The Voynich Ninja

As the info was missing, VENEZIA, Biblioteca nazionale Marciana, Fr. Z. 2 (=223) was created 1390-1399
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Quote:a manuscript that is linguistically pure Picard North-French, but materially and historically 100% North-Italian courtly art, commissioned to satisfy the aristocratic tastes of the Gonzaga family.

Very odd. Was Picard even understood in Northern Italy? I don't think the Gonzagas had any French possessions around 1400, only in the 16th century. Were Franco-Flemish works fashionable or was it another one of those prestige collectible books that were not meant to be read anyway? Too bad nothing about the alleged author Pozzolino da Basilea appears to be known.

(02-06-2026, 12:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Very promising!, but of course now what about the 'b' in Aberil?
I once read that this could have been used in Luxemburg (which was quite a bit larger then), but I have not seen that appearing in discussions here.

The "b" in Aberil is more easily found in German sources, sometimes paired with "augst". I wonder, and this is just me speculating, if the MHG tendency to devoice b > p may be at play here. Blut, Brot, Bock turn into Plut, Prot, Pock. And a certain Diebold/Diepold can't decide on how to spell his name. 

If so, spelling "aberil" may be a form of hypercorrection: the writer knows or senses that he tends to change b > p in his dialect, so he unnecessarily "corrects" aperil to aberil. This would be along the lines of what happened to "octembre", which Jules Feller also describes as an unnecessary alteration stemming from lack of familiarity with the standard form.

That said, for me the question remains open on whether this was someone striving to write French or simply someone writing the month names as they understood them in their own dialect. With what we learned recently, and taking into account the unattested mess that the whole series is, the hypercorrection angle is certainly growing on me.

If the month name writer was attempting to write in a language they didn't fully master, would the implication be that they weren't writing for themselves?

Possibly but not necessarily. It depends on why the month names were written in 'plaintext' at all and whether the author understood what was going on in the VM. We don't know.
It may very well have been a fashion. My Upper Bavarian grandparents used French phrases in their conversations though they could not speak French at all. It was a fashionable thing that made you look educated and international, like using anglicisms nowadays. Needless to say, many French words were spelled terribly wrong when written by a German. But that was fine in a private context, the reader still knew what was meant.

I still wonder about the Picard - Northern Italy connection. It shows that imagery and language are not necessarily connected. Things were way more international even in the 14th century, than we imagine.

Not to distract from the other topic of conversation, but I was just looking at this and thought it may be of some interest.

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Cimbrian, Ladin, Mòcheno: Getting to know 3 peoples, by Maurizio Fugatti - President of the Autonomous Province of Trento

Trento (Alpine region - Northern Italy). Location of "Buonconsiglio Castle Museum" (Merlons map).

The other months would not match up, but its a use of "b" in "April" in a language which pre-dates the VMS and survives today (I don't know what variations it went through, if any.. yet). 


Oberel
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Abrèl
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[attachment=15895]

The Wiktionary is actually interesting there: the Cimbrian and Mocheno forms derive from OHG/MHG: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Middle High German
Alternative forms
abrille, aprille, aberell

Those German dialects in Italy would be a great lead, if they explained more than Aberil. But I don't see how we can manage the other months without some French component.

The Mòcheno and Cimbrian speaking peoples left southern Germany and travelled to the alps of northern Italy to mine, in 13-14C. 
If aberelle, abrille, aprille, aberell become Abrèl and Oberel for the people who went to Trento, maybe some other people hooked a west, went to France ended up with Aberil, the "curse of the stubborn b".

.. that actually means something different in English  

Anyway.. I have no clue. Seems like it could possibly be a thing.

I did some digging on Gallica for octembre post 1500 to see if we can get any info on how long its usage spanned. 
A decently sized amount were from the 1200s, the majority were from the 1300s, and a great many were from the 1400s, roughly as expected from our current results. Post 1500, I found 2 mentions of octembre in 1507 (2nd hand),  one from 1589 (2nd hand), one from 1641 (2nd hand). Then, kinda weirdly, the next time that you see octembre is a flurry of them in newspapers between 1889 and 1940. I don't know what to make of that.

Sources: 
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Given the interest in "De re Militari" in another thread, I thought it would be worth mentioning an entry that contains the old french translation of the text with an incomplete yet somewhat ineresting sequence.

