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Repetition of words
Forum: Voynich Talk
Last Post: Grove
29 minutes ago
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The Book Switch Theory
Forum: Theories & Solutions
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32 minutes ago
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My pet theory
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2 hours ago
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Trying to identify the in...
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2 hours ago
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Huth's reading of f116v: ...
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Scoring artefact for 45% ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
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2 hours ago
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No text, but a visual cod...
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3 hours ago
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Water, earth and air
Forum: Voynich Talk
Last Post: R. Sale
8 hours ago
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The claimed Voynich page
Forum: Imagery
Last Post: Fabrizio Salani
Yesterday, 11:54 PM
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Voynich Zoom CFP
Forum: News
Last Post: proto57
Yesterday, 07:58 PM
» Replies: 39
» Views: 3,367
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| New Voynich Blog as of May |
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Posted by: -JKP- - 23-05-2018, 01:57 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (4)
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Every few months, I do a quick Google search to see if there are any new proposed "solutions". I didn't see any, but I noticed this...
A new blog on the VMS.
I tried to read a few paragraphs, but much of it is initial impressions (I didn't see anything new or provocative) and it's somewhat verbose, but there may be some who would like to keep up with the various opinions that are posted, and perhaps in time (as the person gets to know the VMS) it will become more interesting, so I'll link it here:
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| Women as allegory for the life force of plants - or just a plant biology lesson? |
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Posted by: Aurara84 - 20-05-2018, 01:48 AM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (37)
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Disclaimer: I’m a relative newcomer and certainly haven’t discovered every theory out there regarding the VM’s imagery so if I’m just going over old ground or stating the obvious, I apologise (and please point me in the direction of a proper analysis of this theory!). I wanted to share my thoughts with you here as I haven’t come across this explanation anywhere yet, even though it jumped out to me when I looked over the manuscript as a whole. I’m a visual artist and so, while my theories may not be particularly scientific, I know imagery! [/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]I believe the bathing women could be a symbolic way of illustrating the biological functions and anatomy of plants. The big green "baths" could be leaves, the tubes / pipes are the stems through which water is carried through the plant (the green "water" in the "baths" is the same green used on the majority of leaves in the entire plant section, and the baths' shapes are leaf-like, see page f81r). I would propose that this document uses the women as an allegory to help us understand how plants function biologically. [/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Take page f77r. At the top, there is a horizontal green stem with cut-off offshoots, showing us that water travels through them, possibly food, gasses or waste products too (see the 4th offshoot). The woman at the top left of the page is standing in what looks a lot like the roots of some of the plants on the botanical pages. Are her and the women beneath her working away collecting water/nutrients from the soil and sending them up the correct tubes to different parts of the plant? [/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]On page f78r, the two elements at the top corners of the page are inescapably flower heads or seed pods of some kind (a little bit like those on the botanical page f18v). The little "collars" all along the tubes are like sections of the outer stem, cut away to allow us to see what flows through the middle of them. The two green pools could be leaves; their fluid-like green colouring make me think of chlorophyll (I know, this wasn’t discovered until the 20thCentury, but still, we can all see leaves are green!). This would also explain why the tubes seem to be filled with blue and be letting blue water (?) into the baths/leaves, and also perhaps why the bath/leaf on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (with the walls and windows) shows blue through the windows and green on top; the leaves are fed with water through the stems and hold it within their structure.[/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Another way of looking at it may be that the women represent a way to communicate the notion of a substance or essence that is the life force which animates these plants, a sort of ‘vital force’ (maybe even intelligence) which gives things the spark of life and elevates them from their basic inanimate state into something which is alive. Are the green pools on this page (f78r) a zoomed-in section of something smaller than a leaf? Could they be a cross section of the stem itself, showing it is filled with water (or life), and the women are the author's way of understanding how plants contain life, or a life force, and have the agency to live and feed themselves/grow? They do remind me of cell diagrams from my gcse biology class. [/font]
