The Voynich Ninja

I do not like to post anything in which I'm not sure of, or which, in my estimation, has low degree of likelihood, and I usually abstain from such publications. This is one of the cases when I stray from this practice, mostly because of that while the readings referred to hereinafter may prove wrong, still the idea which might be built on top of them may deserve attention independently of the readings' validity.

So I warned you that the below considerations are highly speculative.

There are some words in the VMS marginalia which may be interpreted as Mediterranean geographical names.

First, as I You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a year ago, the much disputed "anchiton vs michiton" of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. may be neither of those, but rather “Nichiton” (supposing somewhat “ornate” ascender of the leading letter). “Nichiton” was the historic name of Frangokastello, as Flaminio Cornelio suggests in his book “Creta Sacra”, - a Venetian castle (or rather fort) built in late 14th century when Crete was under Venetians' rule.

Next, "Abia" (found in the second line of the "spell" in f116v) sounds the same as the name of an ancient town on the southern coast of Greece. Now it's just a village, but on the verge of the 15th century it was also under Venetians' rule, and they built a castle named Mantineia there.

The enigmatic "mallier" of f17v, which resists interpretations as a single word not split in two, may relate to the name of Mallia, or Malia, an ancient town in Crete dating back to the Minoan era. Specifically, it may be interpreted as "the inhabitant of Mallia".

I don't see any immediate problem with these readings. Looking at these marginalia again though, I can't help but noticing the "chi" part in the first word bears some similarities to a benched gallow. The gallow looks different, but the bench is there. The following "t" again resembles a bench onset.

(28-03-2016, 05:22 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't see any immediate problem with these readings. Looking at these marginalia again though, I can't help but noticing the "chi" part in the first word bears some similarities to a benched gallow. The gallow looks different, but the bench is there. The following "t" again resembles a bench onset.

The bench char was a very common ligature in the middle ages, in several languages, but particularly in Latin and German. It stood variously for cr ci tr ti cc tc rc rt and others.

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(28-03-2016, 04:33 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Next, "Abia" (found in the second line of the "spell" in f116v) sounds the same as the name of an ancient town on the southern coast of Greece. Now it's just a village, but on the verge of the 15th century it was also under Venetians' rule, and they built a castle named Mantineia there.

...

It might be abia. It could be Aka.

It doesn't seem anything like a k to us but at that time, a k was sometimes created by writing an h-shape (without descender) and then adding legs on the right of the loop, and sometimes the legs didn't always touch the baseline the way we do it now, sometimes they were higher up, about midline. There was significant variability in how k letters were written, moreso than most of the other letters.

I think it's more likely it's ahia...

If you look very closely at the "b", the bottom doesn't loop. In the other b letters, the line descends and loops back up. This one doesn't do that—both stems go fairly straight down from the top. It doesn't curve up or loop across to fill the bottom gap. It might be aka (with one of those strange medieval k letters) or ahia.



The text is Gothic Cursive. The only letter that isn't written in typical Gothic Cursive is the figure-8. In Gothic Cursive the dee or ess were not written that way. The "d" would loop around and sometimes almost look like a figure-8, but it was not intended to create an "8" shape, it was meant to be slightly off, to distinguish the "d" from an 8. Same with the ess. If it was at the end of the line, it would sometimes almost look like an 8 but not quite, if it did, it was a slip of the pen, not the way the scribe usually wrote it, it was also just slightly different from an 8.