The Voynich Ninja

I'd like to open a thread on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to intensively attack it. The short reason being, it is a page with no more than three vords which one could assume have a direct relationship to the plant. I don't think any other page has less text on it than this one. Considering that all other plant pages have several paragraphs of text (an average of 89 vords per plant page - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), there must be a compelling reason for this plant to warrant a miserable three words. I have dashed off a series of observations and questions to get us started.

Plant identification.
The possible identification of this plant was recently discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Examination of the parts

Seeds
As ReneZ pointed out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the "seeds" are drawn branching out in opposition on the right hand branch, but in sequence on the left hand branch.
They are drawn a third way for the top branch - a single branch protrudes up before splitting into three with "seeds" at the end.


The very top of the folio has been trimmed and part of the image has been lost.


All the seeds are drawn in very similar fashion, regular fashion. They all have either five spikes and six balls, or six spikes and seven balls. No apparent reason.

Leaves
The leaves on the right hand branch are drawn incorrectly. The first two leaves appear to be part of the branch. I think this is a scribal mistake, at the third leaf this is corrected in an exaggerated fashion with the branch coming out at an angle.


In subsequent branches the leaves are drawn with greater distinction from the trunk of the branches. Possibly the right hand branch was drawn first.

Roots
Brown bulbs connect to a central bulb from which the plant emerges. Three branches end in a tapering line, the fourth in a squashed bulb.

The folio as a whole
The counter folio to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is f58r. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the first full page of text after the herbology section, with the exception of the four people pointing on f57v, followed by another full page of text on f58v. (f65v is another plant image). So this sheet of parchment consists of two pages of text on the left and plant images on the right.

Remember that three whole folios have been lost between f58 and f65, as illustrated You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
(When reconstructing the layout of the book, we are going by the numbers inked on the right hand folios.)

Text
There are three vords on this page.
otaim dam alam
otaim dam alam
There has been no attempt to leave space on the page for block of text, which indicates to me that the scribe never intended having a large description. Why?
Q - Which was inked first, the plant or the text?

The three vords appear to have been almost an afterthought, and the last glyph runs into the leaf, despite there being plenty of room.


The first two vords are close together. The third has a double space, which is why it runs into the leaf.
Q - Why is this double space so important?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a rare word, it only appears twice (f65r and f111v). This may be a scribal issue, but the two don't seem that similar to me.


On the other hand, this may be my own wishful thinking - what do you think?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. appears all over the place, 98 matches.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has eight matches.

So let's have some fun! Let us assume otaim is the name of the plant. We thus most likely have a subject - object - verb  sentence going on (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), based purely on the frequency of occurrence of the vords. Something like plant_name used [for] nothing.

This makes a certainly amount of logical sense for an a priori constructed language, especially coming from a Latin speaker. It also explains away the double space in the sentence - the scribe paused to think before dashing off the final vord.

dam doesn't have to be just one vord - it is perfectly possible that this is an artificial construct. It could, for example, be a shorthand construct meaning something like, for example, the purposes of.

So let us assume otaim is the subject, the noun, the name of the plant. Let us further assume that this vord has been contracted in some way, by the use of scribal abbreviations. So:

Q - Can this word otaim be deciphered or expanded to link to any known or reasonable vernacular name for a plant similar to the one depicted?

With the depth of mnemonics that the author had, he probably had no need to mention plant names in botanical folios at all.

So trying to link otaim to a plant name may well lead to a deadend.

What's interesting is that alam is found, beside this folio, only in text-only f58 and in Recipes. Which makes it "special".

What's also interesting but possibly coincidental is that 7 of 8 occurrences of alam are line-end.

I find it not unlikely that alam was written first to label the leaf (or the plant on the whole), and only afterwards, maybe at another time as an afterthought, otaim dam was added to the left.

What's interesting about this folio is that it looks as if the author never intended to place regular text there. The image occupies too much space.

