The Voynich Ninja

I recently posted a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the blog of Stephen Bax in which I point out a regular pattern of words in the zodiac pages. Here is a slightly edited and extended version 

I used Job's excellent voynichese tool to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for two prefixes that commonly appear in the manuscript: shed- and ched-

In the 12 zodiac pages, there are 15 matches, on 7 different pages:
Shed- Libra, Leo, Sagittarius
ched- Pisces, Taurus (dark), Cancer, Scorpio

All occurrences appear in the rings of text, not in the labels of the “nymphs”.
According to an ancient tradition (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), masculine (or diurnal) and feminine (or nocturnal) signs alternate in the zodiac. Other sources (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. II, 150 or the Pseudo-Ptolemy’s You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) only classify the signs as masculine and feminine (not diurnal and nocturnal).



All the 15 occurrences of the two prefixes give a consistent match on 7 different zodiac signs. A possible hypothesis is the existence of some kind of equivalence:
Shed- masculine (diurnal)
ched- feminine (nocturnal)

There is another possible interpretation, based on the classical association of the zodiac signs with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
Aries, Leo, Sagittarius correspond to Fire (hot and dry)
Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn correspond to Earth (cold and dry)
Gemini, Libra, Aquarius correspond to Air (hot and wet)
Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces correspond to Water (cold and wet)

So, the masculine signs are “hot” and the feminine signs are “cold”. Another possible interpretation is:
Shed- hot
ched- cold

Of course, it is well possible that this is just an irrelevant coincidence. It should also be noted that a possible inconsistency is a “nymph” labeled “ched” in Sagittarius (a masculine sign that should have “shed”, according to this theory). Apparently, the hypothetical regularity I observed is not respected in the labels of the nymphs. The above linked search on voynichese.com searches for the ched- prefix and only matches if the prefix is followed by one or more characters.

Other possible regularities:

oty You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to four of the six (or five, since Capricorn is missing) “dry” signs (Taurus, Leo, Virgo and Sagittarius). Again, two Pisces nymphs should be ignored.

choteey You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. exactly to the three Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces)

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A table of the Galenic properties of the signs (hot - calidus, cold - frigidus, dry - siccus, wet - humidus) by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Well spotted, Marco. 
It's probably too early to say what it could actually mean, but the examples you provide do show that some kind of complementary grammatical distribution is possible. If more examples can be found, it may give us some insight into the grammar of Voynichese. 

In this case a possibility would be, if I understand it correctly, thay words starting with ch can be the opposite of the same word starting with sh?

(06-05-2016, 09:18 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I recently posted a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the blog of Stephen Bax in which I point out a regular pattern of words in the zodiac pages. Here is a slightly edited and extended version 

I used Job's excellent voynichese tool to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for two prefixes that commonly appear in the manuscript: shed- and ched-

In the 12 zodiac pages, there are 15 matches, on 7 different pages:
shed- Libra, Leo, Sagittarius
ched- Pisces, Taurus (dark), Cancer, Scorpio

All occurrences appear in the rings of text, not in the labels of the “nymphs”.
According to an ancient tradition (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), masculine (or diurnal) and feminine (or nocturnal) signs alternate in the zodiac. Other sources (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. II, 150 or the Pseudo-Ptolemy’s You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) only classify the signs as masculine and feminine (not diurnal and nocturnal).



All the 15 occurrences of the two prefixes give a consistent match on 7 different zodiac signs. A possible hypothesis is the existence of some kind of equivalence:
shed- masculine (diurnal)
ched- feminine (nocturnal)

There is another possible interpretation, based on the classical association of the zodiac signs with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
Aries, Leo, Sagittarius correspond to Fire (hot and dry)
Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn correspond to Earth (cold and dry)
Gemini, Libra, Aquarius correspond to Air (hot and wet)
Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces correspond to Water (cold and wet)

So, the masculine signs are “hot” and the feminine signs are “cold”. Another possible interpretation is:
shed- hot
ched- cold

Of course, it is well possible that this is just an irrelevant coincidence. It should also be noted that a possible inconsistency is a “nymph” labeled “ched” in Sagittarius (a masculine sign that should have “shed”, according to this theory). Apparently, the hypothetical regularity I observed is not respected in the labels of the nymphs. The above linked search on voynichese.com searches for the ched- prefix and only matches if the prefix is followed by one or more characters.

...

Good work, Marco, and finally maybe people can see, in the way you've visually presented it, that the syllables don't have to be words, they can be concepts (how long have I been saying that?).

Also, I am happy to see some support for what Wladimir has been saying for a long time also, that syllables can have meaning in their own right (look back at his charts) and there are regular patterns to the use of those syllables throughout the manuscript (particularly in the labels).


Good work, good way to illustrate it, and such a refreshing departure from the widespread obsession with 1-to-1 substitution codes.


