The Voynich Ninja

(24-09-2023, 12:52 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Koen, what is match no. 4 ? I understand that it can only go from 0 to 3.

Well spotted, apparently I ruined my own system  The 4's are gone now.

Thanks, bi3mw. We need a few more people to fill in their scores:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Yes, definitely. The more the better. Unfortunately, it will probably not be technically possible to put your spreadsheet at the top of the thread so that the link does not "disappear". Well, posting the link again after each new participant works too.

There are also cases of good or perfect partial match (root only).

(24-09-2023, 05:52 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are also cases of good or perfect partial match (root only).

I went kind of lenient on those: if the root is a perfect match, it is probably safer to include it, even if the flower is different. But this is why a number of people should rate, then I think we will get a decent picture.

I will follow the strategy of just including the link in each post here

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

I will go through and add my scores. I don't think I will give any zero as if I were to have, then I would not have included them to start with; however there are certainly some that I would give less than 3.

It is noticeable that in some cases there is much less to compare, such as when there is only a drawing of a leaf or only a drawing of a root. And of course I recognise that in some cases the leaf matches, but the root doesn't or vice versa. In the case of these partial matches the way that one interprets them may vary from person to person. Some might interpret them as a deliberate device by the author to mix the leaves and roots. I might be more inclined to put this down to author/artist error or carelessness/inattention to detail. Someone else might view this as representing a completely different plant.

I certainly would be intrigued to see others scorings.

And of course if anyone has a match to add that I have missed I would be very interested. I have tried to be very thorough and consider all possible matches, but it still remains conceivable that there is something that I haven't spotted.

The interpretation of the artist's motivation is difficult to determine based on the botanical illustrations. Some matchings, like some of the plant identifications, are good, some are mediocre, others are poor to nonexistent. The botanical investigations lead to a garden of forking paths with increasing ambiguity. If nothing further can be learned from even the best matchings, what is accomplished by pursuing progressively weaker examples?

Botanical investigations are like intellectual flypaper. Those that get stuck here cannot move forward. It's not until the VMs cosmos, when it is seen as a combination of the BNF Fr. 565 cosmos inside a Shirakatsi wheel, that the full extent of VMs artistic "manipulation" starts to become apparent.

(24-09-2023, 11:59 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If nothing further can be learned from even the best matchings, what is accomplished by pursuing progressively weaker examples?

I am not sure that much effort has been made to learn anything even from the best matchings.

I am not clear if you have understood, the primary reason that I personally am interested in matching the plants is as a means to potentially accessing their textual relationships not due to any personal horticultural fixation.

So far I have seen little to no evidence that anybody has made this textual study even for the best matching. Without including the less certain matchings in the study one cannot tell if they show evidence of, possibly strong, textual relationship. And if it turns out that there is no textual relationship whatsoever then that raises the question as to why that is and what if any conclusions can be drawn from that.

I have also discussed other ways in which these plant matching relationships might have implications for the correct order in which the different folios of the manuscript were written.

Generally though the approach of saying that this might not lead to results so is not worth doing is ultimately laziness.

Nick did You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on this a few years back

Actually, they are two different medicinal plants.
Since the root was mainly used for one of them, it makes sense that one of them reappears in the root part.

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

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