I now have a (Judaeo-)Greek reading of the 3rd line of the passage at the top of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1. I present it here together with the first two lines.
Again, in my rendition of the quasi-Judaeo-Greek text below, I am going to use the transcription "A" to stand for a letter that could have been represented in a Judaeo-Greek text by the Hebrew letter "aleph". As I noted in my post about the historical text earlier, when Greek was written in the Hebrew script, the Hebrew letter aleph could be a placeholder letter under which a rather wide variety of vowel diacritic dots could be written, but the diacritics were not written in this ms. Thus in this place there could often occur Greek alpha, but also omicron or epsilon or upsilon. I do not use this symbol anywhere near that freely in my interpretation below, but I do use it in some places.
first three lines of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1 in the Voynich ms text:
Now "normalizing" this Judaeo-Greek text into a more standard Greek form:
eipan tis ipeirous otan skiais tis , eipan oun
para autous & autes tora oikous ouk eisi tes , tis t'-eipes
sou tes etan auttoi aules , deite [te] vasein , phes
Very literal word-for-word English translation in the same word order as the Greek:
"they said the continents when in the shadows , they said then"
"beside them (masc. & fem.) now [astrol.] houses not are they , to them it-you said"
"to you they were these houses/courts , you see the foundation, you say/assert"
Idiomatic English translation:
"They said when the continents are in the shadows, then they said
now there are not (astrological?) houses by them, you said to them
these houses/courts belonged to you , you see the foundation, you claim"
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Comments: As I pointed out in my post about historical Judaeo-Greek, some ambiguity in the representation of Greek vowels is inevitable in such a script. Neither Hebrew nor Voynichese can possibly render all the Greek vowels as precisely as the Greek script itself does.
First of all, I have fixed the end of the 2nd line: since I am finding more and more evidence that Voynich [l] is more likely to be Greek "s" than Greek "n", I now read the last two words of this line as "tis t'-eipes", meaning "to them you said it". It is common in Greek, as in other Balkan languages (the "Balkan Sprachbund"), to use a pre-verbal clitic object pronoun. This explains the "t'-" (short for "to") prefixed to "-eipes" ("you said"). Thus I do not have to explain away the gallows letter here as a pilcrow-like glyph strangely placed in the middle of a paragraph.
Further, I now have a *consistent* use of the form "tis" as a dative plural pronoun/article in two different phrases in the first two lines: "skiais tis" meaning "in the shadows", and "tis" here meaning "to them". The Ancient Greek dative plural form was masc/neut "tois", fem "tais", but Modern Greek just has an accusative plural (feminine) form "tis" or "tes". In this ms text we see the author trying to use the classical dative plural, but using the more modern form "tis" to do so.
This identification of "tis" as the dative plural pronoun/article, consistent with the historical change from Ancient to Modern Greek, but distinct from both, may be the most significant grammatical feature of Voynich Judaeo-Greek that I have identified so far. If I am able to interpret the entire ms in this way, I hope that I can produce an accompanying work on "The Grammar of Voynich Judaeo-Greek" to explain as many such forms as possible.
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About the third line in general: I rather like the poetic flow of the Greek in this line in its final form:
"sou tes etan auttoi aules, deite vasein, phes"
One can even hear the meter:
"sóu tes étan áuttoi áules, déite vásein, phés"
The grammatically consistent phrase and clause breaks, after "aules" and after "vasein", even fit with the poetic meter of the line.
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More detailed comments about the individual words:
The phonetic spelling of "sou" as "shio[u]" is consistent with modern pronunciation of Greek, which late medieval Byzantine Greek resembled much more than Ancient or Koine. If you hear for example the basic modern Greek greeting "geia sou" ("hello"), it sounds more like "yeia shou". There is no *phonemic* distinction of [s] and [sh] in Greek, but there is variation in the pronunciation of the phoneme /s/. For a Judaeo-Greek writer, who was familiar with Hebrew in which there is a distinction between /s/ and /sh/, it would have been natural to write Greek "s" as Judaeo-Greek "sh" in many such cases.
The Voynich vords [s oeeg] are somewhat difficult to read on the ms page, but the most natural Greek interpretation "t-Aees" = "tes" fits very well with both the meaning of the line, the grammar of the line, and even the poetic meter of the line. "tes" simply means "they".
