The Voynich Ninja

In his presentation at the Voynich Zoom on March 11, Volkhard Huth proposed reading part of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as "so nim gâs mich," interpreting "gâs" as an East Central German dialectal form of "ganz" (wholly, completely), yielding "so nimm mich ganz."

I was able to verify this reading using the Reference Corpus of Middle High German / Early New High German (Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch) hosted at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The corpus contains three instances of "gâs" used as an adverb meaning "ganz":

1. "den vrouwin Und îlte des gâs zouwin"
2. "den hiez er bindin Und bat im gâs ir uindin"
3. "Sie azin gâs un̄ quamin"

[attachment=14622]

Notably, all three instances are spelled with a long-s in word-final position.

In each case, "gâs" functions as the adverb "ganz" (wholly, entirely, completely). All three instances come from the same text, classified as "omd" — ostmitteldeutsch (East Central German). This is the dialect region that includes Thuringia, Saxony, and the area around Prague and Vienna. The corpus evidence shows that "gâs" with word-final long-s is attested. This means "gâs mich" can be read as two separate words — the adverb "gâs" (ganz, wholly) and the pronoun "mich" (me) — yielding "so nim gâs mich": "so take me wholly."

The form "gâs" for "ganz" is therefore attested in medieval East Central German — the dialect region consistent with Huth's proposed geographical origin of the manuscript.

Sources:
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This really interested me.  I looked up gas from the annotations and could not find it.  Are you sure gas is a Middle High German word?

Torsten, I did find this in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Make sure for each word you go back to the start of the dictionary.  mam is mnam, but other sources in there produce mam for mnam. gab is listed  gab(be n

bo mam gab mach

Together money lies to the soul

So mam gab mach

so money lies to the soul

[attachment=14624]


I really gave it a look for gas in the annotations but I did not find a perfect spelling.

Hm, I haven't watched the presentation but this solves the problem of the creative goat milk spelling. However the language of your examples is truly ancient. Middle High German. That's 12th, 13th century, not 15th. And in one of the examples, gas is gahes / gach (fast, swiftly), not ganz. Both are viable readings for gas, I think we already had this discussion. Considering the overall weirdness of marginalia texts it's another one of countless interpretations.

I cannot contribute to this, but I am just curious. Is the caret above the "a" indicating length, or a lost sound (abbreviation).

(15-03-2026, 01:44 AM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hm, I haven't watched the presentation but this solves the problem of the creative goat milk spelling. However the language of your examples is truly ancient. Middle High German. That's 12th, 13th century, not 15th. And in one of the examples, gas is gahes / gach (fast, swiftly), not ganz. Both are viable readings for gas, I think we already had this discussion. Considering the overall weirdness of marginalia texts it's another one of countless interpretations.

Thank you for the critical engagement. Two points:

Regarding the dating: The three instances come from "Athis und Prophilias," a verse romance preserved in a manuscript from the third quarter of the 13th century in Hessian-Thuringian dialect (Berlin, Staatsbibl., Nachlass Grimm 196; Krakow, Bibl. Jagiellońska, Berol. mgq 846; edition: Kraus 1926; Handschriftencensus: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). You are right that this is earlier than the Voynich Manuscript. However, the Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch covers texts only up to 1350, so the absence of 15th-century attestation reflects the scope of the corpus, not necessarily the disappearance of the form.

Regarding the alternative reading gâhes/gâch (swiftly): This is a fair point for the first example — "den vrouwin Und îlte des gâs zouwin" — where "îlte" (hurried) pairs naturally with an adverb of speed. For the other two examples, "ganz" seems the more natural reading: "bat im gâs ir uindin" (asked him to find them entirely) and "Sie azin gâs un̄ quamin" (they ate completely, i.e. finished eating, and left). But I agree that gâhes cannot be excluded on purely contextual grounds in a 13th-century text.

The disambiguation comes from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. itself. "So nim gâs mich" makes natural sense as "so take me wholly" but not as "so take me swiftly." Either way, the corpus confirms that the form "gâs" — spelled with long-s and circumflex on the a — is attested in East Central German. This addresses the main problem with the standard reading "gasmich" as a single compound word for "Gaismilch" (goat's milk), which requires an unattested scribal omission of the L in "milch."

@Bernd You were right. After further investigation, I have to correct my interpretation. The word "gâs" in the corpus instances is indeed a contracted form of "gâhez" (swiftly, at once), not a shortened form of "ganz" (wholly). See the entry in the Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

So "so nim gâs mich" would mean "so take me at once" rather than "so take me wholly." The reading as two separate words still holds — "gâs" with word-final long-s is attested as shown — but the meaning is different from what I initially proposed.

I appreciate the critical pushback. It led me to look more carefully at the evidence.

That is an S not a b.  That is German yet so what about this in middle English with the s.

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so money looks upon the soul

Quote:The Spiritual Challenge: The phrase suggests that one's relationship with money is a "soul concern." It is a test of how much of your love and dedication is reliant on material possession. It encourages "examining" your money with curiosity to align it with your inner, authentic self.

When it comes to the spelling of long-s at the end of the word, dating absolutely matters. If we respect what's on the page and assume it is later than 1400, it says "gasmich" in one word.

For the language it also matters. Apparently, the corpus only goes up to 1350 because that is the traditional cutoff point of "classical" MHG. I am no expert on this particular topic, but I assume there is a reason for this cutoff.

Apart from that, I keep repeating that the word order "so take quickly me" is unnatural, also in MHG. Proponents of the "gahes mich" reading choose to ignore this rather than address it, even though (going by what Torsten wrote above), Huth changed the word order himself to the perfectly acceptable "so nimm mich ganz."

In the snippets Torsten posted, the word order is the expected one each time:

• "they ate quickly", NOT "they quickly ate"
  
• "and asked him quickly" NOT "and asked quickly him"
  
• Not sure of how to read the third one. The language and spelling conventions here are not those of the 15th century German I'm used to.
  

There's a lot one needs to ignore and gloss over in order to validate a "gahes mich" reading. 

I do agree that there is potential in some interpretation of the shape of "a". Maybe it's even a macron, making it "so nim gansmich" or "gamsmich".

I found the previous discussion on 'gas - gahes' here and on the following page:
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And on Koen's blog
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I agree the word order gas - mich is a bit of a problem, one would expect it the other way round. but it might be a poetic structure. I also have no idea how long this term was used but to me the language in the examples appears far more ancient than the marginalia - as far as they are intelligible (barely at all). In the VM marginalia, also would like to point out the horizontal line in 'g' crossing through the 'a' and the vertical line crossing through the 's'. Whatever that means, if anything at all. But many of the marginalia letters are extremely odd.

Still a good find. It would be helpful to look at the actual text passages to see how exactly this 'gas' in the examples was written. As Rene asked - with a caret / abbreviation mark or without?

All in all I'm neither fully convinced by the 'goat milk' nor the 'wholly/quickly me' solution and I'm increasingly unsure if there's any deeper meaning in those marginalia at all. But we're talking about the VM after all. Few things are certain.