I believe the key to translating the Voynich Manuscript. Is within the manuscript itself. If taken that one or two pages are the key to translating the manuscript. Based on written language of the time period. And using certain key pages to translate to those languages. As most times the Manuscript is looked at that the entire of it needs translating. When a translation key may have been in-bedded within the text itself.. Reference Page 114 and 119 of the manuscript may help. Pages 183 to 205 maybe a glossary of sorts for the manuscript. Multiple Ancient written languages symbols are used. Considering that when looking to decipher maybe what is missing.
I remember reading a long time ago (forgotten where and who posted) that the voynich text seems to have 2 shapes at the core of many of its glyphs. These are the slanted i, and the c shape (e in EVA). Basically, quite a few of the other characters can be created by starting from these two shapes, and expanding on them somehow. I can’t remember who posted this, or which website I’d read it on, but for some reason it stuck with me. I had another look into it this week, and made an observation I hadn’t noticed before. Presumably others have noticed this way quicker than me, but I wanted to share my thoughts, and ask the more experienced collective their thoughts. My thoughts are that, not only do a lot of the glyphs start with either a i or a e (referred to as “i” or “c” now for simplification), they seem to also have a twin glyph, which appears to be the exact same shape, apart from having the “i” or “c” as their ‘starting point’. I have made a table to demonstrate what I mean, which is below. As you can see, I have put the “c” glyphs on the left and the “i” glyphs on the right.
At the bottom of the table, I have also included the gallows glyphs. The reason for this is that, while not made from the “c” and “i” shapes like the rest of the glyphs, they still definitely have a distinctive ‘twin’ with which they can be linked. The only difference between the gallows is at the top left of the vertical stick, where on the left hand column the stroke moves backward first, forming a sort of “mini c” , and on the right column, the stroke moves immediately to the right, which could almost be a small “i”… … hang on… Nah… There can’t be anything in that, can there? Anyway, besides that, we still have several shapes which are unaccounted for. O should certainly be a candidate for the “c” column, as should the bridged c’s, I should imagine. But my main point for writing this is the following question, which I wanted to put to everyone. Do you think the person who designed the voynich text deliberately chose shapes (pre-existing latin letters or otherwise) which had a twinned shape? In which case, shouldn’t ALL voynich glyphs have a twin? And if so, how do we group the remaining shapes? There seems to be far too many glyphs with “c” at the root compared with “i” What about the glyphs that DONT have a twin. Are these intermediaries? It would be interesting if the shapes were chosen in this way based on some kind of unknown rules of their alphabet or pronunciation. Perhaps if this is a cypher text (and I’m on the fence about whether it is or not), the twin glyphs had the same value, but one was a negative value (or had to be treated/decoded opposite to its counterpart)? Or when laid out on a wheel, if the “c” glyph was on one side of the perimeter and the twin glyph fell exactly opposite?
NONE of which helps us decipher the text I know. I have a few other ideas which I’m happy to be talked down from. On the diagram I made, on the right of the main column I have grouped some other glyphs and attempted to ‘twin’ these also. The “g” shape and “x” shaped glyphs I grouped together because they are both drawn by adding a roughly vertical line from their upper edge, which falls below the main text line, and slightly to the left. And what about the “a”? Why did I position this as twinned to the “bridged c” glyph in the “i” column? Well, I speculated that perhaps the “a” is made by adding a c shape onto the front of the “i”. In order to create a twin of this shape, the text designer couldn’t have simply put a c on the front of a pre-existing “c”, or it would have looked like two “c” glyphs back to back. So instead, the scribe draws a line over the top of the two, showing that this is to be treated as one glyph. Well, there you have it. That’s my “what if” for the time being. I am very happy for people to say it’s silly, and it certainly has a lot of holes. I haven’t accounted for O and 4 and a few other minor glyphs, simply because I couldn’t decide how to ‘twin’ them. But that’s my idea for the time being. Twins. What does everyone think?
I wonder if the thing in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might allude to physical pins that were used for rotating elements, and thus evoke the idea of a volvelle without actually making one. I thought so after seeing this page:
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Just for fun, I decided to download a photo editing program and attempt to 'clean up' the rosettes page. I carefully airbrushed out the dark lines and damaged caused by the folds in the vellum, and then did my best to redraw in any of the drawings and text which had been lost due to repeated folding of the page.
I'm a beginner at studying Voynich, but I'm even more of a newbie at photo editing so I'm sure most could do better. And I fully recommend people to try it themselves! The reason? By zooming up very close to the document, and carefully removing imperfections, it forced me to scrutinize the page even more closely than I had done before, and I actually noticed a lot of things I hadn't picked up on before.
I've attached a scaled down image to show my attempts. If anyone would like a full-page large size copy of the image, I'm happy to send one across, but with enough time and patience, I'm confident my own attempts could be far surpassed!
