The Voynich Ninja

I've also noted a color annotation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (as well as other kinds of text in the leaves that are hard to discern).


I don't know whether René mentioned it earlier (it's something I noticed independently) but if it is a color annotation, it says something about the language of the person doing the annotations or whoever was tasked with the painting.

"G" is green in quite a few languages (green, grün, grön, grønn, grøn, groen, gjelbër, grien, grænt, glas, greng, grin) but most of them are western European, more specifically the germanic languages rather than romance languages (which are usually "v"), eastern European languages are usually "z", and African and Asian languages vary, but are not usually "g".

If the label in the root is intended as "rot" (which seems probable but is not completely certain), then it confirms that the annotations are germanic.

so, this container simply must have been yellow painted.

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ps. Which undoubtedly Rene, or somebody else, already wrote somewhere, in another time, before.

(11-04-2017, 02:25 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know whether René mentioned it earlier (it's something I noticed independently) ...

@JKP,

I am sure you have observed and derived many things completely independently, and I am also fairly sure that in many cases it is not easy to figure out afterwards who saw what first. I know you have been working independently and without exchanging (much) with others for many years.

It's a real pity that this spectre of 'who said what first' is haunting so many discussions.
It is obviously to be expected that if many dozens of people are looking at the same thing, many people will come to the same conclusions completely independently.

Priority only starts playing a role when it comes to significant points.

With respect to the colour annotations, I only know this much:

I first noticed the characters that I now read as 'rot' in 1999 when I saw the Voynich MS in the Beinecke for the first time. I did not read it as 'rot' but thought that these could be Greek letters.

Of course I won't claim that I was the first to see this. I have no way of knowing that.  
Also that should be obvious, and anyone claiming the be the first to observe this or that has the impossible task of proving that nobody saw it before.

Anyway.
Essentially all of these annotations were listed after the colour scans became first available at the Beinecke. This was at one of the pages at 'voynich central', now no longer there. At that time, the reading of 'rot' as such was first proposed to my knowledge (not by me).

I only became convinced that these were indeed colour annotations when I first saw the images of the Vicenza MS, and at that time I realised the implication that the person making these notes would have had German as his first language.
I specifically remember that this happened just after the 2009 Austrian documentary appeared. I'm sure that the producer would have been interested in including it somewhere, had this happened earlier.

The supposed writing inside the brown 'berry' on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. may be imaginary, but there really seems to be something in the yellow leaf. Somehow it almost looks like pencil.

Many things are just artefacts from the parchment surface. A good example are the green stripes  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

I hope the administrators will move the discussion started at post #18 to a new "Color annotations" thread. This subject is extremely interesting and it definitely deserves its own thread!

I did a quick split from my phone, hope I didn't mess anything up. 

If these are color annotations though, wouldn't we expect more of them? Why these specific places?

Also, if the reading is correct, the painter clearly didn't follow the instructions well since the rot stalk is not red.

Might it be implied that the annotations were left by a corrector after the initial painting had been done?

I'm still not sure, whether it is the single letter "g" or some illegible word (Sic...? Sib...? Sir...? Sr? gr?) in the top right corner of the f 42r.
[attachment=1280]

(11-04-2017, 08:59 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Also, if the reading is correct, the painter clearly didn't follow the instructions well since the rot stalk is not red.

Might it be implied that the annotations were left by a corrector after the initial painting had been done?

Once  again, the Vermont herbal (also discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) is a good parallel for the VMS.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (rotated in the attachment) provide examples of color annotations rossa/rosso (red) that were ignored and painted green. In my opinion, a possible explanation for the poor job of these painters is that they couldn't read.

The fact remains that in the VM these annotations are extremely limited in comparison to other examples, and the few we have are ambiguous. 

A simple "g" is the worst ever color annotation in Germanic languages because it can mean both green and yellow. Also grey and gold.

(12-04-2017, 07:00 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The fact remains that in the VM these annotations are extremely limited in comparison to other examples, and the few we have are ambiguous. 

I am not aware of a great number of examples of color annotations, so it's difficult for me to say if the VMS is peculiar or not in this respect. It would be interesting to know what a skilled paleographer has to say on the subject. In his 2016 paper, Touwaide didn't comment on these annotations being strangely limited.

Alain Touwaide (translation mine) Wrote:Voynich ms illustrations contain instructions about the colors to be applied to pen drawings, according to the different parts of plants. Such instructions mention the name of the color to be applied (Voynich f4r), but in German, a peculiar fact that does not seem to be compatible with a Northern Italian origin of the manuscript.

For what is worth, in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I identified 9 color annotated plants on a total of more than 300 illustrations. One could say that those are limited too.

(12-04-2017, 07:00 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A simple "g" is the worst ever color annotation in Germanic languages because it can mean both green and yellow. Also grey and gold.

I agree on the interest of the usage of the ambiguous "simple g" in German. The Vicenza Bertoliana ms 362 parallel pointed out by Rene is great also because it presents both "rot" and the simple "g" in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. illustration. In other illustrations from the Bertoliana ms (this example was posted by JKP), yellow is indicated as "gel".

One could think that green is some kind of default as leaf color, so a "g" in a leaf was meant to indicate that? But, again, I am not a paleographer and possibly there are better explanations for this interesting practice.

I'd think the opposite, you'd paint leaves green either way. When they are marked it must be a sign that special caution is needed.

This would explain the mark in the stalk since those aren't red by default. 

In the attachment you posted, the annotations are there to guide a specific color pattern. That's completely logical. In the VM though, you'd get a g for green on one of a thousand green leaves? I'd find it more logical if it was supposed to mark a special case like yellow or grey or gold. 


One other thing is the problem that there are other marks in the vm plants as well, which are harder to link to color annotations. An example that comes to mind is thewavy symbol in the centre of a flower. I'm still on my phone so can't post it now, but you surely know what I mean.

Then again, what is it if not a color annotation?