medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On 30 September 2019 at 11:28 John Briggs wrote:
>Rosemary Hayes wrote:
>>I wonder whether Gerard would be kind enough to tell us the
>>provenance of the MS? Which Dominican priory and where is
>>it now?
>Please don't encourage him! (It's the Voynich MS...)
>John Briggs
Yes, please don't encourage him! Not because it's the Voynich MS, but because it's Gerard Ceshire!
Ceshire is a person with a training (and recently obtained doctorate) in life sciences, who never learned a second language beyond his maternal English, and never daigned to aquire at least a basic training in linguistics and paleography, but claims nevertheless to be able to decrypt the Voynich MS and to reconstruct its language as a "proto-Romance" variant of Latin allegedly written in the first half of the 15th century when, according to him, Latin (at Naples, one of the European centres of early humanism, and where a century ago an author like Boccaccio had acquired an important part of his vernacular culture!) was "on its way of becoming Early Italian".
In his decryption and reconstruction, the Voynich MS offers samples of this early humanist Latin or quasi "Early Italian" as the following:
"nas e nas orlet omina omosl omor nena tosar nomina"
"This translates word-for-word-as: Enters and, churning, divine,
dissatisfied, terminates, baby, removed, re-appointed. This
page evidently alludes to using herbal drugs for forcing
miscarriage of still babies or unwanted babies, thus to
either save the mother's life or to save reputation. The
source languages are Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Latin,
Greek, Romanian, Catalan and Galician." (Cheshire, Linguistic
Dating, 2018, p. 20)
Or, according to his more recent discovery of a reference to Atropa baetica:
"léta é o naus or ormé ea e que as asa"
"léta [killer, slayer. Latin] é o [it’s the. Portuguese] naus
[food, eaten. Vulgar Latin] or [is, now. Italian] ormé ea [it’s
mark. Italian] éas [result. Latin] e que as [it is that. Portuguese]
asa [v. ara. path. Latin]"
"It’s a killer when eaten, that is the mark it leaves from taking
that path" (Plant Series, No. 1, 2019, p. 2)
The Voynich MS, carbondated to the first half of the 15th century and originated presumably in Italy, is the unique document of a carefully crafted script or pseudo-script which includes a number of glyphs shaped like medieval minuscule writing forms of Latin "a", "c", "d", "o", "-s-"/"s-", and "t" (I leave aside formal similarities with standard abbreviations and numerals, because Ceshire does not use these similarities and does not know anything about medieval Latin script). Cheshire has used passages of the Voynich MS and surfed the web for Latin words which offer some of their letters in the same position as Voynich words (or pseudo-words), and when he found a word with a meaning meeting his semantic expectations, he has regarded his find as a hit and inferred from it that the remaining glyphs of the Voynechese word must be equivalent to the remaining letters or "sounds" of the given Latin word.
To make his system more flexible, he also regards some of the Voynich glyphs as "diphthongs", "triphthongs" or "quadraphthongs" denoting groups of two, three or four "sounds" of matching Latin words. As he believes that only few documents of medieval Latin have survived, and none remotly as rich as the Voynich MS, and that medieval Latin was a language where rules of Classical grammar did not imply, a "diluted" and depraved form of Latin from which the Romance languages in the early 15th century emanated and which had incorporated also many words from Germanic, Slavic, Greek and Oriental languages, he takes the liberty to "reconstruct" this language as a gibberish with no morphosyntactic or other grammatical system at all and extends his websurfing to matching words in all these other languages too. Which is why his "translations" include presumptive matches from so many languages.
If Cheshire had ever learned a second language instead of sucking in only English as his maternal language, he would have had an opportunity to form a less absurd idea of what a language actually is, and would hopefully have spared the scholarly world from his breathtaking discoveries.
Medieval-religion is a list dedicated to *scholarly* discussion of medieval religion, and not for advertising pseudo-science not even worth to be discussed in a primary course of Latin, of linguistics or of medieval or early modern studies. The absurdity of Cheshire’s approach and results have repeatedly been pointed out and demonstrated to him on other discussion lists. Dr Cheshire is invited to follow our present discussions as a beginner and learner if he has an interest in medieval religion and believes that he can digest the scholarship. He is also invited to ask questions or to offer suggestions regarding the questions asked by others here, as long as he restrains from phrasing his contributions as an alleged expert and does not refer to his own Voynich studies as valid scholarship. But I want to discourage him strongly to pursue in his present abuse of our list, and should he continue with it I will ask my co-listowners to consider cancelling his membership.
Otfried Lieberknecht
Dorbaumstr. 86
D-48157 Münster
mob. +49 1573 79 79 329
tel. +49 251 287 99 111
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http://www.lieberknecht.de
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