The Voynich Ninja

(07-04-2018, 04:06 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....



Now back to page 116v. Immediately to the right of mur: Is that, or is that not, the Latin letter g?

It's doesn't say "mur". It says so nim gas (or gaf) mich. Note that the "i" has a leading serif, just as it does elsewhere on this folio.

In fractured German that can be interpreted a number of ways (there are long threads about this).


One can't really tell if it's "gas" or "gaf" (gave) because there is a scrape in the parchment that goes down through the top stem and the spot where the crossbar for the "f" would be. It could be either "s" or "f". And note that this is a medieval "s". It is called a long-s.

(07-04-2018, 05:29 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:"Isn't Maria a religious name in Italian? I sure hope you're not reverting back to authorship by the northern monks?

I think you handwriting experts are suffering from optical illusions. Let's try an experiment. Let's remove the word mature from all its surroundings and show it to people. I'm pretty sure many or most people would identify that central plus sign (+) as the letter t. Your judgment is being distorted by the surrounding plus signs and you don't realize it."

There's no way a contemporary viewer can accurately read medieval text unless they've had practice reading (or at least studying) old manuscripts. My judgment is tempered by many years study and practice, so I'll trust my judgment over a bunch of random people who probably can't read even read 16th-century script, much less the more difficult 15th-century script.

That is not a "t". It's a cross that's been inserted. If the text on the last page is an incantation or prayer, the cross symbol means you genuflect at those points while reading it out loud.


I don't know how you can say my judgment is being distorted when I've paged through thousands of medieval texts and have read many medieval manuscripts that are in Middle English, French, German, Nordic, and Latin. I can even kind of get the gist of some of the Russian, Italian, and Spanish texts, not much, but enough to get a sense of what they are about. Unfortunately, I don't know any Czech or Turkish (except for a few words) and my Greek is limited to reading titles, mythical names and names of plants, but Greek is a different character set anyway and doesn't apply to the style of script on 116v.

No handwriting expert can overcome a great Renaissance scholar who wishes to write deceptively on purpose. Thus, the cross reflects a t, and perhaps more than that.

On my last post, I forgot to mention that, according to two of the three handwriting experts consulted by d'Imperio, the g marks the beginning of the word "gaf". I see that this word, today spelled gaffe, aptly describes both the numbering mishap and the g  for p blunder. 

JKP wrote:

"I hope you are not assuming the text on the last page was written by the same scribes that wrote the Voynichese main text. I am skeptical. The text on the last page might have been written around the same time, but I don't see truly convincing evidence that it's one of the same scribes that wrote the Voynichese, in spite of the fact that there are a couple of Voynichese tokens on the page."

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Shakespeare is generally believed to have lived in the late 16th century and early 17th century, and the VMS is generally believed to have been written in the early 15th century, so I can't possibly imagine how you think Shakespeare could have written the Voynichese main text and not just the marginalia.

(07-04-2018, 05:45 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-04-2018, 04:06 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....



Now back to page 116v. Immediately to the right of mur: Is that, or is that not, the Latin letter g?

It's doesn't say "mur". It says so nim gas (or gaf) mich. Note that the "i" has a leading serif, just as it does elsewhere on this folio.

In fractured German that can be interpreted a number of ways (there are long threads about this).


One can't really tell if it's "gas" or "gaf" (gave) because there is a scrape in the parchment that goes down through the top stem and the spot where the crossbar for the "f" would be. It could be either "s" or "f". And note that this is a medieval "s". It is called a long-s.

What on earth does so nim gas mean?

I read sō as son, a very common French word and signaling that the next word should be a noun, like mur = wall.

The bottom line is as follows: the g of gaf looks like the g of augst, the u of augst looks like the u of mur, and the r of octēbre looks like the r of mur. Thus, your arguments are unconvincing. Moreover, as I have been showing lately, there is a lot of extraneous evidence in support of the WALL

I suggest you read the threads on this. This specific phrase is closer to German (or old Yiddish) than any other language.

so is German (it's similar to "so" in English)
nim is German (this was a common way to spell it in certain areas in the Middle Ages, now it is spelled nimm and means to take)
gaf means gave in lowland Medieval German, gas can have a number of interpretations, one being "goose"
mich is "me/to me" in German. Some have also suggested it might be short for "milch" for "milk" in German and that is reasonable as consonants were sometimes dropped from words if the word was pronounced that way.

