The Voynich Ninja

(28-06-2018, 07:16 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
  I think the Voynich is a method to identify stars too, but I don't know how it works. The number 9 stands at the beginning or at the end, or alone, I think for marking the position of a particular star in the ninth sphere and not to be confused with another in the eighth sphere, but it could otherwise. Sincerely I am no sure, but as you see my hunch is based in objective observation.

Antonio, have you looked at how often the number 9 appears in tokens throughout the manuscript?

If you want to be objective, then look at a page of text, a plant page, for example, and note how often it occurs. Why would the ninth sphere have to be repeated dozens of times on the same folio, in the same paragraph, even in the same line? Why would a plant require 30 references to the ninth sphere?

And what about all the other spheres? The figure-8 frequently occurs at the ends of tokens next to the 9. If the figure-8 is the number 8 then why would the 8th sphere be next to the 9th sphere with nothing in between and nothing following either of them? And where are spheres 1 through 7?

From sphere 1 to 7 there are not stars, only planets. The stars are in the eighth and ninth sphere, and they are the same stars  of the Zodiac but in different positions. Knowing the medieval cosmology is essential for understanding the Voynich. This is not only the script. It is the script and the imagery. Without the imagery it would be impossible to decipher the Voynich. A picture is worth a thousand words, say journalists. And they are right. With the imagery we can try a theory because we can glimpse the mind of the scribe.What I see in the Voynich are herbs and stars, and they was linked in the mind of mankind of the Middle Ages.
   Regarding the repetition of number 9 in the same line o word  it may be many things. Maybe the scribe was rotating the Volvelle and write down the glyphs corresponding to each day and repeating them. I think is the same reason by wich there are repeated words in a row. Also,the system could represent no only the position of a star, but the better moment to pick it too. And maybe there are more than one star linked with an herb.
  Emma did a bright analysis about (o),(a) and (y or 9) as the same class of character. They are complementary and occur in the same position in the word. I think all of them stand for the stars in different positions or moments.

Except for the occasional enlightened astronomer (and there weren't many), people in the medieval period didn't make much of a distinction between planets and stars. They called most of them stars, "moving" and "fixed" stars.

---

(30-06-2018, 08:16 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
  Emma did a bright analysis about (o),(a) and (y or 9) as the same class of character. They are complementary and occur in the same position in the word. I think all of them stand for the stars in different positions or moments.

This is not quite correct and I don't think you are interpreting Emma's work correctly.

The "o" and "9" behave in certain ways that are similar in certain positions, but you will NOT find the "o" at the ends of words in the same way as the "9" and you certainly will not find the "a" behaving like "o" or "9", it has its own unique patterns. Nor will you find the "o" following "8" at the ends of words in the same way as "9".

I think all of us agree that the creator or creators of the Voynich were learned men who knew astronomy and cosmology well. To me the manuscript is the work of a school of astrological medicine. In the Zodiac pages we see the 30º of each sign personified in pregnant ladies, that is to say the stars wich make grow the herbs.
  What Emma said is that  there are interaction among (o), (a) and (y or 9) and that these glyphs have a complementary distribution in the words. But it would be much better if Emma wants to explain it by herself.

(30-06-2018, 12:20 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think all of us agree that the creator or creators of the Voynich were learned men who knew astronomy and cosmology well. To me the manuscript is the work of a school of astrological medicine. In the Zodiac pages we see the 30º of each sign personified in pregnant ladies, that is to say the stars wich make grow the herbs.
  What Emma said is that  there are interaction among (o), (a) and (y or 9) and that these glyphs have a complementary distribution in the words. But it would be much better if Emma wants to explain it by herself.

Nope, I don't think whoever created the VMS knew astronomy well. I have read real astronomy books from the medieval period (the ones sometimes loosely called compotus manuscripts) and they are very different in content, layout, and organization. The VMS strikes me as more similar to a book of knowledge that might be accessible to those without a mathematical background, whereas 15th-century astronomy texts require a much higher level of understanding of calendars, math, the ecliptic, and the movements of planets. They have pages and pages and pages of charts for working out dates, eclipses, etc. I see no evidence of this in the VMS even though I've looked for it. I've even tried to line things up as though they were in charts with the lines removed and there MIGHT be parts that work like this, but they still don't come out like charts in astronomy manuscripts (except for the more simple ones).

.
Is the VMS about astrological medicine? ALL medicine in the middle ages was about plants and astrology, all of it, so if the VMS is about medicine, then there is a 90% chance it is also about astrology. This seems to me to be obvious. Astrology was a required course in medieval medical schools. Knowledge of plants was required in medieval medical schools. Many of the herbal manuscripts that contain more than just labels have information on the ruling planet, but they don't code it into every other word on the page. They mention it once by each plant because that's all that's necessary.


