The Voynich Ninja

(28-01-2018, 10:20 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote: e l'almugaver, quel veu venir tot abrival vers ell, lexal se acostar, e trames li la scona als pits dels cavall, si que li'n mes be dos palms entre los pits e la espalla;

From Choix de chroniques et mémoires sur l'histoire, Volume 3
Bad spelling doesn't help the translation of this passage. The word is not "abrival" in the original text but "abrivat". Means spontaneous, intrepid.

I translate it as:
and the Knight, who sees them all coming headfast towards him, (prepares his lance?), and puts his heels into the sides of his horse, without there being more than two handspans between his breastplate and the sword;

April, in modern Catalan, is Abril. We've been over this elsewhere, the etymology doesn't allow us to fix a location, most Romance languages (actually, most European languages - even Basque!) use a variant upon the original Latin Aprīlis.

Quote: Your software would not allow me to respond to your post. I was taken to a message saying I was unauthorized to do so, and I thought I had been banned from this discussion group. That would not be something new for me: a few years ago I was banned from a Yahoo! Group called the Nostradamus Research Group. But your software did allow me to respond to someone else.

Strange, your session must have timed out or something. You haven't broken any rules or incurred any warnings so no ban of any type exists for you.

OK. I'll concede on that.

(28-01-2018, 06:19 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Since you are unable to say when and by whom the Latin names of months were entered in, I fail to see how you can claim that it cannot include the letter v. I see words like "vn" in early publications and that must have come from a handwritten manuscript. Most of all, I think it important that the interpretation of the handwriting be made to comply with word spellings that really existed, which you fail to mention for abirel and abiril. In contrast, abril, abrial and abrival are real words....

I did not write "abirel"---you copied that wrong.

I said "aberil" and "abiril" ("abiril" is less likely than "aberil") and it was quite acceptable to add a vowel to "abril" in the 15th and early 16th centuries (without taking the other month-names into consideration, "Abril" was both Spanish and French and not specifically Catalan).


If you read my message again, you will see that I noted that the writing and abbreviation style were consistent with 15th and very early 16th-century Gothic script. I have looked at thousands of and thousands of samples of this form of writing, have read hundreds of manuscripts in this style in numerous languages, and have collected almost as many samples and nobody who wrote in that style of script wrote "V" that way but many of them wrote "r" exactly as it is written on that label.

Quote:Morten St. George:
BTW, by my theories, it is also impossible for these month names to be "handwriting from the 15th and very early 16th centuries" as you claim because during that time frame the VMS lived in Peru. The handwriting is likely post 1584, when it arrived in Europe, though the possibility of written in Peru after 1533 cannot be ruled out.

That is only a theory and I doubt that you have as much experience with 15th century scripts as I have, so I am speaking from experience and you are trying to impose a date on the handwriting based on a hypothesis rather than on direct observation of how it is written.

(28-01-2018, 11:13 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(28-01-2018, 06:19 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Since you are unable to say when and by whom the Latin names of months were entered in, I fail to see how you can claim that it cannot include the letter v. I see words like "vn" in early publications and that must have come from a handwritten manuscript. Most of all, I think it important that the interpretation of the handwriting be made to comply with word spellings that really existed, which you fail to mention for abirel and abiril. In contrast, abril, abrial and abrival are real words....

I did not write "abirel"---you copied that wrong.

I said "aberil" and "abiril" ("abiril" is less likely than "aberil") and it was quite acceptable to add a vowel to "abril" in the 15th and early 16th centuries (without taking the other month-names into consideration, "Abril" was both Spanish and French and not specifically Catalan).


If you read my message again, you will see that I noted that the writing and abbreviation style were consistent with 15th and very early 16th-century Gothic script. I have looked at thousands of and thousands of samples of this form of writing, have read hundreds of manuscripts in this style in numerous languages, and have collected almost as many samples and nobody who wrote in that style of script wrote "V" that way but many of them wrote "r" exactly as it is written on that label.

Quote:Morten St. George:
BTW, by my theories, it is also impossible for these month names to be "handwriting from the 15th and very early 16th centuries" as you claim because during that time frame the VMS lived in Peru. The handwriting is likely post 1584, when it arrived in Europe, though the possibility of written in Peru after 1533 cannot be ruled out.

That is only a theory and I doubt that you have as much experience with 15th century scripts as I have, so I am speaking from experience and you are trying to impose a date on the handwriting based on a hypothesis rather than on direct observation of how it is written.

