From the beginning, the VMBOK initiative at once went into some quite specific statements about imagery, text et cetera. I would like to pay attention to some generic introductory statements which are also needed. So one of these is (partly adopted from Wikipedia):
Statement [UPD Nov 2, 2016]
The Voynich Manuscript is a manuscript handwritten in an unknown writing system and containing numerous images.
Explanation
As opposed to Wikipedia, I chose "manuscript" vs "codex", because IMO there's not enough evidence that it was really meant to be a codex.
"Handwritten" may seem excessive, since the word "manuscript" implies this, but nowadays the word "manuscript" often designates something not literally handwritten (e.g. "to submit a manuscript to a journal"). So "handwritten" would not harm.
There are two cases where a small uppercase F has been written on the manuscript, once on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and once on f103r:
Questions:
Is the F on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the same ink as the illustration? It seems hard to tell.
What about the F on f103r? Same ink as the stars and/or text?
Are these two F's in the same hand?
Do these two F's have anything to do with each other? Or did two different people decide to write a small F on the manuscript for completely different reasons?
Does a small uppercase F have a known meaning in other manuscripts? Is there some reason why it might show up in these two places in the VMS?
No other document written in Voynichese script has been found up to date
Explanation
The glyphs of Beinecke MS 408 have not been found in totality in any other work. Certain signs and combinations of signs, such as qo and y, are found in contemporaneous documents. However, to our knowledge no other document contains all of the signs of the Voynich script (or "alphabet"), and there are no other existing examples of Voynichese writing.
Notes
10/26/16: Changed the statement to include "has not been found" and "glyphs"
10/26/16: Rewrote the statement according to Anton's phrasing: no other document written in Voynichese script has been found up to date.
The Voynich Manuscript is a manuscript handwritten in an unknown writing system and containing numerous images. No other document written in Voynichese script has been found up to date.
History:
TBD
Physical material:
Generic
The Voynich manuscript is not a palimpsest.
Palaeography:
TBD
Text:
Generic
TBD
Labels
The predictability of glyph placement within label vords is in concordance with that of vords in the main corpus.
Marginalia
TBD
Imagery:
Generic TBD
Large Plants
There are 129 full-page plant illustration pages (aka Large Plant pages) in the Voynich Manuscript.
They generally feature one plant per page, but there are five pages which feature two plants, so there are a total of 134 large plants in the Voynich Manuscript.
For a page-by-page breakdown, please refer to the OP in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread.
Small Plants
The Small Plants section, actually composed of two groups of folios (88r-99r1 and 99r-102v1) features a total of 45 containers. For a page-by-page breakdown of the number of containers and items beside them, please refer to the OP in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread.
Quire 20
There are 324 stars in the margins of Quire 20. Red paint has been applied to 163 of them. For a page-by-page breakdown, please refer to the OP in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thread.
Recognizable Patterns
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. 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. 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.
What are the the reasons that heraldry fails, or succeeds, as a method of interpretation in the VMs Zodiac and as a historical validation for the significance of Stolfi's markers in f71r?
This image is weird from what I pulled from the voynich manuscript f28v. Could this indicate the Voynich was produced in 1475? There is a place mark below 4 and 1 and would that indicate shift? Is this found in other manuscripts from that time with that marker as a shift indicator?
JKP brought to our attention the flag finials decorating the rooftops of some of the buildings in the 9-rosette foldout.
"Also on the rosettes page, many people notice the Ghibelline merlons, but they don't seem to comprehend the importance of the saddleback roofs. They are almost as significant as the merlons! Saddlebacks with the flag on each end were a very specific architectural style that is hard to find outside of certain areas in the 15th century. France, southern Switzerland, Bavaria, a few of the northern Italian (Lombardic) states, and some of the Lombardic and German colonies in the Greek islands are the major areas where you find flagged saddlebacks. Since people walked in the 15th century, it was important to know where to enter a city, or you could end up walking a lot of extra miles. Each culture had a slightly different way of indicating a portal and flagged saddlebacks were primarily Frankish and Germanic."
So I decided to open a new thread to discuss where and when in history we can see examples of this architectural detail.
