And this guys has actually translated some parts and the translations make sense.
Perhaps a reference to Facilitated Communication is appropriate here. FCers “translate” what a severely handicapped person supposedly says, and it makes sense. But unbiased tests strongly suggest that the facilitator is the one doing the actual talking, not the handicapped person.
I submit that the “translator” in this case, in the absence of corroborating evidence, may be making the translation up, just to make sense. I’m willing to be proven wrong.
What does a article from 2017 have to do with a theory published in 2019?
Yes, Cheshire released a draft of one idea on how to translate, but that doesnt have much to do with his paper two years later, where he actually published translations.
No he hasn’t, and no they don’t. He has made some claims as to what some isolated words and phrases mean, without corroboration. That’s not translation. And here’s an example of one of his extended “translations,” which looks like you passed a passage through Google Translate from Polish to Swahili to Chinese to Korean to English.
Please provide an example of an extended passage you think “makes sense.”
Fine. We’ll just wait a while for you to eat crow on this one, just like the last time you were breathlessly enthusiastic about a Vonych translation that everyone was saying was crap.
It doesn’t matter if some guy claims he is able to read the manuscript. What matters is that you and I can do so. Especially if it be in Latin, not exactly an obscure language in Europe, we should be able to read it just like we can read Julius Caesar. I wonder what explanation he offers for the fact that statistical analysis of the text shows it is different from Latin, as well as other reasonable guesses for the language, nor does it look like Latin (or proto-French, or whatever) when we stare at it.
High-res images of the manuscript, as well as several transcriptions of the contents, are available online, so if it’s that easy we ought to be able to go through a couple of randomly-chosen paragraphs right here.
It’ll probably be one “Dr. Stewart.”
I am reminded of James Thurber, who once claimed, tongue in cheek, that he was having his entire library translated into French. Because they lose something in the original.
Here’s a book ca. 2012, full of charts and graphs, that also claims to have solved the mystery. It’s an astrological text! From the publisher’s blurb:
See if you can make any sense of it; I can’t.
Damn, that’s quite the take-down. What I found interesting was his list of “non-language-like behaviours” of the VM text. I had also never heard the phrase “Neal keys”, which is apparently the name for the “letters” in the manuscript that look like one or two legged gallows and that don’t correlate with any other known letters.
I’m going to lose a lot of time on that blog. Here’s a more general take-down of VM solutions from 2018.
I’m going to lose so much time.
Which, oddly, was pretty much your same reaction the last time a - completely different - supposed solution gained this amount of media traction. So, for example:
"Of course, maybe his “solve” is wrong. I dunno. "
Actually, it’s not, it was written* two years *before Cheshire’s article was published.
Look, I am not a expert on this but he did provide a few short translations that made sense. And it is in a peer reviewed journal, which the rest have not been.
is everyone’s point is that the manuscript isnt translatable? So every translation is bogus?
It sure is, unless you and I can read it and it makes sense. The same way you can learn to read Old Babylonian, Ancient Egyptian, and Classical Chinese. And Latin.
Slightly different, in as much as there was never any question about where those ancient languages came from, roughly when they were spoken, or, indeed, whether they were actual languages in the first place, or just clever gibberish.
Check out YouTube and you will find at least dozens of “translations” that are just as robust.
Cheshire’s paper includes: “Ultimately, a consensus emerged: that the manuscript was either impossible to solve or else written in gibberish, as an elaborate practical joke” which is a gross misstatement, and "Unbeknown to the scholarly community, the manuscript was written in an extinct and hitherto unrecorded language as well as using an unknown writing system . . . ", which is an obvious falsehood, and “Past scholarly attempts at solving the writing system are far too numerous to mention individually, but none was successful in any way, because every attempt simply used the wrong approach . . .” which is amazing self-congratulation.
He speaks of Proto-Romance as if it were a single language. This lets him ransack multiple languages for words that sound something like what he’s decided to declare the non-standard letters in the manuscript sound like. His work showing how he decided what the “letters” sound like is not shown. His work showing how he decided which letters were written is not shown (the penmanship in some areas is not good - he’s only showing areas where it is easy to read). His work showing how he decided the translation of most of the words is not shown. He does not discuss grammar at all. That is not a linguistics paper or a history paper. It’s a puff piece. All conclusion and no analysis.
The Author Information given: “Dr. Gerard Cheshire has recently completed his doctorate, expounding an adaptive theory for human belief systems, and is now a Research Associate with University of Bristol. The solution to the codex of MS408 was developed over a 2-week period in May 2017 after he came across the manuscript for the first time whilst conducting research for his PhD dissertation. Having deciphered the writing system, he subsequently realized the significance of the manuscript to Romance linguists and Mediaeval historians, and so decided to publish the information.” Translation: I have a doctorate in Biological Sciences* and History and Linguistics can’t be hard compared to that.
- per the University of Bristol, where he’s listed as a Visiting Research Associate.
As a separate thing, Janick and Tucker (the OP link) argue that the carbon dating of the manuscript has to be wrong because that illustration there has to be a sunflower, which is a New World plant. Also because other illustrations look like Mexican cities to them. Have you seen those illustrations? They’re like ink blots - you could read anything into them. Also, they don’t translate anything, they just identify medieval illuminations without any background in medieval history. (Background: 1- horticulture, 2- herbarium director, with help from a linguist and wildlife ecologist)
At least Cheshire doesn’t claim the carbon dating has to be wrong.
Whoops. Already a thread on this. Sorry !