Thanks, but you have not yet answered my question: To which languages do the words 'aberil' and 'abiril' apply? Is there a historical record of the use of those specific spellings?

Is there any chance the final 'l' could be an exaggerated 'e'?

What do you think of "octebre" on folio 72v instead of "octubre" or "octobre"? My Latin text has "astrelogi" instead of "astrologi". Just a coincidence? Are you able to clearly distinguish between the "br" in "octebre" and the "be" in "aberil"?

The scholars who broke the Voynich code (my theory) had the following quirks in their handwriting from the viewpoint of printings and printing errors: frequent confusion between the letters 'u' and 'n' and occasional confusion between the letters 'r' and 't' and between the letters 'G' and 'C'. They used 'v' for 'u' at the beginning of words and 'u' for 'v' in the middle of words. The 's' looked close to an 'f' except at the end of a word when it could look like an 's' or a 'z', but 'S' looked like 'S'. A 'c' could sometimes look like an 'x', and a 'c' before the letter 't' could look like a cursive 'E'.  The letters 'i' and 'y' were freely interchanged. They also used 'i' for the letter 'j'. They sometimes wrote the letters 'on' as an 'o' with a bar on top.

Let me know if any of that helps.

(29-01-2018, 08:41 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Thanks, but you have not yet answered my question: To which languages do the words 'aberil' and 'abiril' apply? Is there a historical record of the use of those specific spellings?

...


Yes, I did. As I said, if you evaluate it in isolation (without taking the other months into consideration), Ab[e]ril can be Spanish or French.

I also pointed out that there's nothing unusual about the extra vowel ("e") being inserted. In the Middle Ages they often spelled things the way they said them, either adding or dropping characters and sometimes the same word would be spelled three different ways in the same paragraph. After reading hundreds of these manuscripts you get a feeling for which kinds of variations were common or normal and which were not.

Quote:Is there any chance the final 'l' could be an exaggerated 'e'?

It's reasonably clear that the ending is "ril". The "r" is completely normal. The undotted "i" is very common. The "l" is written in the looped style common to the time (it's more typical of late 15th and early 16th than to early 15th).

Quote:What do you think of "octebre" on folio 72v instead of "octubre" or "octobre"? My Latin text has "astrelogi" instead of "astrologi". Just a coincidence? Are you able to clearly distinguish between the "br" in "octebre" and the "be" in "aberil"?

• Pisces is "mars" (the ess is inherited from Greek sigma and this form  is quite common at the ends of words).
  
• Green Aries is "ab'ril" and the squiggle can stand for a number of things in Latin script (er, re, ir, ri, r, e), so in this case, it's aberil or abiril.
  
• White Aries is the same "ab'ril" (aberil or abiril), it's just that the squiggle is less clear and the shape of it might be more explicitly showing "e".
  
• Taurus is "maÿ" which is a transitional form. It represents "maii" except that a terminal-i was often given a tail (which makes it look like a "j" to modern eyes). When i without a tail is followed by i with a tail (a descender) we get the shape that evolved into "y" as we know it.
  
• Red Taurus is the same as Taurus "may" and since this was the period in which ii/ij/ÿ had almost finished transitioning into "y" it's not uncommon for the dots to be dropped and for it to look exactly like a modern "y". Note that the tail of the "y" arcs to the right. This is very important. Certain regions swung the tail to the left or the right somewhat consistently, so it can sometimes be used with other information to help geolocate the handwriting.
  
• Gemini is "ijon9/yon9" which is yonus. The character that looks like a "g" or "9" at the end is one of the most common Latin abbreviations. It is frequently used at the ends of words to stand for "-us" or "-um". If it's hyper-abbreviated text, then it can even stand for "yonius". It depends on the scribe. This, of course, is June.
  
• Cancer is "iolleo" and as there was no such letter as "j", the "io" makes a similar sound to soft-j (not the hard-j we use in English). Soundwise, this is similar to Spanish iullio but slightly rounder, and is July. In Spanish/Portuguese and various Galician and Provençal manuscripts, there are many different spellings for July, although using an "e" rather than "i" is less common. "iolleo" definitely leans more toward Spanish-related languages than French.
  
• Leo is augst which I see very frequently in old Swiss-German and German manuscripts and which is not typically Spanish or French.
  