The patterns of glyphs in the VMS are different from linguistic patterns in some important ways. Even if some of the glyphs turn out to be abbreviations, then the glyphs in between them seem inadequate to define the rest of the alphabet. But the patterns of glyphs are even more different from astronomy texts than they are from linguistic patterns, and it seems unlikely that the same astronomical or astrological information would be coded in the same way from the first paragraph to the last for 200 pages.


I think astrology is probably included in some fashion because it was considered important to most aspects of medieval life (the planets and stars ruled parts of the body, medicine, plants, good days, bad days, bathing, etc.), but I don't think it was the designer's primary interest. Most of the drawings are about plants and they are also the more accurate drawings. The designer was interested in plants. If the text is related to the drawings, I'm pretty sure plants take precedence over astronomy and all those repetitious tokens might be about things that are hot/cold, wet/dry, masculine/feminine, plant habitat, and which parts to use, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the end, information about the constellations has been coded into the more narrative pictures, as Koen has suggested, but even this is not really astronomy, it's mostly astrology and medieval astrology was never very accurate in terms of star positions.

If it is the way I see it, the images are mostly about popular astronomy, that is constellation myths etc. Aratus'  popular poem is the closest I can think of, along with similar texts like Hyginus and parts of Manilius. (Even though Manilius was called the first real astrologer, the majority of his work is what we would call astronomy).

My objection is of course that you can never know what a medieval scribe actually knew. So much of what they produced was compiled from traditional authorities.

That said, JKP is certainly right that most advanced astronomy books in the middle ages are quite technical and you can spot them from a mile away.

(30-06-2018, 09:13 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(30-06-2018, 08:16 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
  Emma did a bright analysis about (o),(a) and (y or 9) as the same class of character. They are complementary and occur in the same position in the word. I think all of them stand for the stars in different positions or moments.

This is not quite correct and I don't think you are interpreting Emma's work correctly.

The "o" and "9" behave in certain ways that are similar in certain positions, but you will NOT find the "o" at the ends of words in the same way as the "9" and you certainly will not find the "a" behaving like "o" or "9", it has its own unique patterns. Nor will you find the "o" following "8" at the ends of words in the same way as "9".

The glyphs a and y are complementary in distribution: they typically don't appear in the same environment. This suggests that they could be variants or closely linked glyphs. However, if you take these two glyphs to be halves of a single a / y glyph, then that a / y glyph is in contrastive distribution to o. This suggests that they have different meanings but belong to the same functional class of glyph.

I therefore consider it odd if any discussion of y doesn't also discuss a and o, in different ways.

Thank you Emma for joining in the debate. I agree with you that the Voynich is a normal language written plainly and not a criptological text, although I think is a visual language, no phonetic; an astronomical code with rules like the position of the gallows at the beginning of paragraphs and at the top of lines. I think they mark the coordinates at the Midheaven of the Ecliptic to place the stars and the Moon as the celestial sphere moves.
 It's true thant the Voynich is not a technical book of astronomy. These books are full of charts with numbers and numbers to place stars and planets on the Ecliptic. It is by wich I believe that the script of the Voynich is a variant of it and as boring as these books. In the imagery of the Voynich is where I've seen the more original interpretation of Aristotle's cosmology: the stars personified like women coming down to the Earth trough pipes and tubes because they have to come across the solid crystal spheres to reach their destination.
  At the time of the Voynich people knew the proper names of many stars. Although original, the Voynich is only a product of its time. We are the problem for our incapacity to understand the world as it was seen in the XV century.

When arguments in the discussion tend to go towards "I think that.." and the other one replies with, "I think that.." as well, I am sorry but then I will jump off that train: arguments are based on subjective information and what follows is often a non-discussion.

When arguments are soaked with self-invented definitions or correlations, in relation to the Voynich, I will also jump off, because arguments are presented based on prior subjective knowledge, where an outsider can not reasonably participate without becoming familiar with those definitions. That "learning time" is academically often well spend, but in relation to the Voynich, proven to be a waste of (my) time.

Another waste of time are the repeating circular presentations based on images in the Voynich and based on the positions of the characters in the text. Presenting that hard information, which we all got on our computers, is like slapping the readers in their faces over and over again with the same information. Hoping that it will result in anything new, sounds to me as an attack on the common intelligence.

The beauty of your theory Antonio, is that it is a straight and simple theory. I've done research in relation to the animism, tarot,  cartomancy and related other -mancies and there is a good chance the text in the Voynich is related to a subsequent trend. When it does, it must follow a SYSTEM. Then there must be logic and rules behind such a system.  If there is a clear definition for those, that system could be considered as "a solution". Is there a way to do that based on the hard (preferred: textual) facts and published research?