I’d just like to take this opportunity, as the Eve of Christmas 2010 draws in across the world, to wish my readers a joyous Christmas. May this Baby be born in us today, or born afresh in those who have lost His image.
God’s grace, which is new every morning, comes in the form of a new born baby, born in undignified and poor conditions, in a sinful and lost world, in order to be God amongst us, living and dying for us. May the love of this Christ be your experience, and the greatest joy and comfort for you.
One reader of this blog brought up the subject of the Voynich Manuscript and asked whether the Goldlist method could be a good tool to someone wishing to decipher this.
I produced the first draft of the below answer in the comments section next to the query, but I thought it was a very good idea to talk about this as a main article on its own account, so I’m reproducing the answer here, and expanding it a bit with a few more thoughts.
It will be a nice precursor to another article I have in the pipeline, namely my story “Otherwise Engaged” which also talks about a special book made by one person and handed down in a family, this one containing a self-fulfilling prophesy. Although it was among my favorite short stories in the ones I ever entered into the Daily Telegraph‘s monthly short story competitions some years back, it was one of the ones that actually didn’t get anywhere, other than some nice comments by other Telegraph bloggers at that time.
Anyway, now to my thoughts on the Voynich Manuscript.
The easiest thing is to assume that it is a hoax, as so many of the unexplained things are hoaxes, but in order not to assume any bad intentions on the part of the author, let us say that it is a work of art.
The paper and the ink seem to be consistent with 15th century Italian, which also had a writing style of the sort used here at that time, a revival of an earlier Carolingian handwriting style.
The manuscript should not be looked at in isolation from the accompanying illustrations. They contain detailed drawings of plants which are not actually consistent with plants to be found in any of the linguistic locations posited, in fact, these plants don’t exist, unless they all existed once and all coincidentally disappeared, or maybe they exist on another planet and the author was a shipwrecked alien, or, most likely they are the product of someone whose psychology is a ‘creator’ style psychology. Continue reading “Question about the Voynich Manuscript”→
When studying Arabic or Hebrew using Goldlist, it is probably more comfortable to place the target language column to the right of the vehicle language column.
The following is a discussion that started with a PM on another forum, but the software in that forum baulked at something in my answer, but I was able to save it here, and I have the person’s permission to publish the correspondence. Which in a way is just as well as here it will benefit more people. The rest is the correspondence.
Hi, I’ll try and lace my answers in with your questions.
— Previous Private Message — Sent by :****** Sent : 16 December 2010 at 8:42am Hello, Sorry for bothering you with some trivial questions, but given that you have created the Goldlist method and learnt Russian, I thought you would be the best person to ask. I study Russian (and Arabic) at university, and although this forum is very good for methods on how to teach oneself a language, I find there aren’t that many resources for university students.
Fair comment. There seems to be less and less for University students, but only more taxes for them to be paying later on. I don’t know how Clegg looks at his face in the mirror.
My first question would be about the extent of the vocabulary I should ideally acquire at university. Indeed, I’m now on my year abroad (3rd years), and will shortly start using the Goldlist method, however, I’m a bit lost regarding the amount of vocabulary I should learn to reach a good degree level, and to some extent, fluency. Continue reading “Questions on the Goldlist methodology for university students”→
I really can’t MTSU, this time. I’ve seen some dire ones over the years, but this one is downright scary. I’ve changed the logo of the Firm who sent it as it is a legal firm and so I might get sued, and I did make a very slight adjustment to the lead partner’s face, just to emphasise a certain aspect I noticed about it.
A very scary Christmas to you, und Du, et vous...
Not only can nearly none of them (with the worthy exception of the one speaking Italian) manage to crack their faces into a smile or any appearance of happiness while launching into their multilingual greetings in Polish, English, Italian, German, Russian, French, and, for some inexplicable reason, Taiwanese Chinese, but also the greyscale photos seem to lend a depressed air to the whole effort.
With regard to the Chinese one containing half characters that most Chinese people outside Taiwan wouldn’t recognise any more, I assume they went into the Google translate thing and saw that they could have “simplified” or “traditional” and they probably thought that “traditional” would be better for a Christmas card.
I’m also far from sure some of these people speak the languages that are bubbling out of their mouths. I did check their website, and it says what languages they actually claim to speak. Hanyu is not included among them, as you may guess, but the guy speaking German here is in fact a real German.
As a marketing effort this is such an epic fail I can only put it here under the ICMTSU section. If you know any worse ones, please include them in the comments!
I see on the news that the UK is in for another bout of what they are calling “extreme weather conditions“, by which they mean the sort of weather which is absolutely normal anywhere from about Berlin eastwards. Since that’s where I live, I thought it would be a good service to the British people to give you at this time my observations on how Poles, Russians and others in a climate that seems to be causing a lot of ructions as it moves across the Britain. It seems that these colder winters are not going to go away as far as the UK is concerned and so you may as well get used to them. I have about 20 East European winters on my climatic CV, so my experience is something which may be of use to you.
Dress
The first item is dress. There’s a Russian saying “Нет плохой погоды, есть только плохая одежда” – that means “There’s no such thing as bad weather, there is only bad dress”. And the thing to go for is many layers of clothing rather than a few layers of what appear to be warm clothing. If you’re going to work in an office which may be well heated, you do not want to be sweaty all day long so you don’t need to have anything more money that you can’t take off when you get there. That’s the disadvantage of thermal vests. A jumper on the other hand can be taken off quite easily. The scarf is very important because that protects the throat which can be an Achilles heel. It is better than a beard as the beard will make a person feel too warm in a heated location. A decent hat is critical as 30% of heat loss goes from the head. A hat with flaps that can be brought down to cover the ears is particularly useful as you will not want to walk around with your ears uncovered once the temperature goes below about -6°C. Really big headphones can also be helpful to keep the ears warm, but in extremes of cold you can also damage the headphones, although I will say that I haven’t yet. On that note digital cameras need to be used sparingly when its cold, as I have ruined one that way, on stocktakes. Continue reading “Huliganov’s Winter Tips for the British”→