PS, as the image is still quite large, the image attached doesn't show up fully in the post.. you have to right-click and go to "show image" to see the full page... sorry!
PPS... is it sacrilegious to mess around with the document images like this?!?
I'm new to the forum and this is my first post, although I have been fascinated by the VMS for several years.
Sorry if this has either been done before, or something similar - I have been looking through past posts on the forum and couldn't find anything that matched, so wondered if you guys thought this was an interesting concept.
Basically, I am quite a visual person, and while lots of people have listed tons of "rules" as how the words are formed and what order the letters generally fall in, I find it hard to process it all. Instead I have tried creating spider diagrams with the 'words' from the VMS, (or should I call them vords on this forum?) to give myself a visual representation of how these vords are formed (I think I'll call them words - predictive text keeps changing vords to voids). Attached is a picture of what I've been doing, a map of the '8' (or B or D character) for several of the "recipes" pages.
You may notice I haven't been using common EVA letter assignments. This is purely for my purposes and could be easily changed, but I found it easier to type what the shape looked like, rather than follow EVA, because when notating, I tend to mutter what I'm seeing in the VMS until I transfer it into the chart ("okay, the next word reads...O, H, A, I, I, 8, G..." etc.) 1) all paths start with a grey colour. If another voynich word follows the same path, the colour becomes pink. Then blue if a third follows that path. Then light blue, etc, through the colour wheel of the programme i am using until I reach red. After this point I think of this as a "very common path". 2) If a word starts with the same few letters as another, but then ends with a new sequence, I will colour the first few letters to show the path has become more common, but then make a new offshooting "branch" at the point of the change, which will be coloured grey until another word matches. 3) If a word ends after several letters, but another word follows the same pattern, with several more letters at the end, the shorter words last letter will become a diamond shape. This indicates that it is possible for the word to end at this point. 4) Gallows are listed as H, h, P and p, depending on shape. As I said before, this is only because that's how my mind sees the shape, and it made for quicker transcribing to the chart than trying to remember which EVA character this represented. I could change these back later (or even better, put a picture of the actual glyph onto the diagram!) Gallows with the joined C shape become CHC, CpC, etc.
Once completed, it may be possible to simplify the trees by identifying paths which are the same, but omit a single letter. Instead of two separate branches at this point, you could group the two together but draw a line around the omitted letter, joining the path up again at the following letter. Other simplifications may be possible, but the diagram would need to complete before these simplifications were made.
So far, I have only mapped several pages of the "recipe" section, and it is slow going. But my thoughts were, if I could map each word in this way: 1) popular word patterns would be immediately visible, without needing to remember word rules, simply by looking for the Red paths. 2) you could instantly see if any words were "unique" because their paths would be still in grey. 3) by comparing the diagrams of different starting letters simultaneously, we might be able to see if any have similar "routes", or even branches of routes, and possibly make links we haven't before. 4) It would be quite fun to have charts with which you could use to create voynich text yourself, knowing that by following the paths you would be making pre existing words 5) It may show up possible new words which should theoretically be possible, but which don't appear in the VMS. 6) We may be able to use the ending of all the branches and work backwards through the tree too, and identify easily what makes up endings, and if these endings identify more with some starting letters than others. 7) shorter word paths may match with larger paths in several other diagrams, identifying that path as a possible word "portion" rather than a full word. (Sorry, I'm explaining badly...) 8) if a certain tree was identical to another, with the only difference being that one tree had an extra letter at the start, it would immediately identify that letter as a definite "starting" letter, and the trees could be merged. (Again, I'm explaining badly what I mean. I am better at visuals than explanations!)
As I say, the word structure has been studied countless times before, but sometimes you can see patterns and links between things if it is visual, rather than someone simply stating all the rules in written form.
What does everyone think? Waste of time? Pointless exercise? Good concept, but very poorly executed? Any ideas welcome.
Also, I'm making these diagrams by reading the original VMS because I can't find anywhere an actual word document, or other file which lists all the possible word sequences, and the number of times that word appears in the VMS. Does such a file exist? I've searched the interwebs for ages, but perhaps I am looking in the wrong places.
Anyway, nice to be part of the community, and enjoying reading the other posts.
(19-01-2021, 06:04 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Here we are talking about the Voynich MS, and the Voynich symbol y is certainly not to be equated with the Latin abbreviation -us (when in word-final position).
Please let me know if this has been discussed before. Can the star in Virgo's hand give us some hints? In another thread, I presented a programmatic way to compute similarity between zodiacs. Having a star in the hand is a pretty rare characteristic, observed in just 3 zodiacs out of the 100 I looked at:
Mantova Lat. 209 (1470, Lombardy, Italy)
Berlin Regimen Sanitatis Ms.germ.fol.1191 (1450-1460, Freiburg, Germany)
BNF Arabe 5036 (1436, Samarkand)
It's interesting how the bottom two are similar to each other (full constellation, left hand pinching the vest, etc.), despite being from very distant regions.
