This is the first time I’ve logged into my Voynich Portal account in 3.5 years. I couldn’t even remember my password. I’ve been fighting for democracy. All my research, hobbies, family relationships, all the things that matter to me, have been sidelined by the need to be actively engaged.
Time Lost
It was a crushing blow to set aside my research. After 13 years of basic legwork, I was making discoveries, exciting ones, and now all the emerging threads are moldering on an old hard drive that I pulled from a computer that I sold, with my paper notes gathering dust in the attic and under the bed. I feel like a small ship that lost everything in a bad storm, including the captain’s log and now, amidst an even bigger storm, I’m trying to find it all and drag it back into the boat.
Except I can’t. Not yet. There’s more work to be done on the home-front and it’s more urgent than ever.
A Token Note
I can’t pop in and out without at least posting something about the VMS. So maybe the most appropriate snippet is this… at the time I was forced to drop my Voynich research, in 2021, I was booking a trip to Europe. This is one of the more speculative parts of my research but I was itching to travel somewhere mysterious and beautiful, and I set my sights on Plitvice, the waters of the mysterious legend of the Black Queen.
I tentatively booked accommodation, selected a train pass, and was making a final decision between two air routes. I was long overdue for a vacation and wanted to see if there was a connection between the fabulous pools and falls in Plitvice and drawings in the Voynich Manuscript. I wanted to “walk the walk” and try to match up the connections on the “map” pages and “pool” pages with something real. I was forced to cancel all of it. I’m still longing to go there for both personal and academic reasons.
Summary
This is all I can post right now. I will try against all odds to drop in and get some of the more important VMS-related matters resolved (like my findings about the drawing that was located in Italy by F. Salani) but for now, duty calls.
Speakers of Chechen sometimes have difficulty reading and writing their own language. Currently there are about 1.4 million Chechen speakers, mostly in the Caucasus, but also in scattered colonies in the eastern Mediterranean, western Russia, and Bavaria/Tirol. The Chechens live in the mountains, in a linguistically diverse region that includes some very old languages.
In July 2018, I posted a blog on Tischlbong, a Slavic/Bavarian blended language spoken in the village of Timau on the Bavaria/Italian border. This blog takes us further east, to the region between the Black and Caspian seas, where a surprisingly diverse group of languages, some of which are nearly extinct, are still spoken in cultures that are thousands of years old.
It was actually the Azerbijani language that attracted my attention first, for a number of reasons, but after I began to appreciate the diversity of languages in this region, I learned of some unusual aspects of Chechen and decided to look into this, as well.
Chechen and Nearby Languages
Chechen is spoken by a little more than a million people in a culturally ancient and linguistically diverse region between the Black and Caspian seas, bordering Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Russia. [Source: Google maps; Vyacheslav Argenberg, Wikipedia]
Ubykh, one of the languages in the Akbhaz-Circassian language group, became extinct in 1992. This remarkable language had 82 consonants and only two vowels (Coene, 2009).
In general, minority languages and even some of the majority languages in the northern Caucasus region did not have their own alphabets until the 19th and 20th centuries. Chechen has a longer written history than most of the minority languages. Some of the minority languages are spoken by only a few thousand people and may be gone in a generation or two.
The Avar or Azerbaijani languages are used bilingually for economic transactions by a number of people in this region. Russian is also spoken and mandated in some areas.
In some ways, the Caucasians and Basques have characteristics in common. Not in terms of their language specifics or background (although both languages are agglutinative), but in resistance to outside influences. This is largely due to cultural isolation—mountain strongholds are harder to conquer. Historically, these cultural groups retained a certain autonomy that is reflected in their languages.
More recently, however, technology, Soviet expansion, and wars have left their mark and have wiped out a sizable portion of native literature. When orthography changes, books in previous alphabets become obsolete and are destroyed. With them goes the link to ancestral history.
History and Orthography
Chechen and Ingush are related to Vainakh, a northeast Caucasian language.