In other words, depending on how gas/gaf is interpreted (as "f" or as "s") it might mean he gave it to me to take (in corrupted grammar typical of a foreign speaker), or so take goose milk (which might be a remedy connected with an incantation).



If it were perfect German, it would have been interpreted as soon as Voynich laid his hands on it, he probably knew German from all his travels, because it is imperfect, we have a mystery to solve. For your information, the official language of the Holy Roman Empire at that time was German, so a lot of people from other areas were in a situation where they had to learn it even if they weren't good at languages, and especially if they didn't know Latin (or didn't know Latin very well).

The text on the first line also shows signs of possibly being German, although I have blogged about other possibilities, but it's hard to deny that the "-pfer" at the end of the line is German, since other languages rarely combine p and f. The second line is more similar to Romance languages, the third is more similar to Latin (some of the words are Latin).

[attachment=2059]


Note that the "i" has a leading serif like the other "i" letters on this folio.


For the record, I can read both French and German (I know French better than German).

There are 14 crosses. They are all drawn pretty much the same way.

In the second line (the one that starts "anchiton" and includes "portas") there are two unambiguous "t" characters (and possibly a couple more than are not as clearly written). Notice how the "t" has a curved foot. I don't know how you can insist the cross in "ma+ria" is a "t" when it looks like the other crosses and does not look like the other tees.

(08-04-2018, 09:11 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are 14 crosses. They are all drawn pretty much the same way.

In the second line (the one that starts "anchiton" and includes "portas") there are two unambiguous "t" characters (and possibly a couple more than are not as clearly written). Notice how the "t" has a curved foot. I don't know how you can insist the cross in "ma+ria" is a "t" when it looks like the other crosses and does not look like the other tees.

Let's be fair. The + in mature has a longer bottom shaft than the nearby +s, coming closer to a Latin cross or t than the others. Also, notice that the + in mature is much closer to the surrounding letters than the other +s. There is every reason to believe that this +, in contrast to the others, could be intended to represent the letter t.

(07-04-2018, 10:46 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I suggest you read the threads on this. This specific phrase is closer to German (or old Yiddish) than any other language.

so is German (it's similar to "so" in English)
nim is German (this was a common way to spell it in certain areas in the Middle Ages, now it is spelled nimm and means to take)
gaf means gave in lowland Medieval German, gas can have a number of interpretations, one being "goose"
mich is "me/to me" in German. Some have also suggested it might be short for "milch" for "milk" in German and that is reasonable as consonants were sometimes dropped from words if the word was pronounced that way.

In other words, depending on how gas/gaf is interpreted (as "f" or as "s") it might mean he gave it to me to take (in corrupted grammar typical of a foreign speaker), or so take goose milk (which might be a remedy connected with an incantation).



If it were perfect German, it would have been interpreted as soon as Voynich laid his hands on it, he probably knew German from all his travels, because it is imperfect, we have a mystery to solve. For your information, the official language of the Holy Roman Empire at that time was German, so a lot of people from other areas were in a situation where they had to learn it even if they weren't good at languages, and especially if they didn't know Latin (or didn't know Latin very well).

The text on the first line also shows signs of possibly being German, although I have blogged about other possibilities, but it's hard to deny that the "-pfer" at the end of the line is German, since other languages rarely combine p and f. The second line is more similar to Romance languages, the third is more similar to Latin (some of the words are Latin).




Note that the "i" has a leading serif like the other "i" letters on this folio.


For the record, I can read both French and German (I know French better than German).

Just because all the great handwriting experts of the past say it's nim does not mean that you have to follow in their folly. We are very fortunate that Shakespeare decided to help out by giving us "ubren" because the shape of that n doesn't even remotely resemble what could be the first letter of mur, so that word couldn't possibly be nim! As I have been saying, the dot above mur is just a stray dot like the dot you see down below the letter u. Meanwhile, the ending upswing on the final r faded away as it almost did for the r in ubren. It's a WALL, silly.

I have some fantastic news to report. I found the wall!

