The Voynich Ninja

Here, near the beginning of the notebook, it looks like Frederick was trying out variations. Above the line/loop there's a German saying with ae[u]io, below the line is one in Latin with aeiou:

Frederick's notebook includes a number of calligraphic and substitution alphabets. It also has Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew alphabets.

I clipped this emblem near the end of the alphabet section at the beginning:



I thought this version was interesting because the AEIOU isn't as obvious as some of the others. It is framed, and the o has an ascender to connect it to the F that is inserted between A and E.

Quote:Pivec also agreed with another statement of Lhotsky [1], that originally Frederick III did not connect a certain meaning with these vowels"". They were - according to Lhotsky - a "magical or numerical gimmick", a formula in which the ruler must not even have thought of a certain meaning of the word".

[1] Alphons Lhotsky has researched the meaning of AEIOU, title: AEIOV. Die "Devise" Kaiser Friedrichs III. und sein Notizbuch.

Source: Roderick Schmidt: aeiov, The 'Vocal Play' of Frederick III of Austria, Origin and Meaning of a Ruler's Motto, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Roderick Schmidt develops his own thesis on AEIOU in his paper.

bi3mw, Lhotsky is on my reading list. His name appears in the bibliography of most sources about HRE Frederick III I've come across. To your knowledge, has anyone translated Lhotsky's work into English? I haven't been able to find more than small excerpts of his work translated.

I have to say I'm a bit jealous of you native-level German and Italian speaking Voynicheros. You have a wealth of potentially relevant primary sources, particularly archives, much more readily available to you than the rest of us.

@RenegadeHealer: Unfortunately, I don't know any English translation. I am also looking for the above-mentioned paper by Lhotsky in German but unfortunately I have only found an OPAC - catalog entry without link.

In the article that bi3mw linked, I noticed this, "Die Ritter führten das fünffache Jerusalemkreuz, das Friedrich dann zur Grundlage seines Monogramms machte."

Translation: The knights transported the five-part Jerusalem cross, that Frederick used as the basis for his Monogram.


I assume the author is referring to the emblem with the fence-like bars:




But I notice, the number five also comes up in relation to the five masses.

AEIOU is five vowels, so it fits with the theme of five, as well. Perhaps this, in part, inspired Frederick to select the vowels.

A slight tangent, but when I see something "five-fold" in a Christian context, especially when it is 4+1, I think of the five wounds of Christ. Wikipedia seems to confirm this connection:

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Quote:The symbolism of the five-fold cross is variously given as the Five Wounds of Christ, Christ and the four evangelists, or Christ and the four quarters of the world. The symbolism of five crosses representing the Five Wounds is first recorded in the context of the consecration of the St Brelade's Church under the patronage of Robert of Normandy (before 1035); the crosses are incised in the church's altar stone.

This five-fold pattern occurs a few times in the VM in different contexts.

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Good thought, Koen. I'll have to find a source for this, but I'm fairly sure that Rosicrucianism (among other esoteric and mystical interpretations of the Christ story) tied the Five Wounds of Christ to a wider body of alchemical symbolism involving sets of five items. This is definitely something I want to look more into.

Also, this may or may not be relevant, but I learned yesterday that some versions of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" have AEIOU instead of EIEIO. I was unable to find any evidence that any of these versions are older, though. So the most parsimonious explanation is that AEIOU was substituted for the original EIEIO, to make this children's song a bit more meaningful and richer in educational value. In fact, some old versions of the song have the first line as "Old MacDougal had a farm in Ohio-hi-oh", and none of the known precedents from England have anything that could become EIEIO. But I'm still open to the possibility that the use of a string of vowels in song or verse, stripped of consonants and used as an abbreviation the way VViews and JKP discuss, could be the tradition which inspired both the AEIOU of "Lo Boièr" and the EIEIO of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm".

(16-12-2020, 09:17 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It also has Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew alphabets.

Don't forget Armenian, too. (For the sake of all you Anania Shirakatsi fans out in Voynichland!)

I'd like to point out that a thorough walk around the Old City of Jerusalem would carry a high probability of encountering signage with all four of these writing systems (in addition to the now-ubiquitous Roman alphabet, of course), at least when I visited it in 2010. I imagine the same would hold true when Frederick III made his pilgrimage there as a young man. Plus, a literate man of noble standing, who arrived in Jerusalem as an honored guest of a local in good standing, would have easily had access to documents and books written in all five of these writing systems, plus a few more (Kartvelian, Syriac Estrangelo, Glagolotic, perhaps Mandaic, perhaps a few ancient scripts no longer in use by that point).