The Voynich Ninja

I have more than a thousand samples of handwriting that I specifically culled from many thousands of manuscripts due to their similarity to the column text, the main text, and the marginalia.

I also have enough background in this area to have some expertise at this.


I have hundreds more "reference" samples, some of which are hybrid or transitional between the 1) Italic and Humanist/Secretary hands and 2) the proto-Gothic and Gothic cursive hands, along with more pure examples of each and some of their related styles (e.g., Anglicana, which is a cousin to Gothic cursive).


My observations so far (I've been working on this for many years):

• I'm reasonably confident that the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. column text is Italic/Humanist/Secretary hand (the differences are small and I'll explain them in more detail later along with more correct terms). I have many samples to support this. I'm close to pinpointing a date and location (it took several hundred samples before even I began to consider dates and locations because I don't think it's good science to rush this and guess from a small set of samples).
  
• The marginalia is an early Gothic cursive blended with a small amount of Gothic book hand (this is not unusual since some people learned both hands). I have many hundreds of carefully selected samples, a half a dozen of which score in the 80s (out of 126) on a mathematical scale keyed to the reference marginalia. I also know which letter forms are specific to this hand (I can document this) so that the hand can be recognized.
  

• I'm reasonably confident that the main-text writers were familiar with Gothic cursive scribal conventions and abbreviations and I have some reference hands that are mixed Humanist/Gothic (that sounds like a contradiction but they do exist, they include both Gothic forms and Italic spacing conventions) that come somewhat close, and I have also identified which key shapes are unique to the main script, and which ones are common to many (I have done the same with the marginalia). It's very important to keep in mind that ciphers are often written with different spacing from a person's regular hand. There are many historical examples that show cipher shapes are often closer to a person's printing than to their handwriting. IF the VMS is ciphered text, the spacing will not necessary reflect the person's handwriting, but some of the letterforms may (e.g., a and o).
  

The reason I haven't written this up is because it takes time to do it right. With the zodiac symbols, for example, I didn't want to quote statistics or make generalizations until I had at least 500 complete cycles, and it took many years to find and key them. If you use a small sample, it's supposition and guesswork—a larger sample, and a little bit of actual math and scientific inquiry comes into play.

My feelings about the text are the same. I didn't want to make generalizations and write it up until I had culled at least 1,000 samples from extant manuscripts that were CLOSE to the hands in the VMS, with information about their dates, origins, etc.


I wanted to devote another year to studying this before making any of the above generalizations, but once topics are brought up on the forum, they tend to take on a life of their own, with everyone jumping in the pool, and often going over the same ground and collecting and posting the same items I already have in my files. Once the ball is rolling, I have no choice but to climb on the wagon and present what is incomplete (compared to what I had planned). If I don't, there's a huge replication of effort (plus I get accused of copying other people's work).


This is not a criticism, it's just the way it is when a community pools its resources relative to someone working independently. I had hoped to write this up as a paper—not because I had thoughts about getting it published, but because some topics are better treated this way. It's far too extensive to post as blogs (it would take 20 blogs just to lay a foundation for understanding it).

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The column-text hands I posted You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., later in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) are just the tip of the iceberg. Not only do I have much more in my files than I can fit on a blog-chart but I have found some important additional data since the last time I posted it.

I have also done an in-depth study of the foliation and quire hands and I have data that shows the foliation may not be John Dee's hand (it is very similar to Dee's hand but I have located a couple of other hands that might be considered more similar).


The research I've done on the marginalia far exceeds the work on the column text. Here is a quick grab (very quick) of some of the ca 1,000 hands I've collected (these are ONLY hands that bear a significant resemblance to the marginalia, I have many more hundreds that are reference hands or which match other parts of the text):



One of the things one notices when looking at the dates of the manuscripts represented by these hands is that they are within the same general ballpark as the radio-carbon dating for the VMS, which indicates that the last-page marginalia may be contemporary with the creation of the manuscript, or added within a few decades of its creation.



Note: I did not look for hands that were specific to the 15th century. I consistently searched hands from about 900 CE to about 1720 CE, but only those manuscripts (or marginal commentaries) that were written around the 15th century (give or take about 40 years) tend to exhibit this style.

I split this post off Rene's thread so the discussion about the humanist hand in the VM can be focused here. 
For starters, it would be interesting to know what exactly proponents meant when they said the VM script resembles humanist hand. Was this about actual Voynichese? Or marginalia? Or both? 

And perhaps most importantly, why did they come to this conclusion?

I'd be interested in knowing that, as well.


Personally I see many aspects of Gothic... in the Latin letter forms, in the tails... so I agree with Helmut.

The letter-spacing is wider than normal for Gothic, but that would not be uncommon if it's an invented script (like Glagolitic) or a cipher script. These tend to be spaced differently (usually wider) than normal handwriting. In fact, many of the scripts invented by missionaries to communicate with their converts or to introduce them to written language, have these properties.

I was looking for a proper thread to post in, and decided to pick up this thread.

It has been constantly reiterated, with examples, that many Voynichese symbols closely resemble elements of medieval Latin writings.

Occasionally, I stumbled upon another example which, as it seems to me, is not only similar, but strikingly similar to the Voynichese in a number of shapes. Namely, in what is Voynichese n (here it is tail of m or a etc.), Voynihese s and Voynichese y. There is found an r-like shape also.

The examples shown are dated to the first half of XV century, with the first one dated to 1436 and the second one - to 1446. So, unless the scribe of both of them was the same (which is of course possible but I don't know for sure), the time span of 10 years suggests the systematic scribal style, or whatever that's called in the world of paleography.

