The Voynich Ninja

Hi everyone,

Just to let you know that I have completed the first stage of my efforts to decode the VMS. Progress has been slow but significant. 

I have summarized the latest findings in an essay called "A Rosetta Stone Theory for Decoding the Voynich Manuscript." It can be found online at the following URL:

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Greetings to all.

Limiting myself solely to the Spanish, it's ungrammatical and certainly not something a native speaker would have come up with.

Urbe means "metropolis" and usually refers to the capital city. It's a very rare word (the corpus del español) finds a mere 73 usages. And you can't say "Por libre urbe". Por libre is a transitive expression which means "without obeying established custom" - you'd use it in the sense of striking off on your own, for example, but here you're missing the intransitive verb (ie ir). And you can't say por libre urbe because you're just plonking the noun in a sentence without verbs. Oh, and it's mar salada, not salina. A salina is a saltflat.


Interestingly enough, una rama prender actually means to graft a branch (prender in a botanical sense means to graft, to grow roots). Except it's backwards - should be prender una rama, even if you want to make it mean what you did. If you want to infuse it with the meaning of fire, una rama prendio [fuego]. Same with del grande abierta guerra - should be del gran guerra [i]abierta .  [/i](Abierta makes no sense here).

David,

I put a lot of time and effort into writing that essay and I was really hoping for criticism more valuable than what you provided.

It is apparent that the author of the marginalia had no intention whatsoever of making himself easily understood and probably for the same reason that the VMS was written in code in the first place.

On 16th century Spanish, rather than Google Translate, you could try the dictionary of the Real Academia:

urbe 
Del lat. urbs, -bis.
1. f. Ciudad, especialmente la muy populosa.

salino, na 
La forma f., del lat. salīnae.
1. adj. Que contiene sal.
2. adj. Que tiene cualidades propias de la sal.

prender  
Del lat. vulg. prendĕre.
1. tr. Asir, agarrar, sujetar algo.

BTW: Did you bother to read more than the first few paragraphs?

(24-09-2018, 11:52 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.David,


It is apparent that the author of the marginalia had no intention whatsoever of making himself easily understood and probably for the same reason that the VMS was written in code in the first place.

There's no way to know if the marginalia writer had any connection to the VMS main text. At least I haven't yet seen a convincing argument yet to substantiate the link. The two VMS tokens and the drawing may have been there long before the rest was added and if it is a charm (as just one possibility out of several), then invented words were often included and did not have to have meaning, as they were "power" words that just needed to sound right. Mixing languages was also common in charms, some of the power words were medieval interpretations of old Semitic names or kabbalah words or old Latin.

It was extremely common for those who owned a manuscript after it was written to add notes, especially at the end. I'm HOPING there's a connection (I think the 17v marginalia is in the same hand, so I have my fingers crossed that the marginalia writer was contemporary with the VMS) but it's definitely not proven yet that the marginalia writer knew what was in the text.


Being deliberately obtuse and being obtuse perhaps due to using a less familiar language (or who knows, maybe due to having a hearing impairment) might look the same on the surface, but exist for different reasons. I have seen many manuscripts (especially herbal manuscripts) where the spelling is so far off, possibly due to the writers mis-hearing a word from a lecture and trying to write it in sounds familiar to them, that only the accompanying picture makes it clear what they were trying to write.

Morten, my Spanish is very near that of a native speaker. The RAE backs up my translation - at no point did I use Google translate.

I suggest you find a counter-example of "la mar salina" or "por libre urbe" in 16th century Spanish to prove your point.

Furthermore, your translation of 5(35) isn't very accurate from the old French. You have:

Quote:By free city of the great Salty sea,
That carries again the stone to the stomach:
English fleet shall come under a drizzle
To take a branch, from the great one: open war.

The Wordsworth edition of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.has it as:

Quote:From the fair city of the great crescent sea,
Which still carries the stone in its stomach.
An English fleet will come through the fog,
To seize one branch; war is declared by the great one

Which would impact extensively upon your translation. Spanish, of course, is much closer to French than English so the translation should not go through English.

Morten, one thing is to find a dictionary entry that matches what you need. Another is to build a grammatical sentence. Your Spanish sentences pile up one grammatical impossibility afted the other. No one who knows any Spanish would write anything like that.

(Also, "through the fog" and "under a drizzle" don't quite have the same ring to them  )

Hi Morten St. George,

I'm french and I know very well Nostradamus.

Allow me to write that you made a mistake (as many others) with the translation of the word "Seline".

This word is a false friend.

I know that "sel" in french means "salt" in english.

But Seline doesn't mean salty.
Salty is translated by "saline" in french.

Seline refers to the Moon.
The greek etymology of Seline is Séléné, sister of Helios (the Sun).

In Nostradamus prophecies, you can read :
VI.27 : le grand Chyren Selin
VI.27 : the great Chyren Selin
Chyren = Henry. Probably Henri the second, king of France (1519 - 1559).

I insert below the coat of arms of this french king.
You can easily notice the three crescents of moon.

[attachment=2386]

If you need to be completely convinced, here's another prophecy.
IV.77 : SELIN Monarque l'Italie pacifique.
IV.77 : SELIN King, Italy peaceful.

I hope that I changed your mind about Selin.
Selin refers to the moon and not to the salt.

Very interesting Paris, thank you. I was wondering how they got crescent from saline.

(25-09-2018, 09:48 AM)Paris Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Morten St. George,

I'm french and I know very well Nostradamus.

Allow me to write that you made a mistake (as many others) with the translation of the word "Seline".

This word is a false friend.

I know that "sel" in french means "salt" in english.

But Seline doesn't mean salty.
Salty is translated by "saline" in french.

Seline refers to the Moon.
The greek etymology of Seline is Séléné, sister of Helios (the Sun).

In Nostradamus prophecies, you can read :
VI.27 : le grand Chyren Selin
VI.27 : the great Chyren Selin
Chyren = Henry. Probably Henri the second, king of France (1519 - 1559).

I insert below the coat of arms of this french king.
You can easily notice the three crescents of moon.

If you need to be completely convinced, here's another prophecy.
IV.77 : SELIN Monarque l'Italie pacifique.
IV.77 : SELIN King, Italy peaceful.

I hope that I changed your mind about Selin.
Selin refers to the moon and not to the salt.

Hi Paris,

Your logic is flawless and this is the type of criticism that I appreciate hearing.

It looks to me like the Rosicrucians wanted to link the Saline of prophecy V-35 with the "sel" of prophecy IX-49, so they made it Seline. See the closing paragraphs of my essay A Brief History of Solomon's Prophecies (mortenstgeorge.net) for an explanation of the potential usefulness of that link.

Often, when they do something off-beat, they give us a clarification nearby. Thus, in stanza V-38 (forward three stanzas) we find the word "Salique" (with capital S) which is the only appearance of that word in the prophecies. Although Salique does not mean Salty, we find justification therein to view Seline as Saline.

(25-09-2018, 06:46 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Morten, my Spanish is very near that of a native speaker. The RAE backs up my translation - at no point did I use Google translate.

Gosh. I completely forgot that you live in Spain!

I wrote a website in Spanish (mortenstgeorge.com) so I guess I might have made the mistake of quoting myself.

Keep in mind that, by my Rosetta Stone theory, the Nostradamus French is a translation of medieval Spanish extracted from the VMS, which Spanish would have been heavily Latinized, so it is justifiable to give consideration to the meanings of the etymological root of the words in question.

"Spanish, of course, is much closer to French than English so the translation should not go through English."

I only stuck in the English translation to help out those of you who are unfamiliar with French and Spanish.