Voynich researchers seem to have a very insular mentality. In my research I would say that many of the most useful contacts, that I have had, have been with academics from disciplines outside of Voynich research, but who have knowledge relevant to Voynich research. I wonder again if Voynich researchers need to cast their net wider.
I have noticed that time and again images are posted on this forum that have been found on the internet especially from digitised manuscripts. However only a small part of what is out there is to be found online, although it is impressive what is to be found online. (I think I remember Nick Pelling observing the limitations of online resources.) Nevertheless it seems that books or archives are rarely if ever consulted by Voynich researchers. I wonder if Voynich researchers should cast their net wider or otherwise they could find themselves waiting a long time until documents are digitised. I remember posting not so long ago about archives with no response, it is as though primary resources are considered irrelevant. I understand there is more effort and maybe more cost required when drawing from books or archives as googling is a much simpler more convenient way of researching. It feels like Voynich researchers need to reassess their approach to research.
I have found a word (تبری) which is defined as sumac (سماق), and it is for the folio95r1. At first, I was thinking the drawing is more like a barberry. What do you think about it being a Sumac flower? To what I see, in voynich portal it is suggested that the other plant in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can be a Poison sumac. So, if what I'm saying is correct, can we have two sumac plants? Or the writings are in the wrong place?
Blue, red and "white" are used with strong effect in the VMs cosmic illustrations. Does this particular combination of colors show up in any other aspects of medieval investigation? In heraldry, and particularly in the earlier and more simplified versions of heraldry that is more appropriate to the time before c. 1450, many two-tincture insignias are still in use and red, blue and white combinations are not that common over all, even if vair is considered as white and blue.
Recently, two investigations involving heraldry with red, white, blue and gold tinctures have occurred regarding the counts of Gorizia [Gorz with an umlaut, etc.] and Celje > Cilli > Zylly with umlauts. Does the particular color combination indicate any connection of these historical locations with the VMs? And where else might the same, primary combination of colors occur?
Blue, red and white are used in the arms of Portugal. Does Portugal connect to the Order of the Golden Fleece? Is there a list of examples for the VMs having connections with the number 'five'?
The use of Arabic numerals has been promoted in Europe since the 10th century, but it took until the age of printing for them to (almost) entirely replace Roman numerals. One reason for the lasting popularity of Roman numerals in certain contexts would be that they are harder to tamper with, so they kept being used for things like accounting. (So far I've only seen anecdotal mention of this though. May need confirmation.)
The idea would be that they wrote for example xxvij. Because of the "j", nothing could be added. By contrast, something like 27 could be changed to 271 with minimal effort and drastic effects.
Obviously, one often-mentioned commonality of Roman numerals with Voynichese is low character entropy, or "low positional information". If I give you the alphabetically sorted set EVA [a, d, i, i, n], you know exactly how to combine them into a vord. The position of glyphs in clusters is inherent to the system and hardly provides information. In Voynichese as well as in Roman numerals, this is not an absolute truth (IV does not equal VI), but the contrast with regular texts and Arabic numerals respectively is similar.
Now I'm not saying Voynichese is designed for accounting or to prevent tampering, but the writing system also shows some resemblances to the practice with Roman numerals described above. There are some glyphs that look like they have something added to them, and those tend to "guard" edges of vords.
* The "c" or "a" with a swoop, in EVA called [y], guards both the left and right sides of vords. According to Voynichese.com, only 3% of [y] tokens do not appear at the edge. I think the actual percentage is even lower, since many examples seem to involve uncertain spaces.
* If you add an upward swoop to the [i] minim, you get what EVA calls [n]. This extended form of the minim could be said to "guard" the right side of words.
* EVA [m] is another glyph with an added swoop, and it appears almost exclusively at the end of vords. Exceptions often occur at the ends of lines, where some compression may have taken place.
* EVA [q] seems to guard the left side of vords. But [o] can do this as well, which is an argument against the system: if you have a word starting with [o], you could change it by adding [q] in front.
* 83% of [s], a curve with a swoop, is found at the first or last position of vords (this is [s] as a standalone glyph, not as part of the capped bench. I just did some quick calculations on Voynichese.com but there may be errors).
To be clear, this is not an attempt to read Voynichese as Roman numerals. But it is interesting to see some common tendencies between both systems.
this is to let you know that I am planning two, largely overlapping, talks about the Voynich MS.
The first will be on Saturday evening 9 October near Frascati. It will not be online. The title is: The Voynich MS in Rome and Latium.
Please contact me directly if you are in the area and would like to attend.
The second will be on Sunday 17 October at 16:00 UTC. (That's 18:00 Central European Time, or 12:00 US Eastern time). It will be online only. The title is: The "discovery" of the Voynich MS by Wilfrid Voynich.
I will provide registration details for this event as soon as I have them.
Stefano Guidoni commented on my blog that swallowtail merlons appear to come in two styles: straight an curved. I agree with him that the VM style *appears* straight, though we don't know if this was intentional.
Still, I wondered if there is any regional or chronological preference for either style, so I decided to copy our map and mark all straight V's in yellow, curved V's in black.
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Something weird happened though: the more I scrutinized existing buildings, the more I noticed that most (if not all) swallowtail merlons appear curved to some extent. They only look straight from certain angles, and some are more obviously curved than others. A nice and straight V only seems to occur in images.
Now, there are several possible explanations, which are not all mutually exclusive:
1) I was too strict and classified some pretty straight V's with the curved ones. Or I should have used different categories, like "a bit curved" versus "very curved".
2) Both styles exists in buildings, but our list of castles happens to lean seriously towards the curved side.
3) The straight style was once more common, but was often replaced by the more decorative curved style.
4) The "V" in swallowtail merlons is almost always curved, and the straight shape is just an artistic convention. Possibly because even curved merlons might appear straight from certain angles.
I almost certainly made mistakes in the list as well, so everything so far should be taken with a grain of salt. What do you think?
Since there has been a lot of interesting research and discussion recently about the swallowtail merlons castle drawing and comparable known examples by Koen, Marco, Aga, and others, I have a question about the text in this rosette:
Does anyone have a clear transcription of the entire circle of text going around the rosette in which the castle with the swallowtail merlons appears? And also of any text in this rosette that looks like it could possibly be related to this castle drawing? For example, I see what looks like a label word or phrase outside the text circle directly "above" (technically to the left of, since the castle is actually oriented to the left on the page) the castle. The spiraling text in the middle of the rosette may also be interesting and relevant. Unfortunately, the otherwise very useful voynichese.com transcription does not include the Rosettes page, and even in the Beinecke images, when one zooms in on this rosette to make it large enough, the text is too blurry to read and make out the characters.
I have attached an image of the castle with the label outside the text circle, so that you can see which text I am referring to, and so you can see how the text in these images is either too small or too blurry to read and distinguish the characters.
