The Voynich Ninja

There are two cases where a small uppercase F has been written on the manuscript, once on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and once on f103r:


Questions:

• Is the F on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the same ink as the illustration?  It seems hard to tell.
  
• What about the F on f103r?  Same ink as the stars and/or text?
  
• Are these two F's in the same hand?
  
• Do these two F's have anything to do with each other?  Or did two different people decide to write a small F on the manuscript for completely different reasons?
  
• Does a small uppercase F have a known meaning in other manuscripts?  Is there some reason why it might show up in these two places in the VMS?
  

What's interesting about the F letters is they are block printing. This is not characteristic of medieval scripts and yet the ink looks very similar to the inks around them.

One of the sets of marks under the "blue cube" also looks like it MIGHT be an upper-case A in block printing style. The fact that the F letters exist seems to strengthen the possibility that there might be a block A in the blue cube, although it's hard to tell when it's over-painted.


What do they mean? Don't know. The ones that are in older script styles on other plants ("g", "rot", "por") might be paint instructions (green, red, purple). Not sure of those either, but it's possible. But the F seed capsule is unpainted on the part that has an F and the F might be in a hand different from the others and thus might have some other significance.

They do look very modern.  Is it even possible that they are from the 15th century?

I can't remember ever seeing the one of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. before.
( I had made a list of "external writing"  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  ).

The list also includes a faint capital B in a similar style as the F's:

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(middle of the picture)

I'd forgotten about the B.  It does seem similar to the F's, so I'll include it.



The B is interesting because it's a bit "camouflaged", in that at first glance the B just looks like one of the small hairs found between the other leaf segments on that image.

The F on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was discussed on the VMS list about a year ago, that was the first time I'd seen it mentioned anywhere.

Thx Sam.

The "F" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has been discussed quite extensively, e.g. in Nick's blog, although I don't remember if anyone was able to propose some valid
meaning for it. It seemingly does not fit any German color code. I used to think of it as of the "feoh" rune, which it is most probably not

The "F" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I was not aware of. It is interesting that there is apparently an erased (or poorly visible) inscription to the upper right of it, ending with "R".

As for the "B", it has been proposed to mean "blank"; I think that "beige" could be another option.

(26-10-2016, 07:28 AM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are two cases where a small uppercase F has been written on the manuscript, once on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and once on f103r:


Questions:

• Is the F on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the same ink as the illustration?  It seems hard to tell.
  
• What about the F on f103r?  Same ink as the stars and/or text?
  
• Are these two F's in the same hand?
  
• Do these two F's have anything to do with each other?  Or did two different people decide to write a small F on the manuscript for completely different reasons?
  
• Does a small uppercase F have a known meaning in other manuscripts?  Is there some reason why it might show up in these two places in the VMS?
  

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. could be Flax.  Voynich gardens refers to f4r as flax and the wikipedia picture looks similar to the VMS picture of f4r.  Thanks for this post and perhaps greater supporting evidence for my method.


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There is also a capital 'L' in the root on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (go down at about 5 o'clock from the 'r' of 'rot').

I'd agree these capitals don't look fifteenth century. Sixteenth or seventeenth maybe?

Sam.
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Regards

Block capitals were very common in the days when letters were carved on stone, it's difficult to make curves with a chisel, but became quite uncommon during the period around the creation of the VMS, when scribes were busy writing on parchment rather than stone.

I haven't had time to look up the history of block letters to see exactly when (and why) they came back into common use but I suspect it's tied to the emergence of public school systems.