The collection is referenced as "AGAD, TVars CVars dissoluta (1424–1500) nr 1, z. 1", with "AGAD, TVars CVars dissoluta" essentially meaning land and town registers or  "Księgi ziemskie i grodzkie warszawskie; Terrestria et Castrensia Warsaviensia" in Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (Central Archive of Historical Records) in Warsaw.

The registers do not seem to be publicly available in digitized form (but scans can be ordered as paid service), but I looked at the two pages shown in "Sanktuarium i parafia TRÓJCY PRZENAJŚWIĘTSZEJ i Św. Anny w Prostyny", by Paweł Rytel-Andrianik, 2nd ed, 2010.

The book is available here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (free registration required)

The images of interest are shown on page 20.

The Voynich glyphs are Latin shapes: alphabet, numbers, ligatures and scribal abbreviations. I have thousands of examples.

There really are only a few exceptions and these are not especially unusual either, since they tend toward Greek shapes and abbreviations.


These are the two classical languages most often studied by medieval scholars. It's not uncommon to find Greek alphabet and number pages included in Latin manuscripts, as well as Greek root words and loan words, so seeing them together is not unusual either.

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What is unusual is how they are organized within tokens. While some of the abbreviation shapes hold the same positions as they do in Latin (e.g., EVA-y, EVA-m), while others follow a certain specific VMS order and do not show the same variety of positions as is typical of Latin (or other natural languages).

Thank you, Anton! One of the interesting thing is that the n-like flourish tends to be word-final in Latin as it is in the VMS. In this example, it generically stands for "truncation". See for instance "dei gratia"
[attachment=2146]

I think it is perfectly legitimate to consider the possibility that the word-end-only glyphs in the VMS correspond to other glyphs when in other positions.

Another interesting detail of this script is the 'th' ligature, which is vaguely gallows-like (see "Bartholomeus").
[attachment=2145]

Also, 'ci' sometimes looks like Ch ("citato", "principis").
[attachment=2148][attachment=2147]

PS: one of the differences between this hand and what can be observed in the VMS is the shape of "p". I am thinking of the Voynich Latin-alphabet marginalia and color annotations: in those, "p" typically (always?) has a loop which is open at the top. In TVars CVars dissoluta, "p" is also peculiar, with a double vertical bar  traced as a narrow descending-ascending loop. This "p" appears to be written without lifting the pen from the page, while Voynich "p" is written in two distinct strokes.

(29-05-2018, 02:34 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Voynich glyphs are Latin shapes: alphabet, numbers, ligatures and scribal abbreviations. I have thousands of examples.

Well, some people argue them being native to Mesoamerica, so you see there's room for discussion.

But I just stumbled upon another, very curious, example - which is not Latin script. The document is from the so-called "Lithuaninan Metrica", which is the collection of legal documents (spanning over five centuries) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At present, the collection is disjoint, with its major part being preserved in Moscow, but also in the Polish AGAD and some other places.

The document is written in Russian (except for the Polish language part), hence in Cyrillic script. It is dated to 29th December, 1609 and represents a statement of Russian boyars. It features a shape which is strikingly resembling Voynichese s. As I can see, here it stands for the consonant "t", but the strange part of it is that here it is used together with the conventional Russian "T", which, in its lower case variant, loosely resembles Latin "m", and is widely used in writing until now (in print, the same shape "T" as for the capital letter is used). What is the orthographical rule dictating when to use "T" and when to use s, I don't understand. Notice that s is also used as a superscript, but that is just to correct its omissions.

I'm not very comfortable with old Cyrillic scripts and don't know what's the history and designation of the "s" glyph.

NOTE: We don't seem to have auto-scale in place, so use right-click to open the image full-size in a new tab.

What a lovely example of old script. If you had asked me to guess, just from glancing at it, I would have guessed the first part was Polish written in Latin characters (not the second part, which obviously is Cyrillic).



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This will take some study.

In medieval Latin (which was used for Latin, French, German, Italian, Czech, English, etc.), a tail on a letter (e.g., shapes like EVA-r, EVA-s, daiin) almost always represented an abbreviation or ligature (or both). In subsequent scripts, after typesetting was invented, Latin abbreviations and ligatures began to fade from use and the tails on letters often became nothing more than calligraphic embellishments.


So... one has to become familiar with the script of the time or to be able to read the specific language to figure out if the tail represents letters or if it is an artistic choice. Unfortunately, I have to run and can't look at this example until this evening.  :-(

Quote:Well, some people argue them being native to Mesoamerica, so you see there's room for discussion.

Mesoamericans used pictograms. Spanish missionaries taught them Latin script.

The reason I keep saying they are Latin (I know some people are tired of hearing me say it and many have said they don't believe me) is because 90% of the VMS glyphs are found in regular, common Latin script, not just one or two or three or four characters, but almost all of them. The ones that are less common in Latin can be found in Greek.

The only thing unusual about the shapes is that a few like EVA-r and EVA-i lean backwards more than usual (which is why some people have asked if the script is by a left-hander), but I have found examples in Latin manuscripts where the letters lean backwards quite a bit, so while it's not common for them to lean, it does occur.

JKP, I think Anton's comment was poking fun at Tucker's bold claims in his new book and shouldn't be taken too literally
I actually wonder if anyone on the forum right now would argue against the glyphs bearing most resemblance to Latin script?

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That said though, I would say that the combination of all the gallows characters and the way they consistently rise above the other glyphs is unusual. Can you really trace the whole set to Latin scribal habits?