The Voynich Ninja

(12-11-2019, 03:51 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You think that's a 4???.

Larger scans are not going to make it clearer. They will simply distort your perception of what a quill pen can do on textured vellum (which isn't very much at this scale).

The writing is certainly small, so it true that some would argue that it is too small to be anything more than a slip of the pen; however I think not.

I could certainly draw a 4 at that scale and drawing a 4 at that scale is not much more difficult than drawing a 1.

Ultimately you can tell me that it is a drawing of a flamingo and I can say it isn't, without more evidence it seems we are just left in the "Yes, it is", "No, it isn't" back and forth.

Spend enough time looking at the TIFF image with massive zoom and you will soon be seeing letters in the grain of the parchment,
just like what happened with Newbold.
Anyway its patently obvious that the horizontal bar underneath the 1st of the 3 glyphs is a 1 tilted thru 90 degrees,
then the alleged 4 is a 9, followed by a 1 then a latin upsilon doing duty as 0.
Giving us the date '1910' when Wilfred Voynich forged the VMS and put the date as his 'forgers' mark' in plain sight in the middle of a flower.

(12-11-2019, 05:14 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Spend enough time looking at the TIFF image with massive zoom and you will soon be seeing letters in the grain of the parchment,
just like what happened with Newbold.
Anyway its patently obvious that the horizontal bar underneath the 1st of the 3 glyphs is a 1 tilted thru 90 degrees,
then the alleged 4 is a 9, followed by a 1 then a latin upsilon doing duty as 0.
Giving us the date '1910' when Wilfred Voynich forged the VMS and put the date as his 'forgers' mark' in plain sight in the middle of a flower.

Well put!

(12-11-2019, 04:32 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.More data is always better than less data. Larger scans mean more data.

If additional data is irrelevant to your question, then it is irrelevant and possibly harmful. It may slow you down or cause confusion. Ideally the data you collect is the data you need. Microscopic features of ink on parchment is not what we need, unless in support of some weird theory. Or for something related to analysis of the physical material, which is not what we are doing right now.

I fully admit that the text is not a perfect rendition of any christogram. But since it is found in the sun-shaped flower, I find it close enough to consider.

I think additional data is very relevant to the question and will not cause confusion, if one is careful. I think to answer this question more data is needed. I think microscopic or magnified features of ink on parchment is what we need to answer this question. We are trying to determine the hand motion of the author. Trying to determine precisely what is going on with the pen motion would benefit from more information, of course we have to consider what is physically possible or not for the author to do, but doing so requires thought and care. 

I appreciate that you find your identification close enough to consider. I find the alternative that I have presented even closer than yours.

They didn't write 4 with the loop so small that it looks like a hook. They wrote it with a loop (the loop could be sharp or rounded). All you have to do is look at the 4 shapes on the same VMS folio to see that the little stroke with a hook is proportioned and written differently:

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If one were to interpret the scribble as 4157, then I have to point out that they didn't write 5 or 7 like modern numbers either (it was uncommon to see the modern 5 or 7 in the early 15th century). Here are examples from the early 15th century and the late 15th century so you can see the transition to modern numerals (note that if you look at actual manuscripts, modern numerals for foliation or indexes were usually added at the time of binding, which was often a century or two after the creation of the manuscript).

Note how the numeral 1 often has a hook:



Note that the 7 was not written with curves, this came later (when fountain pens were introduced, which gave more control over the pen). It was usually two rather severe lines. Occasionally the top curved, but they didn't add an "s" curve to the stem as we sometimes do now.


Mark, it's more than a decade since Nick wrote Curse and I get the impression that he's always reading, always learning, so whatever he thought about this subject in the past might not be what he thinks about it now.


If you consider how tiny the text is (the Beinecke scans enlarge the image quite a bit), then whatever creates a lighter spot within a line might just be a bump in the vellum where less ink took hold. If we went through the whole manuscript with a magnifying glass, we could probably find bits of numbers and letters in many of the tokens that are nothing more than artifacts of the substrate.

I am reluctant to try to interpret something so small. If you need a magnifying glass to see it, it's probably smaller than a quill is capable of modeling. I'd rather look at the overall composition, how the shapes work together, to try to interpret it in context. If we accept that the VMS is early 15th century, it is extremely unlikely the letters 4175 would have been written this way. If it's a century later, then maybe (assuming the person was trying to partially hide the 4 by making it disproportionately small compared to the other shapes).

(12-11-2019, 10:46 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They didn't write 4 with the loop so small that it looks like a hook. They wrote it with a loop (the loop could be sharp or rounded). All you have to do is look at the 4 shapes on the same VMS folio to see that the little stroke with a hook is proportioned and written differently:




If one were to interpret the scribble as 4157, then I have to point out that they didn't write 5 or 7 like modern numbers either (it was uncommon to see the modern 5 or 7 in the early 15th century). Here are examples from the early 15th century and the late 15th century so you can see the transition to modern numerals (note that if you look at actual manuscripts, modern numerals for foliation or indexes were usually added at the time of binding, which was often a century or two after the creation of the manuscript).

Note how the numeral 1 often has a hook:

Quote:Note that the 7 was not written with curves, this came later (when fountain pens were introduced, which gave more control over the pen). It was usually two rather severe lines. Occasionally the top curved, but they didn't add an "s" curve to the stem as we sometimes do now.

As I have already written here before it is not my opinion that it is 7.

Quote:Mark, it's more than a decade since Nick wrote Curse and I get the impression that he's always reading, always learning, so whatever he thought about this subject in the past might not be what he thinks about it now.

Nick might have changed his mind, I have no idea, but that doesn't matter as my point was that identifying that symbol as a "4" is not as ridiculous as you suggest as more than one person has been of that opinion, though in truth I think I saw the identification first in Nick's book.

Quote:If you consider how tiny the text is (the Beinecke scans enlarge the image quite a bit), then whatever creates a lighter spot within a line might just be a bump in the vellum where less ink took hold. If we went through the whole manuscript with a magnifying glass, we could probably find bits of numbers and letters in many of the tokens that are nothing more than artifacts of the substrate.

That is what a higher resolution scan would make clearer.

Quote:I am reluctant to try to interpret something so small.

This is the difficulty, of course, with this particular piece of text. My point, as I have stated, was to push back on the idea that it says IHS, which did not and still does not seem very plausible to me.

Mark, a quill pen cannot turn a corner that small, especially on vellum, which is textured. It can make a hook, but not a triangle at that scale. I've used quill pens. I know this from first-hand experience.

Higher resolution scans won't tell you anything more than what you can see from existing scans because the writing implement is not capable of microscopic details.

Look at the example I posted in #86. Look at the t in the otol front of the scribble. Look how the line wiggles and shakes on the textured substrate. You can get a finer line by turning the nib sideways, but there's a limit and that little collection of lines is hitting the limits of what is physically possible.

How you want to interpret it is up to you.

I just think it's important to know how they wrote 4 in the Middle Ages and also how tiny the scale of the stroke is.

Quote:If you consider how tiny the text is (the Beinecke scans enlarge the image quite a bit), then whatever creates a lighter spot within a line might just be a bump in the vellum where less ink took hold. If we went through the whole manuscript with a magnifying glass, we could probably find bits of numbers and letters in many of the tokens that are nothing more than artifacts of the substrate.

If you pay attention to the "microtext", then in the following example, you can even see the signature of John Dee. (green paint)  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.