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| geoffreycaveney's Judaeo-Greek theory |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 14-03-2019, 11:03 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I must begin this post with a cautionary note that reading any individual line of the ms text must be treated as tentative and speculative, at our present stage of knowledge of the ms text (i.e., very little).
But this particular line came together so unexpectedly well, that I would like to share it with those who may find it interesting. (Others may well consider all such tentative speculation pointless and unproductive at this stage.)
I was actually investigating the distribution of [p] and [d] in the first lines of paragraphs (see the thread "glyph [d] as a substitute for [p] and [f]"). To the extent that I had any particular language in mind when I began to look at the 1st line at the top of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1, it was a Romance language such as Old Occitan or Middle French (see the thread "Old Occitan troubadour cryptograms...").
But with my provisional guesses about possible and logical phoneme values of certain characters and series of characters, I read the third word in this 1st line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1, [epairody], as "ipeirous". I wasn't trying to force this reading; I didn't even have the correct language in mind as I transcribed it. The one letter here which will be different from most other proposed transcriptions will be [d] as "u", which I have discussed in the "glyph [d]" thread.
As I looked up Romance languages, I found instead that I had stumbled upon the Greek word for "continents".
***I wish to point out that VViews' blog post on the red text on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 2 makes the insightful point that in many medieval texts, red text highlights and indicates a different language than the rest of the text. Although the opening 4-line paragraph at the top of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1 is not written in red, it is very prominent text on the adjacent and related page. It is possible that certain parts of this section may be written in Greek, while much of the rest of the ms may be written in a Romance language. This would surely wreak havoc with all of the statistical calculations performed on the entirety of the ms text.***
At this point I went back to my Greek grammar and phonology notes, and took a closer look at the rest of the line. Again, with a set of provisional guesses about possible and logical phoneme values of certain characters and series, I transcribed the entire line as follows:
[teeodaiin shey epairody osaiin yteeoey shey epaiin oaiin]
"geiopan tis ipeirous otan skiiois tis epan oan"
I note that in the first word, [d] occurs after an initial gallows character [t]. In a comment in the "glyph [d]" thread, I had proposed the hypothesis that the scribe may have substituted [d] for [p] and [f] wherever a gallows character had already occurred in the same word. My reading in this line here would be an example of such a substitution, as I read [d] as "p" rather than "u"/"v".
With these two critically significant readings of [d] in [teeodaiin] and [epairody], the rest of the line of text comes together as Greek strikingly smoothly, with only a couple minor and natural adjustments of closely related vowels. Such variation is only to be expected since we are dealing with the late Byzantine period of Greek, which will not be exactly the same as either Ancient Greek, Koine Greek, or Modern Greek.
"geio" = Earth
"pan" = all, the whole
"tis ipeirous" = the continents
"otan" = when
"skiiois tis" : read as "skiais t(a)is" = in the shadows (This is the Ancient Greek dative plural form, or an archaic expression in medieval Greek, and it could express the locative sense of "in")
"epan" : read as "eipan" = they said
"oan" : read as "oun" = thus, then, as
"eipan oun" = as they said
Thus the whole line may be read with the following meaning:
"When the whole Earth and all the continents are in the shadows, as they said"
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Detail notes on the provisional system of phoneme values for characters here:
[t] can be /k/ or /g/
[s] and [sh] are /t/ This is very logical for Greek since the common single-character word [s] could be the definite article forms "to", "tou", ta", abbreviated as "t' ".
[y] is /s/
[r] is /r/
[-iin] is /-n/ Thus [osaiin] is [o+s+a+iin] = /o+t+a+n/, whereas the [i] in [epairody] is not part of [iin], so it is part of the diphthong [ai] = /ei/.
[p] is /p/
[e] can be /e/ or /i/ This is not so surprising for medieval Greek, since a famous sound change from Ancient Greek to Modern Greek called "iotacism" made a large number of vowels that used to be pronounced /e/ or /ei/, all come to be pronounced as /i/.
[ai] is /ei/
[a] is /a/
[o] is /o/
Note: my interpretation of [t] as alternately /g/ or /k/ is significant. It indicates that the Voynich script may not distinguish between voiceless/voiced pairs such as k/g, t/d, p/b, s/z. This feature, along with the substitution of [d] for [p] and [f] in many environments, would have a dramatic effect in lowering the entropy, conditional entropy, and character pair distribution plots when performing statistical analysis on the text.
One way to test this, would be to take regular texts in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, or what have you, and change all the voiced phoneme letters to voiceless phoneme letters, g>k, d>t, b>p, z>s, as well as p>v and f>v to account for the hypothesis about [d] replacing [p] and [f]. (Also, write "u" and "v" the same, as in Classical Latin.) Then do the entropy and character pair distribution analysis on these adjusted texts, and see how their statistics compare with the Voynich ms text.
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As I emphasized at the start of this post, of course this is only one line and as such it must be considered as tentative and speculative. Nevertheless it arose naturally from a logical investigation of the phonological system as a whole, not from an attempt to force one particular interpretation in one particular language on the ms text. As I said above, I thought I might be looking at a medieval Romance language, when I stumbled upon "ipeirous" instead, and this piece of data forced me to go back and consider a Greek reading again.
As a provisional approach to relate characters to phonemes, this is still at a very tentative stage. As an interesting speculation about the possible content of this 4-line introduction to the astrology / astronomy section of the ms, I thought it was worth sharing.