• Virgo is "sept'br". Long-s, messy e, normal p, blobby e, normal Latin apostrophe standing in for "m", Gothic b, and the superscripted leaning "r" is an abbreviation for "er/re" and probably represents "re" here. French for September. It's not likely old Catalan, they tended to drop some characters and here would likely have dropped the "p". It's very interesting to read old Provençal verse because many of the harsh sounds were dropped to create sounds that were very sonorous (and were reported to be so), which would make perfect sense for a land of lyric poets (the original troubadours). Galician also sometimes dropped letters.
  
• Libra "octe'bre" - completely normal and readable abbreviated Latin for octembre (French).
  
• "nove'bre" is quite clear. The line above the e is a normal Latin apostrophe for "m" (as in octe'bre), so we get French novembre. Note that the last "e" on a couple of the months is a bit more ornate than usual. It's possible this person learned both cursive and book hands, because this is not a cursive "e", it's a calligraphic "e" (book hand). This is not unusual. John Dee, as a familiar example, was constantly switching between cursive hand, note hand, and calligraphic hand.
  
• "d'c'bre" is messy writing, but it is still pretty readable if you are familiar with Latin abbreviations. d, then the squiggle stands for the missing "e", then a messy c that almost looks like "e" but I'm pretty sure is "c", then the squiggle/apostrophe standing in for "m", then a normal "bre". Again... French.
  

Where would they use a crazy mix of Spanish and French (and German for August) in the 15th century? In the borderlands between France, Switzerland, and northeastern Spain. There were many dialects in this area and some major trade routes moving north-south through the Burgundian connections along the French border. The coastal area is still culturally and linguistically diverse.

Note also that language groups sometimes get "split". For example, in the medieval Veneto, some of the words were more like Spanish than Italian, harking back to earlier times before several waves of colonists moved in between Venice and Provençal and Spain. Language groups also migrate. Certain languages were brought to the Mediterranean islands by colonists who exterminated or absorbed the earlier settlers.

Quote:The scholars who broke the Voynich code (my theory) had the following quirks in their handwriting from the viewpoint of printings and printing errors: frequent confusion between the letters 'u' and 'n' and occasional confusion between the letters 'r' and 't' and between the letters 'G' and 'C'. They used 'v' for 'u' at the beginning of words and 'u' for 'v' in the middle of words. The 's' looked close to an 'f' except at the end of a word when it could look like an 's' or a 'z', but 'S' looked like 'S'. A 'c' could sometimes look like an 'x', and a 'c' before the letter 't' could look like a cursive 'E'.  The letters 'i' and 'y' were freely interchanged. They also used 'i' for the letter 'j'. They sometimes wrote the letters 'on' as an 'o' with a bar on top.

Using v for u and u for v (or alternating them) was completely normal in the middle ages. Also, "i" was used for "j". The one that looks like a "j" is an embellished "i". You are correct in that "i" and "y" were freely interchanged, sometimes even by the same scribe in the same sentence.

I'm not sure what you mean about scholars who broke the Voynich code. No one has broken the Voynich code yet.

(29-01-2018, 10:05 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(29-01-2018, 08:41 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Thanks, but you have not yet answered my question: To which languages do the words 'aberil' and 'abiril' apply? Is there a historical record of the use of those specific spellings?

...


Yes, I did. As I said, if you evaluate it in isolation (without taking the other months into consideration), Ab[e]ril can be Spanish or French.

I also pointed out that there's nothing unusual about the extra vowel ("e") being inserted. In the Middle Ages they often spelled things the way they said them, either adding or dropping characters and sometimes the same word would be spelled three different ways in the same paragraph. After reading hundreds of these manuscripts you get a feeling for which kinds of variations were common or normal and which were not.

Quote:Is there any chance the final 'l' could be an exaggerated 'e'?

It's reasonably clear that the ending is "ril". The "r" is completely normal. The undotted "i" is very common. The "l" is written in the looped style common to the time (it's more typical of late 15th and early 16th than to early 15th).

Quote:What do you think of "octebre" on folio 72v instead of "octubre" or "octobre"? My Latin text has "astrelogi" instead of "astrologi". Just a coincidence? Are you able to clearly distinguish between the "br" in "octebre" and the "be" in "aberil"?

• Pisces is "mars" (the ess is inherited from Greek sigma and this form  is quite common at the ends of words).
  
