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Welcome, Guest You have to register before you can post on our site. Username/Email:    Password    Remember me Search Forums (Advanced Search) Online Users There are currently 1318 online users. » 6 Member(s) | 1309 Guest(s) Applebot, Bing, Google, Bluetoes101, Mark Knowles, R. Sale, Ruby Novacna, sivbugge Latest Threads AI-generated "Voynich man... Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media Last Post: Bluetoes101 43 minutes ago » Replies: 99 » Views: 49,522 The Modern Forgery Hypoth... Forum: Theories & Solutions Last Post: proto57 1 hour ago » Replies: 375 » Views: 34,207 Textual similarities with... Forum: Analysis of the text Last Post: JustAnotherTheory 3 hours ago » Replies: 2 » Views: 85 Would a NEW Voynich Manus... Forum: Provenance & history Last Post: dashstofsk 3 hours ago » Replies: 17 » Views: 368 “The Library of Babel” by... Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media Last Post: Mauro 4 hours ago » Replies: 4 » Views: 150 116v Forum: Marginalia Last Post: Searcher 7 hours ago » Replies: 1,207 » Views: 720,446 Just a hoax? Forum: Theories & Solutions Last Post: ReneZ Yesterday, 11:46 PM » Replies: 35 » Views: 920 Elephant in the Room Solu... Forum: Theories & Solutions Last Post: MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) Yesterday, 06:32 PM » Replies: 80 » Views: 4,675 Has anyone actually made ... Forum: Analysis of the text Last Post: Mauro Yesterday, 09:58 AM » Replies: 17 » Views: 671 Could incantations explai... Forum: Theories & Solutions Last Post: JoJo_Jost Yesterday, 09:42 AM » Replies: 42 » Views: 2,433

[split] f85r2 Posted by: Linda - 02-01-2021, 06:46 PM - Forum: Imagery - Replies (35) (01-01-2021, 08:11 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now we can say without a doubt that the important detail in the manuscript is water or some kind of liquid, pools, barrels and pipes occupy a significant part of the manuscript, including the Zodiac part and the Rosette map. I'll give one example, a detail of which has gone unnoticed. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.5r2 contains a diagram with 4 human figures. In addition to the clothes of these people and the things they hold in their hands, I was attracted by one detail - their (human) directions. It actually looks like a mess, these directions would look random if not for the direction of the fountains, which are placed exactly in the same direction as the figures. Personally, I don't know what that might mean. The version about the four tides of the equinoxes here seems the most realistic, but what do mean directions? Happy New Year Searcher I agree the water direction in that diagram goes with quire 13.  In quire 13 there is a path of water, there are two routes, Europe, and Asia/Africa. The commonality of the two routes is the Sea of Azov, for the first route one takes a western river, the other route takes the eastern river. I believe the pointing person at the top of f85r2 represents Azov, with the pointing hand representing Azov itself as a mnemonic. This, coincidentally, is the one with the two directions of fountains.  Counterclockwise, the fountain points to Burgundy or France, ie the Fleur de Lys is the mnemonic here. This one then points to Portugal/Spain with the spring deity mnemonic. That one points to Italy/Sicily with the container.  I think the other direction of Azov points to Italy/Sicily in the clockwise direction because it is the first one of the other three you can get to after going the Asia/Africa route, plus the other two will lead you there also. 'All water leads to Rome' has come up before in the representation of the lakes on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and especially f84v.  So, this map of Europe, if you will, is east up, with Azov being the easternmost point, Burgundy being north, Spain/Portugal being west, and Italy/Sicily being south. Does this not fit?   Kircher's Tarantella Posted by: MarcoP - 01-01-2021, 08:07 PM - Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media - Replies (11) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was an interesting phenomenon still existing in Southern Italy in the 1950s. It is a psychological condition traditionally associated with the bite of the semi-mythical spider "la Taranta / Tarantola / Tarantula". It could only be cured by dancing at an appropriate kind of music "la Tarantella". I was surprised to find out that Kircher discusses the subject in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. He also provided transcriptions of the music and lyrics (in both the original Southern dialect and his Latin translation). Attached Files Thumbnail(s)       Movies related to VMS, Linguistics or Antiquarian Literature Posted by: Pythagoras - 31-12-2020, 07:50 AM - Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media - Replies (5) I didn't see a thread dedicating a listing of related movies to the VMS search. The most obvious one to me is: The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski starring Johnny Depp. Another one i saw recently is less to do with literature... but in it is a relation to language and staring into the abyss which i sometimes think can be seen as relevant to VMS study:  The Empty Man. I can probably add the one about Alan Turing: The Imitation Game. Anyone know any more or have any to recommend?   