The Voynich Ninja

On the question of the dead nymph, I want to note the following. This is the only nymph, in which only the head is visible.
What is green paint? If this is a mortal shroud, then along with the "fire" it is like burning with the Buddhist rite (the star is the soul).
If the green paint is "dirty" water - then in the lying position of the nymph, her legs do not fit on the bed and should be bent into the mouth of the "funnel". This can be interpreted as 1 / annihilation 2 / as a rebirth (rejuvenation), as in a Russian fairy tale, when Ivan bathed in a vat of hot milk.
I assume this on the basis of the fact that the lower part of the throat is an inverted tip ( of tent), that we can be moved to consider this page with an extension in page  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (or 75v, 78r).

As another parallel for the figure on the right, this is from Amiens BM MS.108, Navarre Picture Bible, Dating:1197.
The illustrated scene is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the death of David's child).

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(26-07-2017, 12:33 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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?

They are not rules. This is commentary. It's what I can reasonably explain and fit into one forum post.

I did not say you have to follow these "rules", I said you have to EXPLAIN your reasoning when you make inconsistent choices, otherwise it will look as if you are juggling the results to suit your own assumptions.



I am not as inflexible as you seem to think. I've considered that it might be polyglot even though it is not structured like polyglot. I have considered that it might be anagrammed (but in a regular, not random, way). I have considered that it might use one glyph to express two sounds or vice versa. And it's quite possible that the "o" shapes could be interpreted in more than one way because otherwise there are too many of them. I've considered that some units might be biglyphs (but as I said, or and ol have the same statistical properties and thus it is important to explain why you used one and ignored the other).

If you believe that the author of the manuscript wanted to be able to read back the manuscript, then there had to be a certain level of consistency to the text and one cannot ignore that either.

Also, if you want others to believe that you are onto something and not just reading meaning into a token here and there that could be done in other languages, you will have to explain and justify your choices, otherwise you won't be taken seriously.

Quote:Next, I think you go faster than the music, I did not pretend to read the entire paragraph in Greek, not yet.

But you have to ask yourself, are you leading people (including yourself) down a blind alley? If you didn't read anything more than two tokens, how do you know it's Greek? How do you know you assigned the substitutions accurately?

You need to try to read at least a sentence or two, before making ANY decisions about what language it might be. Two tokens can be converted into almost any language and produce meaningful words. For example, the first word in that paragraph can quite easily be read as "Nostrum" in Latin, without much juggling, if you follow the conventions for Latin endings (EVA-dy  and EVA-y). In Latin, the number 9 at the end of a word is Latin for -cus -cum, -us, -um (or occasionally -rum although the abbreviation for -rum is more often a "4" shape).

Since EVA-y and EVA-dy occur with unusual frequency at the ends of tokens, it's possible they are stand-ins for more than one common ending, regardless of whether it's Greek, Latin, or another language. And then again they might not be. They might only be intended to look that way.

Quote: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).

It doesn't matter. Look at the paragraph, look at the patterns... if you substitute N for M or vice versa, you still get the same problems of repetition, length, cadence, and grammar, and even if you expand the suffixes into a variety of endings, it doesn't mean it's Greek—most languages have common endings.

You have to identify characteristics in the text that indicate Greek, along with sense units that go together, even if it's not a full paragraph. You have to DISCOVER and CONFIRM whether it's Greek and it's impossible to do that with only two or three tokens or even with a dozen. It would probably take 30 or more to be relatively sure you have the right language and the right system, that you are on the right track.


Let's take a look at that paragraph again.

Languages with short syllables (which tends to be the more ancient languages) will map better to the VMS text than others but...it's the same "words" repeated over and over, the same characters at the beginning of words, the same characters at the end. In natural languages, words don't all start with the same letters, words don't usually have certain letters that ONLY appear in the middles of words and never anywhere else. And even if it's rhyme or song or prayers or incantations, this level of repetition is highly unusual.

Does Greek work this way? Or any language with which you are familiar? In most languages, there is a certain amount of flexibility in how the letters can appear at the beginning, middle, or ends of words. Not in the VMS. How often do you see "cc" at the beginnings or ends of words? How often do you see "dy" at the beginnings or middles of words? How often is "4o" in the middle or end of words (there's one very rare example in this paragraph)? Simple substitution codes don't look like this:




I can find many Greek words in the VMS (I have pages of them), also Latin (many pages), Spanish, Turkish, and a few other languages. It's not hard to map languages with short syllables to VMS tokens, but is the text meaningful when applied to a larger chunk of text or to adjacent words (even if these are considered lists rather than sentences)? That's the part that matters.

That's a very nice parallel Marco. It certainly adds evidence that the audience would have understood this figure as a dead person.

Have you noticed that the headdress on this nymph is different from most of the veils and diadems on the female nymphs?

It looks like one of those rolled and hanging fabric-tail hats worn by men. They wrapped them in a variety of ways, but what they had in common was a rounded part (sometimes rolled) over the forehead, then tails hanging in two directions, either front and back or side and side, or sometimes back and top as in the red hat on the left. There is no long hair flowing from under the headdress as one usually sees.

[attachment=1534]


Also, the nymph's breasts are in darker ink (added later??) and the groin area has been either heavily inked or altered.

Was it originally drawn as a man (or did the illustrator start drawing it as a man and change it, either as an afterthought or based on instructions from someone or somewhere)?

The figure on the right reminds me of the "mummia" drawings that are found in many herbal manuscripts, like this one from Morgan M.873:



Many of them are drawn recumbent, with wrappings, more similar to the VMS figure.

Quote:Have you noticed that the headdress on this nymph is different from most of the veils and diadems on the female nymphs?

Yes, I have. I interpret that as a wig. I even had a proposition about what the bald person might be associated with, but I forgot I think that was when I still thought the scene to represent resurrection *. 

About "added" breasts - that's not uniques, many nymphs look like their breasts have been added later, Nick once wrote a blog post about that.

* EDIT: I recall now that I thought about the Biblical Elijah.

(27-07-2017, 12:45 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Have you noticed that the headdress on this nymph is different from most of the veils and diadems on the female nymphs?

Yes, I have. I interpret that as a wig. I even had a proposition about what the bald person might be associated with, but I forgot I think that was when I still thought the scene to represent resurrection *. 
...

I'm aware of other added breasts, but it was the headdress and the darker breasts and the altered groin altogether that made me wonder if this was originally male.


Also... it might just be me, but that lower pleated edge looks more like fabric to me than hair (even wig hair). It's very even, rounded, and deliberate compared to hair on the other nymphs, either male or female. Plus, it's blue, in contrast to a lot of blonde and brown hair:



Both men and women wore this form of scalloped fabric as hats, but it was mainly men who wore it with a thick band of rounded or rolled fabric:

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(27-07-2017, 01:24 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Also... it might just be me, but that lower pleated edge looks more like fabric to me than hair (even wig hair). It's very even, rounded, and deliberate compared to hair on the other nymphs, either male or female. Plus, it's blue, in contrast to a lot of blonde and brown hair:

Both men and women wore this form of scalloped fabric as hats, but it was mainly men who wore it with a thick band of rounded or rolled fabric:

JKP, I agree that it is that kind of headdress, but it is rather a woman's variant, as this:

That's a good example, Searcher. It has a fine-textured scallop.