The [ch] at the beginning of [cheos aiin] is natural, because many stages and dialects of Greek have naturally added an "h-" "breathing" sound at the beginning of words that are written with an initial vowel. So here we find written "heAt-an" for phonetic [hetan], which is more recognizable as the Greek word "etan", the basic verb form "they were".
The next word [okesoe] I read as Judaeo-Greek "Atitoi", representing Greek "aut(i)toi" or just "auttoi" or "autoi". It is possible that this form is some kind of compound of "aute(s)-" ("these") and "-oi" ("the" plural).
The next word [aram] is the heart of the whole line, like "oikous" in the line above it. I read it as Judaeo-Greek "AlAs", representing Greek "aules", meaning "houses, courtyards, courts" (as in the court of a kingdom). It could also mean the "courtiers" of a monarch.
Thus we now have a very grammatical sequence in this line: "sou tes etan autoi aules", as long as we understand that "autoi" is not a classical form but rather a compound like "aute(s)-oi". It is also possible that the author simply confused the grammatical genders of some nouns in this ms text. This is not unheard of in Byzantine Greek: Even in probably the most famous Byzantine Greek epic poetic work, Digenis Akritis (also transliterated as Digenes Akritas, which only proves my point about the ambiguous vowel qualities of medieval Greek!), one scholar identified numerous examples of participles with "non-agreement of case or gender" throughout the work. Other grammatical anomalies in this epic work included "hanging nominatives", "inaccurate use of genitive absolutes", "accusative absolute where genitive required", and so on.
So, if you want to debate me about Byzantine Greek grammar and my Voynich Judaeo-Greek grammar, you are at least going to have to study the grammatical forms as found and used in Digenes Akritas, to say nothing of more obscure Byzantine Greek works.
(By the way, I did some of this research on Digenes Akritas while researching medieval texts in general as part of my successful effort to decrypt Don's Voynichese ciphertext.)
Thus we have the smooth grammatical phrase "to you they are these the houses/courts". In more idiomatic English, it reads "These houses/courts belonged to you."
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Moving on to the final phrase in the last three words of the line, we see that the author likes to end lines with short phrases with simple verbs: "eipan oun", "tis t'-eipes", and here "deite [te] vasein, phes". The verbs include "they said", "you said", and here "you see" and "you say" (or more precisely "you assert", "you claim").
It is true that "deite" is a plural "you" form, whereas the other forms are singular "you". Perhaps this was a set formulaic phrase "you see", rather than a reference to an individual specific person as in the 2nd person singular forms. Or perhaps a better explanation is that the "-te" is actually the definite article that goes with the following word "vasein", "foundation". The phrase "te vasein" is a consistent grammatical feminine accusative singular form. (The "pure" Attic Ancient Greek form would be "ten basin"; the "pure" Modern Greek form would be "te vase"; the form here "te vasein" is mainly modern but with the "classical" accusative ending "-n" added to the noun.)
This word "vase" by the way is the classical Greek word "basis", borrowed directly into almost every European language. In Ancient Greek it meant "step", "rhythm", "foot", "foundation", "base", and more, but in modern Greek its main meanings are "base", "foundation", "basis". (In the latter, the definition is the borrowing!)
The final word [dam] I read as Judaeo-Greek "fAs", representing Greek "phes", meaning "you say", "you assert", et al. It is also the verb form used when quoting someone, "sometimes after another verb of saying". In this respect, it makes sense that this verb appears in the third line after the use of the other verb "eipan", "eipes" in the first two lines.
Thus, the last three words of the line together constitute the clause "you see the foundation, you claim". It is semantically consistent with the first part of the line, as if the "you" whom the author is addressing, is looking at the foundation which is all that is left of the houses or courts that used to be theirs.
Once again, it is interesting in this respect that the Voynich ms was written only decades, at most, before the fall of Constantinople and the collapse of the entire Byzantine Emipre, when the end was surely already in sight for astute and clear-headed observers. (To give the Byzantine Empire some credit, it lasted arguably longer than the Western Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire put together.)
