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I have several ideas about what the VMS "labels" might be and one of them is similar to the labels in red above each of the water channels:
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Although the ms is amazing, I am none the wiser, what is your point?
Genesis 2:11-14 Phi[son], Gi[on], Tig[ris], Eu[phrates].
Mnemonics (in the most extreme cases) or abbreviations, as discussed in this very insightful article by Nick Pelling: You are not allowed to view links.
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Thank you, nablator, that was my point, that the labels may not be full words (that they might be abbreviated or shorthanded in a number of ways). The context would be enough to recognize the reference if you created the manuscript, but would be hard to discern by an "outsider".
As for ways they might be abbreviated, the pic above shows one way. Another way would be text that stretches across labels (in other words, in some instances, the labels may be broken up). A third would be a sort of rhyming mnemonic as was used to help remember oral history or grammatical conjugations.
The same concepts apply in a visual sense to Lullian diagrams. To most people the diagrams look mysteriously unreadable, but if you already know the information behind them, then they provide a way to remember scriptural passages and other information in a very succinct format.
That's one of the few ways I can still see Voynichese being meaningful - a mnemonic construct tailormade to complement assumed knowledge. That's basically what I think the imagery is. The problem with the text though is the scale and its statistical consistency. Even if you had a whole encyclopedia treated like these labels, it still wouldn't look anything like the Voynichese corpus.
Ok thanks Nablator and JKP.
I guess "a sort of rhyming mnemonic" could explain the oft discussed yet unresolved topic of the babble - like pseudo repetition that is such a prominent feature of the VMS.
I wonder if a discussion of medieval nursery rhymes in different languages could yield some insight?
In Greek manuscripts, sometimes just the first letter of whatever the illustration is supposed to represent is shown. Unfortunately, I haven't bookmarked or kept examples (it's one of those things one can simply observes and remember).
For those who know German, here's one that should be easy to recognize...
A
A
H
I
N
U
U
V
Z