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| The Takeshi Takahashi transcription |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 10-08-2017, 08:46 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (18)
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I just noticed two days ago that the version of Takeshi's transciption that is in the interlinear file is quite different from the version on his web site.
First five line in interlinear file:
Quote:<f1r.P1.1;H> fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthres.y.kor.sholdy-
<f1r.P1.2;H> sory.ckhar.o!r.y.kair.chtaiin.shar.are.cthar.cthar.dan-
<f1r.P1.3;H> syaiir.sheky.or.ykaiin.shod.cthoary.cthes.daraiin.sa-
<f1r.P1.4;H> o{&o'}oiin.oteey.oteos.roloty.cth*ar.daiin.otaiin.or.okan-
<f1r.P1.5;H> dair.y.chear.cthaiin.cphar.cfhaiin=
His version:
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(I am not concerned about the comments and the wrappings, just the transcribed text.
I know that his transcription is being used by several people, and I wonder which of the two sources people tend to use.
I will try to contact him, to find out if he updated it in the meantime.
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| f34v |
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Posted by: Koen G - 07-08-2017, 09:15 PM - Forum: Imagery
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I'd like to offer a possible explanation for at least part of this folio. The story goes as follows:
Over at the comments on my blog, Rene was talking about weasels. My mind kind of drifted off at this point, and I ended up wondering which funny stories medieval bestiaries would tell about the weasel. It appears that one of the things weasels do is conceive through their mouths and give birth through their ears. According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Isidore wrote about this behavior but added that these claims are false, which implies that he is not the origin of this tale.
A graphic representation of two weasels mating in this fashion is a marginal drawing in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (England, 1310-1320). The weasels have clearly different body lengths, which makes them a fine parallel for the zoomorphic root of our plant:
weasels.jpg (Size: 50.65 KB / Downloads: 389)
Now I would have let this slide if it weren't for one thing: the root animals' genital appendages are intertwined. Which is mating-but-not-really-mating while joining their heads.
So the animals might be mating weasels.
Next, which plants are associated with weasels?
Pliny mentions the herb rue, but in my opinion this does not look like the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant at all.
But there was something else. I remember that when we were discussing the enigmatic Trinity herbal, I saw a plant with an anecdote about birds and weasels: sticados citrinum. Marco kindly translated the passage as follows:
Some call it "herb of the birds" because a certain bird puts some of this herb in its nest. Similarly, also the weasel does the same in its nest, because the weasel and that bird know | its [of the plant] virtue.
Again, the image does not look much like the VM plant (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. f.74r).
But, and now I get to the point, sticados apparently means lavender. This does not explain the VM plant's round leaves at all, but strangely it does explain the flowers - remember that the VM does not utilize a lavender-like color.
lavender.jpg (Size: 86.32 KB / Downloads: 388)
Image top right credited as: Lo sticados, dal codice “Historia Plantarum”, fine XIV secolo
Bottom: Lavandula stoechas
So if there is a link with weasels and lavender here (and that's a big if), then it would mean that the plant image is composite... any ideas?
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| Listen to the violets. |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 06-08-2017, 06:51 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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There are many discrepancies and incongruities in the VMs. Can it be a valid historical artifact approximating the parchment dates? Or is is a modern forgery? Clearly there is a certain cumulative uneasiness with calling these odd illustrations a clear and accurate representation of reality, but is there sufficient evidence to substantiate invalidation?
Everyone knows that there is an illustration of violets early on in the VMs. Unlike many of the other botanical illustrations in the VMs, the violets are quite realistic, with the single caveat that the flowers are all upside down. Why are the flowers inverted? Either they have wilted or there is some other reason.
Virtually anyone who would try to draw a violet, would have seen an actual violet (or an illustration of an actual violet) and therefore would know the proper orientation of a violet blossom. And a person who intended to draw an accurate representation of a violet would probably draw the blossoms in their natural (not inverted) orientation. The depiction of violets in a wilted condition is an unexpected representation.
Is there another reason to depict inverted violet blossoms? Are the blossoms inverted in the attempt to create something of an exotic appearance? Considering the rest of the botanical illustrations, that might be a possibility. There are these stories coming out of the early medieval era as to whether the Earth was flat or round. Whether things in the southern hemisphere were upside down and so on. This might be part of an attempt to create a document that appears to come from an exotic and unknown culture and location. If so, then the VMs is a hoax. It may not have been verifiable at the time, but the land of inverted violets is not real. It is imaginary. And as a text purporting to originate in an imaginary location, the VMs is a hoax.
Is the VMs a modern forgery? I think of a forgery as a copy or imitation of something, like a work of art, that is similar enough in its replication, that it can pass as authentic. The intent of imitation is to enhance similarity and to avoid what is different, unexpected and exotic, to make something that is indistinguishable from the genuine. The difference in the inverted violets may be subtle and easily overlooked. The difference in the VMs Zodiac is plainly blatant. How hard could it be to simply use the traditional zodiac sequence and structure, rather than Pisces first, Aries and Taurus split, etc., etc? This is not forgery by imitation.