Why did Giovanni Fontana write his book in cipher? Posted by: Mark Knowles - 29-12-2020, 08:37 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk - Replies (27) I was talking with someone recently about the Voynich and I mentioned that I thought that Giovanni Fontana's works were the closest parallel for that time to the Voynich manuscript. They rightly asked why Giovanni Fontana wrote his books in cipher. I said that I wasn't sure, but that it was probably to keep his ideas secret. The obvious point being that it sounds very plausible that the author of the Voynich manuscript wrote his book in cipher for the same reason that Giovanni Fontana did. Now obviously if you don't think it is written in cipher then this is an irrelevancy. I don't know if Fontana explains why he wrote his books in cipher, but it might give some useful insight into the motivations of the author of the Voynich. Opinions on Fontana's reasons for enciphering his works could be interesting.   Females on Moons Posted by: -JKP- - 29-12-2020, 04:31 PM - Forum: Imagery - Replies (14) This was introduced by VViews? on another thread (in the context of Venus in the zodiac-figures section), but is probably worth a thread of its own (maybe the other posts could be repeated here). Here is Mary with her feet on the moon (BSB Cgm 598) and one on the right about planetary influence of Jupiter:              F82v as the Alboran, Balearic, and Ligurian Seas Posted by: Linda - 27-12-2020, 08:11 AM - Forum: Imagery - Replies (8) This post will describe the diagram at the bottom of f82v as depicting the Alboran Sea. The most baffling part of this diagram is the imagery on the far right, so i will start there. I believe it stands for the Balearic sea. It shows that waters from it go toward the Alboran sea, (the pond the green water lines flow to), which is correct, that is how the current flows in that vicinity. The knobby bit to the far right is directly across from a pokey point on the shore. This is one of the Balearic islands, across from Valencia the kingdom, which takes up the pointy point. Note the blue dot, that is the location of Valencia the municipality. So basically it is only showing the Ibiza channel to represent the whole Balearic sea. This map shows exactly the area this nebuly line indicates, and i also believe that the use of blue here is indicative of being able to see the other shore, (f80r poke in the eye establishes this, and these pages are connected, which i will get into later.) Both the cloudband and the use of blue is of alternate meaning than usual, as it is not a river or cloud vapour here.  Even today, the demarcations between seas are not always agreed upon. However, like both current examples, in the vms the Balearic seems not to extend south of the islands, so it actually affects the greater Mediterranean sea, and not the Alboran directly. But the Mediterranean was left out of the vms representation, and not coloured, i think to obscure and make it look more like a pond with a weird octopus doing something to it. Unless you know what you are looking at, then all the mnemonics start to make sense.  They did not include the Gibraltar strait as part of the Alboran Sea, which also makes it look more like a pond. I tend to agree though that the sea ends at Gibralar/Ceuta. The strait is simply the remains of where the Atlantic broke through into the Alboran/Mediterranean, the strait was not a part of the sea before that happened. [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Can you see it?[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]The nymphs are Malaga, Grenada, and Almeria, which stand for the regions or provinces to which their names apply.[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]The double rainbows are river valleys. [/font]The tube is an estuary as it is coloured green, which means saltwater or otherwise mineralized water, but there is blue freshwater moving through it. Silt is shown to indicate these rivers are not as navigable as they were during the height of use in Roman and Phoenician times. [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Why does Granada not have a barrel to stand in? Because those are sheltered ports, and Granada is usually thought of as being located within the river systems, not at the deltas. Later portolans show it like this[/font] In the Piri Reis (third) example there are 5 rivers on the shore, Malaga (Guadiara river) on the left, 2 rivers for Granada, the Almeria (Andarax) River and the Almanzora River/estuary on the right, the same as being shown in the vms, albeit quite differently. You could see from the other 2 examples where the rainbow shapes come from, the Guardiana river valley and others. And you can see why the rivers would drain on both sides, because they don't actually have the same source, just close by. The Catalan atlas of the 14th century also shows the same rivers but it is more triangular in shape, many other examples exist for centuries back where these two valleys are featured. Malaga and Granada are touching because Malaga the municipality was at that point part of the kingdom of Granada until 1487. But Malaga is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and as such has its own distinct history, albeit some of its history is lost, indicated