Those of you working on plant identifications may be interested in these PDFs of Ethel Voynich's botanical notebooks. I was at the Beinecke yesterday and photographed Notebook 1 in its entirely and Notebook 2 in part (I didn't have time to photograph all of Notebook 2). You can find the PDFs here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You may download, share, use, and cite these as you wish, no permission necessary. Please do cite them properly, though, as Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 408, Box G, Notebook 1 (or 2), and the page number of the notebook.
I took hundreds of images of notes, letters, and press clippings from boxes C-H and will post them once I've got them properly organized and labeled. The general contents of the boxes are listed in Barbara Shailor's description here:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Ethel's notes are fascinating and detailed. Enjoy!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Thought board members might be interested in this video game, Inkulinati. Sounds like fun but l’d have to kick my kid off their X-Box to try it (l’m a PlayStation gamer).
If l do manage some console access, l’ll write a review.
I would like to collect early information (pre-1500) on this plant (Tanacetum balsamita) as a possible identification of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. illustration.
This old identification, along with recent discussion about the roots as the wings of Saint Michael, in combination with a French name for this plant, Herbe Sainte-Marie, make for an interesting, combined interpretation. If the roots represent Saint Michael, in his role as the Christian conductor of souls, and the herb represents the Virgin Mary, then this is a subtle reference to the Assumption of the Virgin.
Are there early herbal monographs for this plant that have written text?
This one just has names. "Erba di S. Marie"
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(12-08-2022, 12:35 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of these greek minuscule is very similar to one of rare glyhs of the VM. Any idea of what greek minuscule letter can it be?
nablator Wrote:pi !
This symbol is clearly an ancient one, with many different meanings and usages across human history. I think the Greek Minuscule pi is a decently good parallel. Personally though, I've never been able to unsee You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which is pronounced as an alveolar affricate in Korean — [t͡ɕ], [tʃ], [dɕ], or [dʒ] in IPA. I'm sure this is a shining example of "correlation does not imply causation", but it has crossed my mind that the Korean Hangul alphabet was a constructed script ("con-script"), invented and published at a date that's within the commonly accepted window of likelihood for the VMs's composition.
King Sejong is usually credited with the invention of Hangul, but he actually assembled a think tank, involving his kingdom's top linguists — most of them scholars, translators, interpreters, and diplomats, and all of them among the most worldly and multilingual Koreans alive at the time. The shapes of the letters were determined by their place of articulation. For example, for jieut, the bottom two lines that look like an inverted V (or EVA v, while we're at it!) indicates a fricative at the alveolar ridge, right behind the upper teeth, as the placement of the tongue tip. The horizontal bar on top, meanwhile, indicates a stop in addition to this. It's a very logical writing system, designed for ease of learning. Its promulgation greatly increased literacy in medieval Korea.
Historians and archaeologists tend to recognize a maximum of four inventions of written language entirely from scratch, pun intended: Sumerian Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Chinese Characters, and Mayan glyphs. Mayan glyphs almost certainly took no influence from any other writing system. But it's quite possible that the Sumerians actually gave the Egyptians and/or the Chinese the concept of writing, since they definitely traded overland with both peoples extensively in prehistory. This means that written language may have only been invented completely from scratch twice in human history. But barring this controversial and unproven possibility, there are no writing systems in current use that trace an unbroken lineage to either Sumerian or Mayan writing. All naturally evolved writing systems and a posteriori constructed scripts in use today trace their lineage to the Phoenician abjad, itself a product of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or to Chinese characters. King Sejong's think tank included learnèd men familiar with writing systems from both lineages, and the influence of both can be seen in the design of Hangul.
Again, I don't mean to suggest that anyone involved with the creation of the VMs and its a posteriori con-script was aware of, let alone involved with, the creation of Hangul. Although of course anything is possible, that seems quite literally far-fetched. What I'm suggesting is that both may have inherited, and relied upon, a common and ancient sensibility for how written marks could potentially correlate to human vocal utterances, and how that correlation might be improved upon or played with, to some desired end.
J.K. Peterson has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Voynichese glyphs, with the notable exception of EVA t and p, all have a history of use as scribal abbreviations of the Roman alphabet during medieval times. Brian Cham and David Jackson, meanwhile, have shown with their Curve-Line System that, like Hangul letters, Voynichese glyphs seem to have a deceptively simple logic to their design and selection: Start with a right-concave curve, a short back-leaning straight line, or a tall vertical line. Attach a flourish to this basic stroke: an upward curve, a downward curve, a downward curve with a loop, or a horizontal bar attached to the top; or, alternately, an upward curve attached to the bottom.
Unlike with Hangul, it is not at all clear which, if any, spoken human language Voynichese was constructed to represent. So it's not at all clear what the logic of its design means, or what implications its apparent logic has for its intended use. But I come back, time and again, to a basic question: What sort of information would Voynichese, in its apparent ad hoc design, be particularly well suited to recording? What kind of speech? What kind of content or data? What kind of information that would be readily apparent (i.e. "easily decodable") to the right insiders with the right prerequisite knowledge, but not so much to anyone else?
I am keen to date the attached cipher. In the inventory it is described as "Lettera cifrata dell'oratore di Milano."
The folder it was in contains only 15th century and very early 16th century documents, so it is unlikely to be from outside that time period, though anything is possible.
It is possible that it is mislabelled and miscategorised, although I would not assume so without strong reasons.