Like several middle eastern and central Asian languages, Chechen exemplifies synchronic digraphia—a language written with several alphabets, usually Arabic, Cyrillic, or Latin. Historically, the Arabic alphabet was used for Chechen, but since 1862, a Cyrillic-based alphabet was the dominant script, with recurring and politically controversial attempts to convert to Latin. In 2002, the Russian language was mandated for education, which may threaten the future of numerous local languages.
Members of the Chechen diaspora who settled in Bavaria and the eastern Mediterranean sometimes use Latin characters because they are familiar, but their efforts are not standardized. The number of books published in Chechen is small and some of these were destroyed in recent wars.
Chechen literature has received very little study but is worthy of attention because of its unique poetic characteristics and the position of this region in an important crossroad between Christian and Muslim cultures.
Some Interesting Aspects of Chechen
Chechen is an agglutinative language with some interesting characteristics. Literacy levels were not historically high, so it is difficult to chart changes between current usage and older versions of the language.
Here are some general characteristics…
Numbers (in the singular) and names of the seasons usually end in a vowel. Dal is the word for God, Seli for the traditional thunderer, and Eter for the ancient underground god (the Chechens were traditionally polytheistic).
There are many words comprised of simple 2- or 3-letter syllables, and some that repeat a syllable, such as zaza (flower), or which repeat a consonant together with different vowel or vice versa, as in or qoqa (dove) or adam (person).
Letters like j tend to be at the beginnings of words.
One spelling can have different pronunciations and serve multiple purposes. To take an example cited by E. Komen, the single word деза (deza) can be interpreted as four very different concepts:
No, there is more variety in the positions of letters within Chechen words than in VMS tokens. But it demonstrates that natural languages can have orthographies in which different sounds are represented by the same shape, where vowel representation is limited, and within which the same linguistic unit can be repeated several times with different meanings for each iteration.
Self-driving vehicles are no longer science fiction. They are on public roads. A combination of sensors, hard-coded control software, and AI-related decision-making algorithms have moved the “driver’s seat” from leather and fabric to silicon chips. Control mechanisms have become invisible.
The Future of Intelligent Vehicles
Most people understand the concept of a computer-driven car, at least in a general sense. But have they thought about where this technology might lead?
I don’t mean the more obvious aspects of reading while you’re driving, controlling the car by voice commands, avoiding accidents due to human error, or worrying about GPS bugs that might land you in a dark alley or the wrong side of town. Nor am I talking about sneaking a beer because you don’t have to worry about running into a concrete barrier or oncoming car.
What I see for the future of self-driven vehicles is a biological model based on dolphins. One that goes beyond the individual vehicle.
The Cetacean Connection
Humans can connect with dolphin intelligence. We have a place in our hearts for dolphins and they are attracted to us. But dolphin communication is still mostly a mystery. They learn our languages better than we learn theirs.
In my high-school summer-job days, one of my jobs was working at an aquarium, microphone in hand, narrating the whale shows (killer whales are not really whales, they are orcas, but we called them whales). I learned many surprising facts about whales, dolphins, and sealions that I tried to convey in an engaging and educational manner. I also observed these charming and complex animals having good days and bad days.
One day, the biggest orca was feeling under the weather. He didn’t want to do the show. He went through the motions with lackluster spirit, and then he stalled when the trainer asked him to do a giant leap. He substituted a low leap—you could barely call it a leap.
The trainer gave him a second chance, but the orca offered another sluggish hump, barely breaking the surface, and the trainer became annoyed. He had studied psychology and he knew if he rewarded the orca’s behavior with a bucket of fish, the next performance might be the same or worse, so he did something I had never seen before… he turned his back and slowly, deliberately, walked away with the fish. The audience pays for the show, so this was a gamble. The trainer would have to sacrifice one show for the sake of future customers… but he was resolute. The game was over.
I was young, still in my teens. I hadn’t thought much about the ethics of aquariums, I thought only of their educational value, but what happened next was eye-opening.
When the orca saw his dinner disappearing, he charged after the trainer, frothing up the water along the edge of the pool, with his head well above water.
