The Voynich Ninja

In Voynich there are several pages in which the line of the script invades the drawing and the supposed words are interspersed with the elements of the plants. This is something completely unusual in medieval herbals, where script and drawing are well differentiated. And in cases where the text invades parts of the herb, as occurs for example in Circa instans (Egerton MS 747), the words are written on the drawing, not outside. There is no interspersed text.

What happens in the Voynich is something completely exceptional and makes us think that we are not dealing with the text of a language, but rather with something else.

(22-10-2024, 12:32 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In Voynich there are several pages in which the line of the script invades the drawing and the supposed words are interspersed with the elements of the plants. This is something completely unusual in medieval herbals,

It can be found in medieval manuscripts, such as for example on this web page:
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This is not a herbal, but the principle of cramming text in gaps between the illustrations remains the same.

Now while this is perhaps not very common, it is not a logical conlusion that the text therefore has to be meaningless.

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A few pages:

f. 30r


f. 30v


f. 31r


f. 31v


A page (f. 32r) translated by Marco Ponzi: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It's remarkable that the herbal manuscripts most closely resembling the VM in this layout tend to be ones that have text added in a later stage. It happened like that in the Juliana Anicia Codex. This layout was then preserved its copy, the Padua Dioscorides. In the Yale MS, the text hugging the plant is the French that was added later. So it might be that this type of text behavior was somewhat associated with a certain genre (glosses, notes, accumulated wisdom...).


By the way, the lunaria behaves quite a bit like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :

Of course, there are exceptions to everything. I just wanted to highlight that the unusual behavior of the script in the VM is one more element, just one more, that advocates the idea that the so-called text does not behave like a language.

ReneZ, I do not defend that the text is meaningless. Quite the opposite. I think it has meaning for the enlightened people of the 15th century. But not as a text but as an astronomical-astrological code.

Of all the arguments in favor of the text not behaving like a language, this is really the worst one. Just off the top of my head I could name a handful herbals where the text hugs the image. In addition to the aforementioned, there is of course the Trinity Herbal, but also several very "normal" herbals which seem to do this on purpose for aesthetics. See for examples some pages here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Spend a few minutes googling and you'll find more. Sure, there are good arguments against the text being normal, but this is just not it.

I don't want to argue with this. I have already said that this is one more argument against the hypothesis that script is a language of a phonetic nature. Just one more.

Naturally, in a normal text like the examples that have been given to me, there is the possibility of abbreviations, something very common in medieval writing. By abbreviating words you can fit them into almost any space. That doesn't seem to happen with the Voynich script. I see the same symbols in the gaps as everywhere else.

I give this example:

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It's not just that three words fit in the gap left by the stems. Also that the first three lines end in the same symbol [s] before reaching the first stem. It seems strange.

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Sorry, I hope it shows now. It is the second paragraph of f26r

It's true that whatever is happening in the VM does not entirely correspond to common practice. The system is, to the best of our knowledge, new and unique. But simply demonstrating that it's not normal does not automatically make any non-linguistic theory true. As long as you don't come up with concrete, testable examples, this discussion will remain difficult.

It will be very difficult to find definitive proof about the nature of Voynich, but there will always be approximations or hypotheses that are more probable than others. Regarding the nature of the script, I think that sooner or later the debate will turn to whether the glyphs are semantic units, if each of them has meaning in itself, be it the one I propose or any other.

Those who designed the script did so in such a way that certain glyphs appear to correspond to each other. There is polarity and similarity. And this is something that needs to be studied.

For example, in the script we see the way the number 4 was written in the Middle Ages, and we also see the number 8 as we still write it. One is double the other. I don't think this is coincidental. I don't think the authors gave those glyphs this shape to mean anything else. Really, what they wanted to write and wrote is a 4 and an 8.