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d out, Fagin Davis combed through several letters written in the so-called "humanistic bookhand' commonly used by Petrarch and Boccaccio in 14th-century Italy, since the two Roman alphabet columns in the Voynich manuscript were also written in that style. She compared those handwriting samples with the columns in the Voynich manuscript.
One was a very close match: a September 12, 1640 letter to Athanasius Kircher written by Johannes Marcus Marci, a doctor in Prague who inherited the manuscript from his friend Georg Baresch when the alchemist died in 1662. Marci sent the manuscript to Kircher in Rome in 1665, hoping that the Jesuit scholar and polymath would be able to decipher it.
Fagin Davis identified several "strong markers" between the two handwriting samples that she thinks identify Marci as the would-be decoder. For instance, at this time in the 17th century, many people used prominent loops on the letters b, d, f, h, p, q, s, and y, but Marci did not. Not did the person who wrote the two Roman alphabet columns on that page of the Voynich manuscript. Marci also sometimes used an "open bowl" g, an m with a taller first stroke than the last, and a distinctive shape to his z's—all of which are consistent with the handwriting sample in the Voynich manuscript.
That said, anyone hoping this multispectral analysis of the scans will finally solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript once and for all is bound to be disappointed, although any new textual evidence is significant for scholars.
"These alphabets will likely not help us actually decipher the manuscript," Fagin Davis wrote on her blog. "This is because linguists… and other researchers have established that the manuscript is almost certainly not encrypted using a simple substitution cipher, and the substitutions in these columns result in nonsense anyway. Even so, they do add an interesting and new chapter to the early history of the manuscript. I look forward to hearing from other researchers about this new evidence, especially from experts in cryptography who may have ideas about why Marci or any other early-modern decrypter would need three columns of alphabets to do their work."
Both articles have copious photographs demonstrating how the multispectral imaging brings out details that are not visible to the naked eye.
Despite the hard-won, hitherto unknown data about much earlier attempts to decode the VM provided by multispectral analysis, which tilts the balance in favor of the conclusion that this most vexing cultural artifact is not a forgery or a hoax, we still don't know what this elaborate, illustrated text is communicating. VM case not closed. Selected readings
* Voynich and midfix" (7/3/04)
* "Voynich code cracked?" (5/16/19)
* "The indecipherability of the Voynich manuscript" (9/11/19)
* "The Voynich Manuscript in the undergraduate curriculum" (10/10/19)
* "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23) — CHAT 2
* "Once again the Voynich manuscript" (4/21/24)
* "Latin, Hebrew … proto-Romance? New theory on Voynich manuscript: Researcher claims to have solved mystery of 15th-century text but others are sceptical", Esther Addley, The Guardian (5/15/19)
* "Inscription decipherment with digital image enhancement" (12/1/20)
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto}
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Language Log
Yet again the Voynich manuscript
Perhaps as early as 1640, decipherers have tried practically everything to decode the maddeningly frustrating Voynich manuscript. So far it has resisted all efforts to identify the language in which it was presumably written. About the only way to make further progress in cracking the code is to apply some new technology. As described in the following reports, it seems that a type of digital enhancement has become available and been used to fill in some of the gaps in the manuscript.
The first is the primary document, "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript", which appears on Lisa Fagin Davis' blog, Manuscript Road Trip (9/8/24). She begins with an explanation of what the technology consists of.
Multispectral imaging is a way of capturing a digital image using non-visible wavelengths such as ultraviolet and infrared (click here to learn more). Where medieval manuscripts are concerned, UV imaging in particular can make faded or effaced text legible. This is because most medieval inks (including that used to write the Voynich Manuscript) have a significant iron component. This allows the ink to “bite” into the surface of the parchment rather than sliding off of it. When ink is scraped away or fades, the molecular bond remains, and the faded text may therefore fluoresce when exposed to UV bandwidths. This technology has proven invaluable in helping scholars read palimpsests and damaged manuscripts such as the Archimedes Palimpsest and the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. Could such imaging of the Voynich Manuscript help reveal its secrets?
