The Voynich Ninja

Thanks Marco! That's a good bench indeed. I had somehow expected them to pop off the page at me but it was pretty hard to "scan" this text. 

Some characters in this MS do look like the small -is abbreviations could have given rise to the "capital versions" gallows K and T. It is well illustrated by these two. You just have to connect the left loop on the bottom one to get EVA-t.

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By the way, how would you transcribe the second line with the "cis.non at' de illi" at the end?

Quote:DONJCH
...

This is the sort of thing I was talking about (Capelli)
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See 3rd line down, 2nd column, "collio" = collegio
...

This is exactly what I've been trying to point out to certain researchers who tell me, over and over, that they cannot see any similarity to Latin, and even after I point them toward Cappelli, or post examples from manuscripts, or blog about individual abbreviations/ligatures, the response is, "I still don't see it." and is often followed by the statement, "Have you checked out Georgian; have you checked out Armenian?" (after I've told them many times, yes, I have checked out those alphabets and countless more, in depth, years ago).

I have many examples of the long macron, that resembles a bench. It especially resembles VMS glyphs if the ascenders that are crossed are prefaced and followed by letters like c, t, r, and e. There is a clear precedence for crossing letters in both Greek and Latin scribal conventions.



Here are several scribal-abbreviations shapes reminiscent of the VMS in an early medieval manuscript... litterae elongatae with horizontal connector, an EVA-ell shaped abbreviation, th written as litterae elongatae with a macron indicating the missing letters for "Theodore". These conventions were used for several centuries, until the printing press came along and letter-types were standardized.




You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has some good examples of litterae elongatae and long bench-like macrons. It is early medieval, once again demonstrating that these conventions were around for a long time.

Quote:JKP: Can you link to a page with the "Item" character? No need to sweat the formatting etc.

Yikes. I have hundreds of them. Item, which resembles EVA-k, is a common word at the beginnings of paragraphs or lines in Latin and German manuscripts where the information is somewhat note-form. Astrology manuscripts are full of them. It also occurs in Italian and English manuscripts. Not so much in French because it would be confused with the way they wrote "Il" (he).

This isn't necessarily the best example (I can't do in-depth searches during the workday), but it's one that was easy to grab... BSN-Hss Clm 27044 (a book on saintly miracles) has examples of "Item" spelled out in full but also abbreviated to resemble EVA-k. It also has many examples of EVA-y (con/com/us/um), tails that swoop back over the word (attached macron), and ris/tis/cis. In other words, you will find many of the most common Latin scribal abbreviations.

First look at page 16, where Item is spelled out at the beginning of each paragraph, so you can see how it is commonly used:

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Then look at the 15th-century note added to page 17 to see how it is commonly abbreviated as I + is/em/tem (EVA-k):

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In Greek, Po, Pe, and sometimes Peri are also written like EVA-k.

(13-06-2018, 09:21 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks Marco! That's a good bench indeed. I had somehow expected them to pop off the page at me but it was pretty hard to "scan" this text. 

Some characters in this MS do look like the small -is abbreviations could have given rise to the "capital versions" gallows K and T. It is well illustrated by these two. You just have to connect the left loop on the bottom one to get EVA-t.



By the way, how would you transcribe the second line with the "cis.non at' de illi" at the end?

Hi Koen,
it's not like I can read this stuff. With You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I am totally lost (I could not find a transcription of that work, nor an alternative ms).
This is more approachable (i.e. googleable), since it appears to be a sermon copy-and-pasted from the bible.

Starting from the line above the detail you posted (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. left column, line 8):

[Nam de justis acquisitis de-]
cime debe[n]t dari. Proverbium III Honora
deu[m] de tua s[u]b[stanti]a et c[eter]is. Non a[ccipie]tur de illi-
cite acquisitis. Proverbium XXI Hostie impio-
[rum abhominabiles]

JKP: on the bright side, I was only vaguely aware of the extent of resemblance with Latin habits, but with your recent efforts you've gotten through my thick skull. We're getting there

Marco: ah, of course! That's heavily abbreviated. But they were so into this topic that it was probably easy for them to read.

