The Voynich Ninja

I am not in a hurry to provide a 'solution'. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

(30-04-2025, 04:16 PM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The suprascript letter 'm' in the cipher manuscript is written on a larger area than the regular tiny suprascript and this explain the differences.

Or it is a completely different symbol, which would also explain the difference.

(30-04-2025, 04:16 PM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Here the attempt is not to interpret various Voynichese symbols as Latin letters. The effort is to investigate why two paragraphs in the very first folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. start with Latin letters (being prefixes of the two initial vords?) and how this could help identifying some cipher symbols as distinct letters, ligatures or abbreviations.

There are literally hundreds of characters on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. what resemble Latin letters. p and f do resemble embellished Latin P, e is indistinguishable from Latin c, o a and i look quite similar to their Latin counterparts. l looks exactly like contemporary XV century number 4. q d y won't look out of place in some types of medieval writing. r and s can be interpreted as some Latin letters. And it's possible to explain the difference in how they look by the tiny area that they take on the page, since the letters are quite small.

I'm not saying your idea is necessarily wrong. I simply don't see enough justification to conclude that it's very likely Beneventan, based just on the similarity of a few scattered shapes. If you find more, maybe it will look more convincing.

(30-04-2025, 01:36 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd agree with you if it weren't for the fact that qualifying for the list effectively means death in terms of Voynich research.  Solvers fall into the big hole and they don't climb back out again.  They are irrevocably wedded to their conclusions and don't change their minds, so they have closed the door to finding the actual solution (assuming one exists).  It's a giant, massive trap that people should be warned about again and again.

I don't think discouraging people from publishing their complete solutions helps Voynich research either. It's quite possible that among the solutions already on the list there are a few that got some of the details right. Who knows. And someone looking through them might have an aha moment. If people stop proposing solutions out of fear of getting on the list, some of their insights will likely left unsaid. I think I have seen examples where a completely unrealistic solution attempt included a few unexpected and intriguing observations. The very necessity to publish a complete piece of a solution as opposed to some rambling remarks here and there, may make the author think a bit deeper.

(30-04-2025, 05:34 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Or it is a completely different symbol, which would also explain the difference.
...

Do you have an alternative specific symbol in mind?
Please provide evidence for comparison with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

(01-05-2025, 02:41 AM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have an alternative specific symbol in mind?
Please provide evidence for comparison with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

I don't think this is a good polemical device. The fact that I have no working hypothesis for these symbols doesn't mean any other hypothesis is more plausible.

But there is definitely no shortage of possible symbols to suggest. I've just opened the list of various You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the glyph for Spiritus Vini does look somewhat similar. It's not a perfect match, but essentially it is a V/S combination depicting a vial with some vapor rising from it, so the embellished version of this symbol might look like in the VMS. I see no reason to distort a vertical 'm' just because it's larger, but making vapor look more vapory for aesthetic reasons - why not? It took me 5 minutes to find this parallel and I won't be surprised if after spending a few days I could find a more similar medieval rendition, but I won't be doing this, because I won't invest my time in an attempt based on visual similarity of a few elements, not after the manuscript has been known to the public, including professional medievalists and paleographers, for so many years. I'm not suggesting these attempts are pointless in general, but my skills are more in the numerical data analysis, so that's what I'm spending my time on.

[attachment=10502]

Also, as far as I understand, your interpretation suggests splitting the upper right You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. glyph into three parts, while it almost certainly is made of two parts, judging by the multispectral images.

[attachment=10503]

None of the examples shown in post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are even close to the Beneventan letters in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . 

First, the letters 'V' or 'U' must have a horizontal support underneath with sharp endings. Second, the suprascipt must resemble a sideways 'm' or Arabic numeral '3' but not the letter 'S'.

Concerning the red letters on the right-hand side of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , I explicitly stated that they can be estimated with less certainty (because parts of the letters are concealed or erased). Several options could be explored and an update will be provided when similar existing writings are found (now that we know with more certainty where to search for more examples).

(01-05-2025, 10:18 AM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.None of the examples shown in post You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are even close to the Beneventan letters in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . 

First, the letters 'V' or 'U' must have a horizontal support underneath with sharp endings. Second, the suprascipt must resemble a sideways 'm' or Arabic numeral '3' but not the letter 'S'.

This is subjective. You say the horizontal support is more important, I say the wavy line is not at all like Arabic 3 or sideways 'm', but does look like vapor coming out of a vial. This exactly shows my point: your interpretation is just as unconvincing to me, as mine is unconvincing to you. Maybe one is true, the other is not, maybe both are false. I don't think there is enough evidence for choosing either of them.

(01-05-2025, 10:18 AM)Dobri Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Concerning the red letters on the right-hand side of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , I explicitly stated that they can be estimated with less certainty (because parts of the letters are concealed or erased). Several options could be explored and an update will be provided when similar existing writings are found.

If we discard the upper right glyph for now, what do we have left? Two shapes only? Quite different from each other, but both are supposed to be U/V?

Just in case, I'm attaching all three glyphs and also a few somewhat similar small glyphs from the right column of characters on the same folio, this is the clearest version I could find. (All from the same run of a linear regression model, cropped from the same resulting image.)

[attachment=10505]

A characteristic property of the Beneventan script is that the letters in a word are interconnected by lines. Therefore, the horizontal support underneath 'V' and 'U' is the line which indicates that the letter is a part of a word and is not stand-alone.

If eventually the red Beneventan letters on the right-hand side of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are 'gc' and represent an abbreviation,
then 'gc' could possibly stand for 'graecum' (Greek).