Posted by: R. Sale - 21-05-2021, 08:12 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Heraldry clearly has significant relevance to several areas of VMs investigation. Obviously, the cosmic connection shows that a nebuly line indicates a cloud band, which can represent a cosmic boundary in medieval art. Medieval heraldry supplies the name and structure / definition of the nebuly line. Surely the image of the VMs cosmos tells us that this information is contained in that illustration. Heraldry expands the interpretation of the VMs drawing and the use of any other descriptive term for this line, meandering, wobbly, serpentine, etc., provides a connotation that leads in an erroneous direction. That is cultural information derived from medieval heraldry that was known to the VMs artist.
There are various heraldic shield patterns on the tubs of the outer ring of VMs Pisces.
Another heraldic representation is found on VMs White Aries. Though visually conflicted, there are two clear, ideological, heraldic elements: red hats and blue stripes. History reveals the singular situation of the Fieschi popes. The White Aries illustration clearly has a single figure in the inner circle with both attributes. Heraldry defines the attributes and it identifies historical persons. Heraldry is the pictorial language used in the VMs. What more does it tell us about purpose?
As a language, it needs to be read. It needs to be promoted, not ignored - included as a topic of research, not omitted.
First of all, I would like to greet all the forum participants. I immediately apologize for my english, this is not my native language. There are many difficulties on this forum, one of them for new researchers is that they cannot use all the information that was already discussed here a long time ago.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Also, many are afraid that if they express their idea, someone will take advantage of it and take it away.[/font][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]But at the same time, do[/font] not be afraid to publish ideas, because in the future a sufficient amount of evidence may be collected that can help determine the authorship of the MV (i hope). I think, it is the main idea of what we are doing here.
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]I decided to switch to encoding text in mv for now. understand, how the author could do this.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to my opinion,very similar to circular encoding map. for example, if you divide this circle into 4 circular sections, you can see the starting coordinates.it is a pity that I am an amateur in decoding, and began to think how to approach this. in photoshop I split the map into 4 layers and each one started to rotate.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
I support the theory of adding meaningless text (signs), I came to the conclusion that this map could be used for this. in the first experiments I found "additions" which are often found in the text, endings and parts.[/font][/font][/font]but all this is not so important yet, because the algorithm, if any, has not yet been found. I turned to the Alberti cipher, Francis Bacon. (My theory is still unshakable about the author Cornelius, who was a student of Trithemius. In the fifth book of the Polygraphia series, published in 1518, he described a cipher in which each successive letter is encrypted with its own shift cipher). it all seems similar to me, but I have not yet been able to give birth to something specific. I was interested in the third circle from the center. 17 characters, repeated 4 times. this may give the idea of dividing the turning moment into 4 parts. it may also indicate an additional mechanism that could complement the map itself. and it seems to me that in VM this is a shematic drawing of a real code map, that a person used.
this gif is an example, in my use all layers move.
I am very poor at parchment binding and moving pages in mv, but the number 5 at the bottom of the page can be an interesting piece of evidence. map in VM, presented immediately after the herbarium, and what if it was presented before the herbarium, and folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was at the beginning of mv. I did not see in the drawings of the herbarium stylistically that this plant could not be in the initial pages, and the number 5 may indicate a person who again fastened the sheets, and turned this sheet over and put it in the middle. then he re-numbered the entire VM. this small detail may indicate the important position of the map at the beginning of the manuscript.
I want to note that there are empty paragraphs on the first page f1r . otherwise, in each sample, the length of empty metrics is different. this may indicate a prior knowledge of which additional words can be used to complete the text. and this knowledge can be obtained by looking at or using the cipher card. Thank you for your attention, I hope for your mercy and advice, because we are here to find the truth.
In the Voynich manuscript timeline appears a Petrus Beckx (No. 8 ). He is unknown to me so far and the search engine has also yielded nothing. Can someone explain me the connection with the VMS more exactly ? There is hardly anything said about him in the video.
"For almost a decade now I’ve had express permission to obtain and disseminate the original 2009 radiocarbon report of the Voynich vellum samples. Nonetheless it has been a long, confusing and sometimes frustrating trail to finally achieving that goal. I’m glad to say it has finally transpired, and the report is now up at Voynich.net for download."