(By the way, you scooped me. I've been working on this for a while, but I wasn't yet finished writing it up because I was working on the zodiac imagery at the same time. So good for you. Beat me to it.   )

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Since the cat is out of the bag now, I guess I can drop the hint that this works in the small plants section too (I was working on writing up that one as well, sigh).






Check out the ones that are mostly roots and look at the prefixes. You'll find the same kinds of patterns. By the way, this is also why I've been saying for a long time that labels don't necessarily have to be nouns (in the conventional sense). It was actually the small plant section (specifically the roots) that led me to the revelation about the zodiac labels.



And by the way, some of those syllables are mnemonic in their own right. Wow, I'm going to give away a lot of secrets now... I've been playing my cards close to the vest, as they say in poker, hoping to come up with a big-chunk decryption of the main text before someone else figured this out.... okay, here you go...

if you read the small plant section syllables backwards (the first part), they even look a bit like what they are (e.g., if you spell rotta/rota/rot (which is "root" in a number of languages)) backwards you will see that it matches the first syllable of many of the labels in the root section of the small plants. Wladimir was zeroing in on the same idea, as well, he was thinking stem, root, etc., but I don't know if he noticed (he can tell us if he did) that the root ones actually have syllables that look like "root" and since "root" is also a concept (base, root, beginning, foundation), it can potentially also be used in other sections (and, in fact, it is).

Marco, you'll find this also works on f77r. Wet by the woman, hot by the man, etc.

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(06-05-2016, 10:17 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well spotted, Marco. 
It's probably too early to say what it could actually mean, but the examples you provide do show that some kind of complementary grammatical distribution is possible. If more examples can be found, it may give us some insight into the grammar of Voynichese. 

In this case a possibility would be, if I understand it correctly, thay words starting with ch can be the opposite of the same word starting with sh?

It's not so much a matter of opposition. It's that the syllable stands for a concept. It works for the labels. It works very well, when you consider that in the medieval mind everything was made up of simple fundamentals, usually in groups of three or four, with four being especially important after Europe was Christianized because it supposedly stemmed from the creation story.

The main reason I hadn't written this up is that applying it to a large block of text (the main text) is more difficult. I suffer from the same obsession physicists have, of trying to find a "unified theory". I'm still not 100% convinced the main text works exactly like the labels (it does, sort of, but not completely).

Now this is getting interesting. One thing I don't understand though. What exactly would be the difference with natural language? 

Take a productive prefix like "re-". That's a concept in its own right. I can invent a verb and add the concept "re" to it. Revoynich: to make something look like the voynich AGAIN. 

Or to take an example thst would occur a lot: Latin -que. Or case endings, they stand for multiple concepts: gender, number, function.

Even in a word like football, each syllable stands for a concept.

I'm not trying to argue with your proposed soluton. Just wonder how this would differ from what one could find in natural language, especially stuff like prefixes and case endings.

(07-05-2016, 01:41 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now this is getting interesting. One thing I don't understand though. What exactly would be the difference with natural language? 

Take a productive prefix like "re-". That's a concept in its own right. I can invent a verb and add the concept "re" to it. Revoynich: to make something look like the voynich AGAIN. 

Or to take an example thst would occur a lot: Latin -que. Or case endings, they stand for multiple concepts: gender, number, function.

Even in a word like football, each syllable stands for a concept.

I'm not trying to argue with your proposed soluton. Just wonder how this would differ from what one could find in natural language, especially stuff like prefixes and case endings.

In natural language we make up names for things like Sagittarius.

If, however, you are describing Sagittarius in a conceptual way, you might name it Voynich-style with something like ani (for animal) + sht (for shoot, as in shooting an arrow). Notice how the words animal and shoot are general terms that could be applied to a lot of things besides Sagittarius, in fact, in English "shoot" might also stand for a new bud coming up from a flower seed, in which case you might invent a word like hot-shoot (a peppery plant where you use the shoot as the medicinal part).

This is not an unprecedented way of thinking. Old Hebrew and many Asian languages, as I've mentioned a few times, use concept-modifier, concept-modifier. In old Hebrew the vowels do the modifying. Thus, in an abjad system, the same root-word can serve for both "book" and "writer".

In Asian languages, a radical or attached symbol is often used as the modifier. Chinese uses radicals quite extensively. The Boa language (now essentially extinct) has many of the root + modifier characteristics. You tend to find this structure in the older languages. The world is now a melting pot with most languages being infused with loan-words that don't follow the traditional structure (Korean as a particular example is dramatically altered with imported computer terms that follow English sounds rather the Korean traditional grammatical structure).


If you have syllables representing concepts, you can create something that is hot-dry, hot-wet, etc., and maybe further modify it (e.g., fem. or masc.) INSTEAD of labeling it Sagittarius, you describe its attributes or its relationship to other things (doesn't necessarily have to be attributes).


