The Voynich Ninja

I decided to open a thread about Voynich mnemonics in general. There is a number of threads discussing various manifestations thereof and individual interpretations as well. But seemingly there was no thread about the general paradigm underneath which frames it into a system (yet to be revealed).

First and foremost, mnemonics apparently reveal themselves in the botanical section of the VMS, which gives to some plants rather weird appearance.

Three major questions present themselves from scratch:

1) What is the purpose of mnemonics? Namely: if there is text there (no matter if plain text or ciphertext), everything can be expressed by means of text. So why bother with the additional layer of complexity and introduce graphical mnemonics?

2) What is the information conveyed by mnemonics? Is it plant names, plant usage or otherwise?

3) Is there any system in mnemonics, or it is all ad-hoc? Namely, is there any repetitively applied "logic" that produces graphical shapes from the information as per item 2) above?

Regarding items 2) and 3), I recently proposed a hypothesis in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread, which I will repost here:

Quote:I got a novel idea that can be named "heads and tails" paradigm. With this paradigm:

a) the look of the Voynich plants is explained by that the primary purpose is mnemonics;
b) the roots of the Voynich plants are used as mnemonics for one language/usage (say, Latin/"scientific") and the tops of the plants are used as mnemonics for another language/usage (say, German/"folklore")

For You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. this would be the (provisional) Lysimachia and Schirmkraut, respectively.

With this concept, there may be no plant names mentioned in the botanical folios at all (so my PPN idea would need to be discarded), because they would actually be not needed there anymore.

So, according to this paradigm, questions 2 and 3 receive the following answers:

- The information conveyed is plant names. The end result is that one is able recall the plant's name by looking at the image.
- There is the system as follows. There are two levels of mnemonics generally (although for some plants only one of them may be in place): one in tops of the plants, the other in the roots. The former deals with common "folk" names of plants, the latter deals with "scientific" Latin names, being linked to descriptions in previous textual sources (such as the Natural History by Pliny the Elder).

This is highly provisional yet, and, as of now, is more or less confirmed by one plant only (f5r). 

After that, an idea came to me of a most simple yet elegant answer to question 1. It implies that the text is a cipher.

It is often noted that drawings in the botanical section were made prior to putting down the text. But what if all botanical section drawings were made before putting down all the text? In that case, with 100+ plants out there, the author would have liked some means of identification, in order to avoid confusion. Normally, one could just put down captions when creating figures. But with the intention to encrypt the text, the author could not proceed with plain text labels, because that would reveal information. So he turned to mnemonics - for his own use - to be able to identify plants later when returning to the work with the text.

Why not place encrypted labels at once? Well, it's basically the same question as why not encrypt the whole last line of f116v. Indeed, why not? But it's not wholly encrypted still.

The basis assumption that you make is that we see plants. Why do you see plants, with a stem, root , leaves and flower? (rhetorical) 
Because we recognize existing parts and some details are puzzling or are confusing us: is it a root, is it a picture, is it a box or what is it? (rhetorical) 

The answer after many reading hours in the philosophical corner, is that the author of the VMS is into medieval Aristotelian wisdom, 
and wants to create a mood within he can tells us something. 

This has only sideways to do with the herbals you see.  Searching for the exact names or identical brothers or sisters in the kingdom of plants, will therefore always remain fruitless. It is like the story like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is it really about a literal yellow brick road? (rhetorical)  
No, it is NOT about a real yellow brick road. And you will not find that road in any country, any city, or any village.  

Davidsch - what puzzles me is that you talk like you've got it all figured out but I see very little in terms of concrete, to the point solutions and analyses. I don't mean this in an offensive way, I'm just curious what exactly you mean. So what we call mnemonics, you say is medieval Aristotelian mood-setting? Could you provide an example of how this works?

I believe that the discourse should be developed from simple to complex - namely, the form should be taken as the starting point. What we see in botanical section are plants by form; otherwise there would never have been plant identification attempts, and the section would not have been dubbed "botanical".

