The Voynich Ninja

This again partly overlaps with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. linked by Anton above.

I was curious to visually compare pharma items having similar or identical labels. In some cases, there seems to be some ambiguity about the item to which a label applies. Usually, the page makes clear if a label refers to an item on its left or on its right. I have done my best to select what seemed to me the most relevant item and I have centered the snapped image on that item.
[edited: Anton has pointed out to two cases in which the label ambiguity may be extremely relevant; I have updated these posts accordingly]

Here is a first table which collects a group of four items labels “otoldy” and a group of three items labeled o[kt]ory.

The otoldy group includes three or four roots and possibly a jar. The two roots in 89r1 and 99r are vaguely similar (a spherical bulb with thick roots below it). 
f89r2 is ambiguou: the label could refer to a container or a plant. The shape of the plant is consistent with the otoldy plant in 89r1 and 99r (roundish leaves with an irregular margin, spherical bulb with thick roots).
The root in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is quite different from the other three.

The otory / okory group includes a single leaf, a plant with flat-top roots a and leaf, a container. The relation between the container and the other two items is dubious, since it is based on the assumption that k and t are somehow equivalent. The leaf and the plant have identical labels; only the leaves can be compared and (also in this case) are vaguely similar: they are both lobed, but the top lobe more pronounced than the others; yet the leaf in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is more clearly five-lobed and appears to be more elongated.

[edited on the basis of Anton's comments - see next post]
This second table presents 9 couples of items.

1. okary – Two very similar roots with identical labels. What is strange is that they both appear in the same paragraph (being the first and the last items of the top row).

2. okolo / okolyd – The match is of course tentative, since the suffixes differ. Even if the label in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is closer to the plant on the right than to the container, the layout of the other labels in this row suggest that the label really refers to the container. This suggest that okolo and okolyd really are unrelated words.

3. orar / orar.am – The match is again tentative, but in this case the second label is made of two words, the first matching the label of the first item. This are two sketches of whole plants that appear to be quite different.

4. osaro / osary. Suffixes differ. The first item is a plant, the second a bulbous root.

5. otaldy. Identical labels and different items. As suggested by Anton [see the following post], it seems less problematic to associate the label in 88r with the plant on its right, rather than with the container on the right. Anyway, the two plants in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f101v2 look quite different.

6. otoky. Identical labels and vaguely similar items: two leafless, airy, roughly conical roots.

7. otor.am / otoram. Also this couple is made up of quite different items: a root and a container. Again, it is possible that the label in 88v refers to the plant rather than the container (the label is closer to the plant), but it seems easier to assume that in this case otor-am and otoram denote two different things.

8. saiino / saiiny. Suffixes differ. The two illustrations are vaguely comparable: two leafless, elongated roots. The one in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. bifurcates.

9. salo / salol. This couple appears in the same row of items as the two okary roots discussed at point (1). Once again, the similarity is only partial.


You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Wladimir D observes that similar items in the pharma section do not have similar labels. He also writes:

Quote:Together with this there is the word otoldy (11-1 cases in the text,? F82v? You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ). Which is used four times as a label in the "leaves and roots" section, and the plants are not alike.
....
These two items can be explained if the label is the name of the ingredient from the plant near which the label stands.

[Wladimir seems to be interpreting all the four occurrences of otoldy as referring to plants, while I believe the one in f89r2 refers to a jar].

[What follows is irrelevant. See Anton's comment 
In general, I find particularly puzzling the fact that similar labels often refer to both plants and jars. If I understand correctly what Wladimir wrote, his idea is that the label denotes a substance (that can be "contained" in a plant or a jar). If so, this could be a possible explanation for the use of the same label for plants and jars.
In any case, the shared labels between plants and containers seem to me an interesting and difficult to explain phenomenon.

Hi Marco,

The shared labels between jars and plants would be something difficult to explain indeed. The fact would suggest that the label is not a name, but rather a shared attribute (quantity is the first that comes to mind). However, that does not very much fit the general layout of the pharma blocks which (the layout, I mean) suggests that jars are meant to represent the outcome, the result of preparation, while the rows of plants rightwards to the jars are meant to represent the respective ingredients. In this case, it would not be clear, in the first place, where do we find the name of the outcome (but OK, suppose we do find it in the nearby paragraph text), and, in the second place, what attribute would suit both the ingredient and the product (quantity, apparently, would not, because the part cannot be the same in quantity as the whole).

