One of the advantages of the format of a "forum" is that if you have no time for development of an idea, you can just throw it in with a hope that it may be picked up by other participants.
So do I with respect to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia.
It is notable that at least two of the three plain text marginalia words have been emended.
Where there was "mel", now is "del".
Where there was "mul", now is "mus".
More than that, it looks like the first word was emended as well. It was either "en" (and then "d" was prepended, making it "den"), or it was *en (with the first letter hard to distinguish), later corrected to "den".
Three corrections in three words in a row give rise to a natural question: what for? These words appear as a label to the objects nearby depicted. So it looks like the guy depicted some objects, then labeled them, and then suddenly he decided that the labeling is not correct (!). OK, this is not so very probable.
What else, then? It occurs to me that the plain text of the label may have been associated in some way with the Voynichese text above. So after putting down all this text (Voynichese and plain text), the guy then got afraid that this association may lead to the readers' breaking the Voynichese code, so he emended the letters to change the words to other valid words (e.g. "mul" and "mus" are both valid words in some language, as well as "mel" and "del" are, etc.).
An interesting name for a death metal group from Portugal: The Voynich Code.
It's interesting to contemplate how popular culture has assimilated "Voynich" as a mysterious mime capable to generating such allusions in a name.
Here's their You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.page and here's a review of their You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
There has been much discussion as to the essence of the "gallows" characters in the VMS. Basically, there are several types of gallows there:
"plain" gallows - EVA p, f, k and t
composite "benched" gallows - such as cph and the like - actually we don't know if they represent a single character or a sequence of "plain" characters
"embellished" gallows - which well may be just actual embellishments of the "plain" gallows
weird gallows with one leg in one "word" and other leg in another - notably, EVA t exhibits such behaviour.
Let us consider the "plain" gallows. They exhibit some interesting properties:
They have not so many variations – just four (p, f, k and t).
They are not rare in the corpus.
They occur very frequently as the starting character of the paragraph. Sometimes many paragraphs in a row begin with the gallows.
They seem to never occur in the end of any distinct high-level logical entity (paragraph or label). I was not able to confirm this 100% due to the absence of the respective query in any Voynich tool, but I found no occurrences offhand.
What set of elements could have such properties? It occurred to me that a set of articles is a corresponding match.
E.g. (modern) English has two articles – “a” and “the” (if we add the "an" word form, we will have three), German has five (der, die, das, ein, eine) etc.
Of course, the adoption of this idea would mean that Voynich spaces are not real spaces and that there are real spaces where we don't observe them in the MS.
One objection to this idea refers to short labels including gallows. E.g., consider otol (Voynich "star" in f68r). If t here stands for an article, then it is strange to have only one letter before the article in a given phrase. However, what if o does not stand for a single letter (as t does not, in our assumption)? What if o is a shorthand for some notion (like "star" or "stone")? OK, then we have the sequence <notion X> <article> <notion X> l. Not very promising, unless this is something like "star of the stars..." or "ol" is not the same as "o"+"l".
Well, although this article idea probably does not apply directly, I vaguely suspect that something may be developed out of here.
The below considerations are too raw to be published as an article, so I decided to share them in informal manner.
I was re-reading my own recent article dedicated to the Voynich "stars", when suddenly it occurred to me that the total number of stars in f68r1 and f68r2 (including unlabeled) equals 88.
The interesting fact is that the number of standardized constellations is 88. This is, of course, no more than a curious coincidence, because the definitions and number of constellations evolved over time. However, this made me wonder whether the "stars" in f68r1 and f68r2 might not represent constellations.
A medieval astrological chart would naturally be represented in ecliptic coordinates, that is the "equatorial" plane would be that of the ecliptic. Note that Sun is depicted on the circumference - which would be the ecliptic. This is logical from the astronomical point of view, although I'm afraid this is not common from the perspective of the star maps of this kind.