What follows is a lengthy and highly detailed description of Fagin Davis' analysis of the new data provided by the application of multispectral imaging to the Voynich manuscript.
The second report is Jennifer Ouellette's "New multispectral analysis of Voynich manuscript reveals hidden details: Handwriting suggests Prague doctor named Johannes Marcus Marci tried to decode in 1640" in Ars Technica (9/9/24), which digests and summarizes Fagin Davis' post, while adding amplifications of her own. Here are pertinent portions that highlight the significance of the latest findings.
About 10 years ago, several folios of the mysterious Voynich manuscript were scanned using multispectral imaging. Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, has analyzed those scans and just posted the results, along with a downloadable set of images, to her blog, Manuscript Road Trip. Among the chief findings: Three columns of lettering have been added to the opening folio that could be an early attempt to decode the script. And while questions have long swirled about whether the manuscript is authentic or a clever forgery, Fagin Davis concluded that it's unlikely to be a forgery and is a genuine medieval document.
As we've previously reported, the Voynich manuscript is a 15th century medieval handwritten text dated between 1404 and 1438, purchased in 1912 by a Polish book dealer and antiquarian named Wilfrid Voynich (hence its moniker). Along with the strange handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with bizarre pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. It's currently kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library of rare books and manuscripts. Possible authors include Roger Bacon, Elizabethan astrologer/alchemist John Dee, or even Voynich himself, possibly as a hoax.
There are so many competing theories about what the Voynich manuscript is—most likely a compendium of herbal remedies and astrological readings, based on the bits reliably decoded thus far—and so many claims to have deciphered the text, that it's practically its own subfield of medieval studies. Both professional and amateur cryptographers (including codebreakers in both World Wars) have pored ove[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ice (2)
to kill someone
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Idiom of the Day
let (the) perfect be the enemy of (the) good
To allow the demand, desire, or insistence for perfection to decrease the chances of obtaining a good or favorable result in the end. (Usually used in the negative as an imperative.) Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dweeb
a studious but socially inept person
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let the good times roll
To have as much fun or live life as richly as possible. (Often said as an imperative.) Watch the video
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Word of the Day
duster
Definition: (noun) A loose coverall (coat or frock) reaching down to the ankles.
Synonyms: gaberdine, smock.
Usage: In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper.
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Language Log
"Word salad"
According to Wikipedia, word salad
is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but they are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.
The phrase {word salad} has become increasingly common recently in the popular press, most often as an insulting description of Donald Trump's spontaneous speech. See for example Sahil Kapur and Peter Nicholas, "'Incoherent word salad': Trump stumbles when asked how he'd tackle child care", NBC News 9/6/2024.
The examples focus on Trump's habit of stringing together a sequence of fragments and parentheticals, while hopping around among semi-related topics. As I wrote in "Trump's eloquence" (8/5/2015), this to some extent (mis-)represents "the apparent incoherence of much transcribed extemporized speech, even when the same material is completely comprehensible and even eloquent in audio or audio-visual form". And in many of the examples discussed in my (too many) "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", the material is indeed "comprehensible and even eloquent" in spoken form.
Sometimes, as in the much-discussed child-care Q&A, the sequence of fragments includes some puzzling bits. But even there, the women who asked the question, Reshma Saujani, got a clear message from Trump's answer, although it was not a message that she liked.
FWIW, here's the full audio of her question, taken from this recording of the New York Economic Club session:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Here's the full audio of Trump's answer:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
For a complete transcript of that answer, and a funny but accurate comment on how the NYT describes such content, see Alexandra Petri, "The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine", WaPo 9/6/2024.
But getting to my point, here's Reshma Saujani's evaluation of Trump's answer, from a CNN interview with Jake Tapper on 9/6/2024:
Your browser does not support the audio element.
Jake Tapper: With us now is uh Reshma Saujani. She asked the question yesterday. She's a member of the Economic Club of New York's board of trustees. I don't know if you watched the debate in June, but I tried three times to get him to answer that question, you tried a fourth — did you get anything out of that?