Geoffrey Caveney
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| Period of Original Use |
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Posted by: Emma May Smith - 13-03-2019, 02:51 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
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The Voynich manuscript was made some time in the first half of the 1400s. Yet the manuscript appears in the historical record around 1600 when bought by Rudolf II. There is no record of the manuscript for 150+ years. What can we say about this period?
This "prehistoric" period of the manuscript must be split into two parts between those who understood the manuscript and those who didn't. The manuscript must have had at least one owner (the maker or who it was made for) who could read the text (or at least knew that the text was unreadable). And probably one owner who sold the manuscript to Rudolf as a "mystery" (although we can't assume that the text was unreadable to this seller, however unlikely). But where does the line between these two parts fall?
I understand that quire and page numbering was added to the manuscript at different times, and that some of the painting was redone at one point. This suggests at least one owner between the first and the seller, as the quire and page numbers are different and the final seller would have had no reason to add either set them (regardless of whether the handwriting matches the timeframe). Yet would this owner be among those who understood the text or not? I can't see how we would judge, except that by adding numbering they showed a certain level of care and interest in the manuscript.
Against this we can question whether any Voynich text is not original to its creation. Surely were there a chain of owners who understood the text then we would have more additions or annotations in the Voynich script? Yet if people were adding things in Latin/German/Occitan/French, what was their purpose if they didn't understand the text?
What evidence can we bring forward to bring structure to this 150+ gap to show how long the manuscript was understood or in use and how long a curiosity? Is there any? What things which we do know might fall either side of this divide?
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| glyph [d] as a substitute for [p] and [f] |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 12-03-2019, 10:14 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (43)
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We have long known that [p] and [f] cannot be "normal" characters, in the sense that the overwhelming majority of their occurrences are in the very restricted positions of the first lines of paragraphs, titles, or other text that is somehow marked as prominent. In the non-initial lines of regular text paragraphs, they occur very rarely.
The most obvious hypothesis is that they may be alternate forms for the similarly shaped "gallows" characters [k] and [t]. However, this hypothesis has the problem that it dramatically shrinks the size of the Voynich character inventory, which is already very small as it is, and makes it very difficult to conceive of a system whereby all of any language's consonant phonemes could possibly be represented. Furthermore, I believe it was Currier who first made the point in the 1970's that [p] and [f] occur in distinctly different environments than [k] and [t]: The clearest example I recall is that [p] and [f] almost never occur before [e], whereas [k] and [t] very often do.
Well, I happened to check the statistics for the glyph [d], and I was reminded that it also very, very rarely occurs before [e]: only 1% of all [d] glyphs in the ms are followed by [e]. This is similar to the same statistic for [f]: 0.8% of all [f] glyphs are followed by [e]. The proportion for [p] is even lower.
Likewise, the very frequent words and sequences with [d] also tend to be relatively frequent with [f] and [p] (though not to quite the same extent). We all know [-daiin]; I find that [-paiin] (44 tokens) and [-faiin] (14 tokens) are relatively common as well, considering that [p] and [f] are not all that frequent themselves. So it is with [-dar-], [-par-] (50 tokens), and [-far-] (28 tokens); and with [-dal-], [-pal-] (47 tokens), and [-fal-] (15 tokens).
Of course this correspondence does not exist in *all* contexts of the glyph [d]. Most blatantly, the ubiquitous Currier B sequence [-edy] has no frequent counterpart for [p] and [f], although perhaps it is worth noting that [-epy] and [-efy] do occur 12 and 11 times respectively.
All of this leads me to consider the following hypothesis:
* The glyph [d] represents a distinct letter from [p] and [f], but in non-initial lines of regular text paragraphs, the scribe simply chose to write all of them as [d].
In this scenario, [d] would still have its distinct environments where it represents its primary letter value, where [p] and [f] would not necessarily occur at all. But in many environments, we would see a certain correspondence between the occurrences of [d], [p], and [f]. This is indeed the pattern we observe in the statistics I noted above.
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So what would be the logical letters / phonemes to participate in such a substitution?
I suggest this system could make sense if the glyph [d] represents a value like /u/~/v/, and the glyphs [p] and [f] represent labial consonants like /b/, /f/, or /p/.
In many plausible candidate languages for the Voynich ms, the sound change known as "betacism" has caused /b/ and /v/ to be hardly distinguished from each other at all. Spanish is probably the most famous example, but the process has also occurred in Catalan, southern Occitan dialects, many other Iberian Romance languages and dialects, Neapolitan, Maceratese (Macerata, Italy), as well as in Medieval/Modern Greek and Ancient Hebrew. On Spanish store signs, etc., in New York City, one finds these two letters randomly alternating for each other all the time. Wikipedia notes the clever medieval Latin saying, "Beati hispani, quibus vivere bibere est" ("Fortunate are the Spaniards, for whom living is drinking").
It would not be at all surprising to me if the scribe found it inconvenient to write the fancy gallows character ([p] or [f]) for /b/ in non-initial lines of text, where there is less room above the line to draw the elaborate glyph. It would have been quite a simple fix to just write the glyph [d] representing /v/ instead, which may have sounded almost the same to the author. I notice that on the very first page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , [p] and [f] occur frequently in non-initial lines. Perhaps the scribe tired of drawing them in cramped spaces and made an ad hoc decision to substitute the almost identically sounding glyph [d] as he wrote more and more pages of text. This substitution process may have begun as simply writing /v/ for /b/, and from there it was extended to writing /v/ for the phonemes /f/ and /p/ as well.
The letter representing the sounds /u/~/v/~/w/ has a distinctive place in many languages: sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant, sometimes a glide. It does not fit so neatly in the "series" of other groups of phonemes. Likewise the glyph [d] is distinctive in the Voynich script, and it does not belong to or pattern with any other series or group of glyphs.
