I wonder if the thing in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might allude to physical pins that were used for rotating elements, and thus evoke the idea of a volvelle without actually making one. I thought so after seeing this page:
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Just for fun, I decided to download a photo editing program and attempt to 'clean up' the rosettes page. I carefully airbrushed out the dark lines and damaged caused by the folds in the vellum, and then did my best to redraw in any of the drawings and text which had been lost due to repeated folding of the page.
I'm a beginner at studying Voynich, but I'm even more of a newbie at photo editing so I'm sure most could do better. And I fully recommend people to try it themselves! The reason? By zooming up very close to the document, and carefully removing imperfections, it forced me to scrutinize the page even more closely than I had done before, and I actually noticed a lot of things I hadn't picked up on before.
I've attached a scaled down image to show my attempts. If anyone would like a full-page large size copy of the image, I'm happy to send one across, but with enough time and patience, I'm confident my own attempts could be far surpassed!
PS, as the image is still quite large, the image attached doesn't show up fully in the post.. you have to right-click and go to "show image" to see the full page... sorry!
PPS... is it sacrilegious to mess around with the document images like this?!?
I'm new to the forum and this is my first post, although I have been fascinated by the VMS for several years.
Sorry if this has either been done before, or something similar - I have been looking through past posts on the forum and couldn't find anything that matched, so wondered if you guys thought this was an interesting concept.
Basically, I am quite a visual person, and while lots of people have listed tons of "rules" as how the words are formed and what order the letters generally fall in, I find it hard to process it all. Instead I have tried creating spider diagrams with the 'words' from the VMS, (or should I call them vords on this forum?) to give myself a visual representation of how these vords are formed (I think I'll call them words - predictive text keeps changing vords to voids). Attached is a picture of what I've been doing, a map of the '8' (or B or D character) for several of the "recipes" pages.
You may notice I haven't been using common EVA letter assignments. This is purely for my purposes and could be easily changed, but I found it easier to type what the shape looked like, rather than follow EVA, because when notating, I tend to mutter what I'm seeing in the VMS until I transfer it into the chart ("okay, the next word reads...O, H, A, I, I, 8, G..." etc.) 1) all paths start with a grey colour. If another voynich word follows the same path, the colour becomes pink. Then blue if a third follows that path. Then light blue, etc, through the colour wheel of the programme i am using until I reach red. After this point I think of this as a "very common path". 2) If a word starts with the same few letters as another, but then ends with a new sequence, I will colour the first few letters to show the path has become more common, but then make a new offshooting "branch" at the point of the change, which will be coloured grey until another word matches. 3) If a word ends after several letters, but another word follows the same pattern, with several more letters at the end, the shorter words last letter will become a diamond shape. This indicates that it is possible for the word to end at this point. 4) Gallows are listed as H, h, P and p, depending on shape. As I said before, this is only because that's how my mind sees the shape, and it made for quicker transcribing to the chart than trying to remember which EVA character this represented. I could change these back later (or even better, put a picture of the actual glyph onto the diagram!) Gallows with the joined C shape become CHC, CpC, etc.
Once completed, it may be possible to simplify the trees by identifying paths which are the same, but omit a single letter. Instead of two separate branches at this point, you could group the two together but draw a line around the omitted letter, joining the path up again at the following letter. Other simplifications may be possible, but the diagram would need to complete before these simplifications were made.
So far, I have only mapped several pages of the "recipe" section, and it is slow going. But my thoughts were, if I could map each word in this way: 1) popular word patterns would be immediately visible, without needing to remember word rules, simply by looking for the Red paths. 2) you could instantly see if any words were "unique" because their paths would be still in grey. 3) by comparing the diagrams of different starting letters simultaneously, we might be able to see if any have similar "routes", or even branches of routes, and possibly make links we haven't before. 4) It would be quite fun to have charts with which you could use to create voynich text yourself, knowing that by following the paths you would be making pre existing words 5) It may show up possible new words which should theoretically be possible, but which don't appear in the VMS. 6) We may be able to use the ending of all the branches and work backwards through the tree too, and identify easily what makes up endings, and if these endings identify more with some starting letters than others. 7) shorter word paths may match with larger paths in several other diagrams, identifying that path as a possible word "portion" rather than a full word. (Sorry, I'm explaining badly...) 8) if a certain tree was identical to another, with the only difference being that one tree had an extra letter at the start, it would immediately identify that letter as a definite "starting" letter, and the trees could be merged. (Again, I'm explaining badly what I mean. I am better at visuals than explanations!)
As I say, the word structure has been studied countless times before, but sometimes you can see patterns and links between things if it is visual, rather than someone simply stating all the rules in written form.
What does everyone think? Waste of time? Pointless exercise? Good concept, but very poorly executed? Any ideas welcome.
Also, I'm making these diagrams by reading the original VMS because I can't find anywhere an actual word document, or other file which lists all the possible word sequences, and the number of times that word appears in the VMS. Does such a file exist? I've searched the interwebs for ages, but perhaps I am looking in the wrong places.
Anyway, nice to be part of the community, and enjoying reading the other posts.
(19-01-2021, 06:04 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Here we are talking about the Voynich MS, and the Voynich symbol y is certainly not to be equated with the Latin abbreviation -us (when in word-final position).
Please let me know if this has been discussed before. Can the star in Virgo's hand give us some hints? In another thread, I presented a programmatic way to compute similarity between zodiacs. Having a star in the hand is a pretty rare characteristic, observed in just 3 zodiacs out of the 100 I looked at:
Mantova Lat. 209 (1470, Lombardy, Italy)
Berlin Regimen Sanitatis Ms.germ.fol.1191 (1450-1460, Freiburg, Germany)
BNF Arabe 5036 (1436, Samarkand)
It's interesting how the bottom two are similar to each other (full constellation, left hand pinching the vest, etc.), despite being from very distant regions.