by the nymph not touching the arm to the back. When nymphs hold their arms behind them and away from their back, i believe it means they suffered a defeat or a catastrophe that affected the population. The higher they hold them, the more recent. It is interesting to note that in 1436 there was a defeat of Muslims by Murcians in the Almanzorga area. Or maybe it refers to flooding. When the river segment is held aloft, i believe it means the river rises. The Almanzora is known to swell and flood periodically today, it is reasonable to think it would have also done so in the past. Aha, the Romans called it the Surbo, meaning superb, after its great floods, so there you go. I love it that i knew it from the vms before i looked it up, happens all the time. You can almost see the analogous  point in the African shoreline but as it is not completely painted, that may be a happy accident. Then again, i do not believe it is necessarily an accident when the paint doesn't match the lines. Lots of obfuscation going on. In terms of the ordering of the folios, this one is a little problematic due to the fact that it seems to be a revisiting of the area that was skipped between You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the beginning) and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the second page page), plus it provides some more detail regarding f80r. It makes sense to me as a final obfuscation once the rest is in order. It still counts as contiguous, as we are actually by this page repeating the journey to Azov for the second trip around the world. A repeat that doesn't repeat anything exactly but says it in new ways to fill in information not given the first time around. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. connection is that the Balearic Sea component is a repeat of the beginning part of the shoreline on f80r.  The right hand nymph is Valencia. See the funny triangle thingie at her ankles? It is the same as the funny triangle point across from the Balearic Islands, except this time it is sort of 3d, coming at you. She looks somewhat like the kingdom she represents. The arm behind her but touching her back like that means to me that her history is intact, there probably exist rutters for sailing in the vicinity as well. Also the direction they have her facing makes that elbow echo the point, the negative space in the crook of her arm is triangular also. The waving hand also echos the shape of the kingdom and also signifies readiness to do business with travellers. It is held in front of her which means there is recent prosperity and indeed this turns out to be the case, after dealing with the plague in the 14th century, the 15th was prosperous with regard to Genoese merchants restarting the local silk trade. There it is again, the vms told me, then i looked it up and found out the details. Cartagena and Murcia are the other two nymphs. The next nymph, not shown here, is Barcelona. Notice Murcia shows the least forward leg as she is farthest inland. Valencia has the triangle at her feet rather than to her left, as she stands for the kingdom of Valencia, not the municipality, and the kingdom includes the point.  All in all, taken together, there are enough mnemonics to properly draw the eastern Spanish shore in addition to the Andelusian coast that can more easily be discerned. But not only geography is included, history of the places is also signified by the nymphs. Murcia's spindle is empty, pointing behind her, the direction of her journey. Her spindle is a match to the one on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. combined with the nymph in the top right corner throwing spray, i think the spindles say here is an alternate way to go, by river instead of by sea. But it took a long time, used up the life thread. It may also signify that the population is made up of immigrants, as she doesn't touch her back which means a part of the history is lost. Murcia's other hand raised behind her is likely due to the fighting with Granada, which caused continual downfall from the 13th century until Granada fell in 1492.  Cartagena's arms are low behind her, signifying longterm downfall. I just checked, and they had gone through many hands over time, and there were familial power struggles at the time of the vms that were not solved until late 15th century. I think i have covered everything in the diagram and more, let me know if there is something i can explain further or better in order for you to see it as i do, or, show me the error of my ways, i would be interested in whether and or why you do or do not see it as i do given this outline. Thanks for reading.   [split] References to Adam and Eve in Q13 Posted by: Koen G - 20-12-2020, 08:30 PM - Forum: Imagery - Replies (36) (20-12-2020, 05:40 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Speaking of which Koen, I spent a few minutes staring at Q13 seeing if I could come up with a good possible candidate image for the Serpent. So far no epiphanies, nor even any apophanies. You'll be the first to know if I change my mind on this. I'm just starting to think about these things, so I don't have many refined ideas either. One complicating factor is that the serpent is supposed to undergo a metamorphosis before it becomes the animal we know today, when god punishes it. It is often represented as a snake with a woman's head (sometimes wearing a crown), with arms, sometimes a whole human body. Sometimes a bird-monster. Sometimes a dragon-like creature.  