I considered the glyph [d] as the phonemes /u/~/v/ while taking a cursory look at the idea of Old Occitan (see my post about the Old Occitan troubadour cryptogram poems in the Pre-Modern Cryptography forum). My first idea was to read [daiin] as the indefinite article "un", but it could just as readily represent other common words, syllables, and suffixes such as "-um", "van", "-ban", "ven", or "ben", not to mention "fin" or "vin". Of course there would probably have to be some kind of cryptographic element to make a Romance language possible as the language of the Voynich ms text at all. I do note that writing all of the phonemes /b/, /f/, /p/ the same as /v/ throughout most of the text is a simple form of cryptography, whether it was originally intended in that way or not.
It also occurs to me that the [d] = /u/~/v/ idea could also explain another curiosity of the text, the sudden and ubiquitous appearance of the [-edy] suffix throughout the Currier B sections of the ms, in contrast to the almost complete absence of this suffix in the Currier A sections. As is well known, the glyph [y] looks like the very common medieval Latin ms abbreviation symbol that represented the suffix "-us". Perhaps the Currier A scribe simply used the glyph [y] in the same way, as the suffix "-us", but the Currier B scribe only used [y] to represent the letter "s" alone. In that case, the Currier B scribe would need to add a character before it to represent the "u": with my hypothesis here, this character would have been the glyph [d]. This explanation would account for the otherwise strange discrepancy between the Currier A [-y] suffix and the Currier B [-dy] suffix.
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| The Zodiac section: 79 (80?) human figures in the tubes. |
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Posted by: Searcher - 08-03-2019, 11:37 PM - Forum: Imagery
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I counted somehow Zodiac circles contain 79 successive figures in tubes. Actually, this sequence is begun in Pisces diagram and finishes in Taurus. Of course, I was interested what this number can represent in any sense. The first problem is that the number 79 doesn’t say too much as for its possible meaning, it is quite not frequent among sacred numbers. Therefore I began to think about the number 80 (80 days). I think it is possible if the first diagram (Pisces/March) must really contain 30 figures. Well, maybe, the author accidentally missed on figure or dropped it intentionally. In general, we can only guess but, supposing that the each "month" was to include 30 figures (days, degrees or another points), we get 80 successive tubes with human in it.
I agree that the term “days” is a little doubtful, as no one of diagrams contains 31 figures. Maybe, they are Lunar months and days or they are degrees equated to a number of days (actually, 79 degrees can be passed through 80 days of the year), at last, it can be another, not usual type of calendars. As always, we can only guess, the more that the last two diagrams are lost.
I tried to find any mention of 80 days (not counting "80 days around the World", of course J) and especially those that is somehow connected to liquids. My results:
1. In Judaic and Christian religion, a woman which gives birth to a boy was considered impure 40 days, that one who gives birth to a girl is impure twice as many, 80 days. Theoretically, if the VMs Zodiac section depicts a calendar for a particular woman recently confined a daughter, those figures may mean days of impurity and blood purification. Only on the expiry of this term woman could touch consecrated things and enter into the Temple, bringing of an atonement sacrifice.
This tradition was based on the Biblical texts such as The Book of Jubilees 3:8-14, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., etc.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
8. In the first week was Adam created, and the rib -his wife: in the second week He showed her unto him: and for this reason the commandment was given to keep in their defilement, for a male seven days, and for a female twice seven days.
9. And after Adam had completed forty days in the land where he had been created, we brought him into the garden of Eden to till and keep it, but his wife they brought in on the eightieth day, and after this she entered into the garden of Eden.
10. And for this reason the commandment is written on the heavenly tablets in regard to her that gives birth: 'if she bears a male, she shall remain in her uncleanness seven days according to the first week of days, and thirty and three days shall she remain in the blood of her purifying, and she shall not touch any hallowed thing, nor enter into the sanctuary, until she accomplishes these days which (are enjoined) in the case of a male child.
11. But in the case of a female child she shall remain in her uncleanness two weeks of days, according to the first two weeks, and sixty-six days in the blood of her purification, and they will be in all eighty days.'
12. And when she had completed these eighty days we brought her into the garden of Eden, for it is holier than all the earth besides and every tree that is planted in it is holy.
13. Therefore, there was ordained regarding her who bears a male or a female child the statute of those days that she should touch no hallowed thing, nor enter into the sanctuary until these days for the male or female child are accomplished.
14. This is the law and testimony which was written down for Israel, in order that they should observe (it) all the days.
We can see that, according to the above text, all this began from the Eden when Adam and Eve were created.
Some Rabbinic texts and Aristotle (*) suggested that a human fetus or, even, soul have been formed during 40 days (on the 41th day) after conception for male and -during 80 days (on the 81th day) for female.
(*) – I'm not sure that Aristotle mention exactly 80 days, as some sources say about 90 days. It must be checked later in a more or less primary source.
2. In some alchemical texts, 80 days is a period of making of the Lapis Philosophorum or the Elixir.
Peter Bonus in The New Pearl of Great Price (1338) wrote:
"The time required for the whole operation is stated by Rhasis to be one year; Rosinus fixed it at nine month; other at seven; others at forty, and yet others at eighty, days."
I suppose the last "others" could be rest exactly upon mentioned biblical texts - we know alchemy was always built on male-female relations, relations of opposites.
The famous among alchemists fable "The vision of Arisleus" also narrates about the term of eighty days.
