The Voynich Ninja

(20-01-2021, 09:08 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now, 400 years later it seems that we want to see what they did not see. Doesn't this sound a bit arrogant?

No, certainly not. It wouldn't have been understood because it jumps out of the Latin rule.
Once something from my work and from the bag of tricks.
(Normally I wouldn't do that)

I circled the region in green and examined the language. I take the sentences of the explanation as they are written.

1. the vocabulary of the is largely based on Latin, although of course some phonological and morphological changes have taken place here. Many words are therefore common to other Romance languages.However, there are also other languages that have contributed to the vocabulary.

2.Double consonants (ll, rr etc.), which are common in Italian, are almost non-existent in Latin.
This would have something in common with VM. There also see no double consonants

3. alphabet:
Aa Bb Cc Çç Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Zz
The letter q is used only for proper names and historical place names and is replaced by c in all other cases. The letters k, w, x and y occur only in loan words. They are not seen as part of the alphabet:
Latin quem = cuem, To the ear it is the same. But it means that C occurs more often than it should. Now there is also the K, which is also written in C.

4. Now another possible explanation why so many words begin in VM mio O.
[attachment=5205]

Bag of tricks:  CCCC

We have learned that there are almost no double consonants in this language.

If "c= E", then "cc"... is something else and not EE.

Example: I'll just take it from where it looks like.

"cc = U".  Then "ccc = EU and cccc= EUE".

Here in words in German.

cfccc, fccccr, cccrc, etc.

This is an explanation why the VM always ends up in Timbuktu when compared with other languages, and not where it belongs.


All clear ?

(20-01-2021, 07:54 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.2.Double consonants (ll, rr etc.), which are common in Italian, are almost non-existent in Latin.
This would have something in common with VM. There also see no double consonants

Whitaker's Words for 39403 Latin roots gives the following stats:
1537 instances of "ll" (3.9%)
635 instances of "rr" (1.6%)

Don't think that this counts as "almost non-existent".

I am not talking about general Latin but about the Latin dialect spoken and written in this region. And there are hardly any double consonants used.

I took the explanation from the description and did not invent it myself.

[attachment=5208]

Furthermore, it would explain the psoido Latin on F116.
Since no double consonants are used, it would correctly be "olla dabas" and not "ola".
Or quere instead of cere. From queri = to complain, to complain.
But that is just speculation.
It is certain that Slavic has had an influence on German, Italian and Latin south of the Alps.
See map.

(20-01-2021, 05:26 PM)Helmut Winkler Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(20-01-2021, 12:45 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is not Kircher, it is the dozens of wise men before him.

Did Emperor Rudolph II not have money to pay for the translation of a book he was interested in?

The use of medieval abbr. and the ability to read them ended soon after 1500, the printers changed their habits and did not use them anymore. That meant that contemporary scholars started to publish heavy volumes explaining them, they are no use in solving the VMs., I have tried.

We don't know if Rudolf owned the ms., I distrust the story because it  is exactly the story someone in the 17th  c. would invent if he was  trying to make a profit. It is like today when you try to sell a piss pot and tell people it was owned by siome rock star

There is of course a complete lack of evidence that anyone ever, in any era, could read the Voynich MS.
We may assume that the person or people who wrote it could, but that's all.

With respect to the piss pot, if the nanny of said rock star had actually written her name on it, you'd have a different story.

(19-01-2021, 05:03 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One can always argue about the validity of statistics, but the problem with this one (the very high fraction of words ending in y ) is that it is so far off from any reasonable number for Latin words ending in -us or -um or even combined, that there is no chance for a match.

Just from memory, if the language were Italian, then a word-final -i  would be a lot closer in terms of frequency.
Maybe Marco remembers better.

Hi Rene,
I remember nothing of those measures, so I computed new stats from scratch.

• -y in the VMS, Currier_A : 33% Currier_B : 46%
  
• Italian -i : 18%
  
• Latin -um: 7%   -us: 6% (combined 13%)
  

Unless I messed up something, Italian -i is not terribly higher than Latin -us/-um combined.
Anyway all these figures are extremely different from those in the VMS. As you say, there cannot be any simple match.

(20-01-2021, 03:27 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The y symbol in Latin represents con/com at the beginnings of words and us/um at the ends of words.

Hi JKP,
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says something different: -y for -um is not mentioned. He represents the second as a superscript, but we know that also the final symbol often was on the same line as the rest of the word.

[attachment=5216]

Also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the University of Nottingham mentions con/com for y-, but only -us for -y.

