The Voynich Ninja

(17-03-2026, 11:42 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My confusion came from how you presented all the "gas" attestations as evidence, while they are not all the same word... The occurrence and spelling of some form of "gehen" as "gas" is not relevant for the argument that it could be a contraction of "gahes".

It was actually a response to your claim that "gasmich" is most likely one word and my argument was: 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 far as I see, these are the two suggested readings for the last line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in this thread:

1) Volkhard Huth's reading: "so nim gâs mich" — two words, the adverb "gâs" (swiftly, at once) and the pronoun "mich" (me). This reading requires accepting that the long-s can be word-final on this page.

2) Richard Salomon's reading from the 1950s: "so nim gaismilch" — one word, a dialectal form of "Gaismilch" (goat's milk). This reading requires three assumptions: monophthongization of "gais" to "gas," an unattested omission of L in "milch," and reading the long-s as word-medial.

My goal was to present some evidence for Huth's reading. I believe I have done that.

Correct me if I'm wrong.
Richard Salomons made his decision based on black-and-white photos that Polofsky brought him.
Since I don’t know what the photos were like (in terms of quality), his decision is irrelevant.
Nothing prior to the high-resolution scans is relevant.
When were the first good scans available online? Certainly not before 1992. (The Internet was developed in 1989 and made publicly available in 1991.)

(17-03-2026, 12:37 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.and reading the long-s as word-medial.

Short-s as final and long-s elsewhere is the standard for 15th century handwriting, and supported by the VM marginalia themselves. If we cannot agree on this, I see no point in continuing this discussion.

Der Deutschlehrer:
Ver- und vor-, ich weiss genau, schreibt man steht's mit einem V.
Schüler:
OK, aber jetzt ist vertig mit der Grammatik. 


The German teacher:
“Ver-” and “vor-,” I know for sure, are always spelled with a “V.”
Student:
“OK, but now I'm dizzy from all this grammar.” 

Doesn't work in English

vertig wird mit f geschrieben (fertig)