1) The roots of the plant in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. include depictions of two You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. heads.
2) The roots of the second plant of the bottom row  of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  include depictions of five anthropomorphic heads.
3) The roots of the fourth plant of the bottom row of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  include the depiction of an anthropomorphic head.

[This thread follows You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Trying to accommodate the suggestions of Anton, David et al.]

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Excuse my dropping in from out of left field, but I read in Nature
last week a review of a new book about the manuscript. Now I've
been studying Rene Zandbergen's gorgeous website devoted to it.

Has anybody ever suggested that the VMS is no more (or less) than
a prodigious piece of what nowadays we call outsider or visionary
art, that happens to include a faux script as part of its
invention? If not, I'd be glad to elaborate on the notion, drawing
on my background in psychology and art appreciation.

If you don't vote in this poll, I will count it as you don't know.  If you count outside of the answers being higher or lower, I will count it as a null.  

Please vote as I'm looking to gain some insight into the text and you all being highly smart with the VMS I need your partnership and this is what this forum is for.

Results will be released in two weeks.

The question is often discussed whether spaces in the VMS are real spaces or not.

In his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Bennett specifies that space is the most frequent character in the languages that are considered there (Western European languages mostly). Interestingly, I have never thought of a space in that way before reading the book.

I decided to check whether this is true for Voynichese. I did a very brief check (less than 600 character long - first and fourth paragraphs of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Takahashi's transcription) for a trial indication - and it seems that it is. The space (represented by the dot in the transcription) is ranked first, accounting for 17 and 16% of the total, respectively. I added a space to the end of each line except the last line of a paragraph. I also included "titles" in the count.

I suspect this is the sort of a check that must have been performed before me. Are there results for a more solid body of the text than two paragraphs? D'Imperio does not count spaces, and neither does the "Voynich Reader" tool.

Do the results speak in favour of the assumption that spaces are spaces? It's 3am in Moscow, so I'm not sure right now

I stumbled on this illustration from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Rudolf von Ems’s World Chronicle, Regensburg, Bavaria, Germany, about 1400–10
The windows of this wooden sauna (?) reminded me of those in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I would be interested in seeing more parallels for the interesting "architecture" in the Voynich illustration.

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Has anybody ever devised a numbering system for the paragraphs in Quire 20?

I know that we can refer to paragraphs by page number and paragraph number, but what I want is a way of referring to a specific paragraph easily. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. p4 is hard to remember, but Recipe 46 would be a lot more memorable.

I would like such numbers so I can easily draw parallels and links between them. I'm not certain they are recipes, but it is reasonable to suppose the are the same kind of thing, whatever that may be.


If the answer is no I will make a system myself, but I don't want to replicate the work somebody else has done.

Similarities between certain Voynich glyphs and alchemical notation have been noted by many researchers. But this may be a red herring - let's consider this for a minute.

First off, we need to consider dates.

A lot of this alchemical notation was invented post 16th century - it's Renaissance stuff. It wouldn't necessarily have been around in the 15th century.

Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't an overlap. The manuscript may not be 15th century - it could have been written in the early Renaissance, for if we accept the Rudolph II provenance then we have a terminus ante quem of around 1550 (or maybe later if we look up the date that the language teacher whose name I can't spell left Rudolph's staff - actually, have we ever had a proper debate about this? No, don't post here, I put a different thread on this subject).

So any alchemical notation that we find that is post-1550 must be considered derivative of the influences of this MS, and cannot be a source. We should bear this in mind when presenting such findings.

So to argue that the VM glyphs are derivatives of alchemical symbols, we must fit two givens into our arguments:

1. The symbols presented must be pre-1550
   
2. The symbols presented must have been in general circulation (for if they are unique to a certain author, then what we are essentially arguing is that that author must have had some influence on the scribe, for how else would he have seen them?)
   

There's a certain type of flower that occurs on five different pages of the VMS.  These remind me of "propellers", but if anyone can suggest a better name for them I'll use that instead.



The usual questions:

1. Do similar forms occur in any herbal manuscripts or other sources of botanical imagery?
   
2. Is there a particular kind of flower in the botanical world that this kind of image could be a representation of?
   

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I played around with the Sun on f67r1 and used Welsh, English and Roman Numerals and it's interpreted to me as a 24 hour period Clock.

As best I know, Rich Santacoloma was the first person to realise that the top of folio 77r shows a system of Elements.  Without having seen his work, I came to a similar opinion two years later, but where Rich supposed the manuscript a product of Latin European culture, and so expected that the  fifth element must be ether,  I consider the intention had been to represent a system which considered the world to consist of 5 elements (ether is not part of the world's materials in the Greek system).
The reason for the elements emerging from unformed "wood"  as anyone who reads Greek will understand, though I believe I first brought it to the notice of Voynicheros -  is that "hyle" or "wood" was  the Greeks' term for unformed matter.

From inner Asia, and  India, to the far east, a five-element system is the norm.

For me, there was still an outstanding problem:elements are normally found listed, or depicted, in a rote sequence - sometimes by reference to the directions, or some perceived place in a hierarchy of powers, or by position in a sequence between formation and dissolution etc.etc.

The order of elements in f.77r was not in keeping with any such rote order that I could find (and believe me, I hunted it).. but a couple of days ago I found one one text which offers an exact match for their order.(details of that text in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).


From right to left the five run: Smoke, Fire, Wind,  Water, Darkness.  The same text refers to "the two Ascendants ", assigning those to "fire and lust, which are dryness and moisture" and calling them "the father and mother of all these things."  In folio 77r, the female is associated with the drying heat, and the male with fertile moisture, but in that case, the Coptic text would naturally set the male before the female, regardless of left-to-right considerations.  That order doesn't imply "respectively" as an English text would do.

 I still have no way to explain why there should be six 'labels' needed for five elements, since the 'ascenders' seem to have separate 'labels' above their heads.
I realise this doesn't help with the vital question of Voynich grammar, but I hope it might help in some other way.