The Voynich Ninja

The following symbols:  q  f  p  m  y   are demonstrably not to be identified with letters.
That's five out of (say) 25. How confident can one be that the others are?
And even if they are, what to make of a mixture of letters and non-letters?



This is what ReneZ wrote some time ago. I quote him here as an authority because, in any aspect of life, anyone who studies something for years and years deserves special attention.

I understand that there are those who do not share my theory. I can be wrong, of course. But what I try to convey is that men can and have always been able to convey a meaningful message without using a language

Quote:[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]The following symbols:  [/font][font=Eva]q  f  p  m  y[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]   are demonstrably not to be identified with [/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]letters[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif].[/font]

y is a very common symbol (abbreviation) in medieval texts. It is so common it is sometimes included as the last "letter" of the alphabet.

m is also very common. It is an abbreviation for -ris and its homonyms. It is also sometimes used as a paragraph-end marker.

Both are demonstrably identified with letters.

(18-01-2021, 05:20 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The following symbols:  q  f  p  m  y   are demonstrably not to be identified with letters.

That's five out of (say) 25. How confident can one be that the others are?

And even if they are, what to make of a mixture of letters and non-letters?


This is what ReneZ wrote some time ago.

To keep this in the right context, what I meant is: they are not letters, but they could be (among other things):
- parts of letters (even diacritics)
- variant forms of letters

I certainly do not think that they are astrological (or other) symbols. In medieval texts, astrological symbols can appear inside running texts, but in those cases they are rare and easily recognisable.

JKP wrote:

Quote:y is a very common symbol (abbreviation) in medieval texts. It is so common it is sometimes included as the last "letter" of the alphabet.

m is also very common. It is an abbreviation for -ris and its homonyms. It is also sometimes used as a paragraph-end marker.

Both are demonstrably identified with letters.

Yes, they are in Latin manuscripts. Here we are talking about the Voynich MS, and the Voynich symbol y is certainly not to be equated with the Latin abbreviation -us (when in word-final position).

Even though they lived in another cultural universe, I'm sure the authors of the VM had a sense of coherence like ours. I think the VM has a meaning. It seems more mysterious to me to think that it does not have it. Is a book where what we see above all are plants and stars. It seems coherent to think that the script is precisely something invented to relate these two elements: plants and stars. 

It seems also coherent to think that the glyphs with the same shapes are intrinsically related. For example, it seems that [font=Eva]t[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]k[/font][/font][/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] and[/font]
p [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]f[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]  have something in common. In the mind of the scribe they have an almost similar function.[/font][/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]The stars mark the passage of time. If we think of paragraphs of the VM script as units of time, the gallows fulfill one of the golden rules of their grammar. [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]p[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]f  [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]start the paragraphs or are on the first lines because they are special points on the sphere: the nodes where eclipses occur. [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]t[/font][/font][/font][/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]k [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]mark the meridians in both hemispheres. They are more common. Not whenever the sun and the moon meet there are eclipses.[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]

(19-01-2021, 06:04 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
JKP wrote:

Quote:y is a very common symbol (abbreviation) in medieval texts. It is so common it is sometimes included as the last "letter" of the alphabet.

m is also very common. It is an abbreviation for -ris and its homonyms. It is also sometimes used as a paragraph-end marker.

Both are demonstrably identified with letters.

Yes, they are in Latin manuscripts. Here we are talking about the Voynich MS, and the Voynich symbol y is certainly not to be equated with the Latin abbreviation -us (when in word-final position).

Not just Latin manuscripts. Manuscripts that use Latin scribal conventions in other languages, like German. Scribes adapted them to common abbreviations in their own languages. Not all of them, but some of the common ones from Latin were used as-is or adapted. For example, g (the Latin -cis abbreviation) is used in German as the paragraph-end marker and sometimes the etcetera (et + -cis symbol). The Item abbreviation, which resembles k, was used in many languages.

In Latin-alphabet languages, y was not just -us. It was con/com and us/um. In other words, in the medieval mind, it had a number of meanings discerned by context. Which means, in the medieval mind, it could conceivably be stretched to include other common endings, as well.

I'm not saying the VMS is Latin (I hope people have heard me say that enough times now that I don't have to say it as often), but I think it's essential to understand how Latin scribal conventions and their flexible, contextual nature were deeply burned into the brains of medieval scribes.

Wrong thread but...

I was just saying that the y in the Voynich MS is not to be equated with word-final -us, for very strong statistical reasons.

With respect to my last post and my theory that the glyphs [font=Eva][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]t[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Eva]k [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]mark the meridians in both hemispheres, I would like to introduce the idea of mirror words, that is, valid words that can be composed with one or another of those gallows. This also works for Eva-ch and sh, and Eva-r and l[/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
Why can valid words or mirror words be composed by replacing one glyph with another?

Isn't it as if there were two hemispheres and what was written in one replicated what was written in the other?

It is as if the chains of symbols move in a circle, as if they mark pieces of time in the celestial sphere

(22-01-2021, 05:07 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Wrong thread but...

I was just saying that the y in the Voynich MS is not to be equated with word-final -us, for very strong statistical reasons.

I understood what you meant, Rene (hopefully others did too). I was mainly responding to Antonio's interpretation of what you said.

I agree that statistically it is too frequent to directly equate to -us. I do, however, hold out a weak possibility that it may be used as a broader abbreviation (more meanings), since this was not unusual. However, I only hold to this possibility if other things are resolved (like glyph position within words), so it's definitely lower on my list of possibilities.

In the VM there are some extended gallows like this

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Can someone explain this in terms of language?
Are they embellishment of the script? Is there a manuscript of the time with the same embellishment?
Can it have any spatial meaning? The glyphs below the gallows, were they written before or after the gallows?

Doesn't it give the impression that the scribe is playing at placing pieces in space, as if the glyphs only served to fill the space?

It seems to emulate connected ascenders, like this:

[attachment=5224]

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