The Voynich Ninja

(22-06-2018, 03:01 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.gis has the correct shape alright; the problem being (if it is a problem), it's lower case, and if we make it a capital G, we lose the left loop.

Whether it is a problem depends on what stage the scribe sat back with a bottle of vino to make up the glyphs and give them an independent life of their own.

Yet JKP says the glyphs retain their positional characteristics and that this could explain such features in the VMS so I think origin and case do matter if the scribe was systematic.

Don, many letters have ascenders without being uppercase. The lowercase letters b, d, f, h, k, long-s, and sometimes t, depending on the style of script, all have ascenders and if you add an "is" abbreviation (a loop and stem), they are going to resemble uppercase letters without being uppercase letters. The word "item" is written it + "is" abbreviation and because the t has a long ascender in some scripts, it comes out looking like uppercase, but it's not.

If you add the "is" abbreviation to the letter ell, it looks exactly like EVA-k, but it's not uppercase.


Also, one thing I've mentioned quite frequently is that a small portion of the glyphs might be derived from Greek. Most of the Latin scribal conventions are based on Greek. Sometimes they are identical, sometimes they are adjusted to fit the different language. In Greek, it's not uncommon to have loops on the right, loops on both sides, and also stacked letters (combined in the vertical direction, as are some of the gallows characters).

(22-06-2018, 03:01 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nice one Marco! Does this show that a textbook can be a useful guide to a manuscript search?

Hi Don, I agree!
Most of us are amateurs with no formal training in palaeography: secondary sources can be immensely helpful and prevent a good deal of wheel-reinventing.  A disadvantage of course is that reinventing wheels is fun

(22-06-2018, 03:01 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.gis has the correct shape alright; the problem being (if it is a problem), it's lower case, and if we make it a capital G, we lose the left loop.

Whether it is a problem depends on what stage the scribe sat back with a bottle of vino to make up the glyphs and give them an independent life of their own.

I see you point. I think that you expressed it very well in a previous post when you said that these abbreviations have no "ascenders". Everything is possible of course, but my opinion is that, being embedded inside words, Voynich gallows look more like ascending minuscules than capital letters.

(22-06-2018, 03:01 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yet JKP says the glyphs retain their positional characteristics and that this could explain such features in the VMS so I think origin and case do matter if the scribe was systematic.

The Latin -is abbreviation is normally word-final, so this could either be a counter example about the correlation between Voynich and Latin glyph positions or suggest that the gallows are not related with this abbreviation. I have no definite opinion at the moment.

(22-06-2018, 03:01 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree with your identification of the 3rd word on the next line, given that his c looks like an r. Your translation helps a lot!

Thank you, but please take my readings with a grain of salt: I often make mistakes and in this case the Latin grammar seems slightly dubious. 
Anyway, Ch is frequent for 'ci' and Sh for 'cri' (even if I am not sure this is the case here). This is something I hope to document in the future. I find the thing interesting also because 'ci' and 'cri' can occur in similar phonetic contexts, like Voynich Ch and Sh do.

(22-06-2018, 03:01 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Question: what are the random full stops about?

I think the one in "gerat.altis" is a word separator. Since the text is poetry, I believe most other occurrences mark the two 7-syllables halves of 14-syllables verses.

Quote:MarcoP: Yet JKP says the Latin -is abbreviation is normally word-final, so this could either be a counter example about the correlation between Voynich and Latin glyph positions or suggest that the gallows are not related with this abbreviation. I have no definite opinion at the moment.

I don't have a definite opinion yet either. There are quite a few possibilities. If the gallows are inspired by Greek, for example, EVA-t might be inspired by Pi, which was sometimes drawn with dots, hooks, or little loops on both sides.


On a related matter (the loop on the left), this is something I've posted in the past, but it's relevant to this topic, as it shows another possible inspiration for the loop on the left side of gallows characters. There is also the possibility that the gallows characters are  internally inspired by existing VMS shapes:

[attachment=2203]

Just an observation and a guess. 


If we trace how "o" is written in uppercase (marked with a red square), then we can assume that this is analogous to loops on the gallows. If the connecting line at the bottom has a loop, then this is "o"
If the connecting line ends at the base of the line, then this is "e" (blue square).
If the tail of the connecting line is pointing to the right, then this is an "i" (green square).
This is very similar to how I distributed the modifiers t1, t2, t3. (# 43, 44 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
In this case, the point in the right loop / the filled loop is the umlaut designation for the vowel.
It becomes clear the presence (although very rare) of a double right loop of the gallows.
See, as it is written - "on". The left hinge loop also becomes o (e, i). There are several cases where the left leg of the gallows has a tail that points to the right side.
[attachment=2204] 

(22-06-2018, 12:49 PM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just an observation and a guess. 


