The Voynich Ninja

@ Koen

Okay, you're right. I thought it had something to do with smallpox. Then I'll have to rethink 116.

(17-12-2025, 06:30 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Then I'll have to rethink 116.

I now believe that trying to read f116v is a pure waste of time.  Nuff said.

All the best, --stolfi

I think I managed to un-puzzle myself.. 

So the modern English equivalent would be "So help me" or "I swear", we just leave off "god" and "to god". "I swear, if you make that noise again I'll strangle you!".
In your example, The Church didn't like this frivolous "oath taking" in gods name, so people made up words based on other words as a loophole (rather than just leave off "god"). The guy you quote says "well now you are swearing on god, AND making up names of non-existent things, AND the oath is a lie because non-existent things can't hold you to account!.. a goat can't hold anyone to account!" 

So the quoted guy is saying "it still counts!", but other people are using it in a frivolous way - which was the issue. 
In the context of "pox leber" in the VMS then, it may actually be along the lines of "So help me, I'm done with this stupid book" rather than "By gods name (swear an oath)"?

It's probably obvious to others, I may have just confused myself

More or less, but Ebendorfer's sermon speaks of perjury. So what he is raging against is people swearing real oaths by "golly's blood" and then not keeping their promise. So a modern day equivalent would be "I swear on everything I hold dear".

I wonder if we can find other words people used other than "pox", if we could then finding examples would probably become exponentially easier

The thing with pox is that it's something uncivilized people say, so we encounter it in this sermon for the priest to condemn it. That's the kind of attestation you can hope for such a mainly spoken phenomenon, not actual active uses.

What this fragment definitely does for us, is provide our earliest, undeniable evidence of not only the sound, but also the spelling "pox" being understood as the animal. This is very clear in Marco's updated transcription.

I do think a minced oath fits better than a cooking recipe. It also fits the overall picture of a rather crude and provincial background for the VM rather than the work of a highly educated genius of noble origin. The author obviously had received some form of education but it may have been more practical than humanistic. This in turn would explain the apparent misinterpretations of source materials we see in several places.

Well, my reading for that first line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. now is qolkedam qoChey qoCThy. Or any of a thousand vaguely similar readings.  

But I also believe in Retracers and Chinese Dictators and Frankenstein plants and paper drafts and ocher ink, so never mind.

All the best, --stolfi

I like this "minced oath" theory.

You had a lot of luck finding it. Finding some colloquial, long forgotten folk saying in a Latin book had little chance to succeed. Sure, now we can see it survived in some forms:
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But without that referrence connecting the dots could be impossible.

It all makes sense to me. There was a medieval tradition of writing some signature or something personal in the last page. See: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

So all this text would be some magical incantation after writing the book, probably for good luck. Possibly mixing real words and magic words like "hocus pocus" or "abra cadabra".
"Maria" which appears laters makes sense as well. Yes, it is this Maria, mother of Jesus and the scribe is probably asking her for help among others. And he uses crosses to separate parts of the magical formula like it was in tradition.

By the way, I sense something shady about him like others   A pious man would just thank or ask directly God for help in perfect Latin and not talk in some slang used by boors and ruffians. Some forger or charlatan???

If this writing turns out to be "Voynichese", I will eat everyone on the forums shoes.. you can hold me to it!