The Voynich Ninja

The most obvious solution is that the y= standing alone and we can find that in Spanish:

y='and'
ver =  'see'
mu(cho) = "much"

?mel = honey? or meal or something else

The warning to eat too much, is often a recurring theme in medieval books and a fairly common one.

(12-10-2020, 03:06 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
It blew my mind to visit the Netherlands, and learn that in Dutch, y is traditionally regarded as a variation of ij. Sometimes it's written ÿ in order to draw attention to this equivalence. As a result, the estuary in the center of Amsterdam, the IJ, is in the running for the world's shortest place name, since it can be written as Ÿ. (It pretty much never is, though.) I noticed that the ÿ in the alphabet JKP posted is dotted, which I would think could be a big clue in placing it historically. To anyone's knowledge, does the equivalence y = ÿ = ij = ii = ī = 2 (in Roman numerals) extend beyond the Netherlands in the late Middle Ages?

If you spend a lot of time looking at manuscripts, you will understand quite quickly how ij and ÿ evolved together. We can see it in the way scribes write it and how it changes over time.

It is also related to ii at the end of a word. Often, when you see ij in medieval script, it is not ij but rather a long-i at the end (i with a tail) to indicate that it is the end of the word, the same way long-n (n with a descender) and long-m were written. So... if you wrote "ii" at the end of the word the first "i" looks like "i" and the second one looks like "j" because it is a terminal-i with a lengthened tail. Since they both have dots, many scribes wrote it like ÿ. I have hundreds of examples.

This also applies to Roman numerals. What looks like iiij represents 4. The end-tail is simply a terminal form of the character. Most languages did not have "y". Middle English had a shape that resembles "y" but the sound "y" was closer to the way yogh was pronounced (which looks more like z or 3).

(12-10-2020, 08:05 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are mistaken.
On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the same "S" as in *53 above.
( nuss, gross, stoss ). Has also a bow. This is just the way the person writes.
And he means it exactly as he wrote it. "den mus des".  In good German "dann muss das".
So and not otherwise.

Aga, that's not "s" that you circled in Post #53. That is double-ess at the ends of words. It's a combined letter with two ascenders joined as a ligature. It is not the same as s.

If you look at the letter s in other words in your snippet, it is more rounded and curvy and less looped to distinguish it from a looped-l. The one at the end can have a hook because it has two ascenders that help distinguish it from ell.


The letter at the end of VMS "mel" or "del" is not a double-ess. It is not a ligature; it does not have two ascenders. You cannot compare it to the double-ess in Post #53. It is a normal Gothic looped-ell like the ones on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

@ You have a funny way of looking at things.
At post 53 you see an S with a bow. This does not fit you because 2 S are written behind each other.
At post 55 you have the "des" with a normal S at the end, but that doesn't fit you because it has no loop.
But never mind. I find for you an "des" with an S where also has a loop.
Furthermore, the sentence with "mel and del" simply makes no sense. And not with "ven" anyway.
The sentence is very clear. "y den mus des" and then must des. It is spelled correctly for 1400, and even the dialect is correct.

Translated with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (free version)

My way of looking at things is based on looking at thousands of medieval manuscripts since 2007, in numerous languages, and reading many of them in Middle English, Latin, German, French, Danish, and Swedish.

I can also read a small amount of Greek, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and sometimes Hebrew if I work really hard at it, but I do not claim to know these additional languages, I can only read very basic words. Well, I guess I can read Dutch grammar too, it is similar to other germanic languages, but I'm not super good at Dutch.

I have also sampled more than 40,000 medieval letters. To sample them, you have to be absolutely sure you know what the letter is.


How many medieval manuscripts have you read?


You keep saying, "The dialect is correct," but that is because you are CHANGING the letters. You are not reading it. You are interpreting it to suit your hypothesis about the dialect. Then you are hunting up examples to prove your hypothesis and ignoring the rest, including the common conventions for how things are done. Good science means not making assumptions about what it is "supposed" to say.

I have been reading and speaking it every day for 55 years, ever since I can speak. From morning to night, and I write it too.
No wonder, it is my mother tongue.

40'000 letters ? If you read one every day, you would be 109 years old now, and would have done nothing else in your life.
Sorry, but now you are talking nonsense.

Yes, more than 40,000 letters (alphabetic letters). Hang on a moment, I can tell you a more accurate count.

I just looked through my file. I have c. 125,000 letters categorized, searchable, and very carefully selected from manuscripts in numerous languages. That's not counting the numbers, which I have in a separate file.

Quote:40'000 letters ? If you read one every day, you would be 109 years old now, and would have done nothing else in your life.
Sorry, but now you are talking nonsense.

Maybe it would take you hundreds of years to do it, but I'm a programmer—I develop software tools to help me. I am not talking nonsense.

I did not say I had read 40,000 manuscripts (I've gone though about 18,000 manuscripts, but it's not always necessary to go through the whole thing). I said I had sampled 40,000 letters. I have, however, read numerous manuscripts. If they are illustrated, it doesn't take as long to read them.

What this means is that I am familiar with how they did things. I'm not just cherry-picking examples to suit a hypothesis.


Here's a summary of what I posted earlier:

[attachment=4886]


Also, you should not assume the words are real sentences. It's possible the text that looks like plaintext is partly encrypted. Partial encryption was very common.


I think we can agree that the letters d/v/m (or whatever it is) has been overwritten. If you look at my blog about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which is partly encrypted, some of the letters were overwritten in a similar way.

(13-10-2020, 02:11 AM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As a result, the estuary in the center of Amsterdam, the IJ, is in the running for the world's shortest place name, since it can be written as Ÿ. (It pretty much never is, though.)

All this isn't *quite* right... It is a consequence of the lack of this character on keyboards other than the Dutch keyboard. It has become quite normal also for Dutch people, due to the widespread availability of UK and US keyboards, to type the two characters 'i' and 'j' when meaning this single character.

Foreign web pages are also struggling with this. Beside the Amsterdam IJ mentioned above, there are even two rivers called IJssel. The English wiki page for it doesn't quite get the fact that the initial letter is a single letter.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Automated spelling correction is not a help...

(13-10-2020, 08:04 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.40'000 letters ? If you read one every day, you would be 109 years old now, and would have done nothing else in your life.
Sorry, but now you are talking nonsense.

No ad hominem comments, please.

It has just occurred to me that the bottom of the page next to the reclining woman has been deliberately cut away, and done so in such a fashion as to not cut the roots on the plant on the reverse side, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.


It is of course impossible to determine whether this was done before or after writing, but I would suggest afterwards:
- this sort of incision at the bottom of a page is just about unique in the book
- the natural line of the bottom of the page would continue naturally without this semi circle, indicating it is an act of later vandalism
- the roots on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are so close to the cut that I would have expected the ink to have splashed onto the page below, or the painter to have adjusted the root is the cut had been there when he did the original drawing
- the cut is not very well done. If we examine the edges of the cut we see it has been done in a more irregular fashion than the original cut that created the folio.