It doesn't look like any of the late 15th century Milanese ciphers that I have seen. It doesn't look like any of the early 15th century Milanese ciphers, however early 15th century Milanese ciphers seem to be much more diverse in design than the late 15th century ones. I have not seem many 16th Milanese ciphers, so it is hard for me to say if it belongs to that era.
Has anyone seen anything similar? What makes it stand out to me is the presence of the symbols written over some of the characters.
The Rosettes diagram includes images of various buildings and several interesting architectural details, though some are hard to read.
Here I have selected a few and compared them with details from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a copy of the well-known "Notitia Dignitatum".
Quote:The manuscript is modelled after the Carolingian copy (the lost Carolingian "Codex Spirensis") of a late antique manuscript. This manuscript is the earliest copy of this text to survive complete, made at Basel in 1436 by an Italian scribe and a French illuminator (Peronet Lamy) for Petrus Donatus, bishop of Padua.
Of course, the fold-out contains other noteworthy architectural details that have no parallel in the Basel manuscript (e.g. the ghibelline merlons, or the "stepped" cylindrical tower). Some buildings have their own threads, others can be discussed here.
I open this thread to discuss the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a reference to San Michael.
A detail of the "wings" are the red bands on the top of both "wings".
Here are samples of San Michael with red feathers on the top on the wings.
From left to right:
SYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. unknown artist. Getty Museum
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. C 1405. Metropolitan Museum
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Spain) 1435-1445
As a heraldic image, the VM eagle (if it is an eagle) would have its wings "splayed", like Sigismund's, so that is something they have in common. However, the division of the VM's feathers is decidedly un-heraldic. In heraldry, the large feathers are in the mid section (blue), hanging under the wings. The feathers in the red section are either absent or small. In the VM though, the top feathers are larger than the ones in the mid section, and they extend well above where the creature's head would be.
In heraldry, the tail generally goes down first, and then outward. For example, in the case of Sigismund's seal, you can see that there is first a vertical column, and then almost horizontal feathers. In the VM, we see something completely different, and you will be hard-pressed to find a heraldic eagle that looks like this.
I'm not saying that these differences must be explained, maybe this is just the best way to draw a heraldic eagle in a root. But I don't find the resemblance as straightforward as some people claim.
I entirely appeciate the virtues of tackling Voynichese context-free - such studies are of course necessary and valuable - but I don’t understand why people can be allergic to bringing context to the conundrum.
My methodological model calls for an alignment of text, context and subtext, and I happily alternate between taking a microscope and then a telescope to the problem. The difficulty is a bit like that posed by particle physics: the laws that govern the micro level don’t knit with the laws that govern the macro. The quest is for a general theory.
Contextually, I am led to the conclusion that the language in question must be/should be/ought to be, Ladin. Others have come to the same conclusion. I am strongly of the view that the contextual evidence points to that.
But textually, the text doesn’t map to Ladin (or any other known language.) On the face of it, it least of all resembles a Romance language. There are decypherment theories abroad about “Old Latin” to which Ladin might conform, but it’s a stretch. Nothing like that fits cogently without a lot of massaging.
Nevertheless, I think what we see is an attempt to create a writing system for Ladin. I suspect our problems might lie more with the script rather than with the language.
Moreover, from context, I expect the content to be a sort of survey, with a lot of measurements and numbers generated by systematic studies, which may explain why the text seems like a sort of artificial lexicon with excessive repetition and combinatorics. Such things are less a feature of the language and more the result of the content.
I then test contextual hypotheses against the context-free reality of the text. If there’s no way to legitimately construe the data to the proposed context, it’s back to the drawng board.
But I certainly want to narrow the search with a contextual frame and think that constructive speculation about context is an important part of the slow two-step towards a solution.
I watched Stephen Bax on Voynich Ninja recently. I share some of his views. The script could be an attempt to craft a writing system for a previously oral-only language (he cited the Armenian script as an example.) He makes useful comments about that scenario.
His priviso is that it is a language community with an intellectual need for a script – at which point he wanders off to talk about Hungarian.
That is the point at which I want to apply a contextual focus and argue that Ladin had such an intellectual need in the relevant period (and in a region that is a strong candidate as the relevant locale.)
I am encouraged to discover that there is evidence that Ladin was first put to writing in limited ways as early as the 1300s (although our first extant samples are from 1700s.) The Ladin were overtaken by history and never formed a viable national identity, but there were times when Ladin was not as marginal a tongue as it is today.
The specific context I point to is the 1450s when Nicholas of Cusa was prince-bishop of Brixen and very famously came to blows with Verena von Stuben and the Ladin speaking Benedictine nuns of Sonnenberg, a squirmish in which the Ladin of Val Badia were the meat in the sandwich, as the saying goes. (It’s the same period in which the Ladin and their traditions were the focus of the rising tide of witch hunts.)
In any case, I readily admit the difficulties of matching the text to this (or any other) context. (And my own limitations with linguistics.) But for me, that is the way forward: text/context/text/context. Focus in. Stand back. (Bearing in mind the complications of subtext. There has to be motive, not just means and opportunity.)
Again: context-free studies are great. But I think it is useful to bring a contextual lens – or many – to the data, back and forward, searching for an unforced and cogent alignment.
The research problems are manifold. For a start, the modern presentation of Ladin is not a revealing guide to the language in the 1450s. Can anyone direct me to previous Voynich-Ladin studies that might help, even if to show how little it resembles Voynichese?
