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
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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.
One of the big problems I've seen, for quite some time, in reading the Vms text as meaningful rather than meaningless, are the red ink labels and text on f. 67r2.
As far as I can see, f. 67r2 is the only page with text written in red ink in the entire ms. It seems to me that this should tell us that this text should be *very significant*. I can't think of any good reason for the author to write unimportant or insignificant text in bold red ink that stands out from all of the rest of the text in the ms.
The problem is, the 12 red ink labels around the outside of the circular diagram on f. 67r2 seem to contain fairly repetitive text and vords and phrases, just as much as or even more so than most of the rest of the ms text. And if the bold red ink text is so opaque, what hope can we have for making sense of the rest of the text that isn't written in bold red ink?
Here is the text of these 12 red ink labels, in Eva transcription, starting at the top of the page at 12 o'clock position and proceeding clockwise:
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Note in particular the repetitive vord stems in the 5th label, repeated in the 10th label and the first vord of the 11th label and perhaps of the 12th label. Note further the repetitive vord stems in the 7th label and the 9th label.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I don't care how you propose to read or decipher this set of 12 labels, whether as plaintext or ciphertext: How can anyone possibly read this set of extremely repetitive vords and phrases as, for example, the names of the 12 Zodiac signs, or the names of the 12 months, in any language whatsoever that has ever existed anywhere in the world?[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]And again, if the bold red ink text has no significant meaning that we can ever hope to comprehend, what hope do we have for making sense of the rest of the text written in regular ink?[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Don't worry, this post will not end on such a pessimistic and hopeless note. I just wanted to state the problematic issue here as clearly and strongly as possible. Because yes, it has bothered me a lot.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Here is my hopeful idea for making sense of these 12 red ink labels:[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]A list of different body parts that a medieval physician believed were influenced by the position of the moon in one of the 12 signs of the Zodiac.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It is always surprising to go back and realize this nowadays, but astrology was an essential part of medical practice in the Middle Ages, just as it was an essential part of so much else in medieval life. It was in fact quite standard for a medieval physician to determine the place of origin of a patient's illness in his body by the position of the moon in the Zodiac at the time the illness began.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Since much of the rest of the Vms sections appear to have plausible connections to medieval medicinal subject matter, it would not be too out of place if that is the purpose of the astrological section of the ms as well.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]I can accept a certain amount of repetition in these 12 red labels much more readily, if they are simply lists of body parts believed to be affected by the moon's presence in each respective Zodiac sign. This makes much more sense to me than trying to read this set of 12 labels as the 12 signs of the Zodiac, the 12 months, etc.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The next question that arises from this observation is the one single line of bold red ink text at the bottom of the same page f. 67r2:[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It seems logical that this line of text must somehow be connected with the 12 labels that are also written in red ink. Perhaps this line of text simply states something like "body parts & Zodiac signs & the moon", or some such legend for the labels, presumably with a bit more grammar in the actual text than I have included in this crude guess. I have always thought that the simplest and most likely explanation of the [q-] / [qo-] prefix is that it is the Voynichese equivalent of an ampersand. In this line, that would break up the text into "[first two vords] & [next three vords] & [last four words]". I do note that the first [q-] in this line is a rare example of [qe-], not [qo-], although [qe-] does occur 66 times in the entire ms.[/font][/font][/font]
I humbly suggest that would-be decipherers of the Vms might try these 12 red ink labels and this line of red ink text as a test case for your theories and hypotheses to decipher the script and the text. If anyone can produce a consistent and systematic theory that accounts for everything in red ink on f. 67r2 and yields a text that is both grammatical and semantically plausible in a context such as I suggest above, then I would be highly impressed. On the other hand, if one's theory cannot produce anything remotely sensible for all of this red ink text, then I would probably tend to question the likelihood that it could make sense out of the rest of the ms text either.
I am motivated to post this idea in the spirit of Emma May Smith's approach of language and content agnostic analysis, but with the assumptions of linguistic text written in the plain.
I briefly brought up the outline of the idea in the devil's advocate for glossolalia post, but I realize it may have gotten lost in the 100,000 or so other words of text surrounding it. So I would like to put it forward separately and more clearly here:
At first glance one would think it absurd to propose that each Voynich character *bigram* could represent a single letter or phoneme in any language: surely with 15-25 characters, there must be many hundreds of such bigrams, and no language could have that many phonemes. But in fact upon closer inspection, so long as the bigrams are paired off naturally, and certain obvious non-bigrams are excluded (initial [q-], many final [-y]'s, initial [d-] in some cases, etc.), then it becomes apparent that there are not anywhere near hundreds of such bigrams that occur with any frequency beyond the rare or accidental appearance; rather there are only a couple dozen or so of them.
As a simple example, in the vord [otchy], clearly one must not consider the pairs [tc] and [hy] as bigrams! Obviously the bigrams are [ot] and [ch], and [-y] is a single character at the end. In this case it is obvious because we all know [ch] is one unit, not two separate letters or phonemes. Likewise with the notorious [sh], however many different forms of it may occur in the ms text: in any case, we know the [h] cannot be separated from the [s]!
In this spirit, I propose that the following inventory of bigrams constitutes a substantially large majority of the ms text:
Naturally the apparent ligatures [cth] and [ckh] must be accounted for here as well.
As I noted above, certain obvious and frequent non-bigram single characters must be accounted for separately:
many [y]'s, many [d]'s, [q], many [s]'s, an occasional initial [k] and [t], and the odd extraneous [o], [i], or [e].
But I stress that these latter occasional or extraneous characters are very much the infrequent exception in the ms text, not the common rule. Likewise, it still remains to deal with [p] and [f], not to mention [m], [g], and a few others! But they will hardly affect the reading of the vast majority of the ms text.
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Further, we can make even more sense of this bigram inventory as a phoneme inventory if we regard certain pairs of bigrams as *the initial and final forms* of the same phoneme. The variance in form of letters in initial and/or medial vs. final position is the absolute rule in the Arabic script, exists for a number of letters in Syriac and Hebrew, is known to many in the case of the Greek letter sigma, and existed until modern times in the English letter "s" (the funny-looking "f" without the bar occurring in initial/medial position).
So, for example, perhaps [ok] is an initial form and [ky] a final form of the same letter/phoneme. Likewise [ot] and [ty]. I note on Emma May Smith's blog the suggestion that [a] and [y] may be equivalent: perhaps then [da] and [dy] are the initial and final forms of a very frequent letter/phoneme? More speculatively, but perhaps usefully, might [ch] and [ey] be the initial and final forms of the same letter/phoneme? Further suggestions for the same phenomenon include the pair [sa] and [ar], and the pair [so] and [or].
With such an inventory, we have now perhaps accounted at least somewhat for the thorny issue of initial vs. final glyphs and sequences, and we still have a decent and reasonably sized inventory of distinct letters/phonemes by this method, not too large and not too small.
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I recall that somewhere on René Zandbergen's voynich.nu website, there is the observation that the 3rd character in each vord is much less predictable, and thus contains much more information, than either the 1st or 2nd character. If the text is indeed composed of bigrams, and the initial bigram/letter/phoneme in the language happens to be rather predicable (cf. the Hebrew article prefix h-), then it would indeed make sense that the variation and information and reduced predictability would not occur until the 3rd character.
The bigram theory does introduce the problem of extremely short vords. This would be less of an issue in a Semitic abjad, in which vowels are not written. And we may also consider the idea that each vord may not be a complete word, but only a part of a word, however we may define that.
It is just one theory, in any case. I hope some folks here may find it worth considering and discussing, if not accepting.