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| A possible source for the "modern italian copy" |
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Posted by: voynichbombe - 05-08-2017, 06:05 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I can't find the thread atm which mentions one or two "copied pages" (sometimes assumed to be the one's Kircher received) aquired by an italian copyshop owner, who subsequently got them tested and dated contemporarily.
While watching the "Austrian Documentary" for the nth time (I always find something new that bugs me), I clearly saw a recording of someone doing a copy. Who knows what happened with the film props after production stop?
This is just a thought.. as said I'm out of time to locate the thread, see which folios appeared on that italian market, and compare them to the pages being copied in the video.
Anyways I couln't help a slight chuckle at Rene Zandbergen interviewing Richard Santa Coloma.
That documentary may have moved a lot, but sometimes "good intention" is the opposite of "good".
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| Interesting Vwords - qokeedy |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 31-07-2017, 10:22 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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On the lkeedy thread, MarcoP wrote this, so I thought I would start a follow-up thread on qokeedy
Quote:MarcoP:
Another observation is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. qokeedy (a much more common word) correlates with both lkeedy and olkeedy: 69% of the pages that contain qokeedy also contain at least one of lkeedy / olkeedy
The two words sequence qokeedy.olkeedy occurs three times (79v, 112r, 112v).
olkeedy.qokeedy occurs twice (f82v, f113r)
lkeedy.qokeedy occurs once (f112v)
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| Interesting Vwords - otccg |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 31-07-2017, 11:03 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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If you've been reading the "Interesting Vwords" threads in order, you may have noticed that all the words so far completely skip over the zodiac-symbols section and most of them make only a short stop in the star pages.
So here is one that is different—quite significantly different...
oteey is a "cosmology" word, if we can use that term for vords that are frequently found in the sun/moon/star and zodiac-symbol pages. It's not exclusive to these sections (there are others that are), but it's predominantly found in these sections.
- oteey first appears on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on line 4, in between a mostly-plant vord and another mostly star-related vord.
- It then shows up in a few big-plant pages, mostly in company with plant and cosmo vords.
- It is on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (ven mus mel/del)
- It is then found in many of the sun/moon/star pages, sometimes two or three times on the page, sometimes even more than once on a line, sometimes twice in a row (f69v).
- It appears three times on Pisces, once on each Aries, three times on Taurus, twice on red Taurus, once on Gemini, twice on Cancer, once on Leo, not on Virgo, but some of the text is obscured, so it's hard to know, once on Libra, twice on Scorpio, and not on Sagittarius.
- It appears only once on a pool page.
- It's not found in the small-plant section.
- It appears only once on the starred-text pages, on folio 116r, at the end of the second paragraph and within the 6th and 9th paragraphs.
So, in contrast to the previously posted vords, this one occurs frequently on cosmo/zodiac pages.
It's interesting that it is on only one starred-text page, yet three times. Is it possible this folio is somehow related to celestial bodies?
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| Interesting Vwords - chok |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 31-07-2017, 10:35 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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chok might be a plant-section Vord, except there aren't enough instances to be sure.
- It first appears on the last line of f1r, between two other mostly-plant vords.
- It then appears on 3 big-plant folios—the first two times in the company of other plant vords, the third time oddly sandwiched within four general-purpose (common) vords.
- Then, like the previously posted vord, it shows up in a spoke of the "Pleiades" folio.
The latter point is something I noticed quite a long ago and it made me curious...
To people in the middle ages, everything was interconnected. The stars and planets governed parts of the body, the shape of a plant expressed what kind of illnesses it cured, the stars governed the qualities of the plants. Body/stars/medicine/shapes/influence... they simply weren't separable from one another.
It is assumed by many that star shapes in the VMS are always stars, but I'm not certain that is always so. It's possible, for example, that some of the little stars in the rosette pages are plants/bushes, rather than stars.
When I saw that quite a few primarily-plant vords turn up on star pages like the "Pleiades" page, I wondered, could these pages be something a little different? perhaps an aerial plan for a section of an herb garden for plants that are governed by a certain constellation? Planting guides, rather than pictures of the heavens? Zodiac-based gardens did exist.
Another possibility (I'm always trying to think of alternative interpretations) is that these specific plants have words in common with celestial bodies (there are many plants with words like Saturn, star, Venus, etc., as part of the plant name) and perhaps that is why they show up on both plant and star pages. But then one might expect them on the zodiac pages, as well, and that doesn't always happen.
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| Interesting Vwords - okor |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 31-07-2017, 09:46 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (6)
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okor is a plant- and rosette-section Vord.
It makes its first appearance on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. near the end of the first paragraph, sandwiched between two common vords and two unique vords.
In other words, right from the beginning it differs from the pattern I posted for oKeedg.
- okor occurs once each on 10 of the big-plant pages. There is no apparent morphological similarity among these 10 plants.
- It is found once on a spoke of the "Pleiades" page f68r2.
- It occurs twice on the "douche bag" page, in the first paragraph.
- It occurs on rosette 1 outer ring twice, on a rosette 5 ring, and on the Africa/south portion of the drawing that resembles a T-O map.
