The Voynich Ninja

(05-06-2025, 08:59 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is really strange that he was so adamant on retracing the breasts. The question is - did he retrace or add them? There are some original nyphs with only one breast that is in the outline.

It's possible that the nymphs were done in two passes. One focuses on the outline of the figures, then the second pass adds in missing details or clarifies some important lines. 
In some sections, the first pass still does all the work. Here, the artist clearly takes their time. When it becomes clear that the artist does not have the time to churn out 500 nymphs at this pace though, there is a progression towards a quicker first pass and an equally quick and consistent touch-up.

It's probably about time that I split this thread...

(06-06-2025, 08:44 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But in fact there are examples where the "original" strokes are visible under the "new" darker strokes. Here are some examples (all from the Sagittarius page, with coordinates relative to the Beinecke "full jpeg" scan):

Maybe they are there, but I can't see any original faint strokes in these examples. Especially if we compare it with a very obvious retracing in Bluetoes101 example.

If there are any good examples of these from f1r, f8r, f17r, f26r, f47r, f70v1, f71r, f93r, f102v1, f116v, then we can try checking these on the multispectral images provided by Beinecke.

(06-06-2025, 08:27 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This word that shows clear obvious retracing/correction is the first word of this block of text. And it is very obviously retraced/touched up. Nowhere else in this block I can see anything similar.

There is reason to believe that because of the large number of errors in the first sentence, the author was suspended from working on the cipher. Further writing was done by another author who had his own ink (dark).

(06-06-2025, 08:27 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The  word that shows clear obvious retracing/correction is the first word of this block of text. And it is very obviously retraced/touched up. Nowhere else in this block I can see anything similar. [...]

So, I still think the most likely explanation here is some problem with the writing utensil or ink that made the first word very faint and the scribe decided to fix this immediately.

Looking at the whole page (not just the text) should give a different perspective.

The figures show clear signs of retracing, and in a pattern similar to that seen in the Zodiac pages.  Namely, emphasis on hair and body outline of the nymphs, and addition of the characteristic "lobed shower-caps" on the two nymphs on the left margin.  The retouching is most visible on the "satyr" and nymph at the upper right corner -- whose original outlines are considerably faded, whereas the retraced parts show no sign of fading.  It seems clear those darker strokes are either retracing faded original outlines, or adding spurious details like the showercaps.

On the text, I see three things

1. "normal" strokes with ink that gradually varies in color from dark yellowish brown to light yellowish brown, then suddenly back to dark when the pen is re-loaded with ink, as in the second qotal on line 3
   
   
2. retracings by the Scribe him/herself going back a few words and correcting or reinforcing a few glyphs, like the first "l" and "o" on line 2, and second  "d" on lines 5 and 6;  
   
   
3. very rare retracings by the Retracer.
   

Distinguishing between (2) and (3) is hard because the original text on this page is not faded, except on the row of labels at the top, and uses a relatively dark (but still yellowish) ink.  For this reason, presumably, the Retracer saw no need to retouch the text.  However, on that same word that you mention, I would say that the darker strokes (which are visibly retraced over lighter strokes) are the work of the Retracer, not of the original Scribe.  

By coincidence, that word is right next to a nymph that clearly had her outline retraced in part (from the cheek down to the groin at left, from the armpit to the waist at right), random wisps drawn over her hair, and a "lobed showercap" added. 

Another possible example of (3) are the words qok and qokan, 4 and 5 lines down from that word. It seems that there is a defect on the vellum at that spot that interfered with the writing.  On the first word, note how the bottom half of the "o" and the top loop of the "k" are in "normal" ink, and the latter is rather faint.  As I see it, the Retracer (not the original Scribe) clumsily tried to enhance those glyphs.  Ditto for the second word, on the next line, where the original plume of the "n" was no longer visible, and the Retracer provided a misshaped one, straight up with a round corner at the bottom.  The ink in both corrections is visibly darker than the darkest parts of the original writing, just around those words.

There is also a vertical stroke above the "o" of the first word, also in the very dark Retracer ink.  It may be an accident, but may also be some noise that the Retracer mistook for a faded vertical plume, and decided to "enhance" it -- again revealing his/her ignorance of the Voynichese alphabet.

All the best, --jorge

(06-06-2025, 10:11 AM)Hider Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is reason to believe that because of the large number of errors in the first sentence, the author was suspended from working on the cipher. Further writing was done by another author who had his own ink (dark).

