28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
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Still no luck on chord M #vmas2024 @johnmayer
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Learn English Through Football
Newspaper Headline: Snakes bite
In this football language post we explain the newspaper headline, 'Snakes bite' from the Guardian newspaper about England's win over Ireland in the Nations League.
The post Newspaper Headline: Snakes bite appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
on the level
honest, truthful
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Idiom of the Day
letters after (one's) name
A series of abbreviations indicating the various levels of higher education or military honors one has received, thereby denoting a presumed level of intelligence, wisdom, or respectability. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
cocksure
Definition: (adjective) Marked by excessive confidence.
Synonyms: overconfident, positive.
Usage: He was arrogant and cocksure but also sensitive and understanding, and I loved him dearly.
Discuss
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Language Log
Quantifying the debate
Following up on "Type-token plots in The Economist" (9/6/2024), I lost some sleep last night doing some analyses of the presidential debate, which I shared with writers at The Economist to be published as "An alternative look at the Trump-Harris debate, in five charts", 9/11/2024. They lead with a type-token graph:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Economist2024DebateTypeToken.png
One of their other "charts" is a table of each candidates most-used words. In some cases the explanation is obvious, like Harris using "former" 15 times while Trump uses it only once. But sometimes the difference may seem puzzling, like the fact that Trump used the word "they" 230 times, while Harris used it only 10 times. Why?
Scanning the contexts of use helps make the political content clear. Many of Trump's "they" referents are of two kinds, exemplified already in his opening turn — 5 references to the Biden administration, and 8 references to immigrants:
In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money. They can't it would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They're taking in billions of dollars from China and other places they've left the tariffs on.
On top of that, we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they're coming in and they're taking jobs that are occupied right now by African-Americans and Hispanics. And also unions. Unions are going to be affected very soon. And you see what's happening. You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio, you look at Aurora in Colorado, they are taking over the towns, They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality.
More later…
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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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say no to drugs & YES to flash mobs @nimayndolo #FocusOnDemocracy #CreatorsForKamala
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Had get the self promo in somehow #DebateNight #CampaignVideo
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⚠️ Best of English Learning Channels
👉 @EnglishLearn
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
dweeb
a studious but socially inept person
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Idiom of the Day
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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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
masterclass on debate decorum #2024Election #HarrisTrumpDebate #WillFerrell #zachgalifianakis
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: consternation
This word has appeared in 149 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
muck up
If you muck something up, you do it badly and fail to achieve your goal.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
He's just your average John #VMAs2024 #WritersRoom @johnmayer
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
He has concepts of a guy #2024Election #TrumpImpression
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Wayne & Mike are warming up for the @MTV VMAs tonight #EveryLittleStep
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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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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Please don't bring Arsenio into this #CreatorsForKamala #FocusOnDemocracy #TrumpImpression
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
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.
Featuring:
@malcolmkenyattaforauditor
@MissPeppermint247
@TheKalenAllen
https://www.instagram.com/lizaminnella/
https://www.instagram.com/bryanrussellsmith/
@nimayndolo
https://www.instagram.com/msbellepepper/
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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.
Discuss
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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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Now THIS is avant garde #NYFW #Fashion #avantgarde
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