The Voynich Ninja

First time that's ever happened. Bummer, it had lots of example pictures. Not an easy one to recreate.

Which post, this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

?

It's still there for me

No, I wish it were.


It was a new one where I posted in-context examples of the EVA-m character used as phrase/line/paragraph-end markers, and examples of it used as the -is abbreviation and also as an abbreviation for homonyms like corpus.

Never mind. Maybe on the last edit I hit delete instead of post or something, because it has vanished.

This is more about "composition" than decomposition, but I thought I would post it for interest's sake...

One thing I noticed in many of the "constructed" alphabets, like Glagolitic, and many of the alphabets invented by missionaries for local languages that didn't have a written script, is that lines and loops are very frequent. Kabbalistic and talismanic signs are like this also.

Here's an example of a sash that is probably designed to look like imported fabric (probably Middle Eastern, since Arabic characters were often woven into textiles as a decorative motif) in BNF NAD 1673 Albucasis (Albucasis was an Andalusian physician, you will recognize the themes in the manuscript as Tacuinum Sanitatus), but it's not actually Arabic (or Syrian, or anything in that region), it's a pseudo-script designed to make the sash look "exotic", and it's full of loops and lines. Whenever there are a lot of loops and lines, at least some of them come out looking like Voynichese gallows characters:

[Rotated so you can see it better]:

I have done a long research on the Voynich Alphabet (over the last 2 years) during I have tried to read and translate some parts of the VMS.

I´m not quite sure if I´m totally right, but I think, we have to deal with an alphabet, that consists of singular phones and phonetic syllables.

The glyphs seem to be used for letters on it´s own, like "h" oder "a", but also (depending on the context and the position in the words for things like "hen / her" and "al / ar", if it is used to emphasize a vowel oder as an article, which makes me thinking that we have to deal with a writer, who knows Oriental and European systems of writing. Maybe it´s influenced by the Romani and Spanish people / Basques.

At the moment, I try to finish the last exact phones of the glyphs by using the star maps (folio 68). And it seems, that Bax and also Currier and Bennett, at least had some right suggestions. And not only them, but nobody of them gets the whole thing. As far as I can say, we have one diagram related to the Summer Solstice and one related to the Winter Solstice. The third one may shows the Ring- Eclipse of the Sun in 1409.

What are your suggestions about the pages 68 and which alphabet is your favorite. Did you may have tried to decipher the Glyphs by your own?

I found a webpage on medieval ciphers: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

and the last figure is especially interesting, showing the diplomatic cipher of one Francesco Tanchredino. I can't remember this discussed in the forum.

Note how:

a) the ciphertext symbols are designed: a base shape is prepended with a prefix or appended with a suffix
b) same plaintext letters can be encrypted with more that one symbol
c) plaintext letter pairs receive their own ciphertext symbols
d) some text is enciphered on a word-basis (so, partly a nomenclator solution)

I've blogged about the ciphers collected by Tranchedino. They make liberal use of pretty much every common Latin and Greek character and abbreviation symbol, in addition to astrological and mathematical symbols:

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This link explains how basic Latin shapes are altered slightly with an extra tick mark (in a very orderly way) to create new characters:

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The diplomatic ciphers collected by Tranchedino were substitution ciphers that required many characters (sometimes as many as 200 different glyphs per cipher set) because they were one-to-many ciphers (several glyphs could stand for the same character) that also included nulls plus a glossary of symbols for common words.

In fact, the webpage that I refer to misspells "Tranchedino" for "Tanchredino" after the source that they quote. That's why I was unable to find it via the forum search.

When I decided to dive into VMS, the first thing I did was to read/scan the pages over a few days to understand its characters composition. See attached image.

From it, I believe that ee and ii could each be a single character. (And thus, eee [and iii] has to be single character too or else there would be a situation like, is it 'e ee'  or 'ee e' or 'e e e'?)

The tails of b, n, r, s, l, y are just curved tails, regardless their 'shapes'; they could be tall, short, wide, long - and the pages are abound with their variations which I believe were dependent on the style and mood of the scribes who 'drew' them. The connection point between the tail and the 'base' character e or i could be made at the top or bottom of the tail, with the top or bottom of the e i character, except there is no connection between top of the tail to the bottom of e i character as such connection would made the new character's descender far too low. I believe the macron in c"h is also a tail, but scaled down to fit into the limited space available.

The gallow characters are variations of the right two columns (g m), but use a tall vertical stroke instead of e or i. The character q is probably derived from e and a vertical stroke downward, and o is a special character (possibly with special attributes).

Just sharing my 2 cents worth....

mscheo, your chart is pretty close to how I perceive the shape combinations. I see them that way partly because it follows Latin scribal conventions that were used to write numerous languages.

These are common ligatures and abbreviations used in medieval scribal conventions:

y m g r s n k u b

For example, in Latin conventions, m = r  +  (is/es abbreviation)
                                                        k = i [font=sans-serif]+  ([/font][font=sans-serif]is/es[/font][font=sans-serif] abbreviation, which is sometimes intepreted as "-em" or as "-tem" if it is "Item")[/font]
                                                        s = c + macron (written as a connected tail)
                                                        r = (i or r) + macron (written as a connected tail)

In other words, VMS glyph shapes are very similar to Latin building blocks used in ligatures and abbreviations.

But, I am (of course) not certain that the combinations are interpreted (parsed out) the same way they are in medieval conventions. What is two VMS shapes combined might represent several characters in a western language, but possibly one character in Voynichese. It's even possible that three or four basic shapes represent one character (or vice versa).