Reshma Saujani: Kinda. I- I may have done a little bit more than you did, because he did answer the question. And what he told us is that child care expens- expenses are no big deal. The fact that you're drowning in debt because of them — sorry, but not sorry. And he also told us that "no, I don't have any ideas or proposals or legislation". And it's insulting. And it's insulting to parent who are constantly having to choose between funding their day care and feeding their kids. And the thing is, is like if you don't have a plan to solve child care, you are not fit to be president.
So Trump's answer included a few confusing fragments, but it was absolutely not "word salad", in the sense of words that "may or may not be grammatically correct, but […] are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them".
By the laws of bothsiderism, the press also often uses the phrase "word salad" with reference to Kamala Harris — and the examples are even further from the original meaning of the term, focusing on her use of slogans (sometimes described as [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: scalable
This word has appeared in 31 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
lay out (2)
to explain an idea or a plan clearly and in detail
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Word of the Day
imperceptible
Definition: (adjective) Impossible or difficult to perceive by the mind or senses.
Synonyms: unperceivable.
Usage: The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes.
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r the text, hoping to crack the puzzle.
So much by way of introduction. Clearly, what the Voynich manuscript (VM [not VHM!]) is and what it means is still very much up in the air, but that doesn't prevent VM enthusiasts from throwing in their precious lot.
Among the most dubious is a 2017 claim by a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs, who published a long article in the Times Literary Supplement about how he had cracked the code. Gibbs claimed that he had figured out that the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations describing medicinal recipes. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point. Unfortunately, said the experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.
Fagin Davis was among Gibbs' most vocal critics. She also did not mince words when critiquing the 2019 claims of Gerard Cheshire, an honorary research associate at the University of Bristol, when he announced his own solution. Cheshire claimed the mysterious writing was a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language, and he thought the manuscript was put together by a Dominican nun as a reference source on behalf of Maria of Castile, queen of Aragon. "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing," Fagin Davis tweeted at the time. "This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense." Two days after the initial announcement of Cheshire's "breakthrough," the University of Bristol released a statement retracting its original press release.
Now we come to the nitty gritty of what Fagin Davis' blog post achieves. It is a good example of a responsible, resourceful, determined scholar resurrecting valuable data that had been collected a decade earlier but lain dormant during the interim.
Per Fagin Davis, in 2014, the Beinecke Library granted permission to the imaging team from The Lazarus Project to take multispectral images of ten pages from the Voynich manuscript with the intent of making them publicly available online. For various reasons, the images weren't posted. Fast forward to 2024, when Roger Easton of the Rochester Institute of Technology—who was a member of the original imaging team—noticed an article Fagin Davis had written and emailed asking if she would like to examine the images. She was interested so Easton spent the last three weeks reprocessing the multispectral images to produce the current image set.
…
When the manuscript first came into Wilfrid Voynich's hands in 1912, he noted that the first page had an effaced inscription in the lower margin, applying a chemical reagent to the page around 1914 to make it more visible. He thought he could make out a signature: "Jacobi à Tepenecz," aka an alchemist in Prague named Jacobus Sinapius, who probably owned the manuscript in the late 16th or early 17th century.
Fagin Davis's analysis confirmed Voynich's discovery. She also noted that there was no evidence that the Voynich manuscript is a palimpsest, i.e., parchment that had been reused and thus showed evidence of underwriting. That would have helped refine the manuscript's date of origin. Carbon-14 testing puts the date as around 1425, which Fagin Davis thinks is likely since the illustrations are consistent with that period, but some scholars disagree. Nor is the manuscript likely to be a modern forgery.
…
More recently, Voynich scholars had noted what seems to be a Roman alphabet written in the right-hand margin of that first page. Multispectral imaging clearly reveals the letters a, b, c, d, and e, according to Fagin Davis. In fact, there are actually three columns of lettering, not just one: the Roman alphabet, a series of Voynich characters, and another Roman alphabet, this time offset by one letter. Fagin Davis did her own preliminary transcription of those alphabets and concluded that this is mostly likely an early attempt to decode the manuscript. But who had made the attempt?