Could you give specific reasons for this interpretation? If we are still talking about torolShsdy, this is not the way I see it, this "correction" didn't really correct anything, but it appears to faithfully retrace all letters in darker ink. The only thing I'm not sure about is the plume of s and only because the original line is not visible there. So, to me this looks like a fix to some technical issue that made the first word faint.

(05-06-2025, 08:59 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is there an assumption why the last zodiac pages are so faded? Was the ink weak from the beginning? Are these pages older or were they subjected to sunlight for long periods (on top)?

My guess is that, for several years after it was written, the VMs was kept as a stack of separate quires; each quire being either unbound, or bound all by itself, as a booklet.   

In the Zodiac section, each bifolio presumably was a quire by itself, as it is now.  In that case, when folio f70 was folded in, Aries Dark (f70v1) was the last page of quire 10; Aries Light (f71r) was the first page of quire 11; when folio f72 was folded, Libra (f72v1) was the last page of quire 11; and Scorpio (f73r) was the first page of quire 12.  The last page of quire 12 would have been on folio f74, which is missing (and appears to have been cut off after the book was bound; it may be the sample that Georg Baresh sent to Athanasius Kircher).

So, if the quires were kept unbounded, those pages above would have suffered more from rubbing and exposure to sunlight than the pages inside the quires.  That may explain why some Zodiac pages are more faded than, say, the Biology pages.

All the best, --jorge

(06-06-2025, 10:24 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-06-2025, 10:11 AM)Hider Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is reason to believe that because of the large number of errors in the first sentence, the author was suspended from working on the cipher. Further writing was done by another author who had his own ink (dark).

Could you give specific reasons for this interpretation?

I view each glyph as a ligature consisting of several encrypted symbols (letters).

(06-06-2025, 09:11 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 
I can't see any original faint strokes in these examples.

Sorry, how come? In the last three examples, the original (valid) glyphs can be seen under the (invalid) retraced ones.  They are very faint (and that would  explain why they were retraced), but are definitely there.

In each of the first two examples, the original trace cannot be seen under the darker stroke, but it is there before and after it.   Whether the original had a gap there or not, it it is obvious that the dark stroke was penned only after the whole nymph was outlined.

(06-06-2025, 08:44 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
I would say that the Retracer was very careful when retracing the labels, although he/she apparently did not know the alphabet. He was less careful when retouching the figures, and had fun adding details like the "showercaps", crowns, and right breasts.  Perhaps because he guessed that (as in European astrological diagrams of the time) the drawings were only ornamentation, and the only important parts were the labels?

All the best, --jorge

These following are all vords of "sagittarius" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. inner ring, I tried not to exceed the zoom here to keep things recognizable:



To me, there is nothing of any older/faded writing underneath these thin retracing lines.
Yes, there are several other positions were the originals can be seen under black ink letters, but there are also further positions were nothing is visible that could have been there "before" the guy with the better ink inserted some vords.

Don't get me wrong: I am personally rather convinced that the most "improvements", tunings, the months' names, funny animals, latin-alphabeted scribbles and all pagenumbers were added much later without any understanding of the script itself by some foreigners.
But for a solid assessment it is not possible to leave out those details which do not quite fit to one theory or the other.
So if there was no retracing or re-lining of previous vords, the dark-ink vocabulary might have been inserted by another during VMS production already, but as well inserted (much) later into blank places which were not used in the original writing.

Best regards,

S. Wirtz

(06-06-2025, 01:51 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sorry, how come? In the last three examples, the original (valid) glyphs can be seen under the (invalid) retraced ones.  They are very faint (and that would  explain why they were retraced), but are definitely there.

In each of the first two examples, the original trace cannot be seen under the darker stroke, but it is there before and after it.   Whether the original had a gap there or not, it it is obvious that the dark stroke was penned only after the whole nymph was outlined.

Unfortunately I still can't see anything definite. In the image below the top is a screenshot from your post, the bottom are (what I think) the corresponding parts from the TIFF, with the curves correction set to try boosting faint lines. I tried not to cut any blacks or whites, set the black to the darkest part and white to the brightest pixel and then use gamma to make it darker.

[attachment=10779]

I can see that the tip of the weird e glyph in y keeody wasn't very visible and that the plumes of r and n were very faint, but it still looks like a single character written once and not a retracing, but that's about it. Could you maybe mark on these images the specific lines that you see? There appears to be some kind of barely noticeable faint outlines around all dark strokes, but these are very uniform in width, so probably it's due to minor chromatic aberration or post-processing effects.