(02-02-2025, 09:50 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Let's give it a try.
What might this word mean?
Perhaps the closest thing to the word would be “löffel” spoon. Or not?
I'll clarify it later in context.
What's the goal of this exercise? Three pieces of Voynich marginalia are relatively long inscriptions of at least 20-30 characters. I suspect that if you show this word in the context of a longer 20-30 symbol string it will be cracked fairly quickly.
I have nearly zero knowledge of German, so I'm certainly not qualified for this riddle. My only association is "tafel" as in "tafelspitz"
“pox leber” There is nothing to be said against it.
A “bock” is also drawn. Male or female is not visible. And there is also the drawing of an abomasum. Confirmed twice.
@oshfdk
It's about how difficult it is to explain a single word. (without a sentence).
“tafel” is certainly a possibility if you consider the first and last letters to be different.
I'm certainly not the person to argue for or against specific readings of medieval German or Latin, my point was just that we don't have enough unambiguous transcriptions of marginalia to reliable tell which subset of Latin characters is used.
(02-02-2025, 09:57 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Poxleber in 116v line 1 is quite readable and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The page contains the illustration of a quadruped. I don’t see how that reading could be wrong.
Maybe you are right. But I won't be surprised either, if this is not poxleber. Maybe I'm mistaken, but all the readings we have as of now are of "this is plausible, given there is no better explanation" kind. I'm not aware of a single reading that would successfully produce a meaningful and grammatically sound phrase.
(02-02-2025, 10:25 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's about how difficult it is to explain a single word. (without a sentence).
This is exactly what I'm saying too. If the whole sentence was "goat's liver cooked in chicken broth", I'd agree it's poxleber beyond any reasonable doubt. However when it's "goXt's LiVer lbrang bjglgjglj", this doesn't look as certain to me.
F66 is grammatically and meaningfully correct. The context refers to the drawing and describes what is to be done.
(02-02-2025, 10:33 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.F66 is grammatically and meaningfully correct. The context refers to the drawing and describes what is to be done.
But it's just 4 words of 1, 3, 3, 3 letters, some of the letter shapes look a bit strange and one of the words heavily redacted. Also, they are not positioned on a single line, so, potentially you can read them in many different orders, top-bottom left-right, circular clockwise, etc. I won't be surprised if one can find several good readings in this situation. The same can be said about the drawing, one can easily interpret it in many ways.
(02-02-2025, 10:27 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not aware of a single reading that would successfully produce a meaningful and grammatically sound phrase.
I am aware of several, but it depends a bit on what one should consider 'gramatically sound'.
Perhaps one should not place the bar too high.
Writing ungramaticaly unsound is common today but they're is no reason to think that this is something new.
(02-02-2025, 12:16 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (02-02-2025, 10:27 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not aware of a single reading that would successfully produce a meaningful and grammatically sound phrase.
I am aware of several, but it depends a bit on what one should consider 'gramatically sound'.
Perhaps one should not place the bar too high.
Writing ungramaticaly unsound is common today but they're is no reason to think that this is something new.
Then maybe someone could take these interpretations to answer the question of whether marginalia uses some specific subset of Latin characters or not.
(02-02-2025, 06:36 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Without digressing from the subforum's maintopic: Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's. "gas mich" actually stands out as being remarkably different from the rest of the words. Again, it could just be pen tests, spells, or it could simply be me high on goat milk and qokain.
(02-02-2025, 06:36 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's.
The observation is certainly correct for final -x. You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. transcriptions by four different researchers are discussed (Elmar Vogt, Sean B. Palmer, Jorge Stolfi, Johannes Albus); they all agree that You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. line 3 includes four consecutive words ending -x.
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‘X’ is relatively rare in European languages. In written medieval Latin, it is of course frequent in numbers, but only about 1-2% of non-number word tokens end in -x. The fact that the four occurrences are consecutive is particularly noteworthy. I doubt that four consecutive final Xs can occur in a grammatical Latin text: lines 2 and 3 do look vaguely Latin, at least, "vix" is a legit Latin word (meaning "hardly").
Something comparable can be seen in a charm in Buitzruss's notebook (first half of the 15th century) Clm 671 f.72v (mid-page): compare
"rex pax fax ++++ in christo +"
with
"six + marix + morix + vix + abia + maria +".
But rex, pax, fax are three actual Latin words (king, peace, torch).
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