The fragment from the "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.":
… when the king [Arisleus] takes his advice and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.* and Gabricus** are united, Beya “embraced Gabricus with so much love that she absorbed him completely into her own nature, and divided him into indivisible parts” … In punishment for this apparently disastrous advice, Arisleus and his companions are imprisoned in a triple glass house, together with the corpse of the king's son. (This triple glass house is the alchemical retort.) They are enclosed in this glass vessel and subjected to intense heat and every kind of terror for eighty days… Arisleus and his companions see their master Pythagoras in a dream and beg him for help. He sends them his disciple Harforetus, “the author of nourishment.” This disciple brings Gabricus back to life with the miraculous food of life which resurrects him. Pythagoras then says to Arisleus: Ye write and have written down for posterity how this most precious tree is planted, and how he that eats of its fruits shall hunger no more.
* - supposedly, from Arabic word with meaning “White”
** - Gabricus, Thabritius, Cabritus, Gabertin are different transliterations of the Arabic word for “Sulphur”.
This fable is a part of one of the earliest alchemical texts - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (ca. 900 AD?,), as well, it is considered earliest alchemical text in Latin, since it was translated from Arabic into Latin in 12th c., although originally it most likely was in Greek.
3. The last is shortest. It is from Chinese alchemy. I can’t comment it too much, as I am absolutely not familiar with its religion, traditions and alchemy. The matter is about The Scripture of the liquid pearl. While it is said to contain the mention of eighty one day, the number was translated as eighty.
“Smear the crucible with the Mud of the Six-and-One to a thikness of three-tenths of an inch both inside and outside. Let the crucible dry for ten days so that there are no leaks [of pneuma]. Heat it for eighty days over a fire of horse manure of chaff, and you will obtain a Golden Medicine (jinyao).” (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
Aditionally, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - The Cultivating Perfection: Mysticism and Self-Transformation in Early Quanzhen Daoism, Louis Komjathy.
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| the red ink labels on f. 67r2 and medical astrology |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 08-03-2019, 08:19 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (5)
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One of the big problems I've seen, for quite some time, in reading the Vms text as meaningful rather than meaningless, are the red ink labels and text on f. 67r2.
As far as I can see, f. 67r2 is the only page with text written in red ink in the entire ms. It seems to me that this should tell us that this text should be *very significant*. I can't think of any good reason for the author to write unimportant or insignificant text in bold red ink that stands out from all of the rest of the text in the ms.
The problem is, the 12 red ink labels around the outside of the circular diagram on f. 67r2 seem to contain fairly repetitive text and vords and phrases, just as much as or even more so than most of the rest of the ms text. And if the bold red ink text is so opaque, what hope can we have for making sense of the rest of the text that isn't written in bold red ink?
Here is the text of these 12 red ink labels, in Eva transcription, starting at the top of the page at 12 o'clock position and proceeding clockwise:
[soy shr okar]
[shekchy (s?)ykor]
[ykeody okchy]
[dchtay]
[ykchykchey ykchys]
[chkchdar]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][ykar ykaly][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][lkshykchy okar][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][chky chykchr chy][/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][ykchs ykchos][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][ykchyr aram][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][ykecho ols eesydy][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Note in particular the repetitive vord stems in the 5th label, repeated in the 10th label and the first vord of the 11th label and perhaps of the 12th label. Note further the repetitive vord stems in the 7th label and the 9th label.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I don't care how you propose to read or decipher this set of 12 labels, whether as plaintext or ciphertext: How can anyone possibly read this set of extremely repetitive vords and phrases as, for example, the names of the 12 Zodiac signs, or the names of the 12 months, in any language whatsoever that has ever existed anywhere in the world?[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]And again, if the bold red ink text has no significant meaning that we can ever hope to comprehend, what hope do we have for making sense of the rest of the text written in regular ink?[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]=====[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Don't worry, this post will not end on such a pessimistic and hopeless note. I just wanted to state the problematic issue here as clearly and strongly as possible. Because yes, it has bothered me a lot.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Here is my hopeful idea for making sense of these 12 red ink labels:[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]A list of different body parts that a medieval physician believed were influenced by the position of the moon in one of the 12 signs of the Zodiac.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It is always surprising to go back and realize this nowadays, but astrology was an essential part of medical practice in the Middle Ages, just as it was an essential part of so much else in medieval life. It was in fact quite standard for a medieval physician to determine the place of origin of a patient's illness in his body by the position of the moon in the Zodiac at the time the illness began.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Since much of the rest of the Vms sections appear to have plausible connections to medieval medicinal subject matter, it would not be too out of place if that is the purpose of the astrological section of the ms as well.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I can accept a certain amount of repetition in these 12 red labels much more readily, if they are simply lists of body parts believed to be affected by the moon's presence in each respective Zodiac sign. This makes much more sense to me than trying to read this set of 12 labels as the 12 signs of the Zodiac, the 12 months, etc.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The next question that arises from this observation is the one single line of bold red ink text at the bottom of the same page f. 67r2:[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]sshey syshees qeykeey ykchey ykchey qokeochy oaiin okalar ol(ar?)]
