The Voynich Ninja

If someone wants to catalogue all known instances of the 4o character in 14th and 15th century ciphers then they could go through the presentation that I shared which provided a bibliography of surviving ciphers.

(03-03-2025, 10:31 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This document is one of the many documents I photographed on my recent visit to Milan. It contains the 4o character. There are so many other examples of ciphers with this character being used that I haven't catalogued or listed them all. I suppose this is an exercise that could be undertaken.

That's very interesting. Do you know if this has been deciphered, or how the 4o-symbol is used in other ciphers?

(03-03-2025, 11:30 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(03-03-2025, 10:31 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This document is one of the many documents I photographed on my recent visit to Milan. It contains the 4o character. There are so many other examples of ciphers with this character being used that I haven't catalogued or listed them all. I suppose this is an exercise that could be undertaken.

That's very interesting. Do you know if this has been deciphered, or how the 4o-symbol is used in other ciphers?

I took a number of photos of ciphers as well as other documents whilst in Milan. It will take me some time to process them all. I don't know that this cipher has been deciphered, although I will check at some point, otherwise I will have to decipher it myself.
Again, it would be an exercise for someone to record in each instance how the 4o symbol has been used in each cipher and which state it is used by and the date of the cipher. Someone could calculate the proportion of surviving ciphers from a given state and period that contain the 4o symbol.
To be honest though, I am equally or sometimes more interested in the appearance of other Voynichese symbols in ciphers such as the 4P (EVA-t), which also occurs though less often.

A more ambitious project would be to look at every Voynichese symbol even the rare ones, just because they are rare doesn't make them less relevant for these purposes, and in which surviving ciphers they occur that would mean enciphered letters, cipher ledgers and manuscripts with ciphers in them. That could give one a map of commonality. I have plenty to follow up from my Milan trip so I can't put the time into this at the moment.

EVA-h which I tend to call IP or possibly "1P" is quite common in ciphers. What I haven't yet seen is a standard Voynichese benched-gallows in a cipher, although I mentioned elsewhere on Ninja a symbol which comes quite close.

(03-03-2025, 09:36 PM)zachary.kaelan Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The symbol resembling '4' has usage that varies wildly throughout the manuscript. The herbal section uses it sparingly, the bathing section uses it a massive amount, the astro/cosmo sections barely use it, and the zodiac section uses it almost never.

Perhaps it helps to visualise use of qo as a word prefix by looking at its frequency by quire, illustration type, hand and cluster. The quire 1 and herbal pages have it least. Hand 1 doesn't like it generally. It seems to have been a favourite of hand 2 when writing the bio pages ( quire 13 ). Yet curiously hand 2 chose to use qo sparingly when writing the herbal pages, despite the fact that hand 2 always wrote in the 'B' language.


But there is another prefix that has even greater variance, cho. Have a look at the frequencies by cluster. It is used by 10% of words in the herbal pages by hand 1, but only by 2% in the herbal pages by hand 2, and 0.2% in quire 13.

The number of occurrences of the symbol q followed by another symbol (or a short space and another symbol) is shown in the first attached image.

In most cases, the symbol q starts a new word token (it is preceded by a space or starts a word token in a new row).

There is a small number of exceptions when the symbol q is preceded by another symbol (or another symbol and a short space) as shown in the second attached image. 
Occasionally, said preceding symbol is a part of a longer prefix.

When counting the number of occurrences of vords or distinct symbol combinations, fairly often the number is divisible by 5 or 10.

It cannot be stated conclusively because some folios are missing, but for relatively small counts (for vords or distinct symbol combinations with a lower probability to occur in the missing folios), an observed divisibility by 5 or 10 could possibly hint to hidden combinatorics or abacus involvement in the encoding process.

For roughly a quarter of the symbol sequences starting with qo, the number of occurrences of distinct symbol sequences is divisible by 5 or 10 as shown in the attached table.

There are 50 occurrences with qo shown as a distinct vord (surrounded by spaces or at the beginning of a new line followed by a space).
Here cases with short spaces are not counted.

Also, there are 8 occurrences with qo qo as shown in the attached image.