To fin[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: volatile
This word has appeared in 684 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
watch out
If you tell someone to watch out, you tell them to be careful or warn them of a danger.
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The Debate Topics That Americans REALLY Care About
Content creators, government officials, and drag queens come together to tackle the issues that American voters need the answers to. Astrology, earthing, and whole milk all trouble Americans on a daily basis. Watch how folks at the Democratic National Convention defend the indefensible.
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Word of the Day
stoop
Definition: (verb) Debase oneself morally, act in an undignified, unworthy, or dishonorable way.
Synonyms: condescend, lower oneself.
Usage: The neighborhood bully constantly shouts insults at the children, but they refuse to stoop to his level and instead choose to ignore his rude remarks.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: impunity
This word has appeared in 256 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
go through (1)
to look through a collection of things like documents, books, clothes, etc. to find something or to sort them out
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catch-phrases), ordinary spontaneous-speech syntax, and so on.
But maybe over-use of the term "word salad" goes back to its origins in the 19th century. The OED's earliest citation is from Granville Stanley Hall, Adolescence: its psychology and its relations to physiology, anthropology, sociology, sex, crime, religion and education (1904):
Youth normally comes into a new attitude toward speech at puberty. The vocabulary is enlarged; meanings are re-adjusted; words seem different; there is always a new speech consciousness: interest in new terms shows that in some cases we have loquacity which becomes almost verbigeration; diaries and letters, and even stories and treatises are scribbled at great length. We often observe, too, an inverse ratio between thought and speech, so that as the former becomes scanty and indefinite the stream of words flows more copiously and smoothly; and conversely, as meanings deepen the vocabulary becomes more select and the lapse of speech and pen more restrained. In other normal types the mass of new inner experiences of thought, motive, and sentiment prompt concealment and reticence, and the subject becomes dumb-bound, silent, and perhaps seems to brood, or the range of expression is very confined and narrow. Both these tendencies have asylum out-crops in Forel’s “word-salad” or Krafft-Ebing’s “word- husks” on the one hand, or in mumbling and taciturnity, even speechlessness, on the other.
That's Auguste-Henri Forel, who would have used the French phrase "salade de mots". A search for that term confirms the translation, and also gets us to a StackExchange answer, which links to an 1895 publication that draws an ironic parallel between word-invention by psychotics and Forel's creation of the "word salad" term:
The earliest attestation I can find ascribes the origin to Forel's wortsalat, as translated by Kraepelin to 'wordsalad'. This appears in The Medical Standard of 1895, recounting events from the May, 1894 meeting of the Association of German Alienists and Neurologists, where "Kraepelin of Heidelberg described a 'peculiar group of insane patients,' who, among 'other distressing symptoms,' exhibited as 'the most striking phenomenon' a tendency to the coinage of new words": http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/1895WordSalad.png ➖ @EngSkills ➖
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Language Log
"Welcome in!"
I'm in the little (population about two hundred) town of Wamsutter in southwest Wyoming. It's just west of the Continental Divide and bills itself as "The Gateway to the Red Desert". It is the largest settlement, and the only incorporated town in the Great Divide Basin.
The name Wamsutter is intriguing, but it doesn't sound Native American, like so many other toponyms in Wyoming. As a matter of fact, Wamsutter was originally known as Washakie (c.1804/1810 – February 20, 1900) after the formidable Shoshone chief, but was later changed to its current name due to confusion with nearby Fort Washakie. No great loss for the Shoshone leader, since so many other places and things in Wyoming are named after him, including the excellent student dining center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, in front of which stands a most impressive statue of the chief on his horse. When the town decided to switch its name, at least they retained the initial "Wa" of the original designation, which reminds me of "The Good Old Song" of the University of Virginia, with its "Wah-hoo-wa" cheer, borrowed from Dartmouth.