In the supposed northern, or what I call "dayside" (f68r1), chart we have 29 labeled stars, in the southern (nightside, f68r2) we have 24 labeled and 35 unlabeled stars.
Suppose the labeled stars stand for known constellations. So we need 29 northern and 24 southern constellations.
Ptolemy introduced 48 constellations, of which 47 still survive, and Argo Navis was later split into three distinct constellations, but in 15th century it was Argo Navis still. These 48 constellations can be subdivided as follows:
The problem is whether the zodiacal constellations (residing on the ecliptic) would be attributed to the northern or to the southern hemisphere. In contemporary star charts they are shown partly in northern, partly in southern (which is the actual state of things), but here we have each constellation (supposedly) represented by only one asterisk character, so that's the question. Are they there at all? If they are, then how are they distributed between the two? (They can't be all in northern or all in southern because that would be 21+12 = 33 for northern or 15+12 = 27 for southern which exceeds the actual amount of labeled "stars").
In any case, even with 48 constellations of Ptolemy we lack 29+24-48 = 7 constellations. I think that Ulug Begh's constellation system did not differ much from that of Ptolemy, so we need to search for missing pieces elsewhere.
Let us look at Europe.
Circa 1450 the constellation of Crux began to be considered as a standalone constellation.
Later additions seemed to be Coma Berenices and Antinous You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which are both northern constellations (Antinous is now obsoleted), and then 12 more southern constellations published in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which actually relied upon the globe of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. who, in turn, took information from the Dutch naval expedition of Keyser and Houtman. Those constellations are:
Of course, this is far later than what the VMS is dated to. But considering the Ptolemy's nomenclature alone, the balance is more or less adequate. Supposing 8 of zodiacal constellations topping up the northern side to 29, with 12-8 = 4 left going to the southern side and yielding 15+4 = 19 for it, we then need only 24-19 = 5 more southern constellations to complete the picture. Where were they taken from? Perhaps from some other influence, such as Chinese. As far as I know, the Chinese constellation system includes much more than 48 constellations, so there is certainly no direct mapping. But some southern constellations known to the Chinese might have been "borrowed". Europeans were in China since 13th c., so that would be nothing surprising.
What for the unlabeled stars? While the 23 stars forming the outer circle of f68r2 may be considered as an "embellishment", at a minimum we are still left with 88-29-24-23 = 12 unlabeled stars. From the perspective of the author this looks like "I know that there are constellations, but I don't know how they are called". Does this look as something real? I don't know.
I have come across another Germanic 15th century manuscript which depicts Sagittarius as a human crossbowman. There appears to be quite a 15th century tradition in the area of this sort of depiction by local artists freed from the yokes of traditional imagery.
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I have written You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the repair carried out to the final folio of the VM.
In short, we decided that the top right tear in the final folio was repaired by the parchment maker whilst it was still on its frame (note oval needle holes, a clue that the string used to stitch the parchment was under pressure).
But there is a further consideration to make from this which I am only just starting to think about.
Namely, the wormhole in the top corner (see attachment). If the folio is spread out to be the same size as the preceding one, then the hole corresponds exactly with the wormhole on the previous folio, as is to be expected. So that suggests that at some point, both folios extended out to the same length, ie, their corners corresponded.
Which logically means the stitch in the repair had been removed at this point, allowing the page to come out. Probably the string broke.
Now, there is evidence of this repair being again repaired - if you look at the recto side of the folio you can see smaller needle holes amongst the oval ones, holes that weren't subjected to the same pressure. It's possible that the hair in the folio was thus stuffed back inside its hole and the stitch replaced at some point in its history.
Now this leads us to the question of the trimming. On this page we see writing that extends quite naturally to the very edge of the page. It has always been my contention that the writing was made on a full size folio, which was later trimmed to the very edge of the text (see my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for more).
The trimming is carried out to correspond with the new corner of the page when the stitch is in place. We can postulate that the trimming is not original but carried out by a later owner of the book, one who also repaired the stitch with a quick job.
