Several symbols from the Syrian manuscript are similar or identical to letters from various alphabets. The plant cipher looks somehow like the Ogham script from Ireland. It's hard to tell if the parallels are entirety coincidental...
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Quote:The tradition according to which the name of the letters of the Ogham alphabet comes from names of trees originated in this document (The Book of Ballymote. Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS. 23 p 12)
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If we turned this 90' to horizontal, ascenders and descenders would become our left and right branches.
So, "takey" and "folcg" would be the same once deciphered. It would waste a lot of paper.. but would make a pretty cool alphabet.
The example you show seems to have an example of this with ascending IIII being "c" and descending IIII being "r".
Don't mean to suggest this is what the VM text is doing, just interesting to think about I guess.
I worked on page 218 of the pdf document at You are not allowed to view links.
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Attached is OCR of the main Arabic text (excluding the small rotated section on the right). I corrected the OCR on the basis of an interpretation by an Arabic-speaking friend, who is a professional translator. He characterises the main Arabic text as an argument between two Arab linguists.
The OCR has 38 words, 158 characters excluding spaces, and 191 characters including spaces. The seven lines written in an apparent code have about 150 symbols; so they appear to represent a 1-to-1 encoding of the main Arabic text excluding spaces.
The English text below is my synthesis of Google Translate and my friend's interpretation.
In the last line, some Arabic words are not yet identified. The reference to
lam alif means the Arabic letter which combines
lam and
alif.
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Someone on reddit commented (snipped from the full thing) "I had a friend read it in Arabic, it's kind of about an assistant and his 'master' asking him to decode each character set or something" what you found seems to follow this, a master setting the "puzzle" and the student working tirelessly over it and exclaiming some of it was misspelled which caused them unnecessary problems etc.
I guess one interesting point is that presumably these glyphs were not plucked from thin-air. The left side of "EVA: t" is really a compelling match. Obviously with a million examples random matches happen, but even so, it makes you wonder.