My first example is from the Nuremberg chronicle, 1493
In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I posted this image of a nymph on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. who appears to be holding a rounded beige object under her arm:
Then Koen pointed out that it might not necessarily be an attempt at depicting an object, but just something weird with the coloring, since we can find in the same pool a nymph where the hollow is filled in with green and another where it is left blank:
Now while filling the hollow in with green makes sense, and leaving it blank can be attributed to sloppiness, filling it in with beige is clearly a deliberate choice. In any case, this got me looking at "arm hollows" a bit more closely. Oddly enough, it's clear that the illustrator was paying careful attention to exactly what is depicted within these spaces.
Take a look at this pair of nymphs from f81r:
The front lock of hair on the nymph standing in the back is strange in that it's abnormally long and is extended out at a large angle from the top of her head. And as we can see, the lock of hair ends up in the arm hollow of the nymph directly in front. The illustrator must have drawn the hair this way because it was important that the hair be shown within the arm hollow.
Now look at this pair of nymphs from f75r:
This time it's a nymph's leg that's abnormally elongated and again it winds up the arm hollow of the nymph in front. It seems like this must have been deliberate.
Now if we turn to the pages of the Zodiac section where the nymphs are standing in cans, we can find that sometimes the arm hollow is filled in with dots, and sometimes it isn't:
Looking at just these two examples, it seems like the dots are just the interior surface of the can, which is visible in the arm hollow in the first example due to the strange way the can has been drawn, and not in the second example. We can provide further evidence for this view from looking at another example:
Here the nymph is standing at one side of the can, so we can clearly distinguish the interior surface of the can and see that it is in fact filled with dots.
Thus far it seems like everything can be explained by whether the inner surface of the can is visible or not, but now look at this one:
If we look under the right arm hollow (from our perspective), the rim of the can is clearly visible... yet there is also a row of four dots above the rim. Obviously these dots cannot be explained as a simple depiction of the interior surface of the can. It must have been important to the illustrator that dots be shown in the arm hollow for some other reason, and the awkward bend in the arm also suggests that it was drawn with this purpose in mind. Interestingly we also see four dots in the other arm hollow, yet no can rim is visible, even though it seems like it should be there.
There are some other oddities regarding arm hollows, such as in this example:
Here there's an odd beige stripe behind the nymph's head that winds up in the arm hollow. Is it the nymph's hair? It doesn't appear to be, because her hair is generally not colored in. Yet again it seems that something is done simply to influence what is depicted inside the arm hollow.
Anyway, this list of peculiarities does not exhaust the observations that can be made regarding arm hollows, but I think it suffices to prove that the illustrator was certainly thinking about this. I have no idea what it means, so naturally I welcome any further observations or parallels that can be found in other works of art.
There are several small letters written in the upper corners of several pages in the "cosmological" section. I've collected all the ones that I could find and put them along side the first three letters of the "erased key" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for comparison:
Several questions:
What purpose did these letters serve? Did it have to do with an attempt to put these pages in the correct order?
Are there two different hands in this marginalia? The letters on f68 appear quite similar to the erased key, but different from both the "a" and the "b" on f67 and f70.
When and where were these letters added? Is there anything paleographically distinctive about these letters that might point to a particular time and place? More specifically, is it likely that these letters were added during the Prague period, or were they added before or after that time?
I represent all the "wide gallows" "the k" and "t", as well as a non-standard a selection gallows "f" and "p". Your thoughts about these characters? Figure 23 and 24 - the same glyph. I ask to make the computer processing of the dedicated fragment of yellow in Figure 12. My opinion: on the left leg is a loop. If is the loop, there in the text at all is no the "broad gallows" "k".
There are a thread, which discusses why the is no double gallows? My suggestion: Figure 38 - "p + p" Figure 42 - "p + f" Figure 28 - "f + t" Figure 29 - "k + k"
In Figure 27, the author originally wanted to to write normal gallows "p", but then extended the line up and wrote "wide gallows" "p".
![[Image: CvkhEc0UkAAutO0.jpg]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CvkhEc0UkAAutO0.jpg)
