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Huth's reading of f116v: ...
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The claimed Voynich page
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The Book Switch Theory
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Voynich Zoom CFP
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Water, earth and air
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Can we go further?
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No text, but a visual cod...
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The origin of Fabrizio Sa...
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f17r multispectral images
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Why and how the text coul...
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| Are Eastern and/or Central Europe a relatively blind spot? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 22-04-2021, 07:55 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (15)
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In my experience, there is a difference in availability when it comes to digitized manuscripts, and indeed online resources in general. There are too many German, English, French and Italian manuscripts to view in a lifetime. But outside of the central/western European region, things get a bit more hazy. I could easily name a dozen Italian or French manuscript traditions, among which those that appear the most relevant for the VM. Off the top of my head, I can recall some Czech manuscripts I've seen, and even mailed some Czech libraries to request images, but that's about it.
Now on the other hand, the VM first shows up on history's radar in Prague. So I wonder..
Did I simply not study Eastern and/or Central European regions enough?
Are the most "comparable" manuscripts, like herbals, simply mostly from countries like Italy?
Are there simply fewer manuscripts that were produced east of Germany?
Is it a matter of accessibility? (digitization, literature not in English...)
Do we need to look more towards Eastern and/or Central Europe as a possible context of creation for the VM, or are we best off with the current focus?
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| Is the VM written in Landa Khojki script? |
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Posted by: De1m0s - 18-04-2021, 07:38 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (22)
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Hello
Did anyone seen this:
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I read a lot of the translations so far; none of them made me believe, they did it right. But this one could make the break-point.
Anyone here familiar with the described language? Unfortunately, the author in the video did not translate so much.
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| question: white / red roses in ms imagery? |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 17-04-2021, 04:56 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (3)
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This is simply a question, since I am sure that many people have studied it, researched it, and know much more about this topic than I do:
Can anyone tell me if we can clearly identify any white or red roses in any of the imagery anywhere in the Voynich manuscript?
My reason for asking is probably already obvious to many of you: the white rose and the red rose were the famous symbols of the English House of York and House of Lancaster, respectively, in their feud throughout the 15th century, culminating in the Wars of the Roses. Although the latter wars themselves postdate the apparent age of the Voynich ms parchment, their rivalry and their central place in English (and French!) history in the early 15th century are entirely contemporary with the 1406-1438 range for the dating of the ms parchment. The third and final phase of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, the Lancastrian War, lasted from 1415 to 1453. England controlled much of the territory of northern France in the period 1415-1429 in particular. (I recall one analysis concluded that the month names in Latin letters written on the Zodiac chart pages of the ms were characteristic of a northern French dialect.)
Geoffrey
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| New Blog Post, [imagery] "Sources for the Voynich Forgery" |
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Posted by: proto57 - 15-04-2021, 02:38 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (13)
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Through imagery comparisons it is sometimes possible to identify the source of illustrations used in the Voynich. This is of course done all the time. The interesting thing is that many times images are "grouped" in one source... that is, several images seem to be copied from one book or manuscript, when none can be found in many other sources. For instance, only three books on microscopy each contain several close comparisons to specific Voynich illustrations; while no good or exact comparisons like these can be found in the vast corpus of other books on microscopes and microscopy.
This of course defies coincidence, especially when those sources... whether contemporaneous to the creation of the Voynich calfskin, or predating it, or post-dating it... are so varied. I mean, even if one discards (as is often done) those sources that defy one's choice of era for the Voynich, and keeps only those acceptable to the observer, it is still difficult to explain how the scribe had access to a wide range of sources, from geographically distant places, created over a large span of time. But if one includes all good comparisons, without prejudice to the time of creation of that source, the problem goes from difficult to impossible, leaving really only one reasonable conclusion.
https://proto57.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/the-sources-for-the-voynich-forgery
On top of that, there is context to the observations. They are not floating around in limbo, disconnected. For each of these comparisons, they have context in the Primer. From the post:
"The list below includes the Primer [1904 Follies of Science in the Court of Rudolf II, by Bolton], and then a selection of other sources for the imagery found in the Voynich. They all have one or more of the below characteristics. Some are direct, specific, and identifiable sources, and others are not specifically identifiable but probable works used as models and influences for the content of the Voynich.
- The item, person, activity can be directly traced back to Follies, the “Primer”, and or:
- The item is in some work, or in a work by some person, mentioned in Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolf II, and or:
- The item in the Voynich is related to the disciplines, activities, and items which would would reasonably expect to be found in the Court of Rudolph II, as imaginatively conveyed by Bolton in his faulty work.
- The item would, by being in the Voynich, fulfill the goal of the forgery, i.e., to look as though the book came from the Court of Rudolf II. That is, there is a reason behind these comparisons, that supports them being correct.
- Multiple comparisons sometimes come from single books as sources, further supporting the correctness of the hypothesis.
The fact that, through Follies, all these images from the Voynich connect to Bolton’s vision of the Court, and to each other, gives them context, and greatly lowers the possibility that any one of them, or all of them, is purely coincidence, paradiolia, or wishful thinking. These connections, to each other, and the Court, strengthen these identifications in the context of my hypothesis."
Since writing this post I've been reminded of the copies of the "Buch der Natur", also with several illustrations which can be reasonably tied to the Voynich, although predating it. I plan on adding this observation to the post today, for I agree this is another likely source: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Rich.
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| Lipogrammatic text |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 15-04-2021, 01:45 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (35)
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A lipogram or a lipogrammatic text is a piece of writing in which the author deliberately avoids the use of a certain letter (or possibly letters, although this is not typical), using only words that do not contain that particular letter (or letters).