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1340AD (copied from late 13thC writer "Jean de Meung", who was supposedly the one to translate it from latin)

mars, _ , may*, ioing, _ , _ , septēbre, octembre, nouēbre, _

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These contemporaneous manuscripts seem to have almost the exact style of writing for the months, and may have been copies of eachother.

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1401-1425
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1410-1420

I only realised this where the J in each jullet joins up exactly the same in both and looks like a Y in both. This raises the question of whether many of these entries are truly representative of the scribe's usage, or if scribes commonly copied templates without changing them. This could apply to the 'o' in joing and the 'em" in octembre as well. 

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(02-06-2026, 09:35 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This would be along the lines of what happened to "octembre", which Jules Feller also describes as an unnecessary alteration stemming from lack of familiarity with the standard form.

Does Feller's explanation make sense? If there is a lack of familiarity with the standard spelling form, why would someone write "embre" for something that sounds like "obre"? Not to mention that the many entries (and the VMS itself) have octēbre, not octembre. If a scribe was educated enough to understand and use contractions, they were surely educated enough to have heard Octobre or October.

Actually, now that I think about it, surely the professional writers creating these expensive, luxurious books of hours were amongst some of the most highly educated and highly trained people in europe?

I honestly believe that octembre was a legitimate and commonly spoken variant, if not the most common at some stage. The alternative is that all of these examples using "octembre" in various contexts (many from important and educated people) were all unfamiliar with the standard form, which seems unlikely. 

This You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from 1855 says of Octobre: "This month, called octembre in the manuscripts of the 14th century, was the eighth month of the martial year; despite its name, it's the 10th month of ours"

Feller's explanation does make sense when looking at the linguistic mechanisms in isolation. What he describes is called hypercorrection, which often happens when speakers of a less prestigious dialect try to adapt to a norm they don't fully master. Something like octembre is exactly what hypercorrection does: imagining that rules in the target language apply more broadly than they actually do. So the speaker might think subconsciously "I say octobre, but that's probably wrong because all the other months are with embre, so octembre must be the correct form". This is a nice and clean example of hypercorrection, leading to novel words through the unnecessary application of rules.

That said, I don't know if this is actually the correct explanation. It's linguistically sound, but it might just as well be as you say: that octembre was simply the pronunciation in certain dialects. I think this would really only work if this dialect pronounces "o" rather nasally, even without a nasal consonant around.

Anything else would be hypercorrection because of the "-embre" sequence. 

Those newspapers are interesting in their timing. Since the form is still rare (given the vast corpus available) and I don't see any indications that they are writing in a dialect, I think the only possible explanation is that the typesetter occasionally made this mistake. 

Generally, I do feel like the endings of French septembre - octobre sound more alike than the same pair in any other language I'm familiar with.

How are you finding these, by the way? Does BNF have OCR for its manuscripts as well?

(04-06-2026, 03:12 PM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Then, kinda weirdly, the next time that you see octembre is a flurry of them in newspapers between 1889 and 1940. I don't know what to make of that.

While probably meaningless, at least in the context of the VMS, these are curious in their own way. I would assume that c. 1900 hits are mostly misprints, particularly since several of them have a line break in the word where the typesetter might have thought of september/november. The reason that they are mostly in the late 19th century to 1940 era is probably simply due to the number newspapers etc available which might contain errors. This is the heyday of print culture in Western Europe and long enough ago in terms of copyright for the bnf to put them online. Additionally, the way typesetting worked in that period might have played a role.

(04-06-2026, 07:09 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How are you finding these, by the way? Does BNF have OCR for its manuscripts as well?

Searching terms on Gallica within quotation marks does provide OCR results, yes. However, the vast majority of the available OCR content is from printed material; most of the older manuscripts have no OCR unfortunately. I assume they only thought it worthwhile to scan the material with clear lettering. 

As for the hypercorrection, there might be overlaps here. If enough people overcorrected, say, at the beginning of the 14th century, perhaps that overcorrection eventually became so common that it became an accepted written and spoken variant for a time. So what we're saying might be compatible.

And yes, I assume that the later octembres were indeed typesetting mistakes. Most are oc- *linebreak* -tembre, which is probably telling.