• Green Aries is "ab'ril" and the squiggle can stand for a number of things in Latin script (er, re, ir, ri, r, e), so in this case, it's aberil or abiril.
  
• White Aries is the same "ab'ril" (aberil or abiril), it's just that the squiggle is less clear and the shape of it might be more explicitly showing "e".
  
• Taurus is "maÿ" which is a transitional form. It represents "maii" except that a terminal-i was often given a tail (which makes it look like a "j" to modern eyes). When i without a tail is followed by i with a tail (a descender) we get the shape that evolved into "y" as we know it.
  
• Red Taurus is the same as Taurus "may" and since this was the period in which ii/ij/ÿ had almost finished transitioning into "y" it's not uncommon for the dots to be dropped and for it to look exactly like a modern "y". Note that the tail of the "y" arcs to the right. This is very important. Certain regions swung the tail to the left or the right somewhat consistently, so it can sometimes be used with other information to help geolocate the handwriting.
  
• Gemini is "ijon9/yon9" which is yonus. The character that looks like a "g" or "9" at the end is one of the most common Latin abbreviations. It is frequently used at the ends of words to stand for "-us" or "-um". If it's hyper-abbreviated text, then it can even stand for "yonius". It depends on the scribe. This, of course, is June.
  
• Cancer is "iolleo" and as there was no such letter as "j", the "io" makes a similar sound to soft-j (not the hard-j we use in English). Soundwise, this is similar to Spanish iullio but slightly rounder, and is July. In Spanish/Portuguese and various Galician and Provençal manuscripts, there are many different spellings for July, although using an "e" rather than "i" is less common. "iolleo" definitely leans more toward Spanish-related languages than French.
  
• Leo is augst which I see very frequently in old Swiss-German and German manuscripts and which is not typically Spanish or French.
  
• Virgo is "sept'br". Long-s, messy e, normal p, blobby e, normal Latin apostrophe standing in for "m", Gothic b, and the superscripted leaning "r" is an abbreviation for "er/re" and probably represents "re" here. French for September. It's not likely old Catalan, they tended to drop some characters and here would likely have dropped the "p". It's very interesting to read old Provençal verse because many of the harsh sounds were dropped to create sounds that were very sonorous (and were reported to be so), which would make perfect sense for a land of lyric poets (the original troubadours). Galician also sometimes dropped letters.
  
• Libra "octe'bre" - completely normal and readable abbreviated Latin for octembre (French).
  
• "nove'bre" is quite clear. The line above the e is a normal Latin apostrophe for "m" (as in octe'bre), so we get French novembre. Note that the last "e" on a couple of the months is a bit more ornate than usual. It's possible this person learned both cursive and book hands, because this is not a cursive "e", it's a calligraphic "e" (book hand). This is not unusual. John Dee, as a familiar example, was constantly switching between cursive hand, note hand, and calligraphic hand.
  
• "d'c'bre" is messy writing, but it is still pretty readable if you are familiar with Latin abbreviations. d, then the squiggle stands for the missing "e", then a messy c that almost looks like "e" but I'm pretty sure is "c", then the squiggle/apostrophe standing in for "m", then a normal "bre". Again... French.
  

Where would they use a crazy mix of Spanish and French (and German for August) in the 15th century? In the borderlands between France, Switzerland, and northeastern Spain. There were many dialects in this area and some major trade routes moving north-south through the Burgundian connections along the French border. The coastal area is still culturally and linguistically diverse.

Note also that language groups sometimes get "split". For example, in the medieval Veneto, some of the words were more like Spanish than Italian, harking back to earlier times before several waves of colonists moved in between Venice and Provençal and Spain. Language groups also migrate. Certain languages were brought to the Mediterranean islands by colonists who exterminated or absorbed the earlier settlers.

Quote:The scholars who broke the Voynich code (my theory) had the following quirks in their handwriting from the viewpoint of printings and printing errors: frequent confusion between the letters 'u' and 'n' and occasional confusion between the letters 'r' and 't' and between the letters 'G' and 'C'. They used 'v' for 'u' at the beginning of words and 'u' for 'v' in the middle of words. The 's' looked close to an 'f' except at the end of a word when it could look like an 's' or a 'z', but 'S' looked like 'S'. A 'c' could sometimes look like an 'x', and a 'c' before the letter 't' could look like a cursive 'E'.  The letters 'i' and 'y' were freely interchanged. They also used 'i' for the letter 'j'. They sometimes wrote the letters 'on' as an 'o' with a bar on top.