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[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It seems logical that this line of text must somehow be connected with the 12 labels that are also written in red ink. Perhaps this line of text simply states something like "body parts & Zodiac signs & the moon", or some such legend for the labels, presumably with a bit more grammar in the actual text than I have included in this crude guess. I have always thought that the simplest and most likely explanation of the [q-] / [qo-] prefix is that it is the Voynichese equivalent of an ampersand. In this line, that would break up the text into "[first two vords] & [next three vords] & [last four words]". I do note that the first [q-] in this line is a rare example of [qe-], not [qo-], although [qe-] does occur 66 times in the entire ms.[/font][/font][/font]
I humbly suggest that would-be decipherers of the Vms might try these 12 red ink labels and this line of red ink text as a test case for your theories and hypotheses to decipher the script and the text. If anyone can produce a consistent and systematic theory that accounts for everything in red ink on f. 67r2 and yields a text that is both grammatical and semantically plausible in a context such as I suggest above, then I would be highly impressed. On the other hand, if one's theory cannot produce anything remotely sensible for all of this red ink text, then I would probably tend to question the likelihood that it could make sense out of the rest of the ms text either.
-Geoffrey Caveney
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| Bigram = phoneme theory (language agnostic) |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 06-03-2019, 06:12 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I am motivated to post this idea in the spirit of Emma May Smith's approach of language and content agnostic analysis, but with the assumptions of linguistic text written in the plain.
I briefly brought up the outline of the idea in the devil's advocate for glossolalia post, but I realize it may have gotten lost in the 100,000 or so other words of text surrounding it. So I would like to put it forward separately and more clearly here:
At first glance one would think it absurd to propose that each Voynich character *bigram* could represent a single letter or phoneme in any language: surely with 15-25 characters, there must be many hundreds of such bigrams, and no language could have that many phonemes. But in fact upon closer inspection, so long as the bigrams are paired off naturally, and certain obvious non-bigrams are excluded (initial [q-], many final [-y]'s, initial [d-] in some cases, etc.), then it becomes apparent that there are not anywhere near hundreds of such bigrams that occur with any frequency beyond the rare or accidental appearance; rather there are only a couple dozen or so of them.
As a simple example, in the vord [otchy], clearly one must not consider the pairs [tc] and [hy] as bigrams! Obviously the bigrams are [ot] and [ch], and [-y] is a single character at the end. In this case it is obvious because we all know [ch] is one unit, not two separate letters or phonemes. Likewise with the notorious [sh], however many different forms of it may occur in the ms text: in any case, we know the [h] cannot be separated from the [s]!
In this spirit, I propose that the following inventory of bigrams constitutes a substantially large majority of the ms text:
[ch], [dy], [ai], [ok], [in], [ol], [ee], [sh], [da], [ey], [ot], [eo], [ar], [al], [or], [od], [yk], [sa], [yt], [os], [do], [so], [ky], [ty], [oy]
Naturally the apparent ligatures [cth] and [ckh] must be accounted for here as well.
As I noted above, certain obvious and frequent non-bigram single characters must be accounted for separately:
many [y]'s, many [d]'s, [q], many [s]'s, an occasional initial [k] and [t], and the odd extraneous [o], [i], or [e].
But I stress that these latter occasional or extraneous characters are very much the infrequent exception in the ms text, not the common rule. Likewise, it still remains to deal with [p] and [f], not to mention [m], [g], and a few others! But they will hardly affect the reading of the vast majority of the ms text.
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Further, we can make even more sense of this bigram inventory as a phoneme inventory if we regard certain pairs of bigrams as *the initial and final forms* of the same phoneme. The variance in form of letters in initial and/or medial vs. final position is the absolute rule in the Arabic script, exists for a number of letters in Syriac and Hebrew, is known to many in the case of the Greek letter sigma, and existed until modern times in the English letter "s" (the funny-looking "f" without the bar occurring in initial/medial position).
So, for example, perhaps [ok] is an initial form and [ky] a final form of the same letter/phoneme. Likewise [ot] and [ty]. I note on Emma May Smith's blog the suggestion that [a] and [y] may be equivalent: perhaps then [da] and [dy] are the initial and final forms of a very frequent letter/phoneme? More speculatively, but perhaps usefully, might [ch] and [ey] be the initial and final forms of the same letter/phoneme? Further suggestions for the same phenomenon include the pair [sa] and [ar], and the pair [so] and [or].
With such an inventory, we have now perhaps accounted at least somewhat for the thorny issue of initial vs. final glyphs and sequences, and we still have a decent and reasonably sized inventory of distinct letters/phonemes by this method, not too large and not too small.
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I recall that somewhere on René Zandbergen's voynich.nu website, there is the observation that the 3rd character in each vord is much less predictable, and thus contains much more information, than either the 1st or 2nd character. If the text is indeed composed of bigrams, and the initial bigram/letter/phoneme in the language happens to be rather predicable (cf. the Hebrew article prefix h-), then it would indeed make sense that the variation and information and reduced predictability would not occur until the 3rd character.
The bigram theory does introduce the problem of extremely short vords. This would be less of an issue in a Semitic abjad, in which vowels are not written. And we may also consider the idea that each vord may not be a complete word, but only a part of a word, however we may define that.
It is just one theory, in any case. I hope some folks here may find it worth considering and discussing, if not accepting.
-Geoffrey Caveney
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| devil's advocate: the case for glossolalia |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 05-03-2019, 06:56 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hello everyone,
I hate to start posting here on such a skeptical note, but I am hopeful that if we can refute the skepticism, perhaps it will give us new leads to investigate the actual language and meaning of the text, if any.
I want to state first and upfront that *I hope my following arguments are wrong*. I want this text to be meaningful, I want us to decipher it, I want us to be able to read it and understand it.
A bit about my experience working on this ms text: It would remind one of the Churchill quote about success being the ability to go from failure to failure without losing one's sense of enthusiasm, or the Niels Bohr quote about an expert being somebody who has already made every mistake it is possible to make in a given field. I feel that I am somewhere in that process, just without the success or expertise at the end.
