originally posted by: voynichman
a reply to: AdmireTheDistance
Yes indeed some letters had to be dropped to find words some of the time at most 1 letter.
Are you being deliberately deceitful? Here's two words in which you dropped more than one letter, taken right from the main page of your site.
Dautii, by the way, does not mean 'entertainment'. It is a very specific type of banquet, and, as a word, is quite obscure, having only three known
occurrences.
Perhaps you did not look at all the links and notice many Latin words without letters dropped.
I looked at your main page, and that was all I needed to see to know that this is just silliness. I also noticed, in addition to the arbitrarily
chosen letters that you've dropped, several instances where you've added letters to try and make things fit your incorrect conclusions:
For example, with 'let', you chose to add an -i, making it 'leti', which you've simply (and incorrectly) translated as 'death' (it's actually a
genitive singular form of 'lētum', and more accurately refers to a specific, personalized manner of dying, rather than just the generalized
'death').
Why didn't you rearrange the letters as you've done with most of the other words, and why did you decide to add an -i, and not some other letter?
Could it not just as well be 'alte' (deep/far/high), 'telo' (customs official), 'teli' (spear/javelin), 'leto' (to kill), 'tale' (of such), 'tela'
(weave/web), etc...? Every word that you've randomly added or removed letters to/from could be 'translated' (and I use that term quite loosely) as
numerous other words, by rearranging them differently and/or by choosing other arbitrary letters to add or remove.
Even if one were to overlook those glaring problems, there's the issue of your translations, which are almost entirely incorrect. Take, for example,
the "garlic" image you have at the very top of your page:
Assuming your simple 1:1 substitution is correct (it isn't), you've applied the substitutions, rearranged the letters in a meaningless and arbitrarily
chosen manner to get the word 'nauseo', which you then translate as 'sick', and from that, you somehow extrapolate the phrase 'garlic helps heal the
sick'. Let's look at some of the problems here...
First, the image of "garlic" may bear a vague resemblance to garlic, but it is not garlic. Second, the Latin word 'nauseō' is neither an adjective
nor a noun (ie. "the sick"), it is a verb (nauseate), and given the conjugation, would be more accurately translated as 'I am sick'. Third, there is
nothing either in the image itself or in your faulty translation that would indicate medicinal purposes, so where did the healing bit come from, other
than your imagination?
Also Saturnus is a straight anagram...
So what?
...by the way the encryption for the voynich is very intricate.
If it is in fact 'encrypted' and contains information, and not a meaningless fake, as many believe, then I would have to agree with you. Your
elementary cipher, however, is far from intricate. One could reassign the Voynich characters to Latin letters however they wanted, then randomly
rearrange the letters of each word, dropping or adding additional randomly chosen letters in random locations, and come up with countless other
"translations" on par with what you've presented.
You obviously share the same fascination and curiosity for the Voynich manuscript as many others (including myself) do, and you seem to have put a
considerable amount of time into this, but it's a dead end. Your idea that it's encoded, in Latin, via the most basic of substitution ciphers is
incorrect. The fact that you have to then unsystematically rearrange, add, and remove letters to make it produce anything, and even then get results
that are incoherent, at best, should be more than enough to indicate that your methods are incorrect. To spend any more time with this idea would be a
waste.