The concept goes all the way back to the Ancient Greek author Lasus of Hermione in the 6th century B.C., who wrote poems using only words that did not contain the letter sigma. This concept has reappeared in literature from time to time over the course of the three millennia since then. It would not be an unknown or unfamiliar concept to an early 15th century European author or student.
If taken to the extreme, lipogrammatic text could possibly explain some of the extremely unusual statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text. Naturally it would likely require the avoidance of more than just one letter to achieve anything close to the extremely low entropy and conditional entropy values found in the Voynich ms text. The purpose of most historical literary lipograms was not to lower the entropy values of their texts, and I doubt the statistical analysis of actual historical literary examples of lipogrammatic text would find extremely low entropy values. But if the author of the Voynich ms carried this process to a certain extreme, it could be one part of the explanation for the statistical properties of the text that we observe.
For example, if an English writer wrote a lipogrammatic text using only words that do not contain the letter "a", very common words such as "and", "a", "that", "are", "was", "as", etc., would have to be absent from the text. (Full disclosure: This idea occurred to me while considering this very possibility for a Middle English text.) If the Voynich ms text is indeed lipogrammatic in this way, then we would have to consider not only the effect of the lack of a particular letter or letters on statistical properties of the text, but also the effect on the grammatical structure imposed by the necessity of avoiding, for example, such normally essential function words as "and", "a", "are", "was", etc., throughout an entire text.
Geoffrey C.
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| geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 10-04-2021, 07:01 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (136)
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[Edit KG: I changed the title of this thread so Geoffrey can discuss his Middle English theory here]
Recently in the 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. threads, I have tentatively raised the idea of a Germanic interpretation of certain possible readings of the Voynich manuscript text. To be clear, I certainly do not mean that the Voynich ms text could represent standard German, Dutch, etc., even in their late medieval forms as Middle High German, Middle Dutch, etc. In fact, in my tentative hypothesis I have made reference to an extremely divergent dialect, Wymysorys, strongly influenced by Polish in the area of southern Poland where it is spoken, and moreover exhibiting a curious mixture of High / Central German (like Standard German), Istvaeonic (Dutch / Flemish), and Low German (Saxon) features that even make it difficult to classify within the branches of the West Germanic languages.
But in this thread I want to focus not on the arguments in favor of this latest idea of mine, but rather on its weakest and most problematic points. Among a number of these, I want to begin with the matter of word-final sounds, letters, and characters or units. This is a huge issue for any theory about the interpretation of the Voynich ms text: The number of distinct final units of Voynich vords, however they may be parsed and classified, is strikingly small and limited. The vast majority of Voynich vords end in EVA [y], [n], [l], or [r], with a significant but much smaller number of them ending in EVA [s], [m], [o], or [d]. EVA [n] is virtually exclusively vord-final.
To justify a correspondence of such a distribution of vord-final units with any reasonably possible known language, I must attribute to EVA [y] a special nature, either as a "null character/unit", or at most as an ambiguous laryngeal "H", which may variously reflect an /h/ sound, a lenition or fricativization of the adjacent sound (as in Irish), possibly a vowel sound in certain environments, and/or possibly still a null unit. This analysis allows, for example, the vord-final sequence EVA [-ky] to possibly represent the unit [k] as the actual final unit, possibly modified in some way by the [y] unit, or possibly not modified at all if [y] is a pure null.
In this way, one can develop a system with [l] and [r] as consonants that occur very frequently in word-final position, and reasonably frequently elsewhere (more so for [l] than for [r]). The special nature of [y] allows a possible modest frequency of word-final occurrence for other consonants, but not a great frequency.
So the question then becomes, which is the consonant EVA [l] that is frequent in both final and non-final position, which is the consonant EVA [r] that is frequent in final position and modestly frequent elsewhere, and how does one account for the positional occurrence of all the other consonants?
In the Germanic interpretation, I propose that EVA [l] is "s", frequent in both final and non-final position, and that EVA [r] is indeed simply "r", frequent in final position (syllable-final as well as word-final) and only modestly frequent in other positions. This seems reasonable for Germanic languages.
But the problematic issue, then, is how to account for all of the other occurrences of word-final consonants? In particular, how does one account for and represent word-final "n" and "t"?
The only explanation I can think of is that EVA [ky], for example, represents "tH", and EVA [qoky], for example, represents "nH", and in these sequences "H" is merely a null unit. However, even this solution only provides for about 600 words with final "t" (or possibly "d") in the entire Voynich ms text, and only less than 200 words with final "n".
Clearly there is no way that a Standard German text of tens of thousands of words will only have less than 200 words with final "n". Only 600 words with final "t" is a less extreme restriction, but still requires careful justification and explanation. These are the most problematic points, prima facie, for any Germanic theory of the Voynich ms text.
Now it does so happen that Standard German is rather extreme among Germanic languages for its very high frequency of final "n". Dutch / Flemish, Saxon, and even other High German dialects drop the final "n" in many places where Standard German retains it. Thus, a divergent dialect such as Wymysorys, an East Central High German dialect with an unusually significant presence of Flemish and/or Saxon features, is at least a much better candidate to be the underlying language of the ms than standard German itself.
In short, any theory that the language of the Voynich ms text is Germanic will first of all have to account for the representation and frequency of all word-final consonants, in particular "s", "r", "n", and "t", and also explain how they are represented in non-final position and with what frequency.
Geoffrey
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![[Image: blkx9ean8tt61.png?width=2000&format=png&...79880064e6]](https://preview.redd.it/blkx9ean8tt61.png?width=2000&format=png&auto=webp&s=55d1b7e93696c512e46ccbe466754279880064e6)