Wamsutter is the surname of a Union Pacific bridge engineer, but that's not what I want to write about today. Instead, I will talk about a thought-provoking experience I had at one of the three big gas stations / truck stops that seem to constitute the raison d'être for the town in its present manifestation. (Earlier it would have been a stage coach stop, and in medieval Central Asia it would have been a caravanserai filled with Sogdian traders and their stinking, drooling camels.)
The three stations / stops are One9, Love's, and Conoco. I went in all three to get supplies and food. While I was in the One9, I was puzzled by the frequent shouts of the employees that punctuated the bustling atmosphere of the shoppers and drivers coming and going. "Eh Uh Ih!" "Eh Uh Ih!" (Don't forget that I have tinnitus, which causes one to lose most consonants.)
I really didn't know what they were saying, and I was dying with curiosity to know what it was. Curiosity got the better of the cat, so I went up and asked one of the workers what it was.
"Welcome in!" he said. I almost fell over, both because of my perplexity at not understanding it in the first place and because of my instant realization the it was the exact analog of the ubiquitous Japanese greeting, "irasshaimase". The latter is invariably translated as "welcome", but it literally means "(please) come (in)". Thus the One9 employees' greeting "Welcome in!" is an ingenious combination of "welcome" and "(please) come (in)", with an emphasis on the adverb. We'll have to ask Master Grammarian Geoff Pullum exactly what "in" is doing in the phrase "Welcome in".
Curosity continued to get the better of the cat, so I asked one of the One9 employees if he and his coworkers were instructed by their manager to call out "Welcome in!" to each customer who entered the store. He replied, "Yep! Meet and greet." The cat pursued, "Is this company policy at all One9 travel centers?" "Yes," he acknowledged. "It's not just a local thing."
By the way, One9 is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. They know how to do business.
After I filled up my tank and was about to head down the road to Rock Springs, I looked up and noticed this large sign above the entrance to the One9 store: WELCOME. Selected readings
* "Irasshaimase?" (4/19/21)
* "Irasshaimase?, part 2" (11/10/21)
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pack heat
to carry a gun
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Idiom of the Day
let (someone) off the hook
To pardon, release, or allow someone to escape from blame, responsibility, obligation, or difficulty. Watch the video
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n English teacher asks, pretend you think it’s wonderful.
John McIntyre, "It's a grand day for grammar", 9/5/2024:
In the fifth through eighth grades, I was drilled in the traditional schoolroom grammar by two formidable ladies, Mrs. Jessie Perkins and Mrs. Elizabeth Craig, and while their results with other students were variable, what they taught me stuck.
Over years as an editor it was brought home to me that the schoolroom grammar was seriously flawed. Originally developed to apply Latin grammar to English, a bad fit because the two languages operate on different principles, but Latin was the prestige language when English was the new kid on the block. Over the centuries that grammar was distorted by an accretion of arbitrary rules and superstitions that have been exposed by linguists. But those of us who had the schoolroom grammar had little or no contact with the linguists.
Now we can. The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum, has just been published in this country by Polity Press. Pullum, the distinguished linguist and co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, speaks not as the scribes and Pharisees but as one who has authority, and bridges the gap between the traditional grammar and current linguists in a short, concise book accessible to any reader willing to put in a little time.
As the new book states explicitly, it's basically a more accessible introduction to Geoff's earlier, longer, and denser work:
The first port of call for anyone who wants to delve more seriously into this book’s modern approach to English grammar would be A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar by Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds (2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2022). It’s a 400-page undergraduate-level textbook that’s fully compatible with this book in its theoretical assumptions, but it goes into a lot more detail. It’s not elementary, but then if you have read this book you are not exactly a beginner anymore.
That textbook is based on a much larger and more advanced work: The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press, 2002) – the book I’ve been referring to as CGEL. It’s a large scholarly reference work (over 1,800 pages), and although it doesn’t presuppose a linguistics degree, it uses more technical concepts and vocabulary than this book, and it attempts to be complete and exhaustive. It’s intended for grammarians and designers of courses rather than for students or for the casual reader.
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