Here's my favorite, by Van Der Goes (1479)  Or something like this: There are many wonderous incarnations. (If further interest is expressed, I will split this thread).   Cheshire at it again: "Palaeographic Instruction for the Ischia Manuscript" Posted by: Stephen Carlson - 18-12-2020, 04:10 AM - Forum: News - Replies (96) There's a new article about the VM by Gerard Chesire on Lingbuzz: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]"[/font] Here is the abstract: Quote:The process of palaeography is far more complex and time-consuming than the process of translation, as it requires additional intuition, instruction, involvement and intelligence in order to find the right words, rather than a simple substitution of words. This is one of the reasons why the writing system and language of the Ischia Manuscript took a while to fathom, as the document is unique in the complexity of its palaeographic requirements. This naturally perplexes those who expect or desire effortless translation, but logic dictates that all simple and easy possibilities must already have been eliminated by the experiments of many others over the decades. This paper provides instruction to elucidate and educate the novice about the palaeographic process needed for success with reading the Ischia manuscript. Cheshire maintains his taboo of referring to the VM under the name "Voynich," but now it's called the "Ischia Manuscript." In this article, he decodes a line of text as "l o a s a t a s é è l a s d o a s æ o s é a p é a t é e a s é a s o m é a" and then pretends it a form of Portuguese/Galician and offers a translation, "seedpods of rattle, it is they seeds, here bones it’s of foot of end it is and in the sock." It's all nonsense unfortunately.   The curve - line system Posted by: david - 18-12-2020, 01:06 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text - Replies (3) Many years ago (2014? God I feel old) Brian Cham proposed the "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which I helped with on the statistical analysis. We suggested that Quote:the Curve-Line System is an  intentional feature of the text design, and the text of the Voynich Manuscript is a highly artificial system. Now, my personal opinion remains much the same - the design of the glyphs is highly intentional, and the text is highly artificial (albeit the underlying paradigm is based upon recognisable 15th century tropes). But the basics of the CLS remain the same. That is, that "like attracts like". A few basic rules allow us to assume, with great confidence, which glyph will follow which. Some time ago I zipf'ed the percentages and then graphed the number of exceptions to this rule on Currier A vs Currier B. Despite being very different in number, they graphed perfectly:       avsb.ods (Size: 21.67 KB / Downloads: 82) So what's going on? I asked myself again tonight. Quote:4.2.3 Results Currier language A There are 4,040 invalid words in a text of 10,645. That is 37.95% of the t The body of 4,040 invalid words is comprised of 1,328 distinct words, a ratio of 32.87 (to 2 dp). Of these 1,328 distinct words, 793 (59.71% to 2dp) are ungrammatical by one inconsistency, 404 (10%) are ungrammatical by two inconsistencies, 102 (7.68% to 2dp) by three inconsistencies, 26 by four inconsistencies and 3 by five inconsistencies. Currier language B There are 5,870 invalid words in a text of 20,969. That is 27.99% of the total. The body of 5,870 invalid words is comprised of 1.877 distinct words, a ratio of 31.98 (to 2 dp). Of these 1,877 distinct words, 1,116 (59.45% to two decimal places) are ungrammatical by one inconsistency, 606 (32.29%) are ungrammatical by two inconsistencies, 128 (6.82% to 2dp) are ungrammatical by three inconsistencies, 24 by four inconsistencies and 3 by five inconsistencies. Total Out of a total of 31,614 words tested, 9,910 are invalid. That is 31.35% of the total. The total of unique aberrant words across the whole corpus has not been tested. What we are seeing here is that the idea of the CLS works, and that as it breaks down it breaks down in a Zipfian way. That is, that there is a power law underlying the inconsistencies in the idea. This could very well be attributable to a use of an artificial list of words that cannot be turned into Voynich glyphs, ie, proper nouns. [/quote] A Supposition: Non conforming words have to be non-conforming to the CLS because they are nouns, and reducing them into the CLS system would destroy information. Quote:Manually skimming through the list of non-conforming words, David noted that almost half had “l” as the first letter. Looked like a good place to start, so I tested word-conformance rate across different beginnings of all words in the manuscript text. Most were above 90%, but there were exceptions: words starting with “l” were about 14.7% conforming and those starting with “r” were 40.8% conforming. Could this be explained by the idea that “l” and “r” can be prefixed to a word arbitrarily? Turns out that words with these prefixes are otherwise conforming to the CLS without them, confirming my suspicion. Furthermore... Quote:Three aberrant glyphs which only have medium or high  conformity to the proposed CLS system. However, these three aberrant glyphs conform to very specific rules, and seem to be part of specific ngrams that occur due to some as-yet-unidentified, but very specific, reason. “o” is aberrant 44.51% of the time, when it appears in the following bigrams: “ol”, “or” and (rarely) “lo”, “ro” (where “ro” could be a confusion for “lo”). “l” is aberrant 26.83% of the time, when it appears in the following bigrams: “lo” (see rule 1), “ly”, “ld”.  