The Voynich Ninja

During the last couple of months I have been playing with various attempts to match Voynich labels with the nearby text.
The “pharma” or “small-plants”  section looked like a promising area: a lot of labels and not so much text. If the labels were mentioned in the text, they should be easy to find. It turns out that they are not easy to find.

I have searched the “pharma” section for labels matched in the corresponding paragraph. Out of more than 200 labels, I only found these close matches:

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As you can see, the second match depends on the hypothetical equivalence between k and t. The first match has the word split on two lines and with a different suffix. The other two are only split into two words.

Some of the results seem intriguing to me (in particular, the dol-dam blue mushroom), but they are too few to formulate any positive hypothesis. However strange, my basic experiment seems to suggest that the paragraphs do not usually mention the specific illustrated items. I guess one could try a different, more sophisticated, approach.

... or that the labels are not literally "names" of the depicted objects, but rather pieces of some other information about (or related to) the objects.

Somewhere in another thread Wladimir explored whether there are intersections in words mentioned in the botanical folio where a plant is depicted and in the pharma folio where (an element of) the same plant is depicted. The result was that intersections were very few and did not suggest that plant names are plainly mentioned at all in the botanical section.

(21-07-2017, 01:41 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... or that the labels are not literally "names" of the depicted objects, but rather pieces of some other information about (or related to) the objects.

Somewhere in another thread Wladimir explored whether there are intersections in words mentioned in the botanical folio where a plant is depicted and in the pharma folio where (an element of) the same plant is depicted. The result was that intersections were very few and did not suggest that plant names are plainly mentioned at all in the botanical section.

Thank you, Anton!
I guess Wladimir's post you are referring to is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?

In my current research, I am considering the different sections of the ms individually. Of course, the overlaps between the various sections also are of great interest.

A difficulty I see with interpreting the labels of the small plants as something different from plant names is that the parallels I am aware of label plants with their names. Also, the illustrations are not detailed enough to provide identification of the plants. But, as always, everything is possible. Anyway, also if the labels denote substances extracted from the plants, it's still strange that these substances are not mentioned in the paragraphs.

I attach a 1531 illustration of labeled small plants from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Quote:Thank you, Anton!

I guess Wladimir's post you are referring to is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?

No, rather to this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This is effectively, Wladimir's remark as to my older research where I assumed that first vords of botanical folios stand for names of plants (which, in turn, was inspired by Stephen Bax's paper of 2014).

Quote:the illustrations are not detailed enough to provide identification of the plants

The idea is that "small plants" (plants from the pharma section) may be identified as elements of "large plants" (plants from the botanical section), and thus the name of a given "small plant" may be deduced from the name of the large plant. The name of the large plant is, in turn, suggested by image mnemonics.

Several striking identifications of plants aided by mnemonics in the beginning of this year (this activity was somewhat undermined by the "Coventry event", I think we should resume it) suggest that encoding the large plant names via image mnemonics is a systematic practice employed by the VMS author. In that case, there might be no plant names in the botanical section text at all!

Wladimir found several matches of "small plants" against "large plants" (to be found somewhere on the forum). I do not know whether he finished that work or stopped somewhere along the way, and I also don't know if all small plants can be matched to large ones, or only a subset of those - I don't follow pharma section discussions closely. If some small plants cannot be matched against large plants, this would mean one of the following:

• those small plants' names are to be found somewhere in the pharma section text (presumably, in the respective labels)
  
• those small plants' identification should rely on mnemonics of the respective small plant itself.
  

(21-07-2017, 04:26 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Thank you, Anton!

I guess Wladimir's post you are referring to is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?

No, rather to this one: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This is effectively, Wladimir's remark as to my older research where I assumed that first vords of botanical folios stand for names of plants (which, in turn, was inspired by Stephen Bax's paper of 2014).

Thank you, Anton, I would never have found it
I particularly appreciate the observation of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. label a few posts later.

(21-07-2017, 04:26 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:the illustrations are not detailed enough to provide identification of the plants

The idea is that "small plants" (plants from the pharma section) may be identified as elements of "large plants" (plants from the botanical section), and thus the name of a given "small plant" may be deduced from the name of the large plant. The name of the large plant is, in turn, suggested by image mnemonics.

