"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?
The main edition in youtube of the 2009 documentary about the Voynich MS, that first announced the forensic analysis results, used to be available via this link:
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Last time I saw it, it had 9.5 million views. This number has increased a bit, but now it appears to be blocked.
This may be a regional issue, so I would be curious if anyone else can still see it?
Has ever been discussed the possibility that colors on pharmaceutical containers are not purely ornamental but could have a meaning? Personally I think/suppose they could indicate which part of plants are being used in the related “recipe” and, in particular - brown for roots, green for leaves, blue for seeds/berries/fruits. There is also another color - sort of beige, but I’m not sure about that if it has any meaning and if so - which one.
In 2004 Gordon Rugg published a paper in which he proposed that the Voynich MS text is likely to be meaningless, and could have been composed by an alternative application of a so-called Cardan Grille, namely by moving a piece of cardboard with holes over a large table of word fragments, and writing down the words that thus appear.
Read more here:
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I would like to know about the ideas that have ever existed for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
