The Voynich Ninja

"Palden" in terms of "hurry" or something related to "soon" would corroborate with "gas" as "quick". If something is coming soon, then ("so") you need to take me ("nim mich") quickly ("gas").

It's completely reasonable to read the "p" letters as "b" in old German, especially if the manuscript is from southern Germany or the Alsace.

The word following "palden-balden" is a tougher nut, provided that we agree that the first letter is "p" not "u".

Substituting the first "p" for "b" gives us nothing, because the second letter is "b" in itself.

Supposing the second letter is not a "b", but an erroneously emendated "h", this would be "phren" which in MHD meant "awl", but well it is not "h". The letter "h" is written differently in the text, with its curl propagating below the baseline.

One's hope is the unusual shape of the last letter which might suggest that the whole word is somehow abbreviated. But I don't see why it should be specifically "probiren". Are there any examples of contemporary German words being abbreviated with such particular shape as word ending? if yes, that might give us a clue.

Woerterbuchnetz.de supports wildcard search, but entering "p*bre*" I was not able to locate anything of interest among various Pressbrets and Partikularabrechnungs.

Total mystery.

Interestingly, if the last letter be considered "y", then, given the certain interchangeability of "i" and "y", the last four letters make it "brei", which means something like gruel and is a German word still and would fit into the context of cooking or preparing some medicine. But then that leading letter is out of place.

Are there any searchable corpora of medieval German texts?

There is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I guess it's quite limited.

Just learned that Goethe has a piece called "Pater Brey".

Cappelli quotes "pbr" as a shortcut for "presbyter".

"Balderen presbyteren"? Haha, go catch them.

Haha. Such abbreviations are of coure dependant on the subject of the text. If you're on a forum about an annoying 15th century stack of parchment that's indecipherable right up to the marginalia, you can call it VM withour causing any communication problems.