The Voynich Ninja

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Sigh, he doesn't know about medieval plant names either. Weiler writes this:

Quote:In order to be able to understand this, it is necessary for one to know that the current Latin nomenclature for plants was only introduced around the middle of the 18th century, predominantly based on the printed botanical works dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. The Voynich Manuscript, however, dates from the 15th century. Was the usual Latin name, utilised for a peony at that time, also Paeonia? Did a common designation even exist at that time?

The later botanists used a very high proportion of the old names in order to create the standardized nomenclature. I can easily recognize a high proportion of plant names in old manuscripts and yes, they did call it Paeonia in the Middle Ages and even when they used another name, it's one of the plant drawings that is instantly recognizable (peony has unusual roots and seedheads and the medieval illustrators generally got these details right).

The cucumber plant is also easy to recognize and even though it has numerous names, the names are nevertheless similar and the plant is recognizable with any of the spelling variants.

It's true that some of the medieval botanical illustrations are hard to recognize, but the ones he chose as examples are some of the easiest to recognize. Bad choice of examples.

Paul Weiler Wrote:The source language of the Voynich Manuscript is indeed Latin! To be more precise: pure, unadulterated Latin.

Well, cool. Rolleyes

The Latin scholars in the Voynich community (and there are several of them) will be thrilled to hear that someone who is unfamiliar with Latin abbreviations knows how to recognize "...pure, unadulterated Latin".

Regarding the VMS foldouts, Weiler writes:

Paul Weiler Wrote:This folding technique, which one knows from art books or children's books today, is an unparalleled method which cannot be found in the Middle Ages.

Wrong. Completely untrue. I'm not even going to list all the medieval examples. Many have already been linked in various threads on the forum. The physician's foldout is a classic example, but there are many more. It wasn't super common, but it's completely false to say it cannot be found in the Middle Ages.

You know... reading this is like reading the Tucker/Janick book. I can't get through 10 paragraphs without finding sentence after sentence full of fundamental and truly glaring errors.

About the rosettes folio...

Paul Weiler Wrote:Its contents are very difficult to interpret as there are no known structures of objects depicted on it.

suns? castles? cloudbands? escarpments? water?

If the VMS is "pure, unadulterated Latin" as Weiler claims, and if he has unlocked the secret, as he claims, then why can't he identify any of the plants, zodiac labels, or rosette-folder text? Maybe that comes later??

Paul Weiler Wrote:There are virtually no deletions or additions throughout the whole manuscript.

There are many. I've done four transcripts. I've seen them. They are not super common, but they are there.

There is again the potential for a significant diversity of interpretation for statements like this.

Paul Weiler Wrote:
Its contents are very difficult to interpret as there are no known structures of objects depicted on it.

"No known structures" is widely interpreted as a confirmed absence of such structures - there are none to be found - anywhere.

In reality, it is a statement that the author was unable to discover any structures that could be recognized and identified during the investigative process. That doesn't mean there is nothing there. There is plenty there. Suns, moons, castles, stars, cloud-bands, an uncommon cosmic representation, (not Newbold's folly), zodiac medallions, rainbows, an Agnus Dei, Melusine and Lady Bertilak, the Golden Fleece, armorial and ecclesiastical heraldry and the Fieschi popes. Depending on how one wants to look at it, there's nothing there at all.,

Since I am not in the habit of opening E-mail attachments from unknown senders (especially when the message text offers incentives in doing so), I am afraid I lost one good opportunity of reading a preview of the book Angel

Indeed, the cover was replaced by the Jesuits but I wouldn't hold that against him. It's not really that important.

A small error is important if almost every statement has factual errors. I don't mention small errors unless there are significant overall problems (or if it's something the person would want to know and to correct). We all make errors.

But an accumulation of small AND large errors (and some are very large) means sloppy, hasty research.

Even so, a small error isn't a big deal on a forum where we are all throwing ideas in the pot and trying to stir them into something that looks and smells good...

but this is a commercial product. Customers pay money to see the errors.

I'm only just now seeing the Reddit post. I was assuming it was a short announcement, or the same preview that was on the Amazon listing, but apparently not.

