The Voynich Ninja

(13-07-2025, 08:34 PM)magnesium Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I know this is slightly off-topic, but as we're poking around digitized Swiss archives: Koen, if you haven't seen it already, this manuscript is an extremely good reference for the handwriting of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

It is indeed very good, top 5 in our list. Just in time to be included for VMD

(14-07-2025, 04:58 AM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Pages with "In dem monat" and month names appear to start on 104r.

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As I thought, all month names are Latin. Aprilis, februarius...

Hello,

I have been checking the manuscript from this thread about the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and found several pages with months names that could be added to the document. Here the link to one of the multiple pages with months You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.



As I read:

janer Edit: (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the Rose, the same author wrote ganer)
fabrer
marts
abril
maig
juy' (there is a dot over the y, nowadays it is juny, "ny" is pronounced as the spanish ñ)
juliol
agost (twice)
satembr (the horizontal line may indicate the the final e is missing, so it should be satembre)
octubre 
noembr (again the horizontal line, this should be noembre)
desembr (again, the horizontal line may indicate the e is missing, desembre) Edit: (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the Rose, the same author wrote deembre)

I hope this helps a bit.

Regarding the months, I think there is something with the May and June months that could be worth knowing.

As a catalan ninja, I should tell you that May is nowaday written Maig, but it is pronounced a bit like match. Note that in the Voynich, we have may (with that y at the end).

For June, we have Juny, this is sort of the English J (a bit stronger) and "ny" is the same sound of the spanish ñ. In the MS we have sort of yong.

I have the theory that who wrote this, wrote the same sound of the ending of Maig and the same sound of the beginning of Juny with this kind of "y", and he added also "ny" at the end of Juny (as it is written nowadays). OK, now it is Juny and not Jony... but nobody is perfect.

So what I am saying is that maybe the months are in Catalan or in Occitan or a very near language.

(28-08-2025, 09:28 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding the months, I think there is something with the May and June months that could be worth knowing.

As a catalan ninja, I should tell you that May is nowaday written Maig, but it is pronounced a bit like match. Note that in the Voynich, we have may (with that y at the end).

For June, we have Juny, this is sort of the English J (a bit stronger) and "ny" is the same sound of the spanish ñ. In the MS we have sort of yong.

I have the theory that who wrote this, wrote the same sound of the ending of Maig and the same sound of the beginning of Juny with this kind of "y", and he added also "ny" at the end of Juny (as it is written nowadays). OK, now it is Juny and not Jony... but nobody is perfect.

So what I am saying is that maybe the months are in Catalan or in Occitan or a very near language.

I think catalan was suggested before. However I am not convinced by it very much, previous archival research conducted made me believe that the months are written in a local French dialect with heavy germanic influences. There's a few things that make me say this but the main one is Octembre.
To my knowledge Octembre is not found anywhere else but 1300-1500 northeastern France, and this seems to be corroborated by extensive archival research. Moreover, look at the catalan spelling of the months and compare it with the VMs: Jong instead of Juy, augst instead of Agost, iollet instead of juliol, decembre instead of desembre, Maig instead of maŷ. The ŷ is also extremely interesting since the circumflex accent is almost exclusive to the French language and it only appeared after 1505. Ŷ (not to be confused with a dotted y, which was used by french scribes since the 1300s) is also extremely rare and frankly i feel it should be the focus of an in depth investigation since it is even rarer than Octembre or other weird spellings.

(28-08-2025, 09:40 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There's a few things that make me say this but the main one is Octembre.

Well, this Octembre is a bit tricky:



The middle (e) could easily be an (o) and then it would be Octombre.. Or even, without the (m): why would that person put the straight line instead of an (m), if there is plenty of space for it?

Also, in my previous post here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you can see a page of a catalan manuscript where you can Find Juy' with circumflex y...

(28-08-2025, 10:00 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(28-08-2025, 09:40 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There's a few things that make me say this but the main one is Octembre.

Well, this Octembre is a bit tricky:



The middle (e) could easily be an (o) and then it would be Octombre.. Or even, without the (m): why would that person put the straight line instead of an (m), if there is plenty of space for it?

Also, in my previous post here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you can see a page of a catalan manuscript where you can Find Juy' with circumflex y...

The e and o are quite different as you can observe too, it could be octombre, or Octobre like most french language manuscripts of the time, but it isn't, it's Octembre. As to why they used the line, it was a very common abbreviation used extensively by French language scribes at the time, and stylistically coherent with the rest of the VM months. It was probably just the way the writer was used to write those months. The y you have shown is not circumflex, it has a tittle, it's an important distinction. Tittled ys are found all over european manuscripts. The circumflex accent is a creation of 16th century french grammarians. The y in the VM has a circumflex accent, and not a tittle, like yours or others that you can see in the Drive document shared by Koen.

(28-08-2025, 10:28 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The e and o are quite different as you can observe too, it could be octombre, or Octobre like most french language manuscripts of the time, but it isn't, it's Octembre.

It's OK with me

From the Swabian-Slavic perspective, all variations of the names of the months can be explained.   