If we trace how "o" is written in uppercase (marked with a red square), then we can assume that this is analogous to loops on the gallows. If the connecting line at the bottom has a loop, then this is "o"
...
 

This comes from the Greek scribal conventions that were adapted by the Romans to fit common sounds/syllables in Latin.

In Greek, if you take Pi, for example, and add a small loop to the top-right, it represents "po" (and sometimes "pe"). This convention was incorporated into Latin, but was also understood as "is/em" if a tail was added to the loop.


By the 15th century, the "o" loop was disappearing and very few scribes made a distinction between an "o" loop (the double loop as in the above examples) and the "e" loop (with the single loop and a tail), so the shape of the tail in the "is" abbreviation no longer carried meaning, but the "is" convention remained right up until the 16th century.

Thus, the same shape in a 15th-century document can mean something different in a 13th-century document.


What I have found, though, from actually reading manuscripts, is that the more subtle abbreviations were rarely used. Most scribes picked 10 or so of the most common abbreviations and used those, and this seems to be true in both early and later medieval manuscripts and they are mostly the same, whether it's 12th century or early 15th century.


Wladimir, I hope you don't mind, but I wanted to point out how the loops can be interpreted in your example. Note that the single loops (the ones you have marked in blue and green) represent "e" or "i" in the examples to the bottom and left. The ones that represent "o" are actually double loops (I marked them so both loops are included, in red). This is somewhat scribe-specific (or sometimes word-specific) because, as one can see from the examples below in the top-right corner, a single loop was used in between letters to represent "o".




Also, in early medieval times, a shape that was sometimes drawn as double-cee and sometimes as Greek omega was often used to represent "u" (usually when it was associated with a "q") but it was typically superscripted rather than attached to the rest of the word.

You might also notice in the top right that there is a rather complicated abbreviation for "con". This was rarely used. Most scribes preferred the backwards cee or the EVA-y shape to represent "con" (easier to write and used less space).

Found this in an ms posted by VViews in Astrology/Scorpio thread

Wellcome MS 349, 1488, Heymandus de Veteri Busco, Ars computistica, with astrological and divinatory material You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Looks a bit like EVA-p  though somewhat distorted and missing final hook on the left.

Interesting?
P.S. Tha's no my nasty red mark!

Don, if you look for the VMS abbreviation for "pro" (a p with a loop through the stem), you can find ones that resemble the VMS glyphs more closely than the example you posted. It's an extremely common abbreviation, found in almost every manuscripit.

Pilcrows will also sometimes resemble VMS glyphs, but the styles of medieval Pilcrows vary greatly so it takes longer to hunt them up.

Hi JKP,

Wow, you must be awake late tonight!

I must say, none of the gallows examples posted in this thread are 100% convincing, including my own. Some may be close, but no smoking gun, particularly with the 1 legged gallows. Just my opinion of course and I keep an open mind because at best so far I have only seen maybe 1% of the manuscripts that you have!

I work long hours, Don. The only way I can work on the VMS is by giving up sleep.

For gallows characters some of the Greek acrophonic numbers have half-benches. I haven't posted examples of the half-benches because I simply haven't time. You can see some of the full benches here:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

And a couple more examples here (scroll down to the coin near the bottom and the stacked characters at the bottom.):


You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 

In Greek, and sometimes in Latin, stacking characters or numbers was not uncommon. In Latin, benching is also used to indicate a long macron (abbreviation symbol). When it passes through characters with ascenders, it looks like a VMS bench.

Also, when abbreviations for "per" and "pro" are raised up above the baseline (doesn't happen often but does happen occasionally), they look like P gallows.


I think it's more important to understand the dynamics of abbreviation symbols and the many ways they can be put together at the discretion of the scribe than to find an exact match in some manuscript. Most of the glyphs DO match abbreviation symbols, so it's very clear that these conventions were known to the VMS scribes, and quite a few scribes did combine them in idiosyncratic ways unique to that person.

While Voynichese EVA:g g does look like the Latin abbreviation for -dis, it appears to  be drawn differently.

[attachment=2214]

The Latin abbreviation, seems to start with a d. The bottom loop appears to be written counter-clockwise. 

The Vonich glyph seems to start with a c, that becomes an s and finally g. The bottom loops is often open and appears to have been written clockwise. Is the Latin abbreviation ever written like this?