The Voynich Ninja

(15-03-2026, 06:09 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's AI nonsense. Sorry. What changes is the word that's emphasized and thus takes center stage.

“Nimm schnell mich” means: Choose me quickly. (Pick me quickly) You'd say this, for example, when playing soccer in a group and selecting players; it's said by someone who wants to be picked before everyone else. Here, the emphasis is on "mich" (me).

"Nimm mich schnell": “Pick me quick” means: Choose me quickly. Here, the emphasis is on “quickly.”

I can't find a single example of that usage online, but i'm not german to be fair. If you type "nimm schnell mich" into google, all you get are examples of "nimm mich schnell".

It's not AI nonsense that personal pronouns and verbs go together in german (or dutch) sentences. Would you really shout "nimm schnell mich!" without any additional words? Would you write it down in that form naturally?

Also, what about "so nimm schnell mich"?

I’m German and a journalist, so I really ought to know .

Yes, the example I gave would be a case where it would be said exactly like that. “Nimm schnell mich!” The sentence is grammatically correct. The difference really lies in the intonation.


I ran it through Claude, which is really miles ahead of the other AIs. Here’s the result:

German word order is much more flexible than English, and that flexibility carries meaning. Moving a word to a different position in the sentence shifts the focus — what the sentence is really "about".
"Nimm mich schnell!" (literal: Take me quickly!) This is the neutral, everyday word order. The adverb schnell (quickly) modifies the whole action. The message is simply: hurry up and take me. Nothing unusual — just urgency.

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"Nimm schnell mich" (literal: Take quickly me) This sounds odd in English, but in German it's perfectly grammatical — and deliberate. By pushing mich (me) to the very end of the sentence, it receives a strong contrastive stress, roughly equivalent to the English:
"Take me, quickly!" or "It's me you should pick — and fast!"
The implication is that there are other candidates, and the speaker is insisting they be the one chosen.

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The key principle: In German, the last element in a sentence naturally carries the strongest emphasis — similar to how English speakers use vocal stress or italics to highlight a word. German achieves the same effect through word order rather than just intonation.
So where English would say "Take me, not them!", German can encode that contrast structurally, just by moving mich to the end.

@ Koen yes, that maybe is the Problem...    I need to correct myself, so I’ll do that here in this reply – I also gave the AI (Claude) the following prompt:

Prompt:
"Was this already the case in the Middle Ages, too?" — i.e., did medieval German already use word order to signal emphasis and contrast in the same way modern German does?

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Answer:
Yes, essentially — but with an interesting twist.

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Middle High German (approx. 1050–1350)
Medieval German actually had even more freedom in word order than modern German, because the case system was still largely intact. Just as Latin uses endings on words to show who is doing what, Middle High German had rich inflectional endings (-en, -em, -es etc.) that made the grammatical role of each word unambiguous — regardless of where it appeared in the sentence.
This meant word order was almost purely a rhetorical tool — used for emphasis, rhythm, and focus, not to convey basic grammatical meaning.

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The Verb-Second rule
Even then, German already followed what linguists call the verb-second (V2) principle — the rule that the finite verb always occupies the second position in a main clause. This is still a defining feature of modern German, and it was firmly in place throughout the medieval period.
The tendency to place the most important or emphatic element at the end of a sentence is likewise very old — it's a deep-rooted feature of the Germanic language family going back well before the medieval period.

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What changed over time
As German evolved into its modern form, the case endings gradually eroded. With fewer endings to rely on, word order had to take over some of the grammatical heavy lifting — which paradoxically made it less free in some respects. But the principle of end-focus for emphasis survived intact.

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In short: A medieval German minnesinger — a courtly love poet — would have instinctively understood the contrast being made in "Nimm schnell mich". He might even have exploited it more boldly than a modern speaker would.

(15-03-2026, 04:21 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For me, the long-s plus this awkward word order is enough to make the reading as "adverb - personal pronoun" unlikely. "Gasmich" is most likely one word, and given the "so nim" construction, most likely a noun.

Of course, "gasmich" as gaismilch also has problems. That's why we're still struggling with this.

Some additional findings regarding "gâs":

The word is listed in the Mittelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch as a separate dictionary entry:
"¹gâs, gâes, adv., s. gâ, schnell, rasch, plötzlich, jäh."
(You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

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It is a standard dictionary word meaning "quickly, swiftly, suddenly."

I also found some additional corpus instances where "gâs" is spelled with a short s rather than a long s:

1. "spricht gas vil des liechtz In u͗ch gebriſt wandlent die wil dz liecht hie iſt" (F078, West Upper German, 16th c.)
2. "vnd do man gas der reich gem armen frag aus mas" (F315, East Franconian, 15th c.)

[attachment=14662]

The East Franconian instance is from the second half of the 15th century — the same period as the Voynich Manuscript

Since "gâs" appears with both long-s and short-s in medieval German texts, the form of the s on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. cannot be used as an argument for reading "gasmich" as a single word.

As I said, rules weren’t set in stone in the Middle Ages

Torsten: one of the reasons why we shouldn't just mix all attestations throughout the centuries into one big bag is changing spelling conventions. In earlier centuries, you do get a "shorter" version of long-s at the end of words. But this is no longer expected in the 15th century. So the long-s is a good argument in favor of a reading as one word. 

Like I said before (and helped establish), gasmich would be an unattested (mis)spelling for gaismilch, so basically everything is problematic. The reason why for now I would still favor gaismilch is the context. A large percentage of "so nim" is followed by an ingredient or some kind of implement or tool. A goat-ish creature is drawn in the margin. Goat milk in cooking is preferred for the infirm because it is easy to digest. Recipes and charms go hand in hand... 

I just think it's important to keep weighing the evidence. Following a charm on a 15th century flyleaf, "so nim ingredient" is much more likely than "so nim quickly me".

In a context that doesn’t exist, or at least one on which there is no consensus, it makes little sense to talk about probabilities....

so nim schnell mich
so nim ga(i)smi(l)ch
so nim Got as mich
and other...

none of these is any more or less probable.

You could, after all, also argue that it is less likely to assume a mistake in order to find a word than to take a word that is written there without a mistake....  I don’t think we can settle the question of what is more likely at the moment.

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Zuerst muss man es einfach verstehen.
Das meiste hat keine Grammatik sondern sind gesprochene Eigenschaften.
"ga" bedeutet "geh". Gesprochen kann es schnell sein. Betont, ähnlich wie hopp hopp.
"gaz no guet" = "geht es Dir noch gut".

First, you just have to get the hang of it.
Most of it isn't based on grammar but on spoken nuances.
“ga” means “go.” When spoken, it can be said quickly, with emphasis, similar to “hopp hopp.”
“gaz no guet” = “Are you still okay?”

The first example I looked at seems to be based on OCR text (the one you highlighted in blue): You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

This means that the text was first transcribed by someone using pre-modern standards, and then read by a machine.  This is probably why some of these sentences are so confusing.
(I'm not just saying this to be negative, this is just a phenomenon I've often encountered myself).

My guess (as a non-native speaker) is that it should be "und do man as": "and as they ate". This follows from the rich man and the poor man having the "mittag mal" together. The OCR dreamed up the G.