Hello everyone! I have been working on a script that computes a similarity score for pairs of zodiacs. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to work on this anymore, so I thought I would share everything I currently have with the community in case anyone is interested.
The tl;dr of what I am doing is:
There are 11 components, one for each zodiac sign present in the VMS, plus one for generic characteristics (e.g. number of signs per page, type of frames around signs, etc.)
For each component, I defined a list of characteristics to be compared (e.g. how many limbs does Scorpio have? Is Taurus eating something? etc.)
For 100 zodiacs (thanks Marco for providing the list and for your feedback!) I looked at all the signs and recorded their characteristics.
I defined a similarity function that is tuned for each characteristic but, for most of them, it returns 1 if the values are the same, 0 otherwise.
I subjectively gave more weight to some characteristics and gave more weight to characteristics that are rare across the whole dataset (e.g. virgo being a woman is pretty common, so it's assigned less weight).
For each couple of manuscripts in the dataset, I compute a similarity score for each sign and an overall similarity score (average of the 11 components).
Here are some findings:
The most (overall) similar zodiacs to the Voynich's are, in order:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1450-1460, Freiburg, Germany)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1430-1450, South Germany)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1400-1450, Bavaria, Germany)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1250, South Germany)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1450-1499, Iran)
The most similar zodiacs for each sign are:
Aries: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1200, Soissons, France)
Taurus [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ([/font]1400-1450, Bavaria, Germany)
Gemini You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1250, Amiens, France) and (tie) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1444, South Germany) [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Cancer[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]A lot of ties, because most of them look the same[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Leo[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1480, Ahun, France)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]and (tie)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1412-1416, France)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
[/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Virgo[/font][/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1230, Sicily, Italy)[/font][/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
[/font][/font][/font]
Libra A bunch of ties, not really distinctive
Scorpio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1250, South Germany)
Sagittarius [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ([/font][/font][/font]1400-1450, Bavaria, Germany) [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]and (tie)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1425, Lake Constance, Switzerland)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]and (tie)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1463, Konstanz, Switzerland)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
[/font][/font]
Pisces You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif](1430-1450, South Germany)[/font] [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]and (tie)[/font] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] (1250, South Germany)[/font]
The visualization below instead shows the graph of similarities between all zodiacs, to give you a sense of the "clusters" that exist out there. It's pretty tricky to explain but basically each node is a zodiac, they are connected by an edge if their similarity score is greater than a given value, and they have been laid out using a force-based graph visualization algorithm. The size of the edges is proportional to their strength (similarity).
Note that zodiacs might appear close together even if they are not strongly connected, so make sure you look at the edges.
Full-res image available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. contains the following files:
'zodiac.csv': this is a database of all the zodiacs I found. For each of them, you will find the characteristics of each sign, some general characteristics (location, time period, etc.), and a link to the image of each sign. You can open it using Excel.
'similarities.csv': this is the output of my script and it contains the similarity scores for all couples of manuscripts.
'zodiacs_similarities.py': is my (Python) script.
'edges.csv' and 'nodes.csv' are also generated by my script and can be imported using the Gephi software to visualize the network of zodiacs.
A few last notes:
I did this analysis without any theories in mind
There is a lot of subjectivity going on my script. Feel free to play around with things, change values, add new zodiacs to the database, etc.
My code is pretty bad, I wrote it optimizing for speed, but I tried to add as many comments as possible.
If you have any questions, I am more than happy to answer them
I know we already have a thread about the Thing, but I wondered specifically: what would we make of the Thing if we also have to take into account the Other Thing? Both Things are too similar to be a coincidence, but they also have differences.
The two main differences are:
- the little "spike"
- the way it's held
Of course, the way items are held in the VM is always weird and apparently somehow symbolic - perhaps disconnected from the way the item is held in real life. But that does not mean the way items are held must be meaningless (au contraire), and the fact is that these two are held differently.
(In fact, the nymph with the Other Thing is one of the very few examples where an object other than pipes is held in the hand closest to the viewer).
Within the context of spinning, the change of position and hands can be explained: the distaff is held up, while the spindle is held down in the other hand. See for example Thenaud's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. But there is also a problem here: if one of them has to end in a point, it must be the spindle, since it has to be spun like a top. Putting a spike on the distaff and not the spindle is asking for someone to be poked in the eye.
I was again reminded of the Things when I saw images of the parable of The Wise and Foolish Virgins, a popular motif in manuscript art. The wise virgins have enough oil to keep their lamp burning (up) while the foolish virgins' flames have gone out and their lamps are held down.
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Granted, the shape of the Things is unlike that of oil lamps. But it struck me that the presence or absence of the spike coincides with flame on/off. Selecting the most suitable Virgins for comparison:
Is there anything else that may explain these objects in relation to one another?
Whilst not everyone believes the Voynich manuscript is European in origin my impression is that this is the dominant view.(Now is the moment when I am told how many people think it may not be European in origin.)
Assuming it is European in origin and assuming that the carbon dating dates are correct I thought it interesting to explore what a history of Europe from 1404-1438 might be depending on what events are thought to be important in the time and not incidental. (I am sure it can be debated what constitutes "important" events and what doesn't, but I hope not to get sidetracked into this discussion and away from real historical events.)
Now it could be argued that the major events of history probably had little bearing or relation to the Voynich, but who knows?