Look at the plant names in the small-plants section. Look at the amount of repetition in those labels (particularly in the roots section). Now PEEL APART those syllables, stop looking at them as individual letters... see how concept-modifier has been applied. Note how many have the same first syllable and then.... well what do you know... a modifier specific to that plant.

This is why I've been shaking my head for a long time at the basic assumption by a very large number of people, including some with advanced degrees, that the labels are nouns in a substitution code. They are not STRUCTURED like nouns in a substitution code.

Yeah, I hear ya. The script follows a certain structure, that's for sure. My main reason for dismissing many proposed 1 to 1 substitution solutions is that they don't account for that.

What I still don't get though (sorry) is what the difference would be between what you describe in the roots section and a list like oakroot, beechroot, yewroort... in this case they have the last same syllable and a unique modifire in the beginning, just because that is the word order in Germanic languages. In Indo-Iranian languages it's like in Voynichese : rootoak, rootspruce, rootwillow etc.

If you assume some degree of abbreviation or ligaturization, this may also explain the phenomenon you describe.

(07-05-2016, 02:54 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yeah, I hear ya. The script follows a certain structure, that's for sure. My main reason for dismissing many proposed 1 to 1 substitution solutions is that they don't account for that.

What I still don't get though (sorry) is what the difference would be between what you describe in the roots section and a list like oakroot, beechroot, yewroort...

You can, that's closer to what I think is actually happening, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a name as an identifier (oak- beech- yew), it could be hot-root, hot-wet-root, peppery-root or... spring-root, fall-root, winter-root or... as Wladimir has long-since pointed out a combination of the names of parts that are used medicinally. Getting away from nouns, labels in some parts of the manuscript could even be verbs (for example, it might not say Philomela, it might say running, raping, saving, weaving, spinning) but I suspect the majority of labels in the VMS are noun-combinations (attributes) as opposed to verbs or "name" style labels.

Instead of looking for Pisces, Cancer, Leo (which is what the marginal writer did and what many others have done), look for the attributes of that sign or its relationship to other things in medieval cosmology as Marco illustrates in the above example and it's easier to see the patterns in the letter combinations.

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Maybe it's easier to explain this with a visual example...

In Chinese, you take a character like this (two versions of a similar concept, top and bottom):


Okay, the main concept is on the right. The radical (modifier) is on the left.

These two character-combinations both mean sister but notice the chars on the right are different for each one, as they are different versions of the idea of a sister.


The radical on the left means woman/female. Combined with the character on the right indicates a familial (blood) relationship.

The character on the bottom right can mean a number of things, like lesser, or farther, and when you combine it with the radical for woman, then you get a younger (lesser, smaller) sister or it can also be used to mean a "friend-sister" (one who is not blood related).


So the one on the right is the concept, the one on the left is the modifier and many of these characters are expressed verbally by a single syllable—there's a lot of meaning packed into one sound and when you put two sounds together, you get a related concept which can be different if you combine it with something else.

The VMS has many of the same characteristics.


In English we say dog for a grown dog and puppy for a young one. In some languages they say dog for the grown dog and young-dog for the young one rather than making up a new word for the young one (they don't have words like kitten, puppy, cub, foal, etc.). This means a large number of concepts are expressed with a smaller number of syllables or words and it seems to work perfectly well.

It's possible the VMS uses  a similar system and thus doesn't require an extensive vocabulary. As in old Hebrew, Chinese, and many other languages, a "root" word with modifiers or combinations of root words could cover many individual words.


How could we do something similar in English? Well, taking the example above, let's say the syllable sis stands for sister and we use a 1 to stand for blood relations (or older sisters who came first) and a 2 for non-blood relations or those who came after (younger sisters). Thus we have sis1 and sis2.

Now, if I were to write bro1 and bro2 you would immediately know what I meant without me having to explain it.

Ohh so you mean like in hieroglyphs.  They had this class of glyphs that did that. For them it was necessary to come up with a system like that, since it would exponentially decrease the amount of required glyphs. 

Okay, that is a possibility, and even though at the moment I am not totally convinced, I know that some of the more serious researchers entertain similar ideas.

It is definitely an idea worth pursuing, and it would fit Voynichese.

If this is consistently done throughout the manuscript though - a stacking of concepts on top of lexical words - shouldn't we.expect more variation in those lexical words as well?

(06-05-2016, 10:17 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In this case a possibility would be, if I understand it correctly, thay words starting with ch can be the opposite of the same word starting with sh?

That would certainly be a possibility.
A basic phenomenon like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. could be at work.

On Stephen's site I mentioned a Sanskrit example:

Quote:astrī f. (with lexicographers) “not feminine” id est the masculine and neuter genders.
strī f. (in gram.) the feminine gender etc.

A possibility for hot / cold:
aśīta  not cold, warm, hot.
śīta cold, cool, chilly, frigid