Over the past several years, I have attempted to decipher the Voynich ms text as the following languages: Coptic, Old Irish, Old Norse, Elfdalian, Gutamal, Orsamal, Old Gutnish, Finnish, Old Prussian, Middle High German, Old Albanian, Syriac/Aramaic, and Hebrew. My favorite response from a scholar was the laconic, "The identification of the Voynich manuscript as an Orsamal document would be a truly revolutionary discovery." Classic. (For the record, I was trying to link the Voynich character inventory to a runic alphabet.)
Here is my conclusion, and my challenge to any other would-be Michael Ventris who wants to succeed in deciphering this ms text:
It is not enough to propose deciphering of individual isolated words and names and labels. It is not difficult to do that with a handful of isolated words and letter values for the characters in them. The problem is, if you then continue with the rest of the characters, and the letters in the alphabet of the target language, you will quickly run out of characters, and many consonants in your target language will go entirely unrepresented in the Voynich ms character text.
As a test, try expressing *one whole paragraph* in the text - any paragraph you like! - with your deciphering system. You will likely find that it comes out far too repetitive, with far too few letters repeated far too frequently, and far too many other letters missing entirely. It will not look like actual writing in an actual language at all.
Thus, I cannot take individual letter and word readings seriously, until I have seen what an entire paragraph looks like with the method. Based on my own experience, I can tell you that it probably won't look good.
The only way around this is to introduce ambiguity into one's system, by making one Voynich character represent multiple consonants of the target language, or by presuming substantial misspellings in the target language whereby the author used one letter to represent other similar letters, which amounts to the same thing. Then one has a different problem: if every character can be read as three different letters, then every 4-letter word can be read as 81 different words! It is hard to read such a text, and hard to have any confidence about any one particular reading of any word.
This is why, if the text does represent any language at all, I think it must be a vowelless abjad. There just aren't enough characters, nor enough variety of character combinations, for the Voynich inventory to incorporate both all the vowels and all the consonants of any language. Surely it was not an accident that John Stojko's purported deciphering into Ukrainian, had to make it a *vowelless* Ukrainian. And I can tell you, from experience again, that even with a vowelless abjad theory, it is *still* difficult to represent all consonants without introducing ambiguity into one's deciphering system!
I recently read the thread about "what the heck is an 'otaly'?" and the comments of several experienced researchers about the Voynich ms text as a "defective script". For the classic example of such a thing, look up "Book Pahlavi". Have fun trying to read anything in that script! Here's the problem: without knowing the historical context of the writings and texts and manuscripts and all of the historical cultural heritage surrounding them, *the Book Pahlavi texts would in fact be indistinguishable from random meaningless character strings*. In late Book Pahlavi, the "words" have effectively become the equivalent of logograms: you can only read them if you already know what the whole words are. Sounding out meaning from the letters is next to impossible. *If Book Pahlavi were unknown, and we only found one 200-page text of it from the medieval period, we would never be able to decipher it or read it.* No way. Even if we had full knowledge of the Middle Persian languages and all the Aramaic historical dialects that influenced it.
By the way, I think the question about "otaly" is also a very good point. It makes me question the significance of all of the labels throughout the ms, which is unfortunate. I followed up on the lead and took a look at all the pages where the "otaly" label appears. I look at the top row of labels on f88r, and see a group of small words that are far too short, and far too similar to each other, to represent distinct names or identifications of distinct plants or roots: "oral", "oraly", "oldar", "otoky", "otaly". This is not a set of plant names or parts; this is an elementary grammar book exercise of words that begin with "o", with very small and slight variation in the order of letters that follow it. As meaningful text labeling plants or parts or roots, it is hardly a plausible set of words at all; but *as glossolalia, it is a perfectly logical sequence*.
Likewise with the top row of labels on f99v: "otoldy", "otor(chy)", "oldy", "dar(ary)", "otaly", "olsy", "arol", "otoky". Very slightly more variation than f88r, but not much. The optimist in me wants to find similarities in the plants next to the two "otaly"s, and the two "otoky"s, and so on. The skeptic in me looks at the whole two rows of words and thinks, "These are just strings of similar syllables with slight variations."
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So there you have it: my arguments against the possibility of any plausible convincing interpretation of this text as actual language. Once again, I hope I am wrong. I have spent substantial effort trying to decipher this thing. I would love to be proven wrong, preferably by myself  Seriously, I would be very impressed and pleased if anyone produces a convincing deciphering that attains the support of reputable professional scholars of the given language. But I am skeptical, based on my own experience.
Consider on the other hand the following descriptions of the Voynich ms character text:
"[It] consists of using a certain number of consonants and vowels, in a limited number of syllables that in turn are organized into larger units that are taken apart and rearranged pseudogrammatically, with variations";
"[It] consists of strings of syllables, put together more or less haphazardly but emerging nevertheless as word-like and sentence-like units because of realistic, language-like [structure]".
This sounds like a more or less accurate description of the Voynich ms character text, does it not? I think anyone who has spent a substantial amount of effort researching this text will understand what I mean.
Alas, however, the above quotes are actually not descriptions of the Voynich ms: They are the linguist William Samarin's descriptions of Pentecostal spoken glossolalia in his landmark 1972 book on the subject. (Simply look up the Wikipedia page for "Glossolalia" to find all these quotes.)
Samarin concluded that this glossolalia is "only a facade of language", that it is "meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead." He argues that the syllables are not organized into words, and that "it is neither internally organized nor systematically related to the world man perceives."
