The Voynich Ninja

Discussing the occurrences of q in the beginning of labels, Sam You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. me to the label list by J. Stolfi. And I see a very interesting thing in this list. The vord qokal, which is one of the vords in the leftmost column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the "mussdel" folio) is also used as a label elsewhere - namely, in f75v.

If we admit that labels stand for words, then this means three things.

1) The vords in the leftmost column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. stand for words;
2) Those words are of the same part of speech. I.e., they are all nouns or they are all adjectives, or etc.;
3) They are likely to represent a homogenous set. I.e., if adjectives, they may be all colours (red, green...) or all perceptions (hot, moist...). If nouns, they may be all planets or all stones. Etc.

I think this may be a very promising clue. Definitely, subject to contextual analysis.

An additional hint is that their number is fifteen. Are any sets of fifteen objects out there in magical or other traditions?

There is a potential spoiler though - this stuff in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. may be not labels but a natural flow of text, just interrupted by those floods...

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I have an impression that the first glyph of the first vord in the column is hidden from our view by the binding.

Anton,
The only 'fifteen' set that comes immediately to mind is the "fifteen stars" which were the standard basic list of fixed stars taught in medieval Europe.

Also known as the Behenian stars.

These days you see them mostly mentioned in relation to magic, but they weren't originally "magic' stars, One online source for their connection to stones is

Anne Lawrence-Mathers, Carolina Escobar-Vargas, Magic and Medieval Society,

which refers to the Liber Sigillorum  from the  12thC onwards.

Another text was the Quartripartitum Hermetis  giving 15 groups composed of a stone, a star, a herb and an image. That must have been pretty widely known because it becomes part of a kind of parlour game played in noble courts.

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(11-09-2016, 01:03 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Discussing the occurrences of q in the beginning of labels, Sam You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. me to the label list by J. Stolfi. And I see a very interesting thing in this list. The vord qokal, which is one of the vords in the leftmost column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the "mussdel" folio) is also used as a label elsewhere - namely, in f75v.
...

There is a potential spoiler though - this stuff in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. may be not labels but a natural flow of text, just interrupted by those floods...

...

Anton, I'm not sure about that one either (whether it's a label or whether the text flows across the columns). I've been thinking of it as text, but I'm on the fence about it... maybe 55/45 leaning in favor of text because it appears with the same vord preceding it on one of the starred text pages and with suffixes in a number of places in the main text.

Anton - one of the forms which regularly separates a first character from the rest of a line is number or letter as itemisation, but another in medieval manuscripts is verse.

In discussing this on my blog -n relation to f.49v -  I showed this detail from  Brit.Lib. MS Harley 5437, folio 1  It's a copy of the Alexandreis,
though of course there are many others one might mention.  I mention it because if this were the case, then the 'vord' would actually be that initial+the rest separated from it, and also thinking of Nick Pelling's "block paradigm" proposal.

Quote:The only 'fifteen' set that comes immediately to mind is the "fifteen stars" which were the standard basic list of fixed stars taught in medieval Europe.

Also known as the Behenian stars.

Most exciting! Will look through that. One quick question - has there been any "standard" order of listing these? 

Quote:one of the forms which regularly separates a first character from the rest of a line is number or letter as itemisation, but another in medieval manuscripts is verse.

Yes, but here, beside this leftmost column, we have also another column - that comprised of individual glyphs (except air - which, by the way, was suggested by lelle to represent a single character due to this very nature of that column).

Agrippa made the 15 stars an ordered list in the 16 th century. They exist in different forms before then. One of the main sources was Al-Sufi, 10th century Arabian astronomer whose works made their way into Europe via several manuscripts. In the early 15th century it's all a bit disorganised for sources - mainly Trismiganium lore.

(11-09-2016, 01:03 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

An additional hint is that their number is fifteen. Are any sets of fifteen objects out there in magical or other traditions?

...

Hipparchus (2nd century Greek astronomer) classified stars according to position and their relationship to telling time. Fifteen were considered to be of the first magnitude (the brightest).

Since the star imagery in the VMS varies from simple stars to those with dots in the center and those with bigger colored dots, the differences between them might indicate a hierarchy or some other distinction. If they do, the VMS illustrator and/or scribes may have been aware of the concept of orders of magnitude.


I learned about Hipparchus when looking into Ptolemy's Almagest, when I was researching ancient zodiacs. It is thought that Almagest is heavily influenced by the work of Hipparchus—his ideas survive through reports and misreports of succeeding writers and much of the knowledge was lost and gradually relearned. I wasn't able to determine exactly how much had an impact on medieval thinking about stars (mostly due to lack of time) since it involves tracing the traditions the transmitted the information through 12 centuries.

Clearly the medievalists had some skewed perceptions of the solar system. Besides the mistaken idea of the earth being the center, many of them treated planets and stars as the same kind of object and distinguished them only by brightness and whether they were "fixed" or moving "stars".

I was not aware of the fact that the Behenian fixed stars were linked with 15 plants and 15 stones. I could not understand which specific msYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is based on: 
Incipit liber Hermetis de 15 stellis tractans et 15 herbis et 15 lapidibus et 15 figuris  - Here Begins the Book of Hermes on the 15 fixed stars and 15 herbs and 15 stones and 15 figures - translated and annotated by John Michael Greer from BM Bodleian MS. 52, ff. 44-47.

Anton,
Here's a late (1596) astronomical compendium giving a list of the basic 15 stars.
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For all sorts of reasons, I think you may find the astronomical line more fruitful than the astological or horoscopic, but in any case i don't envy you.  Having worked through a related question some years ago, I must say that the orthography of Latins' "arab" star names is absolutely frightful.

---

PS - as a nice date-marker (because I'm not suggesting the Vms is about Dante),

Robert M. Durling, in his commentary on Dante's Paradiso cantos says re "fifteen stars... density of the air":

Like other introductory handbooks of astronomy, Alfragano's which Dante knew and repeatedly cites, gives a list of the fifteen brightest stars in the order of their ecliptical longitude. Many of them can be reliably identified e.g. Sirius, Rigel, Betelgeuse, Regulus, Antares and others, but not all. The fifteen brightest stars listed in modern handbooks are all brighter than +1, but Regulus is not among them, though it is bright enough" (p.254)

- so I guess sources from the 15thC or earlier might be the most reliable. 

Ref: Dante Alighierii, Robert M.Durling, Paradiso, OUP (2011) 

Cheers

Interestingly, qokal is a very high-frequency vord with the count of 191. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it is even used two times in a row. saiin also boasts a high count of 144. Next to that is dary with only 24 occurrences.