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I want to close by returning to the strikingly smooth poetic meter of this third line in my interpretation:
"sóu tes étan áuttoi áules, déite vásein, phés"
The first two lines are not quite so smooth, but their poetic meter is not too bad either:
The Digenes Akritas Byzantine Greek epic poem had the popular and standard medieval and modern Greek so-called "political verse" or "decapentasyllabic verse", which is 15-syllable iambic blank verse. We do not exactly have that in these three lines, but actually these lines are pretty close. If most of the Voynich ms text is composed in such a verse or something similar, it might explain the rigidity of the line lengths, the types of syllables in certain parts of the lines, the types of letters in certain parts of the lines, and so on. (Perhaps the author was using types of letters and syllables repetitively in certain parts of lines, to help him stick to the required meter? Keep in mind, it doesn't have to be *good* poetry to be an attempt to compose poetry!) Again, I am not claiming it is all going to be exactly this decapentasyllabic verse, but perhaps it is something along similar lines.
In fact, looking back at the second line, the omitted vowels in the ms text at the ends of "para", "tora", and "ouk-eisi" may make sense as the author's effort to reduce the number of syllables in the line, to make it fit within a reasonable length for the poetic meter of the line. As written in the ms text, the 2nd line reads as follows:
This gives the first and second lines each 14 syllables. The third line has 13 syllables; however, recall that extra vowel in the middle of "aut(i)toi". With the extra vowel included, all three lines have 14 syllables each. Since the first and third lines seem to begin with the stress on the first syllable, not the second, perhaps this is decapentasyllabic verse but with the first syllable omitted. In any case, there do seem to be 7 stressed syllables in each line, which is again in line with traditional Byzantine Greek verse. Once again, it doesn't have to be good poetry, to be an attempt to compose poetry.
As I understand it, this year's HistoCrypt (International Conference on Historical Cryptology) conference is open to submissions on the subject of the Voynich Manuscript. If they get enough on the subject, the Voynich may have it's own "track". As it is, René Zanbergen is one of the invited speakers, so there will be Voynich discussion for certain.
The conference will be held from June 23-26, 2019 in the Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium. I am not related to the event, but I do hope to go. And I wanted to mention it here, among my "Ninja friends", because I was hoping that there may be some of you also interested in submitting a proposal for a Voynich talk.
There is still time to submit a proposal for a talk, as I write this. The deadline for submissions is March 22nd. Here is the submission site, or as it is said, the "call for papers":
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
And here is the official main site of the event: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Hopefully there will be varied Voynich talks at the event. If this happens, I'm sure it will be a huge success, and those of us with an interest in the Voynich will have many opportunities over the span of the conference... both officially and unofficially, as often happens, to meet and discuss "all things Voynich".
While researching a related topic, I stumbled across a copy of John Wycliffe's (Tractatus) De Ecclesia (1378) in the original Latin, and the edition happened to include an illustration of the first page of the manuscript of the text. I was struck by the way that certain letters and combinations on this ms page resemble certain Voynich ms characters.
Now I am not saying that Wycliffe had any connection to the Voynich ms, not at all. But I do find it interesting that so many letters in this particular style of Latin ms writing look like certain Voynich ms characters.
The first two attachments are the first part of the Wycliffe ms page. The third attachment is the same Latin text in its printed form.
Take a look at the following letters and combinations on the Wycliffe ms page:
A combination that looks like the Voynich [-iin] ending appears in multiple places on this page. For example, 2nd attachment, 3rd line, middle of the line. The actual word is "ipsam", as found in the middle of line 9 of the printed text. The preceding word in the ms looks like "quo" with a curved line over it, but that represents the actual word "quomodo". The following word, which looks like "pfc?" (hard to read the part after "f"), represents the actual word "perfecte".
In the last line of the 2nd attachment, notice the single symbol by itself in the middle of the line. It looks like Voynich [s]! And guess what, Voynich [s] is the only character that frequently appears as a separate word by itself. In this Wycliffe ms, the symbol is an abbreviation for "est", as found in line 16 of the printed text.
In the next-to-last line of the 2nd attachment, the end of the 2nd word looks like Voynich [r]! This ms word represents the actual word "Christus" in line 15 of the printed text.
There are numerous "figure 8" shaped letters on this ms page that look like Voynich [d].
In the 1st attachment, there are several examples of a letter that looks like Voynich [g]: for example, in the middle of the 3rd line. It is the "d" in the word "quiditate", which looks like "quid" with a small superscript abbreviation after it. Believe it or not, that very short 3rd line of the ms represents all of the following actual words: "materia de quiditate ecclesie, et fi"!