[font=tahoma, sans-serif] [/font]
[font=tahoma, sans-serif][Side note: I’ve just read the post titled “It’s newer than you think” (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) about the similarity of the VM cylinders to 17thCentury Spanish microscopes and, while I’m not ready to let go of the idea that the manuscript is pre 1500, I can’t shake the impression that some of the VM illustrations are very similar to microscopic cellular / biological diagrams (pages f85v1, v2, r3, r4, r5 & r6).][/font]
[font=tahoma, sans-serif] [/font]
[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is another where we can see what looks like buds or flowers of some kind at the top of the stems, and various women (or the plant's life force) arranged about the plant's stem. They are standing in little cup shaped lumps, very like what you see on plant stems at the points that leaves grow out from. [/font]
[font=tahoma, sans-serif] [/font]
[font=tahoma, sans-serif]The illustration on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is so much like a rose hip / seed pod that I'm sure I must just be repeating (in a very garbled way) what someone else has already described far more eloquently. The manuscript may be explaining how plants reproduce, as well as how they drink, and eat. There are hints at a sexual function for some of the parts of the plant in the botanical pages: page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has what looks a bit like two labias nestled in the root system. Then there's the snakes/worms penetrating the roots on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (I know these are likely explained by the symbology of herbal properties/poisons as they crop up in other herbal manuscripts but they’ve also been a phallic metaphor since, well, forever). It also doesn’t seem odd that the author may have believed plant reproduction happened at the base of the plant/top of the roots; roots are leg-like and if we compare plant structure to the structure of the human body it equates perfectly. It also keeps the plant’s sexual function underground and out of sight and I’m guessing medieval thinking, especially religious thinking, would prefer it that way.[/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Question: I’m not a medievalist or a historian of botany and my inadequate internet searches on when exactly the sexual functions of plants were beginning to be understood have proved fruitless (no pun intended). Does anyone know when and how plants’ reproduction was described in the 15thCentury and earlier? I’d love to know! [/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]It may be that the author believed that the inherent life force was actually present in water, which may be why, at the bottom of page f79v, we see what looks more like a lake, with animals coming to drink and a mermaid (?) swimming in it. Perhaps the manuscript combines this belief with a textbook-style approach to describing how said water is taken up into plants and gives them life to grow and reproduce. The use of mini people running about inside plant stems to make them work reminds me of children's biology books that explain how your immune system works using the idea of little soldiers fighting off the bad guys to keep your body safe from infections etc. Not such a bad way of explaining complicated ideas to people who have never been introduced to them before. It sort of reduces the abstract idea of an animistic or life-giving force, to a mechanical one. It reminds me that the 15thcentury was a time when ideas about science, religion, a mechanistic view of the world, animism, spirituality, biology and mysticism were all very fluid and often clashing/combining in a multitude of ways.[/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Another point to make is that, if this text is intended as an explanation of the biological processes inside plants, it makes sense to me that not all of the plants have to necessarily be exact specimens. It may be that they are using some real plants, mixed in with others that just use generic growth patterns and forms to illustrate how the structure/biology is arranged/functions in different ‘styles’ of plant.[/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]And of course, all the people are women. If they do depict the life force that animates the plants, it makes sense that they are women, given our reproductive capabilities![/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]Lots of the posts I’ve read on this forum, whilst looking for any mention of the idea that the women are a way of visually communicating the presence of a life-force (or more simply, how the plants survive by taking up water/nutrients through the roots and distributing it around the plant) actually fit very well with this reading. The more I read the more I’m convinced.[/font]
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[font=tahoma, sans-serif]I would love a discussion on this. Am I talking rubbish? Is this an existing theory and I just haven't come across it before? Am I just dumbing-down the conversation?! And again, apologies for my less than scientific way of looking at this. I don’t have many facts but I’m fascinated![/font]
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Laura
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| Tower with ramp or external staircase |
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Posted by: Koen G - 14-05-2018, 07:24 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (19)
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ramp.jpg (Size: 8.32 KB / Downloads: 576)
I came across an image which reminded me of this tower because of one specific feature: some kind of ramp, slope or external staircase..
