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| Missionaries? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 09-05-2020, 11:02 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (5)
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Something Emma wrote You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. took me back to one of my minor courses at university, comparative linguistics. It was mostly an introduction to the discipline and its history rather than actual comparative linguistics. Anyway, one of the things I found most fascinating was the reason why we obtained grammars and descriptions of many unique languages of native tribes.
That reason is the belief that every human must learn about Jesus.
Missionaries had no way to communicate with these people. Their language was unknown to the outside world, and vice versa. So they would go there, integrate into the tribe, and learn their language by pointing and asking for bits of vocabulary, building from there. Even though I think teaching native tribes about the crucifixion of a Jew and his resurrection 2000 years ago is an absurd and unnecessary ambition, these missionaries and their grammars provided a treasure of information for comparative linguistics.
In the Middle Ages there were also missionaries, and they also had to overcome linguistic hurdles. For example, Stephen of Perm set out to convert the Komi people in Russia, speakers of an Uralic language. We know that in 1372, he introduced You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This script was based on Cyrillic and Greek, but also included Komi "runes", the inclusion of which "aided the script to greater acceptance among the medieval Permic speakers of the time."
The fact that missionaries could be driven to the creation of scripts is new to me, but in a way it makes sense. You want to find acceptance with the local populace, so you might look for something in the middle ground between what you know and what they know. A script that works for you and finds connection to the mainstream, but in which they also recognize something of their own.
I am not opposed to Emma's idea of a culture's emerging literacy, but what I find even more appealing is the idea of someone trying to write a language foreign to him, which he only knows in spoken form. This is a good way to lose some entropy, because he may not recognize all minimal pairs. Native speakers on the other hand, are by definition masters of their language.
So why no Bible? Well, the region to be converted would be non-Christian. If it was hostile to foreign religions or disapproved of the depiction of realistic human figures, it might be wise to disguise one's writings as a book of natural science or what have you.
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| The curious vord "ary" |
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Posted by: Anton - 09-05-2020, 10:57 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (2)
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I would like to draw attention to the enigmatic vord ary.
It is the vord with which the Voynich Manuscript ends (not counting You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia).
It is also the vord with which ends the "four charts" section of Q10.
It is a vord with particular affinity to the line endings. 23 of its 26 occurrences are line-ending. Although occurrences as labels are counted as line-ending as well, but whenever it is within a paragraph, it is line-ending. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. only it is stopped by the stem of the plant, - which is a valuable hint that that may be the effective line-ending as well. The only places where it is not line-ending seem to be a couple of astro charts where it's part of circular inscriptions.
I wonder whether there are other vords exhibiting such strange behaviour, apart from vords ending in m, and what we can make of this.
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Q10 as the Elements |
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Posted by: Anton - 09-05-2020, 05:09 PM - Forum: Astrology
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I've come with an intriguing idea. No sure if I'm the first one with it, because it now looks to me self-evident to propose this view. Anyway.
I'm leaving out the two Zodiac diagrams, of course, they are evidently part of the Zodiac cycle which continues further in the VMS.
What I'm speaking of are four circular diagrams arranged in sequence starting from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and ending on f70r2.
Notably, all of them are situated on a single bifolio. I mean that a single large bifolio was taken to draw these diagrams (and when space was left in the end, it was just used to hold two Zodiac diagrams). This loosely suggests that the four diagrams may be part of the same topic or even a set of homogenous ("equal rank") subtopics. (It's an interesting question whether the same can be said about Q9, but it's off-topic here).
The whole set is depicted by Rene here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (you can refer to that for pictures as well)
So, four supposedly "homogenous" diagrams, if considered from the astrological viewpoint, immediately suggest the four Elements.
If so, which is which? The one in f70r1 looks like Water, because the whole stuff looks like water indeed. The next (and the last) one, f70r2, has the unambigous Sun in the centre. The fact that the Voynich author(s) took no trouble to disguise the Sun in their drawings does them a really bad service. Sun governs Fire, as it's widely known. The pattern surrounding the Sun in f70r2 does not self-evidently look like fire. Maybe without the blue paint it may have passed for fire, but the blue paint is really out of place here. But let's suppose there was no other paint at hand. If this is one of the Elements, it just has to be Fire, because of the Sun.
What we deduce next is that if the Ruler of Fire (the Sun) is depicted in the centre of Fire, then what is depicted in the centres of other Elements must be their respective Rulers. I referred to this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for information about Rulers. The matter is complicated by that there are three sets of Rulers: Day Rulers, Night Rulers and Participating Rulers. So, each Element has three Rulers, one for day, another for night, and yet another to participate I don't know in what. If even participating Rulers are not used in all systems (as Wikipedia reports), then each Element has two Rulers still. Interestingly, the Sun occurs only once in the table of 12 Rulers - that is, as the Day Ruler for Fire. This additionally strengthens the grounds for f70r2 to be Fire, since no other Element is ever ruled by the Sun. This, further, means that the Rulers in these diagrams are Day Rulers specifically, because the Sun is never a Night or Participating Ruler. So we can limit the search space to Day Rulers.