Quote:So trying to link otaim to a plant name may well lead to a deadend.

Doesn't mean it's not worth a shot! 

Why else would there be an almost unique word on that page, with so little text, unless it was linked with that plant?

(19-01-2020, 10:16 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a rare word, it only appears twice (f65r and f111v). This may be a scribal issue, but the two don't seem that similar to me.

That second occurrence is not the same as far as i can tell. Looks like otccam or otcaim or even otcccim but there seems to be an extra c in there compaired to otaim

It is interesting that the other two words both occur on f58v. However with dam i found at least one instance f70r1 that was daim but marked as dam, this is why i don't generally make much use of voynichese.com, happens almost every time i use it that i don't agree with the trascription. other than that the usage seems too widespread to get a fix on, but you could be right about "for". The other word occurs only on this diagram and text only pages, so again no help there.

As to the rest, it could say purple monkey dishwasher, i don't think you can be so sure of SOV, especially if "for" is involved (preposition). it could be adjectives, adverbs , three nouns,  plus even if there is a subect object and verb involved, SVO is not far behind statistically, but which would mean nothing if it is Biblical Hebrew or Klingon (lol) or any other language that does not conform to the larger proportions.

I had the thought just now that the plant could be burdock. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The spikey spherical heads on stems, the large ruffly leaves, the roots are not drawn to reality either but could be a mnemonic for varying thicknesses, or knots from whence more roots will shoot, both of which could fit.

Quote:Why else would there be an almost unique word on that page, with so little text, unless it was linked with that plant?

Definitely linked, but that does not mean it has to be the name. Might be a reference of use or something like that.

The pattern is notable though:

rare vord - frequent vord - rare vord

All parts useable
Good for kidneys
Makes one pee
Pee like horse
Horse eat root
Root best part
Seed eat crushed
Leaves also delicious
Watch for prickles
Prickles are sticky
Sticks to cloth

The possibilities are endless even if we treat them like regular words, but glyph ordering issues may also have to be taken into account, including whether or not the spaces really are spaces and whether they are where they are or need to be shuffled somehow. Seems pretty daunting, but of course we need to try things or we won't get any further along.

A really basic thought: if one looks at the strings of plant names in regular herbals, one will see that these are rarely very short, just measured in millimetres or numbers of characters.

In that sense, if there is a plant name, the most basic assumption should be that it is made up of the entrire string.

The bigger problem is that all statistical evidence suggests that the string was not made by simple character substitution.

(19-01-2020, 07:06 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In that sense, if there is a plant name, the most basic assumption should be that it is made up of the entrire string.

That is one angle, although the three vords have very different usage statistics (unique - common - rare).

(19-01-2020, 07:06 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The bigger problem is that all statistical evidence suggests that the string was not made by simple character substitution.

Well, I'm not expecting it to be as simple as that.... I am just playing with the words to see if anything comes out.

Arctium is a good proposal, Linda. You do have to take some liberties with the leaves though.

(19-01-2020, 03:20 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I find it not unlikely that alam was written first to label the leaf (or the plant on the whole), and only afterwards, maybe at another time as an afterthought, otaim dam was added to the left.

What's interesting about this folio is that it looks as if the author never intended to place regular text there. The image occupies too much space.

I agree with this.
The placement of the text is odd. Although the plant takes up the full space of the page, there was definitely room to add the label without touching the plant outline.

Speculating here, but it makes me wonder if this text could be written by the illustrator rather than the scribe (Or if they are the same person, during the illustration phase rather than the text phase of the page's composition). 
The note is on the "good" side of the plant, the other side of the plant was incorrectly drawn (as David has noted in the OP), so this might be a note from the illustrator saying "leaves should look like this", "these leaves are accurate" or something along those lines.

Other possibilities that come to mind: the label simply reads something like "not enough space for description".
Also, if the Voynich herbal section was copied from another document, the lack of text on the page could be an artefact of the original document, so: "description missing in original"?