Several striking identifications of plants aided by mnemonics in the beginning of this year (this activity was somewhat undermined by the "Coventry event", I think we should resume it) suggest that encoding the large plant names via image mnemonics is a systematic practice employed by the VMS author. In that case, there might be no plant names in the botanical section text at all!

Wladimir found several matches of "small plants" against "large plants" (to be found somewhere on the forum). I do not know whether he finished that work or stopped somewhere along the way, and I also don't know if all small plants can be matched to large ones, or only a subset of those - I don't follow pharma section discussions closely. If some small plants cannot be matched against large plants, this would mean one of the following:

• those small plants' names are to be found somewhere in the pharma section text (presumably, in the respective labels)
  
• those small plants' identification should rely on mnemonics of the respective small plant itself.
  

You should definitely resume and publish your research!

It's not strictly mine, but a community research where possible mnemonics were suggested and jointly discussed in dedicated threads here. Some threads are preserved, and the others have been lost. I think I have an Excel file somewhere where I recorded part of those findings. I remember we have found good matches of aconite and papaverum, and also of some plant with brush mnemonics (forgot its name).

About the vord otol, it's a curious one, I wrote about that two years ago, dunno if you've seen that piece (Section 3 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Just for a note, I would be careful about equating otoldy to otol dy, or, in other words, about assuming that otoldy (otolam etc.) has something to do with otol. The Voynich morphology does not look to me that "linear". In English, we can clearly see that, say, "yearly" derives from "year", but it's not at all evident that, say, otoldy derives from otol.

(21-07-2017, 10:31 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.About the vord otol, it's a curious one, I wrote about that two years ago, dunno if you've seen that piece (Section 3 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Just for a note, I would be careful about equating otoldy to otol dy, or, in other words, about assuming that otoldy (otolam etc.) has something to do with otol. The Voynich morphology does not look to me that "linear". In English, we can clearly see that, say, "yearly" derives from "year", but it's not at all evident that, say, otoldy derives from otol.

Hello Anton, thank you for your interesting comment!
I have done my best to be careful with my observations, but I am aware I make errors sometimes....quite often, actually 

This said, here we are discussing some evidence, and thinking of an explanation for it doesn't seem to me to be necessarily a hint to carelessness.

In this “matching labels” experiment, I have tried a large number of label modifications only keeping those that produced nearby matches. I have observed that allowing for the insertion of a space produces 3 of the 4 “pharma” matches.

In my opinion, the idea you mention (the possibility that doldam and dol-dam are actually related) cannot be lightly discarded without a better alternative being proposed.

• both doldam and dol-dam occur only once in the whole manuscript; both occurrences are in the third “paragraph” of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• both okeeoraiin and okeeo-raiin occur only once in the whole manuscript; both occurrences are in the second “paragraph” of f102v2 (the very similar qokeeo-raiin occurs once in f106r)
  
  
• in this other thread I mentioned that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. appear as labels in the same You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. illustration; dal and dal-shd also appear as labels in the same illustration.
  
  
• an analysis presented You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. mentioned that 21 of 504 labels can be matched as multiple words. 19 of those labels can only be matched as multiple words (otaraldy is counted twice since it appears twice as a label; in this analysis I failed to include okeeoraiin):
  

These observations might be explained by the hypothesis that word AB is sometimes related with the two words sequence A-B. i.e. words like AB are formed by agglutination of two individually meaningful words A and B. Can you think of other explanations?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. provides several examples of inconsistency in the use of space. In particular, it is not rare to see what should be two distinct words written as a single word. We are not speaking of something that can be often been found in manuscripts of roughly the same time as the VMS.

While the “year” / “yearly” example is interesting, it might not be the best possible parallel. As far as I know, “ly” cannot stand as a word of its own. The corresponding Italian seems to me closer to what we observe in the VMS:
“annuale” (adjective form of anno=year) “annualmente” (adverbial form)

In late Latin, these were two separate words You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (literally: with a yearly mind) which in the middle ages became a single word (agglutination). There likely was a period of time in which the single and the double-words forms coexisted (here I am speculating). This kind of evolution in medieval languages may in part explain the irregularities in the use of spaces that can be observed in so many manuscripts.

Obviously, compound words also exist in English (e.g. rainbow, crossbow, sunflower).