From page 116v, line 4:



From page 104r, line 28:



Looks like a match to me. Note that these are the only two appearances of this sequence in the entire book!

Needless to say, page 104, line 28, is in a paragraph marked with bright RED star! Note there is also some red ink in the 116v graphic.

In his Nova Atlantis (written in Latin), Shakespeare extensively comments on the portes recipe, probably using many of the original Latin words in the process. I think I could do a pretty good job in reconstructing the original Latin which could be extremely helpful because the VMS encrypts Latin.

In his Fama Fraternitatis (published in German), Shakespeare provides us with what could be another helpful hint:

"er war in der Cabala sehr fertig, und besonders gelehrt, wie dann sein Büchlein H. genennt, solches bezeuget, in Engelland ..."

By combining Cabala with booklet H it is pretty easy to conclude that the H stands for "written in Hebrew." Here's a brief excerpt from Kaplan's Hebrew to English translation of the Cabala classic:

Twenty-two Foundation Letters:
He placed them in a circle
like a wall with 231 Gates.
The circle oscillates back and forth.

Note that wall (mur) and Gates (portes) are in the same line and both can be found on page 116v!

It looks like the VMS does not use all 231 gates but only a small fraction of them. I'm guessing the three mothers Alef Mem Shin combined with each other and with up to seven additional letters. Apparently, the mothers are the glyphs that look like a c, the cc with bar on top, and the backward leaning i.

Note that the instructions call for placing the VMS glyphs around a circle (possibly line by line along concentric circles) and oscillating the circles, evidently to rearrange the order the glyphs. I once had success on related material with a rotating pentagon then changing directions (oscillating) half way through.

But in the VMS the oscillations may be more frequent than that. For example, look at "ubren" on page 116v. First, we oscillate to the right and pick up the "u". Then, in counterclockwise motion, we get "br" which, of course, needs to reversed into clockwise form, giving us "rb" in the final output. Then back to clockwise motion where we pick up an ē which can be either "em" (as in the crazy "octēbre") or "en". The underlying Latin, therefore, has to be "urbē", and indeed there is a city in the portes recipe. It's the city of the Sun.

I can prove this. Let's compare two lines from the memphis recipe. The first line is from the primary printing and the second line is from the printing of the backup manuscript:

Lon passera à Memphis somentree,

Lon passera à Nemphis somontree:

Memphis is obviously correct (the 50th anniversary was venerated just a few days ago) which leads us to suspect that the second printer mistook the M for a N. But no. I think the ē got picked up on a backward (counterclockwise) oscillation and the decoders didn't know if it should be "me" or "ne" so they put one version in each manuscript. I'll have more to say later.

(08-04-2018, 04:50 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Just because all the great handwriting experts of the past say it's nim does not mean that you have to follow in their folly. We are very fortunate that Shakespeare decided to help out by giving us "ubren" because the shape of that n doesn't even remotely resemble what could be the first letter of mur, so that word couldn't possibly be nim! As I have been saying, the dot above mur is just a stray dot like the dot you see down below the letter u. Meanwhile, the ending upswing on the final r faded away as it almost did for the r in ubren. It's a WALL, silly.

You probably don't realize this, but you say the most incredibly insulting things and make a HUGE number of incorrect assumptions.

I did not consult other experts. For the first five years I studied the VMS the only site I looked at was Edith Sherwood's plant site and it was not because I was using it as a resource, it was because I was shaking my head and disagreed with most of it.


I read this as "nim" because I have read many old German manuscripts, because I know some German and some Yiddish, and because "so nim gaf/gas mich" are German words, four in a row. So it is not folly, but knowledge of languages (several languages) that leads me to read this as nim. That's how it was commonly written in many manuscripts, with one "m".

If you can't see that it says nim and not mur, then obviously you didn't look at the other "i" shapes on the page which all have leading serifs, obviously you are ignoring the dot over the "i" (yes, it is there), you are ignoring how the other "r" shapes are written on this folio (they are NOT written like the hump kind that you are assuming on the word "nim"), you are ignoring the context of the four words around it, and you don't know how to read medieval script.

You see what you want to see.

Over and out. I'm done. Enjoy yourself.