Moving back to the supposed Water in f70r1, we find from the Wikipedia table that the Day Ruler of Water is Venus. Hence, the six-pointed star has to be Venus. But the six-pointed star is also depicted in the centre of f69r, which means that Venus must be the Day Ruler for two Elements at once. And indeed it is!! According to the table, Venus also is the Day Ruler for Earth. I leave it out of consideration for now what may be the connection of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. pattern to Earth, and what those tubes (?) might be (in fact, I have no ready ideas). It's worth mentioning that the supposed Venus in Earth has three stripes in each of its rays while the supposed Venus in Water has not. In other respects, the two are similar.
The one Element left is f69v, the diagram which I personally describe as the "Voynich pipes". By way of exclusion, it has to be Air. This is not bad, I vaguely remember that in the "Voynich Pipes" thread or elsewhere somebody suggested those pipes to represent winds. This is, I think, not impossible, because a pipe is something that can be blown in, and thus it has some association or allegory to the wind. And, according to the table of the Rulers, the Day Ruler of Wind is Saturn. So the eight-pointed star has to be Saturn.
Now, if all this holds true, this brings out unprecedented opportunities for further contextual analysis.
The graphical patterns of the Elements to be found and their context to be analysed elsewhere in the VMS.
Same thing for six- and eight-pointed stars (large ones, of course, and not those in Q20 or held by the nymphs). f67r2 and f68v2 immediately come to mind.
Non-six-or-eight-pointed stars (if any out there, potentially f67v2) to be identified as celestial bodies by way of exclusion.
Astrological notions associated with Elements, such as Zodiacal constellations/triplicities, seasons, conditions etc. to be searched for in diagrams and texts of Q10.
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| f67r1 and the supposed constellations |
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Posted by: Anton - 09-05-2020, 02:03 AM - Forum: Astronomy
- Replies (39)
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f67r1 has a curious centre about which it is not easy to say whether it's Sun or Moon (or both at once), but it features twelve sectors filled with stars that "blink aboon" (as the old poem goes). At least I supposed these asterisks to represent stars several years ago, and the number of twelve being readily associated with hours, months or Zodiac constellations, I picked the latter option and tried to map the sector labels to constellation names in different languages - not directly, of course, but I mean - to find some pattern that could suggest a match. That to no avail.
Since then, the mnemonics discussion arose and went on, and now I'm inclined to think that the author heavily relies on mnemonics and the labels would be anything but the constellation names. So I dropped the labels for now.
Now, there's the symbol at 11 o'clock (marked with red circle below) which I always considered an arrow pointing rightwards. I took that for the direction of rotation or of some sequence that the reader is to follow. That made sense because this sector is clearly marked as the "initial" by the "separator" in the rings of text.
However, I noticed yesterday that this symbol, if rotated 90 degrees clockwise, resembles scales, only if the "pointer" of the arrow is considered grease (of which there is some in the folio) and excluded from consideration, because, on the other hand, this "arrow" contains a strange tail to the left, which, although, if the object is rotated 90 degrees clockwise, looks like the scales' handle.
The scales immediately suggest the sign or constellation of Libra. Note that this depiction of scales does not look as the traditional depiction of the sign of Libra, it just resembles scales schematically.
The "special" point that Libra would occupy in the figure (the "initial" position) is not inexplicable; at the verge of the AD era the point of the autumnal equinox was in Libra (while that of the vernal equinox was in Aries), so the point of the autumnal equinox has been traditionally designated with the sign of Libra since then, notwithstanding that currently the point shifted to Virgo. (The same story is with Aries and Pisces for the vernal equinox).
I then supposed that the asterisks in the sectors (which I considered stars for the sake of this investigation) represent respective Zodiacal constellations. Again, from the point of mnemonics, if you have set the point of Libra and you understand the direction (e.g. counterclockwise), you don't need to take trouble to depict individual constellations, since their sequence is perfectly known and thus can be reconstructed by any reader.
But what follows is based on the hypothesis that those are Zodiacal constellations. To test that hypothesis, I counted the number of stars in each segment (shown in figure). It's not clear whether the large stars should be added to the small stars or they are magnified references. From what we see roughly at 6 o'clock I'd say they are references, but in the table I provide two counts - one is just small stars, the other is small plus large.
Now, does the count match the number of stars in respective real world constellations? The short answer is no, since the number of stars in a constellation is really very very large, and no astronomer has ever discovered them all. Even back from modern astronomy to the times of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, the number of stars in constellations as catalogued in Almagest is much larger than what we find in f67r1. So I further supposed that the author used some handy contemporary reference (I don't know which, maybe somebody has better knowledge in that respect) which listed only the "major" stars of the constellations. Which stars would be "major"? Probably those with smaller apparent magnitude (that is, those which look brighter). So I took the tables of stars of Zodiacal constellations and counted how many of them have the apparent magnitude of 4 or less (the choice of this threshold was such that the count was more or less on par with what is observed in f67r).