Quote:But what was however concealed during the initial presentation of this secret code alphabet is a special feature, which we can see in the last characters of the cipher: Strangely enough, the alphabet does not conclude with the letter z, [font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]rather more it lists three additional characters, namely abbreviation characters for »et«, »us« and »tur«.[/font]

These are three very common abbreviation characters (et 9 tur). It's not uncommon to see some of these common abbreviations at the ends of alphabets in medieval pen tests (especially the 9 char). He says "strangely enough". If medieval script is unfamiliar to him, then it would seem strange, but anyone who reads medieval script thinks of these characters as normal.

Speaking about these abbreviations (several paragraphs, in fact), Weiler writes:

Quote:I determined, a few weeks later on, that I was not the first to do this. As early as 2017, a British researcher published a study paper regarding the Voynich code, which concluded that it had been based on the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum.

The 1940s Study Group looked into this much earlier than 2017. One of our forumites posted their chart of the common Latin abbreviations. It's not perfect, a few small errors, but the general concept is correct and it would have been much harder pre-Internet to gather this kind of palaeographic information. They clearly looked into the possibility of the VMS having these kinds of symbols/abbreviations/ligatures.

Weiler posted a chart of some of these common symbols. I've written numerous blogs on these subjects with many examples coming directly from medieval manuscripts (Weiler seems to be relying almost entirely on Cappelli).

Helmut, Searcher, MarcoP, Lisa Fagin Davis, and several other Voynich researchers (including me) are familiar with these common abbreviations. You can't read or translate manuscripts without knowing them. Weiler appears to have discovered them quite recently and he writes as though they are unknown to the Voynich research community. Maybe his notes are directed at non-Voynich researchers, but it's clear that we have many researchers who understand this subject better than he does.

Quote:This latter method for transmitting secret communications was already sufficiently well known in the Middle Ages, as examples from the aforementioned Stenography work by the Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius clearly indicate.

A small point, but it's not stenography (which means to take dictation, often in shorthand), it's steganography (hiding a message within other distracting information).

And, as mentioned in my earlier post, this is completely wrong.

Quote:[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]The position where the abbreviation character 9 never however occurs, in common medieval utilisation, is at the end of the word.[/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]...The author of the Voynich Manuscript has skilfully utilised this strict regulating system of Latin abbreviation methods for their own purposes: In deviation to all valid rules, they also position the abbreviation character 9 at the end of the word ...[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]

[/font][/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Wrong. Blatantly wrong.[/font][/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]The 9 char is placed at the ends of words more than any other position.[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif] There are numerous manuscripts that use the 9 symbol at the ends of words several times per sentence. And not just in Latin, also in Greek, [font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Italian, French, German, English, Czech, Spanish, and other languages.[/font][/font][/font][/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif].[/font][/font][/font]
[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]He then tries to liken the 9 at the end to a different abbreviation (the symbol that looks like a rotated "m" or a "z"), but he has assigned the meaning of the rotated-em symbol to the 9 symbol when it is at the end. He probably misunderstood something in Cappelli.[/font][/font][/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Well, now I know he misunderstood Cappelli, because he wrote this (which is also wrong):[/font][/font][/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]

Quote:[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]If one takes into account the various Latin declination possibilities, there are well over 40,000 cases (counting according to a search engine for Latin vocabulary with the meaningful name Enigma, which we will learn more about later in this book), in which a Latin word ends on the letter [i]e[/i] followed by any preferred final consonant (mostly [i]m, n, s, r[/i] or [i]t[/i]), this thereby clarifies why we so frequently encounter this character at the end of words in the Voynich text.

[/font][/font][/font][/font]

[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]He has misunderstood the meaning of 9 when it is at the ends of words. At the ends it does not mean "em" or "en" as he suggests. It is usually "um" or "us". When scribes want to add the "m" or "n" , they usually use a straight macron (a form of abbreviation symbol) above the letters, or sometimes a connected tail (a connected macron that swings up and back). They do not use the 9 character for this.[/font][/font][/font]

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