Using v for u and u for v (or alternating them) was completely normal in the middle ages. Also, "i" was used for "j". The one that looks like a "j" is an embellished "i". You are correct in that "i" and "y" were freely interchanged, sometimes even by the same scribe in the same sentence.

I'm not sure what you mean about scholars who broke the Voynich code. No one has broken the Voynich code yet.

I'm impressed! I have copied your response and pasted it into my notes for future reference.

The real problem I have with "aberil" and "abiril" is that it inserts a hard consonant between vowels, effectively creating a new syllable, which, to me, seems inconsistent with the way the Romance languages evolved out of Latin.

I've noticed that there was enormous confusion on how to represent the letters "u" and "v", a dilemma which does not seem to have been definitively resolved until sometime between 1623 (First Folio) and 1632 (Second Folio) as now we see that "haue" has become "have".

I suspect that the author of the Voynich months was someone who did not like this confusion and decided to resolve it, only he went the wrong way, that is, he went contrary to how history would eventually resolve the issue, choosing instead to write "v" for the letter "u" and "u" for "v".

With that possibility in mind, the Voynich handwriting for April could be interpreted as saying abriue, which is a real word:

si se ferirent enz trestuit abriue que uenir cuident de lautre part a garison

Sure, this abriue probably means "opened" but I would be willing to bet that it was pronounced like "abril".

Back in those days, in places such as John Dee's England, there was no consistency in spelling like we have today. I've seen the same word spelled as many as three or four different ways. At times, an author would even deliberately alter his spellings of the same word in a single passage to impress the reader! It was all based on pronunciation, and in that context, abriue is fully plausible.

Any thoughts?

Aberil and augst were used and,  maybe,  is used even now in Switzerland. In particular, aberil was used in Glarus.

Quote:Morten St George:
I've noticed that there was enormous confusion on how to represent the letters "u" and "v", a dilemma which does not seem to have been definitively resolved until sometime between 1623 (First Folio) and 1632 (Second Folio) as now we see that "haue" has become "have".

No confusion.

They were the same. What might SEEM confusing is they had a couple of ways of drawing the shapes but that was completely normal at the time.

For example, at the beginning or middle of a word, they used long-ess. At the end of the word, they used the one that looks like double-ess that is used in German (and eventually became the ß eszett), or the regular ess that we know that was in use in Spain earlier than other countries, or the Greek sigma (σ which was sometimes drawn so it looked a bit like 6).

In other words, it was like Arabic in the sense that there were medial and terminal letters with different shapes but the same meaning.


So, with "u" and "v" there was no confusion as far as scribes were concerned—they read them as the same thing in Latin. There was simply a choice as to how to draw them. Some scribes used the "v" shape as initial "v" and the "u" shape as medial "v", some wrote them all like "v" and some wrote them all like "u". In their heads, they interpreted them the same way—it didn't matter. Read enough manuscripts and you don't even notice any more. Eventually, as the vernacular languages became dominant over Latin, they began to distinguish the different shapes as letters and attach them to different sounds, just as they did with "i" and embellished "i" (which eventually became a "j").

(29-01-2018, 06:27 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Back in those days, in places such as John Dee's England, there was no consistency in spelling like we have today. I've seen the same word spelled as many as three or four different ways. At times, an author would even deliberately alter his spellings of the same word in a single passage to impress the reader! It was all based on pronunciation, and in that context, abriue is fully plausible.

Any thoughts?

abriue might be plausible from a philosophical point of view, but it doesn't look like abriue. It looks like ab'ril (aberil or abiril) and inserting a vowel is less harsh than abril, and making it less harsh was a characteristic of the Provençal region that may have been true for areas surrounding it as well. I don't know if you've heard Swiss German, but it sounds quite different from German even though it's mostly written the same.

In languages that used Latin scribal conventions, you can't ignore the ticks and lines and circles above and between the letters. They were, in a sense, part of the "alphabet" in those days, the same way we use an apostrophe (except they had a lot of different kinds of apostrophes). The month-labels scribe used them on almost every month.


Also, besides the fact that it looks like ab'ril, why would all the other labels be month names and then April be a completely different word like "opened"?

(29-01-2018, 08:38 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(29-01-2018, 06:27 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Back in those days, in places such as John Dee's England, there was no consistency in spelling like we have today. I've seen the same word spelled as many as three or four different ways. At times, an author would even deliberately alter his spellings of the same word in a single passage to impress the reader! It was all based on pronunciation, and in that context, abriue is fully plausible.