I repeat (qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy): I hope I am wrong. This is a depressing and disappointing argument I am making and conclusion I am suggesting. But we have to be honest with ourselves and compare the evidence we have for any meaningful language hypothesis of the Voynich ms, vs. the strength of the above glossolalic description of the Voynich ms.
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Now just in case I am wrong, as I hope I am, here are my few thoughts about the language of the text
Like I said above, if it *is* any language, I strongly believe a vowelless abjad script makes more sense than an alphabet with vowels. I repeat: surely it was not an accident that Stojko's Ukrainian "deciphering" was a *vowelless* Ukrainian. Again, if you disagree, please produce a complete correspondence key of all Voynich characters and all letters of any alphabet with vowels, and we'll see how any paragraph of the text comes out.
Recently I had liked my Aramaic hypothesis a lot. But I came to find that my transcription had too many ambiguities, leading to the problems that I describe above.
Hebrew is much more plausible, to be honest. There were substantial Jewish communities living throughout many parts of Europe in the early 15th century, including in northern Italy and nearby areas of southern central Europe. They did not speak Hebrew as an everyday colloquial language, but they read and wrote Hebrew quite regularly and well, and not just as a liturgical language either. There is a substantial variety of literature written in medieval Hebrew in Europe. D.N. O'Donovan's "Voynich Revisionist" website had an interesting recent article about possible connections to Kabbalah in the Voynich ms and Panofsky's old comments about the topic. I think all of this makes a certain amount of sense. A few years ago The Guardian published an article about Stephen Skinner's view that a Jewish physician in 15th c. Italy wrote the ms, based purely on all of the illustrations.
But I have found that my hypothesis still runs into plenty of problems as soon as I start to try to decipher the text of actual sentences and paragraphs. (Again, the Pleiades and Zodiac labels and other labels are nice to generate hypotheses for letter values of characters. But the proof of the pudding is in the paragraphs.) Here's one idea: rather than each character being a letter, perhaps each pair of characters is one letter. Now you would think, with 15-25 Voynich characters, that you would get an inventory of many hundreds of character pairs or bigrams. But not so! The character text of this ms is so repetitive, with so little and narrow variation, that if you divide the words into the most natural and common bigrams, of course allowing for the odd final "-y" or initial "d-" or "q-" or medial "e" or "i" to occur by itself and not as part of a bigram, then amazingly you only find about *20* or so, yes only TWENTY or so, *bigrams* that occur with any substantial frequency! In fact, as I have tried to pair Voynich *bigrams* with Hebrew *letters*, amazingly I find that I do not run out of Hebrew letters to correspond to the bigrams, I *run out of Voynich bigrams* to correspond to the Hebrew *letters*! Yes you read that right, this ms does not even contain enough frequent *bigrams* to represent a complete abjad without any vowels.
Nevertheless, such a bigram inventory seems to come far *closer* to being capable of representing a language's full abjad or alphabet, than any single character inventory theory that I've ever tried or ever seen. With bigrams, I have issues with a couple or few letters of an abjad. Whereas with single characters and an alphabet, one has issues with substantial portions of any language's consonant inventory.
Of course bigrams have their problems too. The "words" are only half as long as they appear to be. So in this case it really must be a vowelless abjad, as with vowels written no language's words could be this short, even if we take the Voynich words as syllables and take the liberty of joining two of them to make an actual word. For example, returning to "otaly" again, which really is an excellent test case to bring up in many ways, with my bigram theory we only have two letters here plus a probably low-information generic ubiquitous single character ending "-y". And this 2-3 letter word has to represent both plant/root labels, as well as the nymphs in four of the Zodiac sign diagrams. Now it could just be a day number or name that recurs in multiple months (like "15th" or "Ides"), which happens to be a homonym with a plant/root name that appears on two different pharmacological pages. Indeed there are a *lot* of homonyms in an abjad when you don't mark the vowel diacritics. Still, I admit there's not a lot of information in such a word if it is composed of bigrams.
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In sum, I think the Hebrew vowelless abjad bigram hypothesis I just presented above is as good as any other hypothesis that's out there, if not better. But I cannot honestly say that it is more convincing than the glossolalia hypothesis!
The poker pro Mike Caro told a funny story about a student of his, a middle-aged man who was a really bad poker player. Caro recounts that the man used to lose $25,000 a year playing poker. With the help of Caro's poker lessons, the man improved so much that he only lost $5,000 a year playing poker. But Caro had to admit, the man's wife had an even better financial strategy for him: quit playing poker! Caro could help him a lot, but not enough to be better than quitting.
I get the feeling that my hypothesis, and all of our best hypotheses, are like Caro's poker lessons, and the Voynich ms is the unfortunate man: our best theories can seem to have the potential to reduce the level of opacity of the text significantly. But the glossolalia / meaningless nonsense hypothesis is like the wife's advice: it may not be fun or interesting, but it's probably better than anything we've been able to come up with so far.
I have no desire to quit trying to decipher the Voynich manuscript. But I try to keep in the front of my mind the realistic probability that it may well just all be elegantly written meaningless nonsense.
I sure do hope that I myself and others here can refute my arguments and prove myself wrong!
-Geoffrey Caveney
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| f86v3 |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 04-03-2019, 09:55 PM - Forum: Imagery
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F83v2. A fascinating folio, if only because of a) the chicken scratches and b) the fact that it is, IIRC, the only place that I know of where a proper bird is drawn.
A few years ago I drew up a blogpost on this page where I compared it to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and I haven't much changed my opinion.