- It is on several of the small-plant pages (once per folio).
- It is on the third and second-to-last starred-text pages.
okor is not found in the zodiac section and only on one pool page and one star page.
It likes to keep company with plant vords, plant/pool vords, and general-purpose (common) vords, and only occasionally with others.
Most of the time, it is buried within paragraphs rather than being first or last in the line.
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| Conventions |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 31-07-2017, 09:30 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Several points were brought up recently, that suggested to me that the point and usefulness of 'conventions' may not be understood in the same way by all.
The point of 'conventions' (in a way: agreements) is for everybody to talk the same language, and facilitate communication.
The terms used don't have to be 'the best' and they don't even have to be 'very good'. As long as they are 'usable'.
So, for example, one may wonder if 'biological' is the best possible term to use for quire 13. As already pointed out, this term is used in the Beinecke's old MS description, and it probably derives from D'Imperio. If one just thinks about it, it really doesn't matter whether the contents of this quire are biological or not. Nobody knows anyway....
Trying to agree on what is the best possible term is not practical, it would probably change over time, and people would never agree about it.
People may use their own terms, but then others may not necessarily understand what they mean.
Similarly with a recent post by Anton. One may have one's personal feelings about which letter best represents which Voynich glyph.
However, readers are likely to understand Eva, possibly also Currier or v101, but not someone's personal interpretation.
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| Interesting Vwords - xkccdg |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 31-07-2017, 08:55 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Pardon me for departing from EVA, but there are some reasons why I prefer a different system. It's similar, and not difficult to adapt to and I use it for a number of reasons.
I prefer using "x" rather than "l" (ell) for EVA-l because the VMS glyph is not an ascender and writing it with x preserves the upper-lower-case balance and makes it easier to distinguish from the number 1 (especially in certain fonts). I also prefer using "c" for the glyph that looks like "c" and not using "e". I use "g" to represent EVA-y. I would prefer to use the number 9, because that's what the glyph is based on, but it's hard to write it with a descender (to subscript it), so I use "g". I go back and forth between using d or 8 for EVA-d. I'm comfortable with either one. I think 8 looks more like the actual VMS glyph.
So, I write EVA-lkeedy lkeedy as xkccdg or as xkcc8g. (Bummer, I have to fix everything, I didn't realize the EVA capital letters were benched.)
Now, to the subject of this thread, which is Vwords with interesting characteristics... let's look at lkeedy...
lkeedy doesn't appear on the first 75 folios. It begins on f76r, which is a dense-text page with column text, after some of the green-pool pages. It's buried unobtrusively in the first big chunk of text and the second-to-last.
- In the first instance, its neighbors are common general-purpose words (those that appear frequently in all sections, or almost all sections) and one word that is common to the plant and pool pages. This is not common, however. It's one of the few places where it keeps company with general-purpose vords.
- In the second instance, all its neighbors are plant/pool vords. In other words, even though these two instances are on the same folio, they are wedged between neighbors that function differently.
lkeedy shows up next on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (nymph with "douche bag").
- It's buried in the fourth paragraph and has entirely different neighbors this time, a couple of words that are almost exclusive to pool pages.
Next is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the one with nymphs and "parasols").
- It's in the last paragraph at the end of a line, following several plant/pool vords.
Next is f82r, the "mummy nymph" page.
- It's buried in the second paragraph in company with pool vords and plant/pool vords.
Then there's a jump. It passes over the small-plant pages and shows up on the first page of dense starred text, about halfway down at the end of the line, in company with plant and plant-pool vords. From then on it shows up once on most of the first-half of the starred-text pages, usually in the company of plant vords or plant/pool vords... until you get to the 11th starred-text page and then the neighbors are a little more varied.. By "neighbors" I am referring to vords that come directly before and after (usually three or four of them in total).
***On 108v, starred-text, the pattern of one-instance per folio changes to multiple instances per folio:
- On 108v, it shows up three times in the first short paragraph, and twice in the second, longer paragraph, still in the company of plant/pool vords.
Subsequently, there are numerous instances and the neighboring vords are unusually varied. Something has changed. Near the end, it reverts back to one instance per page.
So what we have is an interesting vord that is not found on the big-plant, zodiac, cosmology or small-plant pages, but for most of the instances in which it is found, it shows up once-per-folio directly next to other vords that are mostly on the pool and plant/pool pages. It does not like to be next to pure zodiac or cosmology words and, surprisingly, is rarely next to the common general-purpose words.
It breaks this pattern halfway through the starred-text pages and suddenly shows up not just multiple times per folio, but multiple times per paragraph and starts keeping company with vords that are more varied.
What changed?
- Is there a change of subject matter halfway through the starred-text pages?
- Or is it possible that whatever the vord lkeedysignifies is dealt with in more detail on the pages where it becomes more frequent?
- Or did the system for laying down the VMS text suddenly change halfway through the starred-text pages?
- If it has any linguistic significance, what kind of word that is not a general-purpose word would enjoy the company of plant/pool and pool vords and mostly avoid being next to others?
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