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Lisa Fagin Davis '93 PhD, executive director of the Medieval Society of America and visiting professor of paleography at Yale, introduces the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke Library MS 408) to the students in her Latin Paleography class at Yale. Live-streamed from the Beinecke Library, with special guests Curator Ray Clemens and Yale Professor of Linguistics Claire Bowern.
My apologies if this news was posted on the forum at the time, but as I came across it in my own Middle English research, I also want to share it with everyone else on the forum. Regardless of whether there is any merit to my own Middle English theory or not, I hope that this convenient access to so many medieval manuscripts may be valuable and useful for everyone with an interest in Voynich research and medieval manuscripts.
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For all text analysis, people use one transliteration file or another, without knowing clearly how accurate this data is. The purpose of this short analysis is to give some indication of that.
This is done by looking at the occurrence of "Hapax Legomena", i.e. words that appear only once in the entire text.
The reason for selecting this statistic is, because it is particularly sensitive to the transliteration quality. It depends both on the choices made by the transcriber about the alphabet, and on the decisions where the word spaces are. With respect to the alphabet, it is not a matter of whether d is transcribed as "8" or "d", but whether slighly different-looking versions are transliterated the same, or differently.
The purpose is not to analyse whether Hapax in the Voynich text are normal, or comparable to other texts.
Most people use the Takahashi transliteration, which is in Basic Eva.
There are also the ZL transliteration, which uses extended Eva, and the GC transliteration, which uses the v101 alphabet.
The last two further use a symbol to indicate "uncertain spaces" (namely the comma symbol). Effectively, this means that one can extract two different transliterations out of each of them namely:
- case 1, consider that the uncertain spaces are also spaces, so count all of them as spaces.
- case 2, consider that the uncertain spaces are not spaces, so only count the certain ones as spaces
It is clear that case 1 will lead to a greater number of words (word tokens) in the text.
Altogether, this leads to five different transliterations, all of which are more or less complete for the MS.
For each of the files, I did the Hapax statistics, and in the case presented below, this is done for only the "normal text in paragraphs", i.e. excluding labels, circular and radial texts. (The alternatives have also been done and lead to similar results).
One can count word tokens, word types and Hapax, and then compute the three ratios:
types/tokens, hapax/types, hapax/tokens
The following plot shows the third ratio, which is typically in the area of 10-20%
(Note that hapax/types is usually over 50%, and can be up to 70%).
One should keep in mind that, a priori, all five transliterations should be considered of equal quality.
I would describe these results as "all over the place". The number of word tokens varies between 32,500 and 36,700 while the hapax ratio is between 14.1% and 19.6%. There is also no correlation between the two.
One can clearly observe that, on average, GC "sees" far more spaces than ZL, while IT (Takahashi) is in the middle between the two ZL options.
In general, GC includes more hapax, which can be explained by the specific character set definition it uses.
In a second iteration, I have simplified all five files by translating them to a more reduced character set, in a way similar to the Cuva alphabet I have used occasionally at my web site. This results in five new observation points, which have been added to the plot below:
This has almost no impact on the Takahashi transliteration, which already uses a limited character set.
It has only limited impact on the ZL transliteration(s), whose "special" characters tend all to be rare, while it has a major impact on the GC transliteration(s), bringing the points down to lie (more or less) on a straight line through all points.
The variation is still very significant, due to the definition of words, which strongly depends on how many spaces there really are.
In a simple online search I came across a Latin illuminated manuscript on parchment, identified as from Bordeaux c. 1375-1400. At that time Bordeaux was presumably the center of English-ruled Aquitaine (actually more commonly known then as "Guyenne", in fact more commonly known thus from the 13th century until the French Revolution as I understand it). I believe that Old Occitan (Middle Occitan?) would have been the most common spoken vernacular language of this city and region at the time.
I have attached files showing several pages from this manuscript. The English title of the manuscript is "Mass Lectionary with Readings from the Epistles (Epistolarium)". For those who may be interested, the manuscript is apparently available for sale You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for $55,000.
The description of the manuscript on this webpage states the following: "The attractive Gothic script – each majuscule embellished and filled with pale yellow – pen initials of great refinement and delicacy, and relatively early velvet binding, all point to a commission of some importance."
My question is the following: For those who are knowledgeable about these matters, how do the shapes, ducts, aspects, etc., of the letterforms of this script compare with other English, French, Occitan, other French regional, German, Gothic, other Central European, and other Continental European cursive scripts of this time period?