I'm suggesting that originally that the final folio was the same size as the preceding one, with the top outermost corner being pulled in by the stitch, but the bottom outside corner still corresponding with the folio below. At some point the stitch came undone and the corner drifted back to its original position, at which point the wormhole was made. Now, if the lefthand margin was cut to its current point before that moment, the tops of both folios would not correspond, the top of f116 would be dragged downwards because there is not enough give in the parchment to allow it to correspond with f115 and the wormhole would not be where it is. So we can say both folios were originally the same size, with the top outermost corner being dragged in.
So it seems that when the stitch was repaired - after the inscription on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was made - the sewer decided it looked a mess and trimmed this folio to its current size, corresponding with the new location of the corners of the folios. When we look at the preceding folio we see a number of wormholes on the outermost margin that don't exist in the folio in question, they were most probably the reason it was all cut away - the whole outermost margin was damaged anyway. Other wormholes inside the content of the folio do correspond with holes below, showing the rest of the page lay in its current position quite happily.
Is there any work or resource where all sequential word repetitions in the VMS are listed? I mean not the "Timm's pairs" or "Jackson sequences" but exact repetitions, like
Code:
daiin daiin daiin
It occurred to me that these repetitions may be not as strange as they seem if "spaces" in the VMS are not real spaces and the text is to be read sequentially. Thus Voynichese "words" may be identical parts (or encoded parts) of plain text words.
In that case, three repetitions in a row are not weird. For a ready example, consider German "pur Purpur" (which means "pure purple").
Even four repetitions in a row are quite fine. Consider the following example:
"<blah blah> Purpur. Purpur <blah blah>"
Here "Purpur" is the last word of the first sentence and, at the same time, the first word of the second sentence. Because there is no punctuation in a XV century (or earlier) document, "pur" would appear four times in a row.
Let's develop this example further as follows:
"<This colour is called> Purpur. Pur Purpur <is difficult to obtain>"
Here we have "pur" five times in a row. Six times in a row is not difficult:
"<You should use only> pur Purpur. Pur Purpur <is very expensive>"
We can imagine even seven times in a row, if we append some word that begins with "pur", like "purren" or "purzeln".
This is just an example. Probably such examples can be constructed in many languages. This could explain repetitions both in plain text and in cipher, without involving any shuffling.
What do you think? Was this ever considered in this light?
Posted by: Diane - 13-08-2015, 11:44 AM - Forum: News
- No Replies
An article written in 1937, mentioned with a question mark in Jim Reed's Voynich bibliography, has been sent to me by someone who must have the last copy in the world. The journal went out of publication decades ago.
I've put up an open-access post on voynichimagery.wordpress.com (August 13th., 2015).
The article is largely gained from reading "The cipher of Roger Bacon" - the collected papers of William Romaine Newbold - but it's easier to read than that, and shorter, though mainly it will appeal to those who like to have full collections of things.
Anyone wanting a copy - email me at the address published on my blog. I'm happy to send it.
One of the interesting leads which I simply have no time to follow up - I'd be glad if anyone would like to work on it with me.
I noticed that in al-Sufi's Book of the Fixed Stars, his table for Sagittarius has 31 stars.
The figure on folio 73v, with the archer in the centre, contains only 30 stars-and-holders.
Which suggests (among other possibilities) that (a) the central figure may be identified with the leading star of a constellation (i.e. first over the horizon),
or that - as many others have suggested - we are looking at some version of the Egyptian-Indian decans.
I'm more interested in the first possibility and would dearly like to know if there is any pre-fifteenth century astronomical text (from any tradition) in which the star-list for Sagittarius contains only 30 stars.
Ditto, of course, for all the rest, but Sagittarius interests me most just now.
It's a pest that I simply haven't time to concentrate on this at the moment; it could, potentially direct us to an informing written text.. maybe.
