(07-09-2016, 06:16 AM)Botis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was looking at an old book called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it being an old guide to reading medieval writing styles and abbreviations.
Something I noticed on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is that the way they're writing P looks a lot like voynich 4o.
But this got me thinking -- might it be that 4 and o are always together because it's actually one letter? Are there any examples where 4 is not followed by o?
King Ferdinand's cipher writes the "q" somewhat like a 4o. Some of the other letters (like x and y) look a bit like an "o" followed by "+". If you reversed it and wrote it for comfortable flow, it would look like 4o.
Something I've been wanting to blog about for a couple of years, but can't find enough time, is the Gabriel de Luetz/Luez d'Aramon cipher which includes 4o written in the same way as in the VMS.
It's about a century after the VMS (as is Ferndinand's cipher) but what's particularly interesting is they assembled a team of scientists to basically spy on the Ottoman Empire. The team included a botanist, a naturalist, a writer, and a cosmographer—ideas that are reflected in VMS drawings.
In Luetz's cipher, the 4 can stand alone, but is paired with "o" a number of times. As far as I can tell, it means something different when it stands alone. The cipher also includes the lamba-like character with a cap that makes a few brief appearances in the VMS text. The Latin "9" character is there, as well.
I don't know if anyone has published an analysis of this, I like figuring it out on my own, but the parts that are clear enough for me to see are a simple substitution code, with a few of the shapes representing short words.
I noticed some words that are abbreviated in modern French are written out in full. As for the letters...
The 4 is "a".
The 9 is "e".
The pi-char is "f".
The T-square is "n".
The cross between H and # is an "o".
The 4o is "p".
The lambda with a top bar is "r", etc.
And short words...
The "d" stands for "que" and it looks like Y with a crossbar is "de". The "f" is "il". , the g is "vous", etc.
Pretty easy to see how it works, even from a fuzzy scan.
The reason I didn't blog it when I first found it was because I wanted to ask for a better scan. Then I noticed it was a simple substitution code, which means it probably won't help unravel the VMS, and thus lost my motivation to harass the librarians.
So... the word structure it is not at all like the VMS, but many of the shapes are similar and it uses Latin and Gree
k chars mixed with Arabic numbers in much the same way as the Voynich text... for what it's worth.
I still find it interesting that they created a team of scientists to record their observations and send some of them back in code. If they did this in the early 1500s, could someone have had a similar idea a century earlier?