Sunday 8 June 2014


A Speculative Partial Translation of Voynich Plant 5vBy Spud.

Assuming Marsh Mallow could be the Plant shown,the closest match
for the name I could find to bax: KA?OAR was Hindi - Kajhor

My only language is English and 'oar' and 'or' are pronounced
the same to me so i thought i might be onto something.
This suggested that the missing letters could be JH

I plugged the new proposed letters into a text file of the VM
with the EVA character already replaced with BAX characters.
(using find and replace all in a simple text editor).
The EVA characters were in lowercase and the BAX characters
were in UPPERCASE so any completely transliterated words stood out.

A few words in the VM seemed promising
(eg the word JHAR = plant/forest/water spring/jungle in
 Nepali/Hindi/Indian type languages.)

and the word KSHAR <f49v.P.1;H> which linked to a Wikipedia Article
about an Ayurvedic preperation which gave me quite a shock!.

But I wasn't sure if these few words amongst the 'gobbledigook' were
'statistically relevent' so I followed Professor Bax's methods and
started again 'from scratch' and had a good look at the Plant pictures
to see if it could be any of the other plants being described.

Many of the Plants suggested did indeed look very much like the Artist's
picture and strangely I found some plants from the Himalaya region that
looked like a close match to the Artists Drawing.

i have yet to write up all i have done but

if i am right about my assumptions that :-

1. The underlying Language of page 5v is an Indian or closely related language or a language of the indian himalayan area (im not that great at geography) possibly pakistan or afghanistan

2. That the mappings of characters are largely correct

3.  I expect that page 5v can be translated in six weeks rather that six months

4. A lot less if a speaker/ reader of the language identified, with the ability to  speak, read, or write more than one language gets involved!


Assuming at least the first part of the VM is written in the same language then the same would apply to those as well.

Of course it will soon be possible to translate the VM in milliseconds using a simple computer program and assuming the appropriate digitised dictionary can be found.

evidence for make this assumption should be apparent to anyone who carefully studies the information supplied on this blog.

I ways to  optimise your search techniques when using a search engine
when trying to find evidence for a TRANSLITERATED VOYNICH word that
you think you have identified

If you are tying to lookup a candidate search word online

basically if your results are BEST you are there
GOOD keep going try and refine your search terms
BAD probably not going anywhere or possibly it is a real word but just hasnt been put online
  try moving on to something else for the moment or reconsider your assumptions


how to evaluate search results.

BEST if the words you are finding are from the same Place geographically or thereabouts
AND
A Dictionary Definition in a Scanned (OCR) Book or Document
THEN it is a possible candidate word for your translation
REMEMBER a word can have many meanings in many different languages
or even in the same language


OCR scanned document - try to find a scan of the original, or visit a library to see
   th original source as OCR (Optical Character Recocnition) often does not work
  very well and can garble wgfws

GOOD if they are from closely related languages/ places

eg.Travels of people from your country in foreign lands writing about the native flora and fauna.

Names of places - Think about the region the place is in, How did it get that name?

Role Playing Game(RPG), World Of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), JRR Tolkien
  Laugh - think about how they came up with that world


BAD If the words you are from all over the place

If the words you find are from all over the place
Words not in any human language
A list of Anagrams on a word puzzle site or similar.

I will be writing more about how to refine your search terms
here are some I found useful
W = the word you are looking up
L = the language you are investigating

searches to try

W means
W means in L

Search engines ignore small common words like in the and etc.
if you want them included use +W (put a plus sign before the word
if you want to search for  an exact phrase put it within quote marks ""
combine search terms with AND in capitals

PLEASE TRY AND FALSIFY MY CLAIMS - I WELCOME ANY CRITICISM

















2 comments:

  1. There is no Pangolin in the so-called 'Botany' section

    ReplyDelete