At the top of the 1st attachment, in the "title" text, the word in the middle of the 2nd line somehow reminds me of some of the writing on the very last page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the Voynich ms.
I could go on with further examples. Suffice it to say, many letters in this Wycliffe Latin ms text look like Voynich ms characters.
Posted by: R. Sale - 17-03-2019, 12:36 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- No Replies
The matter of the nebuly lines is an explicit example of something that comes from the historical past, but which is not commonly known in the current era. And yet things of this sort were commonly known by educated persons from the time of the VMs parchment dates – and beyond. Nebuly lines are clearly used in the VMs, but there has been a long period of investigation where they were not recognized as such. This failure to recognize something that was known in the past results in an imperceptible, but not insignificant gap, a lacuna in relevant, historical knowledge. The test for these informational gaps is simple. Name it and claim it. The nebuly lines are another example of things that sit in plain sight but are, or have been until recently, ‘undiscovered.’ And this illustrates the importance of being able to interpret these elements from the perspective that is relevant to the proper time. When certain line patterns have traditional names that were in use at the time of the VMs parchment dates, then is it too much to suggest that something important might be missing if none of the present or previous investigations were in possession of the proper, traditional name. It is simply impossible to fully understand the function of the nebuly line without knowing the name. And it turns out that knowing the name is useful in better understanding for other areas of the VMs as well.
So here is a problem with certain aspects of historical investigations. If ‘name it and claim it’ is one investigational option. Then ‘not name it and <whatever>’ is the other. Obviously, without the name, any attempted research is stuck with the second option of potential investigation and relegated to a set of inferior possibilities. Either the unknown line is a strange leaf margin, or these are nebuly lines disguised as leaf margins. Having the traditional name makes a significant difference in developing the proper interpretation, which is of particular importance in the VMs cosmos. The naming of the nebuly line opens up the investigation of the nebuly line, a totally new (at the time) pathway. And this led to the investigation of ye olde wolkenband, which is significant because they are etymologically connected.
The recovery of historical information, in the form of traditional names, opens up old perspectives of interpretation and new lines of investigation, previously missing. The recovery of historical information, as in the naming of the nebuly lines, is only the first part of VMs investigation. The second part involves the discovery of how this traditional information has been hidden in the VMs illustrations. Nebuly lines used as leaf margins, in this example. The visual alterations in the cosmic comparison show a much greater level of complexity. Cloud bands were placed in the rosettes. Patterns corresponding to armorial heraldry are found in the tub illustrations in the outer ring of Pisces. A paly, a chevrony, a semy of roundels, a papelonny, and others. Red and white galeros of ecclesiastical heraldry are worn by some of the figures on White Aries.
The recovery of traditional names, the filling of historical gaps, can open new perspectives of interpretation that must either enhance or supersede those investigations that existed previously. The creator of the VMs took what was traditional at that time, then made some efforts to disguise those representations in the cosmos, the zodiac, the rosettes and so on. Past VMs researchers have long taken certain investigative pathways without benefit of these recent recoveries. The recoveries include; naming the nebuly line, making the cosmic comparison, examining the structure of cloud bands, recognizing the ephemeral nature of text banners, knowing the ordinaries, sub-ordinaries, and tinctures of heraldry, and knowing the armorial connection to the origins of a tradition in the ecclesiastical heraldry of the Roman Catholic Church that continues from the 13th century to this day. VMs investigation without benefit of these recovered facts has produced a series of fanciful misapprehensions.
These recoveries, by filling in this missing information which has been validated by tradition, then reveal previously unknown gateways that open up alternative paths of investigation, pathways where a better knowledge of tradition would have led somewhat sooner, and ones that will provide new perspectives on VMs content. These interpretations need to be evaluated by discovering their purpose. Why is it that things in the VMs seem to be hidden? Why is that each part of the VMs cosmos seems to have been drawn in a way which presents the same cosmic structure as BNF Fr. 565 fol. 23, but has been given an appearance that seems to intentionally have sought out an artistic representation with the greatest visual diversity? The purpose of alteration is disguise. The purpose of disguise is deception. And that is the nature of the VMs. There is ambiguity and obfuscation in the illustrations. But the disguise has reached its perfection when the element being hidden cannot be named or recognized by those who examine the VMs pages. And that applies to examples from nebuly lines to the papelonny tincture. Neither can the name of some image be used in heraldic canting when that traditional name is lacking. So, what significance should be attributed to VMs investigations formed before these gaps in historical information were filled in? The ones so far. What use is the result of a solution set that does not include basic information of potential significance? What happens when the recovery of historical names, the restoration of historical lacunae, creates an altered interpretation of the VMs creator’s purpose and reveals what has been hidden by intent and all but erased by circumstance?