If the VM author drew not one but two identical birds in the same schemata then a very specific reason compelled him to and several years of research haven't turned up much that isn't a) esoteric and b) non-contemporary.
Now, the thing that interests me is that we can then draw a further comparison to f57v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. represent the four secondary winds of Greek mythology. Albeit this was written in the first flush of youth, with some rather over-enthusiasm, which was later, very commendably, tampered by the experience and wisdom of Diane in the comments section of that blog post, and I must remember to thank her for this.
So let us carry on with this Greek idea. What other folios can we link to classic Greek explanations of physical phenomenons?
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| The sad story of the nebuly line. |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 03-03-2019, 01:20 AM - Forum: Imagery
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This is the sad story of the nebuly line. The nebuly line is one of a historical collection of various line patterns and, taking this collection as a set of patterns, they are best defined and identified through the illustrated heraldic lines of division. Such artistic patterns have existed prior to or outside of medieval heraldry, but the relevant heraldry, with its patterns and definitions, clearly existed well in advance of the VMs parchment dates as a widely known part of European culture. To define the nebuly pattern specifically, it is a regular meandering line, similar to a wavy line or sine wave, but one in which the individual crests and troughs are bulbous. Exactly how bulbous and how many fancy frills can be added to the basic design was an area much explored by medieval artists and is a topic that has been well examined here.
The story begins with the VMs investigator who long has been totally oblivious to everything in the paragraph above. The VMs pictures are strange. The VMs language is unknown. The violas are wilted – or inverted. And then there are the pages of exotic plants. Many investigators have suggested potential identifications for the apparent VMs monographs, some more convincing than others. This is a natural form of positive investigation, one that is based on the assumption that the illustrations are intended to be representational and then on finding the plant that best fits the necessary parameters. This is a typical investigation into the identity of the VMs plants, while trying to interpret the content of the VMs as a normal expository statement. This is the collective effort to move VMs botany forward. Those results have been interesting and informative. And if everything would have worked out better, this would be a happy story rather than a sad one.
But it is a sad story. The violas are all wilted. All attempts to interpret the VMs based on ‘face value’ have failed. Or at least they appear to have failed, depending on the criteria for success and the definition of ‘face value.’ Depending on how each investigator sees the VMs façade. And the sad story of the nebuly line has long been sad because none of those early investigators had the slightest notion about the nebuly line. There has long been a failure to recognize the examples in the botanical section where a clear nebuly line was used to represent a leaf margin three different times. The positive view of botany forward attempts to explain this as an exaggeration or an extinct variety or something. And the prior conditions of obliviousness still apply. Ignorance is bliss.
Now for the sake of discussion, let’s take the opposite perspective. Instead of the positive aspects of moving botany forward, what are the negating aspects of viewing botany backwards? Instead of seeking matches for specific botanical traits portrayed in the illustrations, consider asking what are the obvious botanical errors or mistakes in the VMs? The violas have wilted and there are three nebuly lines. And whatever the botanical reality might be, there are still three nebuly lines hidden in the leaves of the botanical illustrations. Has botanical research provided a single example, let alone three? Yet the sad part is that the investigation has always gone in the botanical direction. The modern investigators, as students of botany, attempt to find a natural explanation. The investigations of the past never went in the *other* direction because there was no recognition of the defined existence for the nebuly line. Only the investigator, who is sufficiently acquainted with the basics of medieval heraldry, would be able to correlate these VMs leaf margins with the proper heraldic name and definition. While, to the contrary, it might be assumed that, at the time of the VMs parchment dates, a better familiarity with heraldry would have promoted a greater chance of this recognition.
It is only in the past few years that the identity and existence of the nebuly line in the VMs has been recognized. And subsequent investigation of nebuly lines soon discovered a multitude of examples scattered throughout the balneological section of the VMs. And while the distractions there are numerous, they are, after a prolonged investigation, apparently just distractions after all. The solution to the VMs is not achieved right away in a single step. Like the botanical section, the balneological section is one that is open to multiple threads of speculative investigation which lead in various directions away from more significant options. The example of a nebuly line that is relevant to further investigation has instead been tucked away in an odd cosmic illustration on VMs f68v. Its relevance is confirmed by etymology and the 43 undulations. The sad story of the nebuly line is about a culturally identified line pattern long hidden in an unrecognized cosmos. The story of the nebuly line is sad because it is a record of missed opportunities. The failure to comprehend something that the author has placed in any document under investigation is surely going to affect the way in which that document will be interpreted. The inability to pick out and name things that exist in the illustrations totally thwarts the capacity for interpretation that is congruent with the author’s intentions. At the same time, the use of everything from nebuly lines to armorial and ecclesiastical heraldry shows that the VMs author possesses significant elements of traditional and historical knowledge that many modern investigators have apparently lacked. That’s how it is. The trick is to evaluate the functions of the parts, not their appearance, in order to see how disguise has been used and deception has occurred without the loss of identity.
One specific fact, when known, can function as a key to new areas of discovery; when unknown, it cannot. And in the case of the nebuly line, it is a key that opens an intellectual pathway to the renewed recognition of certain traditional, cultural elements that are present in the VMs illustrations and have long sat unrecognized. The proper interpretation of the VMs cosmos f68v, is a premier example. The existence of the heraldic fur called papelonny and the heraldic association involved in the origins of the ongoing tradition of the cardinal’s red galero are others. As an early and significant key to a traditional interpretation, yet one that has long been simultaneously disguised by medieval trickery and omitted by the modern failure to possess the essential facts, the presence of the nebuly lines, now being recognized, brings this sad story to an end.
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