Any thoughts?

abriue might be plausible from a philosophical point of view, but it doesn't look like abriue. It looks like ab'ril (aberil or abiril) and inserting a vowel is less harsh than abril, and making it less harsh was a characteristic of the Provençal region that may have been true for areas surrounding it as well. I don't know if you've heard Swiss German, but it sounds quite different from German even though it's mostly written the same.

In languages that used Latin scribal conventions, you can't ignore the ticks and lines and circles above and between the letters. They were, in a sense, part of the "alphabet" in those days, the same way we use an apostrophe (except they had a lot of different kinds of apostrophes). The month-labels scribe used them on almost every month.


Also, besides the fact that it looks like ab'ril, why would all the other labels be month names and then April be a completely different word like "opened"?

Abriue is not part of my theory. It was just the suggestion of a possibility on a matter that I did not initiate. But your claim that the VMS has never been decoded is relevant to this discussion.

The VMS has been carbon-dated to some 600 years back, and for most of that time you cannot state with absolute certainty in what country the manuscript was located, so how can you possibly say that the VMS was never decoded? All you can say is that it appears that no one has decoded it during the past one hundred years. What about the first 500 years?

Do you know that several pages of the VMS are reported missing? How can you be sure that none of those missing pages provided information helpful for the decoding?

Per my investigations, the VMS was decoded between late 1585 and 1589 somewhere in Protestant-controlled Europe, possibly in Nérac, France, under the protection of King Henry of Navarre.

Besides John Dee, scholars suspected of being involved in the decoding project include William Stanley of England, John Florio of England, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa of Spain, Michel de Montaigne of France, Joseph Scaliger of France, Giordano Bruno of Italy, and Isaac Luria of Egypt.

The last-named is recorded as having died in 1572 but cryptic writings suggest otherwise. My theories consider the possibility that the colonization of America was a joint effort of Cathars and Cabalists. For some evidence that this is not a completely ridiculous idea, please see the following:

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If anyone was ever familiar with the type of encryption employed in the VMS, it would be Isaac Luria, the greatest cabala expert ever.

Speculations. The VMS glyphs might represent numbers similar to how the Hebrew glyphs do, and perhaps even the same numbers. Thus, each glyph would correspond to a number. Imagine a sequence of glyphs (numbers) as follows:  2 + 60 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 3. These numbers add up to 100, and 1 + 0 + 0 add up to 1, Aleph, or be it, the Latin letter "a". And that's how a large number of VMS glyphs can reduce into a smaller number of Latin letters. I'm not making this up. It was standard cabala procedure incorporated into their Gematria.

The published result reveals that Voynich encryption was extremely precise, accurately converting into Latin letters on a letter by letter basis. There are no sound or pronunciation considerations to take into account. The encryption, at least for the red-star passages, is entirely mechanical.

Recommendation: We need to assign numbers to the glyphs. I see lists of glyphs down the left hand side of some folios and there are also sequences of glyphs around circles. Perhaps those lists and sequences are in some type of numerical order?

Quote:Speculations. The VMS glyphs might represent numbers similar to how the Hebrew glyphs do, and perhaps even the same numbers. Thus, each glyph would correspond to a number. Imagine a sequence of glyphs (numbers) as follows:  2 + 60 + 5 + 20 + 10 + 3. These numbers add up to 100, and 1 + 0 + 0 add up to 1, Aleph, or be it, the Latin letter "a". And that's how a large number of VMS glyphs can reduce into a smaller number of Latin letters. I'm not making this up. It was standard cabala procedure incorporated into their Gematria.

The gematria angle has been explored countless of times by many different researchers (including me).

I was aware of kabbalah before I knew about the VMS so, of course, it was one of the first things I tried.

Reducing "a large number of VMS glyphs... into a smaller number of Latin letters" is not going to result in anything very intelligible because the VMS glyph-count is already somewhat restrained. Read some of the threads on entropy.


I haven't excluded the possibility of some kind of numeric system, I think it's possible, but I don't think it's based on gematria specifically. Not only is gematria not an "encryption" system (it's intended to find correspondences between "special" words, not for enciphering blocks of text), but it's impractical to read back if it is applied to every word (it leans dangerously toward one-way cipher territory).