Historically, attempts to intepret Voynich have been aimed at discovering the procedure with which one could map Voynichese glyph sequences to meaningful letter sequences in one of existing languages. This approach still prevails up to date. Simple substitution (with slight variations) attempts constitute the vast majority of the proposed solutions, and we are accustomed to hear of new solutions on a more or less regular basis.
Considering Voynich a more complex cipher basically falls into the same broad vein of investigation, - alas, with no success so far.
Of lately, I've been thinking if such approach is efficient after all. The issue is that there are some indications that the Voynichese text, while conveying pretty meaningful message, may not be what we are believing it to be.
One such indication follows from the work by Wladimir which suggests that no plant names are contained within botanical folios. The imagery which is manifesting its mnemonics supports this thesis. In a (supposedly enciphered) text, what reason would there be to exclude plant names? Nothing. The situation is quite different for the representation that relies on a nomenclator. If your nomenclator does not contain plant names, you won't be able to include them.
Another strange thing is the high degree of morphological similarity between vords being members of homogenous sets - such as my favourite "Voynich stars" (f68r1, r2). Of 53 Voynich star labels in total, 39 (or 74%) start with "o". Of those 39, 15 (or 28% of the total) start with "ot", and 9 (or 17% of the total) start with "ok". Those two subsets constitute 45% of all Voynich stars. In other words, notions homogenous in nature are designated by vords similar in morphology. This does not very much look like what we find in natural languages. This could be explained, however, by vords encoding positions in a nomenclator. Homogenous notions may have been grouped in a nomenclator. Encodings of their positions (close to each other) would then appear morphologically similar.
If there is no mapping between Voynichese and plain text on the glyph level but, instead, mapping exists only on the vord-to-word level, then all attempts at "deciphering" would be vain. What one should do instead is to shift from "decrypting" to "translating". Suppose extraterrestrials land and we are presented wtih their writings. We would not try to invent a procedure to decrypt their writings into English or Russian, that would be waste of time. We would seek a way to translate those instead, based on our understanding of what words of theirs map to what notions known to us. This is the direction that might prove fruitful for Voynichese. The problem is with the methodology, as always...
Mostly for fun, but also to improve my understanding of the text, I occasionally play around with methods to generate text that looks like the Voynich MS text.
Just to show an example , the following is a very straightforward 'encoding' of a short piece of Italian.
This can still be tuned a lot, and I'll refrain for the moment from explaining how it was done.
However, it can be inverted exactly, i.e. a very simply process will turn this back into legible Italian (though spaces
are lost).
First in Eva, then in Voynichese:
Quote:oty chey shaiin cheaiin dokaiin ar shy qotsheshaiin dsol chcheol dsar dy
ol chsy dol cthaiin daiin char shchey dy otokchar aiin sain ckhaiin
ckheeaiin sheaiin chcheain okar ototaiin ar qokaiin chesheol shy seaiin dckhear dy
sy cthaiin dokaiin y dcthaiin dokaiin aiin sain dol y dar shokchol qotar dcthain aiin
ol shokchaiin shar sy ctheaiin doty ol dsy qotaiin ddy ain chear dy
oty chey Shaiin cheaiin dokaiin ar Shy qotSheShaiin dsol chcheol dsar dy ol chsy dol cThaiin daiin char Shchey dy otokchar aiin sain cKhaiin cKheeaiin Sheaiin chcheain okar ototaiin ar qokaiin cheSheol Shy seaiin dcKhear dy sy cThaiin dokaiin y dcThaiin dokaiin aiin sain dol y dar Shokchol qotar dcThain aiin ol Shokchaiin Shar sy cTheaiin doty ol dsy qotaiin ddy ain chear dy
Remarkably, the entropy of this text (skipping spaces) is:
1st order: 3.7705
conditional: 1.2110
I have clearly 'overdone' it with the conditional entropy.
I am aware that this is not exactly like Voynichese. Maybe I can do better in the next weeks.
Of course, everyone is invited to present similar experiments,
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