Since there was no perfect match (and we don't know which threshold was used by that supposed contemporary reference), I check not for the absolute values but for the trend. Does the number increase when it increases in f67r, and does it increase when it increases in f67r, while following the circle? For most part it does, except for three cases: supposed Gemini to supposed Cancer, Cancer to Leo and Virgo to Libra. The supposed direction is counter-clockwise.
I did the count very late yesterday, so there may be errors, but I think not many. The first count is the real world, the second is f67r1 (small stars). What's in brackets is small stars plus large stars.
Virgo 10 7 (8)
Libra 6 9 (10)
Scorpio 20 12 (14)
Sagittarius 16 10 (12)
Capricorn 5 8 (10)
Aquarius 9 9 (11)
Pisces 3 8 (10)
Aries 4 11 (13)
Taurus 16 11 (13)
Gemini 13 8 (10)
Cancer 2 12 (14)
Leo 14 9 (10)
Another thing that does not fit is the fact that real-world constellations with small amount of bright stars, such as Pisces, Aries and especially Cancer, are matched, with this plot, to large figures in the diagram - figures that are higher than those of some other supposed "constellations" in the diagram. Note that if we suppose that some asterisks were situated in those half-sectors which are now painted over by the blue paint (a possibility I have in mind), this will make the situation even worse, not better.
Yes, I'm aware that apparent magnitude may change with time. And yes, I'm aware that magnitudes e.g. in Almagest are different from what we are used to today. And that borders of constellations changed with time. With Almagest, or other catalogue of yore, one would have different counts (and probably would need a different threshold). I haven't time to do the Almagest count, but a screening look tells me that it will not improve the situation for Cancer.
What I can imagine is that the author used some chart with graphical representations of constellations where the stars reproduced were chosen only in part in accordance with their apparent magnitude, while the other consideration was to "complete the picture" (of the constellation).
All this, of course, if my hypothesis is valid, to begin with.
67r_scales.jpg (Size: 1.37 MB / Downloads: 1470)
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| The incredible unravelling of the Voynich Manuscript |
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Posted by: RenegadeHealer - 08-05-2020, 10:36 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (96)
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Paul Weiler, published May 3, 2020 on Amazon.com.
This book came to my attention via a post book's author made on Reddit's r/voynich: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The author is very upfront about promoting a book he's selling; I find his candor refreshing. What follows is a lengthy and in-depth post which I found coherent, engaging and not noticeably gimmicky. It presents a subject -JKP- has researched and written about extensively: the derivation of Voynichese glyphs from medieval Latin scribal conventions.
I have not read the book. Paul Weiler is convinced he has worked out a system whereby Voynichese is abbreviated Latin, with Voynichese glyphs mapping to Latin syllables in a one-to-many fashion. This route of investigation has been explored quite a lot and has so far been a dead end. Seeing a couple of Voynichese-as-abbreviated-Latin theories get torn apart here on the Ninja has made me see this possibility as increasingly unlikely. From what I can gather on Reddit and Amazon, Paul Weiler appears to be a German fiction writer. His writing style is fun to read, and the overall tone of his Reddit post suggests someone giving and eager to share. But almost unnoticeably absent from the generous serving of good information he gives, is any actual demonstration of his decoding method. As intrigued and entertained as I am, in these lean times, I can't justify spending ~$20 to read a Voynich theory, without some hard evidence that it might actually be on the right track.
Google and DuckDuckGo searches for +"Paul Weiler" +Voynich turned up no hits. The Reddit user u/PaulWeiler is a new account, with no other posts.
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| [split] Implications of multiple scribes |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 08-05-2020, 06:09 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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So I'm at loose ends here. If the script was written by multiple individuals, instead of some aging wizardly nutter, who badly burned her index finger, then how might VMs creation have come about? Is the VMs complied of disparate sections, in which case divisions should very clear, or were there entries by several persons on a single page, as the tilted lines might suggest?
While reasonably considered valid in the early centuries of its existence, the interpretation of VMs text as a lost 'tribal' language doesn't hold much water any more. While there is the intention to create the appearance, there is no actual "lost culture" or society behind this. There was no culture from which different parts of a combined text could originate. Unbreakable encryption and meaningless content are also investigative dead ends. What possibilities are left? It's the combined work from a cabal of wizardly nutters using set of secret symbols to unintelligibly record their foibles and flights of fantasy in their own private language?
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| Voynich Paleography article |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 07-05-2020, 12:23 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (59)
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Well, friends, here it is!
Davis, Lisa Fagin. "How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript." [i]Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies[/i], vol. 5 no. 1, 2020, p. 164-180.
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't be an open access article, but in the current circumstance Project Muse has made all of their content open access until June 30. So download it while you can!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I will have a longer piece coming out next year in a volume called Digital Paleography, and I may make small refinements to these conclusions.
Also, something went wrong with the x-axis of figure 2...we ended up with multiple EVA-[f]s there, I'm not sure why. It will be corrected in the Digital Paleography version. But that figure isn't going to tell any of you anything you didn't already know anyway.
I know that some of you will have strong feelings about my work, and I'm happy to have a discussion here about my methodology and conclusions. Enjoy!
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