I would be interested in examining some of the manuscripts where you saw -y representing -um. I wonder if this occurred together with -y representing -us: this could result in some difficulty for the reader, since both endings are very frequent and -us words usually have an -um counterpart which is grammatically different (e.g. accusative vs nominative, or neuter vs masculine).

Could you please point out a few examples of -y representing -um, so that I can have a look at the context and the overall abbreviation style by those scribes?

Marco, you are correct. At the end it is typically -us when the language is Latin. When they write -um, more often they use m with macron or connected macron (tail).

At some point I got derailed and started repeating what I had written rather than what I knew.


I will have to go through my files to see if it's -um in other languages (I've been sampling Latin, Italian, French, German, English, Irish, Scandinavian, Czech, Polish, Spanish, and a few others that use Latin alphabet and scribal conventions). If I find examples, I will post.

(20-01-2021, 03:27 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The y symbol in Latin represents con/com at the beginnings of words and us/um at the ends of words. It's a flexible abbreviation. On rare occasions, it occurs within words, but this is not common and it's usually a compound word.

There was a lot of debate on the question of EVA-y (9-like glyph in the VM). While it is true that such letter was definitely used for Latin abbreviation cum/con at the beginning, and us/um at the end, it is also true that in the non-Latin writing, that same glyph often stood for the letter i/y. I suppose when the Latin ending ending -us was dropped in the Italian language, they began to read the names of the saints with the ending -i, not -us. I have noticed such two way spelling in many 15th century calendar Housebooks and even in the bibles that contained the names of the saints. While it is possible that the full and abbreviated names of the saints were used on the same pages, in some manuscripts there is also a third option, where the names of the male saints end on y, or ij, which clearly stands for Y.
In the VM, there are also many free-standing 9-like Y letters. In Slovenian (and some other Slavic languages) medieval language, the letter Y stood for English 'and'. Another frequent use of y in Slovenian was for abbreviated word 'je' (he is), such as 'je počasen' - he is slow; je profesor - he is professor; je dal - he gave. There are many other explanations for the frequency of the initial and final Y in Slovenian language, however, it needs to be pointed out that the letter Y was later replaced with i or j. 
The shape of the letter would not be confused with the Latin q (which was of very similar shape), because even the author of the VM seldom used letter q.
This is just an idea to say that both Petersen and Rene were right.

(28-05-2022, 09:29 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There was a lot of debate on the question of EVA-y (9-like glyph in the VM). While it is true that such letter was definitely used for Latin abbreviation cum/con at the beginning, and us/um at the end, it is also true that in the non-Latin writing, that same glyph often stood for the letter i/y. I suppose when the Latin ending ending -us was dropped in the Italian language, they began to read the names of the saints with the ending -i, not -us. I have noticed such two way spelling in many 15th century calendar Housebooks and even in the bibles that contained the names of the saints.

I am interested in the use of 9 as i/Y. Do you know with more precision when and where its use started?

(29-05-2022, 11:26 AM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(28-05-2022, 09:29 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There was a lot of debate on the question of EVA-y (9-like glyph in the VM). While it is true that such letter was definitely used for Latin abbreviation cum/con at the beginning, and us/um at the end, it is also true that in the non-Latin writing, that same glyph often stood for the letter i/y. I suppose when the Latin ending ending -us was dropped in the Italian language, they began to read the names of the saints with the ending -i, not -us. I have noticed such two way spelling in many 15th century calendar Housebooks and even in the bibles that contained the names of the saints.

I am interested in the use of 9 as i/Y. Do you know with more precision when and where its use started?

I don't know exactly when the change was made. As it looks, it was gradual, after the Calendars with the name of the saints became widely used. I believe it has a lot to do with the humanistic movement which embraced the Bogomil/Patareni /Cathari ideas that the Christians should read the Bible in their own vernacular languages. The Patareni in the Northern Italy were suppressed by inquisition, the humanistic writers, like Dante and Petrarch used symbolic language to spread their ideas among the like-minded. The Slovenian people at the time were divided among Austria, Italy, and Hungary, and most were under the religious authority of the Patriarchate of Aquileia.  From the examples I am enclosing, it is clear that in Latin writing, the 9 is still used in the 15th century for con and us, but the Latin abbreviations -us and -con began to be pronouced as Y/i, ij.[attachment=6575][attachment=6576]

In these samples, you might also notice the 4-shaped q, a similarity of 9y and 9q, Voynich shape of R (but very small) used interchangeably with r, as well as Voynich 8-shaped d.