The tower is located in Asia. I can't read the word within it, but given the religious focus of the map I guess it could represent Jerusalem?
tower.jpg (Size: 59.66 KB / Downloads: 294)
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
MAPPA MUNDI in SALLUSTIO De bello iugurthino. Venezia, fine del sec. XIV, manoscritto, inchiostro e guazza su pergamena, 38 X 28 cm. Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Fondo Ant. Lat. Z. 432, MS. 1656, fol. 40r. (Barber 2001, p. 60)
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| Updated PCA analysis of various languages |
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Posted by: DonaldFisk - 12-05-2018, 10:34 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (12)
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I've updated my recent article at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Written languages have different properties, manifesting themselves as different distributions of glyphs on a PCA plot. Here, I've plotted Hungarian, Italian, a mystery language, the Voynich Manuscript, Mandarin Chinese encoded as Pinyin, and Latin. I've also presented an argument that the cryptographic techniques available at the time of the VMS's creation wouldn't change a PCA plot significantly (but a transposition cipher would). I've explained how the plots work.
None of the plots for any language I've tried so far closely matches the Voynichese plot, but perhaps you have a language in mind you think might be worth trying. If so, I need text (preferably in an phonetic alphabetic script) and a list of glyphs. The text doesn't have to be very long -- a few pages is enough. Alternatively, if you can think of an encoding method which might go from (for example) Italian into Voynichese, I could use encoded text as input and see whether that results in a match.
This should expedite the identification/rejection of candidate plaintext languages and encryption methods. Even if the VMS text is meaningless, I would still expect the scribes to have pronounced it, and EVA is certainly pronounceable (but doesn't resemble any known language).
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| Experiments with language corpora |
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Posted by: MarcoP - 09-05-2018, 03:15 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (26)
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This is a simple experiment partly inspired byYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Hauer and Kondrak and by the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. recently mentioned by Donald Fisk.
It is something I have put together quickly, files have been processed without attempting to remove punctuation or to apply any other normalization (partly because not all samples are in the Latin alphabet). As always, I might have made errors, so double checking would be welcome.
I have used "the dataset created by Emerson et al. (2014) from the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 380 languages", which Hauer & Kondrak used. It is available on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
For each language, I have computed conditional entropy and a custom repetition measure. I consider as repetition any exact repetition of three or more consecutive characters optionally separated by a space.
These count as repetitions:
barbarian
magis magisque
This does not (because the repetition is separated by a letter):
pellmell
I compared with three Voynich datasets:
1. the complete Zandbergen-Landini EVA transcription
2. Currier A in Takahashi's transcription and modified a-la-Neal (treating benches, benched-gallows, ee, in, iin as single characters)
3. the same as above for Currier B
The Voynich samples are plotted in green.
The purple circle corresponds to Latin - entropy:2.98, 2 repetitions in about 10.000 characters. Actually, of the two repetitions, one is coincidental (per personam).
ALL.JPG (Size: 60.4 KB / Downloads: 338)
If one only considers high-repetition (>1 per 1000 characters), low entropy (<2.4) languages, only 10 are selected. All these 10 texts are written in the Latin alphabet. Geographically, none of them seems like a plausible candidate, even if some might be conceivably possible:
Code: rar Rarotongan Oceania Cook Islands
qud Quechua (Unified Quichua, old Hispanic orthography) South-America Peru
hms Hmong, Southern Qiandong Asia China
cbs Cashinahua South-America Peru
prq Ashéninka Perené South-America Peru
mri Maori Oceania New Zealand
qug Quichua, Chimborazo Highland South-America Ecuador
fon Fon Africa Niger
miq Mískito Central-America Nicaragua
kmb Mbundu Africa Angola
(the prq and cbs files are identical: this must be an error in the corpus)
DETAIL.JPG (Size: 29.14 KB / Downloads: 320)
I think it could be interesting to perform more structured experiments along these lines, adding more quantitative indexes that could help measure distance between languages. Also, there are other corpora that one could try with this or similar approaches.
Both the two lowest-entropy languages (Vai and Korean) are not written in the Latin alphabet. Both alphabets appear to be syllabic.
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| Facsimile copy arrives! |
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Posted by: davidjackson - 28-04-2018, 05:22 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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My copy of the voynich, as edited by Siloe, has arrived. Dropped off personally by Pablo from Siloe this morning as he passed my front door, which was nice.
I'm going to do a video showing the real thing so that viewers can understand its dimensions and look.
Any particular questions you'd like addressed?
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| Question about WW2 radio codes |
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Posted by: DONJCH - 22-04-2018, 03:39 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Greetings all, my name is Don and I am new here.
I am a retired medical scientist with a background in chemistry and interest in things statistical, though not in the context of language.