Furthermore, these two bigrams always appear in the following trigrams: “oly”, “aly”, “old”, “ald”. “r” is aberrant 15.76% of the time, when it appears in the following bigrams: “ro” (see rule 1), “ry”, “ra”. These last two bigrams are almost always part of the following trigrams: “ara”, “ora”, “ary”, “ory”. What can account for this?  Let's get into a 15th century mindset. It is perfectly logical that if you create a writing system, you reduce work. By creating a system that allows you to draw a line, followed by a curve. Faster and easier. You only break the system to introduce necessary information. Could it be as simple as a syllabic reduction of words, with added expansion of contractions, but when proper nouns are included the syllabic reduction doesn't work because of the loss of information so extra consonants are included? (And yes I'm fully aware of recent work carried out in this area in recent years, hello Emma and Marco!) So the question here is : Can we speak the Voynich? we just need some experts in spoken medieval Romance languages to give it a try.. Or is there a different angle I'm not seeing? (offtopic) As always, the statistics are interesting, but we end looking at them slack jawed with no real new insight....   Every terminal glyph has a tail... Posted by: -JKP- - 13-12-2020, 04:49 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text - Replies (12) I have a mostly written blog on this, but I am falling farther and farther behind in my blogs (I don't know when I can finish it) and, despite the pandemic, work is busier than ever, so it's becoming difficult to fit in any Voynich research. This topic came up on another thread, but I think it deserves a thread of its own. I've written numerous blogs about shapes in the VMS that are similar to Latin scribal conventions. I want to point out another analogy, and that is that EVERY GLYPH that could (by convention) have a terminal tail in Latin has a tail in the VMS. Look at this example that I snapped from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the big-plant section. There are no exceptions. Every terminal glyph that has a tail-appropriate shape has a tail: This is pretty important because they do NOT put tails on everything in medieval scripts, but they do have a method for deciding which shapes CAN be given a terminal shape. For example, in languages that use Latin characters (French, German, Italian, English, Czech, Spanish, etc.) It is NOT customary to add a tail to the letter "o" because it would be confused with g or y. It is NOT customary to add a tail to letters that already have a descender or ascender (thus "g" does not normally have an extra terminal tail, nor does "d"). It is NOT customary to add a tail to an x-shape (EVA-d is similar to a looped x), and it almost has a descender the way it is usually written in the VMS. If there is a "tail" on the above letters in Latin-alphabet languages, then it is usually an abbreviation, not a terminal tail. A terminal tail is a shape convention, not an abbreviation convention. For example, if you write Roman numeral 4 (iiii) in the old style with 4 minims (rather than iv) then it was usually written iiij. It's not a "j" as we know it, it's a minim with a terminal tail. If you look at the marginalia on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you will see that some of the letters have terminal tails, like the "n" and "h" on the last line. This is pretty normal in medieval script. Some scribes also added a tail to "h" within a word (and sometimes not). It might even be argued that y is a c-shape with a tail rather than a Latin-like abbreviation symbol, but that's a separate discussion. So, the VMS text respects this basic convention of which shapes may have a tail and which ones usually don't BUT it is highly unusual and distinct in having a tail on every terminal letter that is, by convention, allowed to have a tail. This is NOT something you see in medieval manuscripts. It is, however, a very western way of doing things, even if it is idiosyncratic and specific to the order and choice of VMS glyphs. So... putting a tail on everything that might normally have a tail seems to me to be significant because the entire manuscript is crafted like this. It's not like normal narrative text. It's almost like an exercise in scribal conventions and discipline (skills that a would-be scribe would need to have to get into a guild or to secure an apprenticeship). I've often thought that the VMS was unfinished. There are a few things that look like they were left out. One of these is the illuminated initial that would normally be in the upper-left corner of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (it is missing). But maybe it's not "unfinished". Maybe this is part of the exercise. Indent the text to make room for an initial. Demonstrate that you know how to do it. First Previous Next Last