of work on this.
> Would you (Gabriel) have a copy of the Friedman transcription,
> converted to Currier, and with the lines corresponding to
> lines on the VMs? The interlinear file only has the parts
> common with D'Imperio's. I am looking for all.


Hi Rene (and all),
Yes I have it somewhere..:-) Unfortunately at home and I am starting
my vacations as soon as I switch the computer off!! :-)
So please wait until the 2nd January and I can either mail it to
you or send it to Jim Reeds and make it available to everybody.
Or if you can't wait until next year, then the fastest way is to
use Guy's Bitrans and find the table of transcriptions that
Jim mailed to this list some time ago. It should be in the
BIG2 mail file, but I am not sure.

If you see the interlin.vms  you'll realise that there are
MANY differences between the 2 versions.
I can't remember how many folios does the voynich.now has that
the FSG.new does not, but I think that they were not that many
anyway.

Merry Christmas and 8AM MOA89

Gabriel

From rand.org!jim Fri Dec 22 22:40:57 0700 1995
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From: djl <djl@montana.com>
To: "'voynich@rand.org'" <voynich@rand.org>
Subject: greetings
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1995 22:40:57 -0700
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Merry Christmas to all on the list.=20
I'm still trying to get it together to order a microfilm from Yale, just =
to see what all the fuss is about <g>.=20

I tried to get a msg out earlier, but somehow it failed to reach the =
list.  In that msg, I recounted having found, in a Calif. ghost town =
some 35 years ago, a word salad manuscript (word salad is used by those =
in the psyc biz for utterances making no sense, usually vocal, by, =
usually, hebephrenic schizophrenics).  The MS I found was, if I remember =
correctly, about 6 double-sided looseleaf pages.  The thing is, there =
was no punctuation, some capitalization, and no paragraphs, just a long =
string with no connections.  I don't see how the V.MS can be of this =
kind. It is clearly separated, of more than one hand, and contains two =
kinds of "abberation", ie words and pictures. The MS I found was =
composed of English words, not a "new" tongue.

Best,=20
Don


From rand.org!jim Sat Dec 23 10:48:53 EWT 1995
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Date:         Sat, 23 Dec 95 10:48:53 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      Re: Languages A and B
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hi!

Thanks to Gabriel and Jim for replying. Unfortunately I have not
got a PC (YET!!!), so 'translit' is out for me. I've got a
Sun Sparc-5 at work which is doing some background processing
from time to time :-) It has not got a Pascal compiler.....

If there is a version of the Friedman transcription converted to
Currier, I'd be happy to get a copy. Next year is fine with me.
If there is some transcription/checking work still required,
I'm definitely willing to contribute, as soon as my Yale copy has
arrived.

Jim's suggestion of a dot matrix to identify common words is
almost exactly what I did. Of course, I don't see how I could
visualise a 50000*50000 matrix, so I made a 234*234 one with
one (coloured) dot per 'page'. The next thing I'll try is
to break up the text in equal-sized chunks (say 300 words)
and repeat the same thing. My first intention is to check
if the text is correlated with the pictures (I'm sure this
has been done before by someone, somewhere...)

Another thing. I think we should get a coordinated WWW presence.
There are some good intiatives already, by Jim and Michael Roe.
I've got some pages of my own (quite a bit, actually) but I have
no capability of making them visible to anybody else.
The reasons to do this are:
- Popularisation. We need many potential buyers for the book/CD-ROM
  and the coffee mugs, T-shirts  :-)
- Information. Would-be decipherers (or crypto-crackpots, love that one)
  should know that the text is not just <insert any common language>
  written in funny symbols, and many other things already beaten
  to death by the FSG, 2SG, 3SG, etc etc.
- We must get there first!!! There is an enormous amount of knowledge
  in this list (Internet Team Voynich?). People like Jim Reeds, Jacques
  Guy, Jim Gillogly, Robert Firth, Andrai Kornas, Michael Roe, John Baez
  and many others have spent a great amount of time on this and have
  come up with some interesting stuff....
- Everything is on the internet now!
The information may well be distributed, but there should be one
central starting point. Once it's there, it should be included in
all the main catalogues: Yahoo, CERN, you name it, under cryptology,
medieval documents, linguistics and whatever more is related.
I am quite willing to do a lot of the footwork (collect information,
HTML-ise, maintenance, secretarial work if you will), but the Web
server has to be elsewhere. Initially, about 2 Mb of disk space will
be sufficient, but if this works well 5-10 Mb will be required.
Anybody who has such capabilities is heartily invited to speak up!!!!

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen
  spent a great deal of time on this and deserve some credit.

From rand.org!jim Sat Dec 23 11:49:59 EWT 1995
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Date:         Sat, 23 Dec 95 11:49:59 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      What was that in my last message?
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

OOPS!

There was one spurious line in my previous message, after my signature.
This line was edited out from the main text somewhere. Now it looks as if
I think I need credit! Not true!! I ain't done nothing yet!!!

Cheers, Rene
(any lines after this one should be ignored! :-) )

From rand.org!jim Wed Dec 27 16:29:28 EWT 1995
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Date:         Wed, 27 Dec 95 16:29:28 EWT
From: Rene Zandbergen <RZANDBER@VMPROFS.ESOC.ESA.DE>
Subject:      Pleased to meet you Jim (Reeds)
To: Voynich list <voynich@RAND.ORG>
Status: OR

Hi!

This Web search engine 'Alta Vista' is really amazing. It turns up
all the Voynich-related stuff on the Web in seconds. Even a
search using keyword '4OFAM' worked immediately.

Thus I found Jim Reeds' picture on the Web. Amazing how someone is
completely unable to guess what anybody looks like from just
reading their E-mail :-)

Your code is all over the place too! And articles about mazes.
And then an article from Jacques Guy in a magazine called 'Frogmag'.
Everybody can see what everybody is doing (and has done in the
past 15 years), beware!

Anyway, the URL is http://www.altavista.digital.com
I'm probably just the last one to find out :-)

Cheers, Rene Zandbergen

PS. It recently occurred to me how much more fun John Dee's diaries
    would have been if Edward Kelly had stuck with his pseudonym:

    ET dedit nobis 300 ducata...