There is little I can bring to the table other than an analytical mind.
Anyway I have spent a few weeks reading through most of the threads on this site and perhaps can bring a fresh perspective.
I was impressed with the Torsten auotocopy suggestion which has the potential to account for many of the observed features of the VMS including the low entropy by a plausible method available in the 15th C.
To the point though, as somebody else observed, this does not exclude the possibility of actual real content buried in the manuscript. As an analogy I am thinking of the WW2 radio practice of sending coded message phrases buried among a whole bunch of similar nonsense phrases.
As an aside, there was a famous instance in the battle of Leyte Gulf where the message sent was "Where is 5th Fleet?"
and instead the message received by the admiral was "Where is 5th Fleet? The world wonders!"
The accidentally added nonsense phrase amounted to gross insubordination in the context!
I do not know the technical term for this procedure but it strikes me that something similar could easily be going on in the VMS.
It seems also that there are many instances where sections seem to have been inserted in the text as a second pass.
We could ring the changes on the corrollaries of this, such as what upper limit on real content is placed by the entropy stats? Is the message spread throughout the text in small pieces or in less frequent larger chunks? If so such chunks may still be amenable to a statistical approach and in any case Torsten's software could be used to model some scenarios.
Apologies if all this has been suggested before, I am sure it has but maybe not recently in the context given.
I am only an egg compared to most of you.
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| f57v Summation of sequences |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 10-04-2018, 10:51 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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VMs f 57v Summation of sequences
As discussed previously, in the 4 x 17 symbol sequence, the symbol in position five (EVA = ‘v’) has several different potential interpretations. The actual glyph is written as an inverted “V” and therefore is more similar to the Greek letter ‘lambda’ in upper case or to the medieval form of the numeral seven as seen in various places such as Typus Arithmetica. A third interpretation is that it is an inverted representation of the Roman numeral ‘V’ or five, given that it sits in the fifth position. In other words, this is an interpretation that is confirmed (to some extent) by placement or location, not wholly by appearance.
Positional confirmation can also be demonstrated for the first two examples. In the Greek interpretation of lambda in position five, there is also omicron in positions one, which is correctly spaced at the same distance as in the Greek alphabet. Likewise in the system of medieval numerals, the interpretation as the number ‘7’ is the proper distance from the second symbol which is a clear representation of a medieval numeral ‘four.’ Once again visual interpretation / appearance confirmed by positional relationships when compared with known traditions.
These are three well-know sequences of symbols, and it is possible to overlay each of those systems unambiguously onto the VMs sequence with the information presented above. The Roman and medieval sequences are numerical. The Greek alphabet is actually alpha-numeric. (And it has a few quirks to accommodate. The one most relevant here is the insertion of a non-alphabetical symbol, digamma, in the sixth position.)
So, in the Greek numerical sequence, lambda equals thirty. While in the Roman sequence the value of this symbol is five. And the medieval value is seven. And if we go back to omicron, at the beginning, the Greek value is seventy, the Roman value is one and the medieval value is three.
Values in each sequence: (Roman value = symbol position)
Greek 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 < >
Roman 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Medieval 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
Sum: 74 66 58 50 42 34 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
Now if we subject each sum to numerological reduction:
7 + 4 = 11; 1 + 1 =2
6 + 6 = 12; 1 + 2 = 3
5 + 8 = 13; 1 + 3 = 4
5 + 0 = 5
4 + 2 = 6
3 + 4 = 7
2 + 6 = 8
2 + 7 = 9
2 + 8 = 10; 1 + 0 = 1
2+ 9 = 11; 1 + 1 = 2
3 + 0 = 3
3 + 1 = 4
ETC.
And this continues till we get to the Greek alpha equals one, which (if we include the digamma in position six) gives us a symbol sequence consisting of sixteen symbols where the VMs sequence has seventeen symbols.
When we look at the values for the seventeen symbol, the Roman value is 17, the medieval value is nineteen. The total of these two is thirty-six, and 3 + 6 = 9. Nine is the proper sequential value, so the Greek value can not make any numerical contribution - if the pattern holds true.
The final numerological sequence is simple: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
What could this be? Does it have a meaning or some use?
If we consider the choice sequences and their arrangement in relation to each other - doesn't this have to be an intentional construction?
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