07-02-2016, 02:19 AM
In the "A and B plants" thread, René mentioned that some plants depicted the herbal section appear to be duplicated in the pharma section. I think someone mentioned some really convincing examples of this in the comments at Stephen Bax's blog a few months ago, but I can't find it. Does someone have a list of such occurrences? I think that, if the label of the plant in the pharma section occurs also on the relevant herbal page, this would be a strong argument for the text being meaningful, especially if the word is rare. Has anyone found such cases?
I've looked at some very rare plant labels (6 or less occurrences in the whole MS) on the pharma pages on voynichese.com to see whether they occur on herbal pages with similar plants. The only such case I found is the word "opchor" (6 occurrences total), which occurs as a label on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (first row, third from the left) and also in the text on f13r. However the similarity between the plants is rather vague, and the word also appears on two other herbal pages with very different plants. Somewhat more convincingly, the word "otory" (4 occurrences total) occurs on f102v2 (first row, second from the right)* as a label for an oddly-shaped leaf and on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (second row, first from the left) as a label for a plant with similar but somewhat thinner leaves. It may also be interesting that the word "okeoly" (6 occurrences total) occurs as a label on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (second row, sixth from the left) as well as in the text immediately above the label.
I think that, although the presence of such cases is an argument for the text being meaningful, their absence would not necessarily refute this. It may be possible to encipher the same plaintext word in different ways, or the language could be highly inflected. For example, in a Latin herbal, the picture of a plant would probably be labeled in the nominative singular (e.g. "convolvulus"), but in the main text the word might occur only in other forms such as "convolvulum" or "convolvuli", which a simple approach like the one I tried would not find.
* I'm using the foliation from voynichese.com here, which seems to be the same as on jasondavies.com. Not sure if this is correct in this case.
I've looked at some very rare plant labels (6 or less occurrences in the whole MS) on the pharma pages on voynichese.com to see whether they occur on herbal pages with similar plants. The only such case I found is the word "opchor" (6 occurrences total), which occurs as a label on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (first row, third from the left) and also in the text on f13r. However the similarity between the plants is rather vague, and the word also appears on two other herbal pages with very different plants. Somewhat more convincingly, the word "otory" (4 occurrences total) occurs on f102v2 (first row, second from the right)* as a label for an oddly-shaped leaf and on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (second row, first from the left) as a label for a plant with similar but somewhat thinner leaves. It may also be interesting that the word "okeoly" (6 occurrences total) occurs as a label on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (second row, sixth from the left) as well as in the text immediately above the label.
I think that, although the presence of such cases is an argument for the text being meaningful, their absence would not necessarily refute this. It may be possible to encipher the same plaintext word in different ways, or the language could be highly inflected. For example, in a Latin herbal, the picture of a plant would probably be labeled in the nominative singular (e.g. "convolvulus"), but in the main text the word might occur only in other forms such as "convolvulum" or "convolvuli", which a simple approach like the one I tried would not find.
* I'm using the foliation from voynichese.com here, which seems to be the same as on jasondavies.com. Not sure if this is correct in this case.