The Voynich Ninja

This is exactly the kind of insight I'm interested in! We need an explanation which accounts for all the seeming 'mistakes' that we see, as well as the ordinary characters.

(27-05-2017, 11:05 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is exactly the kind of insight I'm interested in! We need an explanation which accounts for all the seeming 'mistakes' that we see, as well as the ordinary characters.

This example isn't a gallows and it isn't about stroke order, but it does relate to your comment...

Most of the VMS glyphs are based on Latin. I've insisted on this for years, I have many clips to demonstrate it, and the only problem is finding time to document it with examples so that those without paleographic experience can see it.

So... on the subject of Latin, Latin is not just about so-many-letters-of-the-alphabet. It's about an extended understanding of characters that are abbreviations which were just as intrinsic as the letters themselves. Just as we use an apostrophe in regular communications. they used many apostrophes/macrons and ligatures as though they were letters.

When I first saw these in the VMS, I recognized them as Latin abbreviations (the shapes, not necessarily the meaning):



In Latin, the one on the left is "-ris", sometimes "-tis" (depending on the writing style) and the one on the right is "-cis". Occasionally lazy scribes also used the first one for -rum or -rem instead of the more flourished -rum. These are not just variations of the pen. They are two distinct glyphs. The one on the left is more frequent than the one on the right.

I don't know whether they are ligatures or abbreviations in Voynichese. The creators may just have borrowed the shapes to make Voynichese look like Latin (there are many indications that the text may have been contrived to resemble Latin, but it's hard to tell because they knew Latin notation and may have chosen them because they were familiar and thus comfortable to write).


So... when I created my own transcription, I differentiated between long and short EVA-e, between round figure-8 and straight-leg figure-8 (EVA-d), and between -ris/-tis/-cis (and a few others). There are many glyphs, however, where it's difficult to tell whether pen variations or glyph variations are intended. I do think it's helpful, however, to look at Latin as a reference when trying to sort them out. It's clearly been used as a model for many of the shapes.

I think that it's not entirely correct to draw conclusions about the order of writing glyph elements (bench-gallows), since it is probably more was applied text copying. In this case, the clerk can change the order of writing glyph elements (with an external resemblance to the original). And this diverse order is found many times (depending on the amount of ink on pen).
I suppose that we should raise the question of the order of "reading" the ligature (the bench is the gallows).
 If you follow the rules of Latin reading, when the superscript (diacritic symbol, in our case, the gallows, apostrophe, point ...) should be read after the symbol above which it is located.
Therefore, my interpretation of the bench with the gallows            e — gallows e
Example JKP # 10           e — — t o e '  

I don't see why, when copying such a long text, the scribe would not have developed a standard way of writing every letter. They may have sometimes written letters in different ways, but surely not as a regular thing.

I have never given any thought to this. My possibly naive impression is something like the attached sequence.

[post about gallows being added after vanished]

I have never looked at this, and have no experience with, or knowledge about, writing with quill pens.

However, the observation that the crossbar usually aligns well with the second 'c'  and less with the first 'c' to me suggest that the crossbar and the second 'c' were written in one stroke.

The imperfect connection of the first 'c' and the crossbar to me fits with Marco's writing order (which is also the one I would have assumed a priori and without looking in detail).

I would expect the 'mismatch' there to be well below one millimetre in most cases.

To me, looking at Marco's example, the most logical explanation for the length of the "bar" is that it was added before the gallows. Basically the order Marco suggests seems correct, but I'm not sure why the gallow wouldn't be added last.

Nice gif by the way, did you do that in photoshop by erasing the parts in reverse order?

Oh that was strange!!

I started to add a new post, the editor opened, my browser crashed (my own fault, I had too many heavy-duty apps running), when it opened again to a blank editor window, I assumed it was still in "New Post" mode... I finished my post and saved it and then... when I looked at the thread, it had wiped out my previous post rather than adding a new one and overwritten it.

So... FYI, my previous comment belongs here, not up there and the old one (which said basically the same thing in slightly different words) has vanished into the ether.

This is just my personal opinion, but having looked at the text extensively while creating my transcription of the entire manuscript, I really feel the gallows part is usually added after. There are many many places where it has an "added in" look, where the baseline doesn't match or sometimes even sits on top of the crossbar or where it looks like it was squeezed in.

Having thought about it some more, I feel like the order Marco suggests would certainly be the most logical approach, for two reasons:

• it respects the left-to-right writing order of the main glyphs. The crossbar can be seen as dotting i's and crossing t's, i.e. to return to a letter to finish it.
  
• it would allow for a more accurate length of the crossbar since the gallow is already there.
  

But I also really think that the gallows look inserted. That's a bit strange, since, in our current paradigm of c-K-c, it would mean that the order of writing the letters is 1-3-2.

Now it's still hard to tell whether this is the case or not, and any conclusions drawn from it are highly speculative. To me it might indicate either of these things:

• The scribes were really copying these glyphs and didn't think of them as sounds. They were "drawing" rather than writing.
  
• Or, in the scribes' mind, bench glyphs form a unit, that can be optionally stretched to add in a gallow.
  

Or something else or nothing...