In philosophy, if a philosopher sees a chair, s/he may develop the trail of thought quite deeply, musing over whether this is a real chair, after all, or just a fruit of imagination of the individual, then, if real chair, whether it is material or immaterial, whether it is a chair or some other thing (e.g. a table), and whether, even if a chair, it is cognizable or not, etc.

The same thing one can do with Voynich. But in all cases we have the percepted form, regardless of the substance and the meaning beyond. And mnemonics, as well as plant identification attempts, deal primarily with the form.

I've You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on what I wrote, so I do not pollute this thread

(@Anton, sorry to pollute your thread. It was a thing of the moment.)

Let's go along with your idea.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.tell us there are 9 types:

1. Music mnemonics: Songs and jingles can be used as a mnemonic. A common example is how children remember the alphabet by singing the ABC's.
2. Name mnemonics: The first letter of each word is combined into a new word. For example: VIBGYOR for the colours of the rainbow 
3. Expression or word mnemonics: The first letter of each word is combined to form a phrase or sentence
4. Model mnemonics: A model is used to help recall information.
5. Ode mnemonics: The information is placed into a poem or doggerel
6. Note organization mnemonics: The method of note organization can be used as a memorization technique.
7. Image mnemonics:  The information is constructed into a picture 
8. Connection mnemonics: New knowledge is connected to knowledge already known.
9. Spelling mnemonics: An example is "i before e except after c or when sounding like a in neighbor and weigh"

So in order to look at the concept we should at the complete mnemonic possible scenario of the plants as suggested.

The first thing I would do is find out if drawings of plants are known to be a mnemonic model in medieval times?

[font=sans-serif]I do not know, but if the look & the roots of plants have such a thing hidden, it certainly would not be a new thing. [/font]
[font=sans-serif]Are there examples of such use or similar?[/font]

The whole idea of mnemonics is not mine, what is mine is the "heads and tails" idea specifically.

From the Wikipedia list, I guess that model mnemonics/image mnemonics are the things in question. What "information" is the subject of it - this is being subject to dispute. I think that that is primarily plant names, others think that that is primarily plant usage/usefulness. I guess, ultimately it may turn out that it is some mix of these.

Quote:The first thing I would do is find out if drawings of plants are known to be a mnemonic model in medieval times?

[font=sans-serif]I do not know, but if the look & the roots of plants have such a thing hidden, it certainly would not be a new thing. [/font]
[font=sans-serif]Are there examples of such use or similar?[/font]

In short, yes there are. Koen and Diane may advise on that better than me.

I think there are two things to understand here:

1) Before the rise of book printing, people were much, much more reliant on their memories than we can even imagine. Their whole culture was entrenched with mnemonic devices. Many texts were set to verse and rhyme, many tales were set to song. Authors in antiquity already knew that to remember large amounts of data, you had to activate the spatial and visual parts of the brain. 

Before the invention of the printing press, people did this naturally, and from the poet to the humble peasant they were all masters of memory compared to today's standards. So could a system like this exist in other works? Yes. Could it have been made up for this particular set of plants? Yes, why not?

Mary Carruthers' work is a must read if you are interested in medieval memory techniques.

2) The word "mnemonics" is used somewhat loosely here. Diane used it to describe what she saw in the plants, and from there on it took a life of its own to refer to any "additional" image in the plants. In Voynich studies we call these non-botanical elements that have been consciously worked into the plant image "mnemonics". This doesn't mean that all people who use this term think that they are used to help the memory, but it's a convenient term for the phenomenon. And seeing these things as mnemonic devices remains one of the most plausible explanations.

Perhaps there is a solid medieval model which shows mnemonic examples links and/or citations which especially shows herbals and which we can use on the Voynich.

Depictions of mandrake is the most obvious thing that comes to mind.

As to the entire ready "template" model that could be used... don't know, I doubt this. If there were one, we would have had the Voynich at our fingertips long ago. But I'd also like to hear a professional opinion on this. Basically what I'm doing is trying to reconstruct the possible model that this guy adopted.