When the calendars were inserted into the medieval Bibles, Psalters, and Hausbuchs written in vernacular languages, they were copied from Latin and most of the time used Latin names, or Latin names adopted for vernacular languages. Sometimes, the names of the months, and the names of the saints were spelled in full, and sometimes the Latin abbreviation was used for suffix -us.  To make things even more complicated, the letter g has similar shape as 9-like Latin abbreviation for -us.  In some Swabian manuscripts, the 9-like g was used for the sound j (Genner for Jenner). The Czech language had no sound g, therefore the g as 9-like letter was used for i and j.

The question of 9-like Voynich glyph - EVA y was never satisfactory explained, because it was decided by consensus that it stands only for the Latin abbreviations con- or -us. While that was the case in most medieval Latin manuscripts, in Czeck and in early Slovenian,  it was also used for i and j sounds, which were often written as y.  

[font=Segoe UI Emoji, sans-serif]March - Mars has no Latin suffix -ius. If written as Marc, it could be pronounced as Mark. There was some confusion about the pronunciation of c, which is probably the reason author used s instead of c or z. [/font]

[font='Segoe UI Emoji', sans-serif]The name of April in the Voynich Manuscript seems to have a subscripted h or e. It looks like on one page the German h was added, on another  the Italian c which was pronounced as a silent h. Because of the similarity of the shapes, it can also be read as e. Whether it is h, c/h or e, it indicates a slight pause in pronunciation. It looks like the author was indicating two different spelling conventions.[/font]
 
Before the letter j, which came into use in the mid-16th century, i or y was used for the sound j. The month of May is spelled maj in contemporary Slovenian. 


June  in contemporary Slovenian is spelled Junij. The long u was often written as o,  n is represented by two minims and the last letter looks like g. This is probably how some medieval imitators have transcribe it, which for contemporary readers does not make much sense. The reason for this is that the vernacular languages abandoned the 9-like letterform and used regular y. Slovenian replaced y with i, j, ij, ji, but it was still quite often used in the 16th century.

The letter y in Voynich July looks more like 9-like y, and again, o is used instead of u. The reading as Latin word jolleus does not make sense, however it is conceivable that the short e stands for semivowel.

In the name of August, the short u is not written. Dropped short vowels are characteristic for the Voynich text. That was also characteristic for the early Slovenian and Croatian. 
[font='Segoe UI Emoji', sans-serif]In the Voynich Manuscript, the g in Augst and g in June look the same, but they are pronounced differently, which indicates that the author did not follow the Czech spelling consistently. Instead he mixed Czech with Swabian, because he also used letter b for the sound p. These two letters were frequently mixed up in Swabian manuscripts (like Stainpock and Stainbock for Capricorn). The sound change from p to b  is less common, but it did happen in Slavic: Czech PAN (lord) became Bosnian word BAN (title of the ruler, Lord).[/font]

The spelling octembre for October was found in an medieval Carthusian document, which makes it more likely that the names of the months were added by a Carthusian monk. 
The Latin name octembre was also adapted in Macedonian and Russian,

Marco's idea to compare the spelling of all twelve months makes a lot of sense, however  we must not forget that there was a network of monasteries throughout Europe where books and calendars were copied, and that humanistic writers were also moving from place to place: Slovenian professors were teaching in Vienna or Paris, monks from France, Bohemia, Alsace were leaders in Slovenian monasteries.  

There could be several reasons for the spelling of the months:
- The names of the months were added later, perhaps a decade later, perhaps by the same author who was familiar with different languages, but judging by his handwriting, he might be old and senile, mixing different letters
- the vernacular languages were not standardized yet
- the transcription from one language to another was ambiguous, particularly because of the similarity of 9-like y and g letter forms.


Even Chat gpt can explain some of this confusion. I asked the following question;
In medieval Czech manuscript, the word Jesus was written as gesus or with 9-like y -9esus, yest was written as gest or 9est. Did 9 stand for g or for j?

I received the following answer:

? What Did the "9-like" Symbol Represent?
In this specific context, the "9-like" symbol at the start of words like 9esus or 9est did not stand for "g". Instead, it was a scribal abbreviation for "j" or "i", particularly in the Latinized or ecclesiastical spelling of names and verbs.

• Jesus in Latin is Iesus, and in medieval Czech, it was often rendered as Jezus or Gesus—the "g" being a phonetic stand-in for the "j" sound.
  
• The "9" symbol was used as a shorthand for the "j"/"i" sound at the beginning of words, especially in religious or formal texts.
  
• Similarly, jest (meaning "is") could appear as gest or 9est, with the "9" again standing in for "j".
  

? Why the Confusion?

• The looped descender of the "9-like" abbreviation resembled both the Latin abbreviation for "-us" and certain forms of "j" or "i" in Gothic script.
  
• In Bohemian and Moravian manuscripts, scribes often used regional conventions that blurred the line between abbreviation and phonetic spelling.
  
• The lack of standardized orthography meant that "j", "i", and even "g" were sometimes used interchangeably depending on the scribe’s training and the manuscript’s purpose.
  

?️ So, Final Answer?
In the examples you gave—9esus and 9est—the "9" stood for "j", not "g". It was a visual abbreviation for the initial "j" sound, especially in religious or Latin-influenced Czech texts.