I had previously read your careful discussion of otol and I have re-read it now. As you and Koen discuss in the comments You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., what you observed seems to suggest homonyms / polysemy, i.e. a word having several unrelated meanings. Your “Dog” example is obviously close to what can be observed in latin. “Canis” appears as the name of two constellations “Canis Major” and “Canis minor” and as the name of various plants “Canis Lingua” “Dens Canis”... In Voynichese it could be even worse than this: the homonyms might sometimes not be etymologically related (they might also be homographs but not homophones).
Polysemy and agglutination may well coexist (I think they do in most languages). I am currently focusing on the analysis of single sections in isolation also because I think this might mitigate the influence of homonyms.

The doldam seems to be out of place here, because there is no dol dam in f99v, only doldam (without a space) twice (label and paragraph).

The uncertainty of spaces is a separate thing intervening into these considerations. For example, in f102v2 the label looks like okeeoraiin, while the sequence in th eparagraph looks more like okeeo raiin. Of course, it is quite reasonable to suspect that both sequences relate to the same thing. But is it because okeeoraiin = okeeo raiin, or simply because the scribe was careless about introducing too much of a space in the paragraph (or too little of a space in the label)? As we know, the spaces are very uncertain across all through the VMS, so the latter explanation is at least as fitting as the former.

Quote:These observations might be explained by the hypothesis that word AB is sometimes related with the two words sequence A-B. i.e. words like AB are formed by agglutination of two individually meaningful words A and B. Can you think of other explanations?

This hypothesis is inducted by the implicit perception of the VMS as a simple "flow" of language, or a substitution cipher. If one forces himself beyond this perception, this hypothesis becomes not that self-evident. For the foremost example jumping out of my head, imagine that vords stand for unique numbers, and the numbers, in turn, are used to refer to words of a dictionary (nomenclator). Suppose, okeeo stands for, say, number 235, while raiin stands for, say, number 512. Let us even suppose that the word number 235 is "cross", while word number 512 is "bow". Now, even if we suppose that the agglugination is linear, i.e. okeeoraiin would stand for number 235+512 = 747, there is no ground whatsoever to make a conclusion that the word number 747 in the nomenclator is "crossbow".

(Again, I don't mean that's the case with the VMS, just the first example which came to my mind.)

Thank you, Anton!
As you point out, we could be dealing with two kinds of spacing “errors”:

• by the scribe – this could be the case with okeeo-raiin
  
• by the transcriptor (Takeshi Takahashi) – this seems to be the case with dol-dam
  

Both cases suggest that it's a good idea to consider space variability when looking for matches. Personally, I consider the evidence of scribal inconsistency in spacing as a hint to some kind of agglutination, but they might just be errors or whatever.

The numeric example you propose would make the nearby occurrence of the totally unrelated okeeoraiin and okeeo-raiin purely coincidental. The 19 labels that only appear as word sequences in the text and the various dal-based labels in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. would be more coincidences. I don't discard the possibility of coincidence, but I don't see it as an explanation.

Anyway, an analysis of words with a single occurrence (hapax legomenon) that match word sequences could hint to the presence or absence of a spatial correlation: if the two are unrelated (as in your example) they shouldn't be spatially correlated. This seems simple enough to do and I might give it a try in the future.

But of course, I am always biased by my implicit perception that the text is meaningful at all....

Quote:

• by the scribe – this could be the case with okeeo-raiin
  

Worse than that, the scribe could have been a mere copyist not understanding where he should place a space and where he should not.

Quote:Personally, I consider the evidence of scribal inconsistency in spacing as a hint to some kind of agglutination, but they might just be errors or whatever.

The worst case is the copyist's errors.

Quote:The numeric example you propose would make the nearby occurrence of the totally unrelated okeeoraiin and okeeo-raiin purely coincidental

Unless there is a "space error" either in the label or in the text.

Quote:But of course, I am always biased by my implicit perception that the text is meaningful at all....

I have no doubt in the text being meaningful. Too much effort - and, to all appearance, hidden meaning - put in the imagery for the text to be meaningless.

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With respect to the "space problem", a much more favourable case (for our researching the VMS) would be the case when the observed spaces really do not matter, and there is some other mechanism in place to designate the "real" plaintext spaces.