The trainer pointedly ignored him and kept walking. The orca then sped to the other end of the pool, turned, swished his tail to pick up speed and executed the most beautiful series of dolphin leaps I have ever seen. The trainer didn’t even look around. He turned the corner toward the supply room.
Orca executing a similar leap.
Now the orca was seriously worried, determined to get the trainer’s attention and his reward of fish. So he sped to the far end of the pool, veering around a smaller female orca and the gray dolphins, dove as deep as he could, whipped his tail to propel his immense body up to full speed and… right next to the trainer at the far end of the pool came completely out of the water in the most incredible giant leap I have ever seen. He landed with a mighty splash that poured a tsunami over the delighted audience.
The trainer didn’t even glance around. He walked into the supply room and shut the door.
The orca hovered at the edge of the pool, nose out of the water, waiting for the door to re-open, thinking he had made up for his previous lapse. He had, after all, just given the performance of his life.
The “killer whale”, more properly called an orca, similar to this one, waited for the trainer to re-emerge.
But the door didn’t re-open until it was time for the next show, an hour later.
From that point on, the orca gave his usual excellent performance. Most of the time, he enjoyed the hourly shows, but it was never the same as the adrenalin-charged series of leaps that the trainer never saw. His extra effort inspired me to learn more about orcas, and how they live in the wild, and I tried to incorporate this information into my narrative at the whale shows.
The audience seemed to enjoy the additional information in the commentary, until I started talking about dolphin sonar. Then their eyes would glaze over, so I dropped it from the narrative… but I never lost interest in the subject.
How Dolphins See
Even though we feel a kinship with these intelligent creatures, a dolphin’s world is very different from ours.
If you put a toy in a box and ask a dolphin to identify the toy, it doesn’t try to peek in the box with its eye. Instead, it sends out signals from a biological sonar to probe the contents of the box. Dolphins can tell you what’s inside by selecting a picture of the item from a set of flash cards. They can even distinguish one material from another in objects of similar shape.
Dolphins are highly social animals, sharing unique modes of communication.
This is not too hard to comprehend either, if you have a basic understanding of sound waves. It’s similar to the way bats navigate in the dark by sending out chirps that echo back to build up a ‘picture’ in their heads of their environment.
But where it gets elusive is when you consider that dolphin communication is shared. If one dolphin sends out a signal, the waves that radiate back are apprehended by all the dolphins. You can’t “secretly” probe something. It’s group-sight.
If all the dolphins signaled at the same time, it would be cacophony, with one dolphin’s signals drowning out the others. If they want to sense their world in a rational, comprehensible way, they have to coordinate those signals so they don’t all ‘talk’ at the same time.
The Concept of “Self”
This is what I was thinking when I heard that smart cars were now driving on public roads. A self-driven car is only the beginning. Inter-communicating cars—that is the future. But it’s not as easy as just adding sensors and telecommunication devices—you have to coordinate the signals in much the same way as a nervous system coordinates the different parts of a body. Then the concept of the “self-driven” vehicle becomes an anachronism, with the concept of “self” subsumed into the whole.
Maybe that’s the way VMS research is headed. Research was historically a solitary pursuit. The 1940s Study Group made a collaborative effort with the limited resources available, but there were many hurdles to medieval research in pre-Internet days.
The VMS mailing list was a good start in terms of collaboration, but the format is not as flexible as a media-ready platform. Now we have the Voynich.ninja forum, where imagery can be shared and research can be read within minutes of being posted. Nick Pelling blogged an informative article about preprint servers. Scientists are enjoying unprecedented access to information and opportunities, a blessing in a time of pandemics.
Rene Zandbergen is gradually building up a historical resource of what we know, but I’m not sure we’ve come up with the best format yet for what-we-suspect but don’t quite know—a significant challenge considering the diversity of opinions on every small detail of the VMS. I keep finding posts from a few years ago that I forgot I had written.
What might be helpful is a visual clickmap of the major areas of VMS research linked to the major threads dealing with that subject. This is not a small project. It might take the cooperation of the whole community to make it happen, but it might be a useful tool to prevent reposting of the same info that was posted years ago.
