Starship Asterisk*

Ref: Voynich MS All posts reproduced here were extracted from a locked thread on the same subject. All links and references are re-posted in the order in which they were entered. For attribution to author please refer to thread. To see the ms go to http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/ an...

Llaveder may have a solution to the Asteriskians (?) term, if my recollection of a French cartoon character named Asterix is correct. Is Asterixes the plural - assuming that a proper noun has a plural to begin with?

As I've no access to past observations I don't know if the trail in the pictures - shown by both observatories with little parallax - is typical for a satellite, but if it is, wouldn't its height be computable as originally noted by RJN? A very high altitude would account for the transit time but - ...

Pinpan - I doubt that anyone here denies that behind us we have billions of years of instinct and only a few thousand of intelligence, so "intuitive" instant grasp of concepts is not - far as I know - a handicap. What does strike me as a handicap however is denial of the simplest definitio...

Final from me: for most of the history of voynich.net there was no reliable way to compare illustrations in the MS with other contemporaneous sources without a very-high-speed supercomputer, but now this software is becoming available. I wonder whether such a search (purely optical scan matching, ig...

Boldra - have you run your PERL code with any of the transcribed alphabets other than EVA? Several appear here:
http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html

Misfit - this is not a Balkan travelogue site. Btw, your "Macedonian" language is a Bulgarian dialect, and Slavs arrived in the Balkans in the 7th century AD - that's a thousand years after Alexander of Macedon died. Please look up sites like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_la...

"...The education of Gypsies who spoke Romany was inhibited because the language has no alphabet or written literature...."

More on Bulgaria and its linguistic minorities here:
http://bulrefsite.entrewave.com/view/bu ... 29p148.htm

Misfit - as another poster told you already this is a transcribed alphabet you're looking at. The "phonemes" or "letters" are arbitrarily designated so as to parse the text without recourse to the original characters. Separately, the so-called "Macedonian" is in fact Bu...

Note to RJN: the moderator here is making valiant efforts but there's no way to delete the avalanche of posts by the spamming poster "Guest" unless his computer's IP is disabled from this site. Hint: if the IP is traceable to a server in Acapulco - from info on other online boards it's pro...

Helen: Re your letter distribution statistics. Think of a modern star chart. It might have full contellation names, in which case it would conform with "typical" distributions. But maybe it only has the 3-letter abbreviations, so your letter counts would look very strange indeed. You coul...

Note to moderator: thanks for removing the post of the spamming "Guest" on page 13 after somebody else complained. For those who didn't see it, it was a lengthy announcement by the archdiocese of Yucatan, of all places, followed by a lengthy advertisement for a Bible-selling outfit in Mexi...

Archer - the mathematical distributions of the "letters/words" in the MS aren't encountered in language but are quite common in card games, dice throws, casino slot machines and so on. If you view the whole thing as a medieval version of a video game you can account for the illustrations t...

Thanks for the links, Archer. In the second one> http://www.voynich.nu/a_intro.html > there are links to the entropy calculations showing conclusively there is no one-to-one correspondence to any known language so the text is either a hoax or a cipher: " ....It can be shown mathematically that ...

The majority of the posts here are written by people who have neither understood the manuscript is an entire BOOK > http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/ (enter "voynich" in the search function) > nor that the distribution of the "letters" forming "words" cor...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0208/voynich_schaefer.jpg By "hoax" I only meant it's neither a language nor a linguistic code with one-to-one correspondence in letters. Does anybody know if gambling was illegal in the 16th century? That binomial distribution suggests this whole bo...

This excerpt from the SciAm article (link previously posted in thread) seems to second the motion that it's a hoax: "For example, the word lengths of Voynichese form a binomial distribution--that is, the most common words have five or six characters, and the occurrence of words with greater or ...