 I hope that many researchers know that the Latin letter "z" at the end of the word is written as a Russian letter "З" with the lowering of the lower tail in the substring. I was surprised that in the Latin text so many "z" letters are used, and it is regularly applied at the end of the line. If you analyze the book using the Latin abbreviations You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  , it follows that "Z" was also used as a marker, indicating that the word is not completely written (in the figures, the omitted portions of words are highlighted in the blue box).It becomes clear why "z" is often found at the end of the line. It is the author's unwillingness to transfer part of the word to another line.
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 I do not know if anyone previously mentioned the similarity of the statistics of the use of the symbol "m" (EVA) in the VMS and the Latin "z" .
1 / The vast majority of "m" (more than 90%) is written at the end of the words.
2 / very often (especially on pages where there is a lot of text Q13, Q20) "m" is written at the end of the line (perhaps to save space and not to transfer words to the next line).
In cases 1 and 2, "m" is probably an empty symbol / marker for omitting a part of a word.
3 / "m" in the middle of the word is a full-fledged phonetic symbol.
 

(13-06-2018, 10:26 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco: ah, of course! That's heavily abbreviated. But they were so into this topic that it was probably easy for them to read.

The script is readable if you are perfectly familiar with it and with the underlying language.

For instance, one must be able to read "sba" in word 4 line 2 (I was confused by the overlapping characters and couldn't recognize the 'b'). Then, knowledge of Latin tells you that this must be a feminine noun in the ablative case. There are not many matches starting with 's' and including a 'b' and "substantia" is the only one that makes sense in this context. All things that the human brain does in a tiny fraction of a second, but if you must google for words or use a dictionary like I have to, reading a short passage easily takes half a hour.

You'll notice the example on the lower-right is "que".


The "q" words in Latin are very common (quibus, qui, quam, quo, etc.) and even a simple q-word can be abbreviated four different ways, with a line through the tail, with a squiggle above the q, with a straight line above the q, with an s-curve through the tail, and with the "z" shape as shown n Wladimir's example. If it's "quo" it can also be written as q with a subscripted "o". If it's quibus than there are two or three more options, with q'bz being one of them. The z is often substituted for "rem" and sometimes for "rum" rather than the more traditional "rum".


The top-page VMS marginalia that starts Allier uses the "z" shape at the end of a word which, in Latin, can mean lucrum or lucorum.

(14-06-2018, 07:36 AM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I do not know if anyone previously mentioned the similarity of the statistics of the use of the symbol "m" (EVA) in the VMS and the Latin "z" .
1 / The vast majority of "m" (more than 90%) is written at the end of the words.
2 / very often (especially on pages where there is a lot of text Q13, Q20) "m" is written at the end of the line (perhaps to save space and not to transfer words to the next line).
In cases 1 and 2, "m" is probably an empty symbol / marker for omitting a part of a word.
3 / "m" in the middle of the word is a full-fledged phonetic symbol.
 

Thank you, Wladimir!
I discussed a similar observation in a comment You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

In that case (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Italy?, 1450 ca), I highlighted two different abbreviations that both tend to concentrate at the end of lines. The 3-like abbreviation appears to exclusively stand for "m" in that manuscript (the character looks somehow like a 90-degree rotated "m").
I believe that "z" was not properly a character of the Latin alphabet: it was only used for foreign (e.g. Greek) words. It is possible that the shape you discussed was initially used as an abbreviation and later adopted as a phonetic symbol for "z" in Germany, but I am speculating.

In early medieval manuscripts, Indic-Arabic numbers were used for many of the abbreviations, probably because numeric shapes helped distinguish them from letters:

0 (zero or "o") - often used for grade/degree and ordinals (still used for this purpose by the 15th century)
1 - er/re/ir/ri/ra (still used for this purpose by the 15th c)
2 - ur/tur (still used for this purpose)
3 (which looks like z) - em/rem and occasionally us/um (still used, mostly for em or rem, but it's quite flexible)
4 (the old style 4 that is the same shape as EVA-l) was a superscripted apostrophe - see Post #42 upthread (this abbreviation fell out of use)

7 - sometimes used as an apostrophe (the old style, that looks like an upside-down vee)
9 - con/com and us/um (still used and very frequent)

5 and 6 were not commonly used. 8 was not commonly used as an abbreviation, but was sometimes used for d or s (especially terminal-s).

As far as I know, all Oresme's work has been transcribed and translated.
These books are quite expensive, that is why you can't find it online. 
I have them sitting on the bookshelf, these are 1000+ pages of reading and very technical.