The Voynich Ninja

Quote:... and if the hypothesis is valid, the the word "wind(s)" should be encoded somewhere in the paragraph and should be matched in astro or in the Rosettes.

I think, it also can be a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (as much as a wind rose), pointing to the North Star.

(24-07-2017, 10:54 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think, it also can be a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (as much as a wind rose), pointing to the North Star.

I think you may be right. This would surely explain why all ends are pointy and there are two sets of four arrows.

The wiki provides this example from the 14thC Catalan atlas:



What I find extremely relevant for Voynich studies is the mark right above the top blue arrow. If that isn't a certain type of line.. 

The compass rose does not feature a hole in the centre, so I consider it a worse match.

Upon further consideration, the thunder symbol (especially as drawn in Hildegard) may itself be comprised of the four winds. Hence it is not that apparent that the apparatus is for winds.

To be more precise, what I suggest is the following.

If the stuff is really about thunder and lightning, then it would mention the last-resort means to escape the lightning (in the absence of the lightning rod). Hopefully, some plants (as the pseudo-Paracelsus does, and the VMS is greatly about plants.

So we:

1) trace the paragraph vord-by-vord
2) look if some vords are used as plant labels in the pharma section
3) if such small plants are found, match them back to large plants of the botanical section using Wladimir's tables (not yet complete, alas!)
4) if such large plants are found, look if they can be matched to any plant known to protect from lightning (such as periwinkle etc.).
5) if such match is found, then voila - we have a match between a word and a vord.

Checked two lines so far, one match: dar - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. top row, although not certain if standalone or as part of darary. I vote for the latter, given how the labels are distributed.

Will continue tomorrow...

One of possible origins for the magic word "abracadabra" - Hebrew phrase: "Abreq ad habra" (Hurl your thunderbolt even to death) 

(24-07-2017, 10:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.orol dair does not bring anything immediately.

These words can simply mean "observer" or "eyewitness" in ancient Greek, if we read "ol" as "a".

(25-07-2017, 09:11 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(24-07-2017, 10:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.orol dair does not bring anything immediately.

These words can simply mean "observer" or "eyewitness" in ancient Greek, if we read "ol" as "a".

The Greek language has many short words, so it's not difficult to fit Greek words to VMS words if you pick out VMS words here and there. This can also be done quite easily with a few other languages, and has been done with other languages by a number of people.

However, there is no way to know if the interpretation is correct unless a chunk of words, that are meaningful in context with each other, can be interpreted together.

You have to look at where else in the manuscript they occur, how frequently they occur, and whether the word-tokens in the rest of the manuscript that are next to them make linguistic sense.



I can find many, many Greek words in the VMS, also many Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, Latin, and Baltic-language words, if I cherry pick them here and there. I can find whole phrases in some languages.

But then one has to explain why a certain "word" occurs 3,342 times when it is not usually a common word in that language, or why another only occurs 20 times when it IS a common word in that language. One also has to explain why two "words" that don't make sense together are next to each other AND why the substitution system works with one or two words, but not with words nearby them on the page (as in a group of labels, for example).

(25-07-2017, 09:11 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(24-07-2017, 10:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.orol dair does not bring anything immediately.

These words can simply mean "observer" or "eyewitness" in ancient Greek, if we read "ol" as "a".

Let's take a look at this. On your blog you offered this interpretation:



1. First you need to explain why you ignored the space between orol and dair. It's possible that the spaces need to be interpreted differently from the way they are laid down in the VMS, but you can't just add and remove them at your own convenience to create words—you have to give reasons for your choices. orol appears a number of times in the VMS by itself, so it is possible it is meant to stand alone. In English you can't arbitrarily combine the words prim and rose to make primrose because the "prim" part means something completely different when it is separated from "rose" (so does the "rose" part since primroses are neither prim nor are they related to roses). The same might be true of the VMS.

2. You have interpreted ol as a biglyph. Okay, I've written that it might be a biglyph many times (I am not 100% certain this is so, but I think it's a possibility), so I won't argue this, but then you treat or as two glyphs even though or has all the same statistical biglyph-like properties as ol. Again, you have to explain your choices if you inconsistently interpret glyphs and biglyphs.

3. Next you changed oratain (οραταιν) into ορατεoν or ορατηρ (visitor), altering the end, presumably to wrestle it into a valid word. If you had treated each glyph as a single glyph, you could just as easily have produced ορεσταιν (orestain - "visible"). It does ignore the space, but it changes only one letter (the second "o"), and does not inconsistently treat mono- and bi- glyphs. This may not be a correct interpretation either, but it takes fewer liberties with the original VMS token than the two options that you provided.

4. Now you have to look at where else it occurs, and how often. If it means eyewitness or observer, as you have claimed, and it shows up frequently next to roots in the small plants section, for example, then you have to question whether it makes any sense in the manuscript as a whole.


Many people who claim to have translated parts of the manuscript leave out that one crucial step, which they should have taken before announcing their discoveries, which is testing whether the same "rules" for translating one or two words still WORK in the rest of the manuscript, or at least in the parts of the manuscript that are physically or contextually related to the parts they claim to have translated.



So...

If we take your system and apply it to a paragraph on the same page (f82r), what do we get?

You translated the first word as μaκτος (you wrote poultice, but it's my understanding this is closer to mucus than poultice and if the ol were an "i" instead of "a" (both very common vowels in Greek), then it becomes the more common word μικτος), but... using your letter designations, this is what happens:



(Note that the "-TOS" ending in Greek may seem valid at first glance, but it could just as easily be interpreted as -CUS, -CUM -TUM, or -RUM in Latin. Most languages have common endings. As examples, we have "-LY" and "-MENT" in English and French or -EN in German. Also notice that -TOS is unusually frequent and sometimes appears alone, which would not typically happen in Greek.)


I have not ruled out Greek as a possible underlying language (I have a list of about 9 languages that particularly interest me with relation to the VMS) but substitution codes in Greek, or any other language, do not generalize well to the rest of the manuscript, especially when you start looking at sentence structure, expected frequency, and context. There is something else going on here that is not typical of simple substitution codes, even if you allow a little leeway in interpreting endings (as is done in Latin).

Labels are only a starting point (and not necessarily the best one in the VMS). By themselves, it would be difficult to prove that a translation is coincidental or real.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my proposal.
The first conclusion I draw from your long comment is your very strong self-censorship, you set too many rules. Is there a guarantee that the author of our manuscript has as much? 
Next, I think you go faster than the music, I did not pretend to read the entire paragraph in Greek, not yet. Besides, you mistake the letter M which I took care to surround in red with the letter N of the following word, which I personally consider to be derived from the verb δονεω (my alphabet differs slightly from EVA). 
As for the ancient Greek, I use the LSJ dictionary (it is marked on my blog) and I  do in fact like the ancient authors themselves, I don't bourden myself  about words endings: for example ορατης in the Bible and in Plutarch and ορατηρ at Hesychios (LSJ always).
I would like to reiterate my proposal to publish the sentences you have read, whatever the language.
Best regards
Ruby