But what I doubt is whether the labels are really shared, if we abstain from assumptions such as glyph equivalence.

If I am not mistaken and miss nothing from your examples, then it appears that there are, strictly speaking, only two candidate matches:

• otoldy (jar f89r2 - plant You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - plant f99v)
  
• otaldy (jar You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - plant f101v2)
  

Consider otoldy in f89r2. I'm not certain that it refers to the jar. It might refer to the leaves of the plant to the right, the root of which is described as okol shol dy. One may argue that that would leave the jar unlabeled. But the case of the jar below looks quite such: it is unlabeled, with six plants and six labels, leaving no label for the jar (alternative interpretation would be that it is the rightmost root that is unlabeled, while the jar is labeled korainy)

Consider otaldy in f88r. Does it refer to the jar or to the root? I would say that it refers to the root, because the label is much closer to the root than to the jar.

To sum it up, there are only two candidate matches with neither of those being a certain match. In this circumstance, I believe that there are no solid grounds to state that the phenomenon of shared labels ever exists.

(23-07-2017, 02:36 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To sum it up, there are only two candidate matches with neither of those being a certain match. In this circumstance, I believe that there are no solid grounds to state that the phenomenon of shared labels ever exists.

Thank you, Anton!
Your interpretation makes things much less confusing indeed!

I will update the two tables according to this idea.

If I understand correctly what Wladimir wrote, his idea is that the label denotes a substance (that can be "contained" in a plant or a jar). If so, this could be a possible explanation for the use of the same label for plants and jars.
 You correctly understood me.
Work with the correspondence of small and large plants (or different pages of small plants) I have not finished yet. Not enough free time. In addition to 32 analogues, I found another 4.
[attachment=1519]  
In parallel, now, I am monitoring the techniques (specific methods) of designating plant elements in medieval manuscripts. According to preliminary findings, I suppose that the plants are "not real", but are made up by collage with some shift of plant elements from different pages.  
For example, the "cart" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. consists of four plants. (Thanks to Koen). This may explain in my analysis - the absence of words that can be interpreted as the names of plants.

Quote:I suppose that the plants are "not real", but are made up by collage with some shift of plant elements from different pages.

Good idea. That would explain why a single plant in the pharma section may have more than one label.

By the way, I don't think that 89r1 matches 43v. I think it matches 24v. Note the characteristic shape of the leaves. The root of 89r1 does not look like the root of 24v (neither does it look like the root of 43v), but this may be explained by that it is a root from a different plant.

(24-07-2017, 08:15 AM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I understand correctly what Wladimir wrote, his idea is that the label denotes a substance (that can be "contained" in a plant or a jar). If so, this could be a possible explanation for the use of the same label for plants and jars.
 You correctly understood me.
Work with the correspondence of small and large plants (or different pages of small plants) I have not finished yet. Not enough free time. In addition to 32 analogues, I found another 4.
  

Thank you, Wladimir! Your research seems to me to be quite accurate and the visual data you are patiently collecting will likely be of use to others.

I have put together the labels of your matches in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (as always, there might be errors). There is not much that is immediately relevant to this thread (few of the couples are entirely from the "pharma" section), yet it's a line that could be developed also in this context. For instance, one could make a search for similar plants limited to the pharma-section (e.g. matching each illustration to the most similar illustration, all in the context of this section, and then compare the labels). I will reflect on this.

Your idea of "substances" is certainly interesting, both because it might explain some weird repeating labels and because it prompts some research on what the pharma-paragraphs could be. I know there are medieval texts about compound medicines, but I haven't really studied any of them. What can these "substances" be? That's a fascinating question!

These are the 12 plants with shared/identical labels. Some of the labels are ambiguous, and I here followed Anton's suggestion of not applying the labels to the jars if there is a good "plant" candidate (you can find the details in the posts above).

Most of the plants that share the same label are similar, in various degrees. The three cases in which the plants are quite different are:

• otoldy otoldy 99v (the other three have spherical bulbs with thick roots coming out of them)
  
• the two otaldy otaldy  plants (both roots and leaves are quite different)
  

The most similar couple seems to be the two okary okary  plants that appear in the top row of f99r.