Explanation
A palimpsestis defined as a manuscript which has been re-used by scraping off the previous writing, leaving a blank skin upon which to write afresh.
The process usually results in a finer skin, as the upper layer has been scraped off, leaving signs to the naked eye. Other methods to detect palimpests include chemical analysis (not carried out) and multispectral imagery (carried out in 2014 with no apparant signs being published).
Careful examination of the scans have failed to detect any signs of this process.
Furthermore, the manuscript has been subjected to analysis by experts from the McCrone Institute and Yale (both in 2009) with no signs being found that this is a palimpsest.
A further examination at the Folger Institute display in 2014 by experts also failed to detect any signs of previous writing, leaving the experts to conclude verbally to witnesses that it was not a palimpest (1).
Just as importantly, nor have the thousands of hours of analysis by amateurs over the course of the last century bought up any serious suggestion that the manuscript is a palimpsest.
Further reading
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We don't have a thread about one of the more important names in the manuscript's post-manufacture history yet, so here goes. These are some of my thoughts, feel free to add your own
Ever since I learned Baresch thought there was some connection between the mystery manuscript on his shelves and Egypt, I have wondered if perhaps he knew something. I mean, he must have gotten it from someone, and that someone must have told him something about its origin. Sure, this could have been a game of "telephone", where the origins of the manuscript are slightly altered with each owner, but I wonder if it is at all possible that Baresch had still gained some knowledge about its original circumstances.
Even if all he knew was something like "it was bought from x", this may have placed him in a better position than us to assess its contents. Apart from the fact that he lived much closer to the time of its manufacture than we do.
One thing is for certain: Baresch contacted the most famous Egyptologist of his time at least twice, and told him his thoughts on an Egyptian connection.
Some of Philip Neal's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on his translation of the letter also point in the direction that Baresch really believed that not only the images, but also the script was Egyptian:
Quote:The point is that Barschius assumes that the key to the problem is simply to identify the script.
Neal also notes:
Quote:It is of interest that seventeenth century herbalists could not identify the plants.
So well, I wonder what your opinions are about Baresch and his letter. Does anyone know if a scan of this letter exists somewhere?
Also, is anything else known about Baresch that might help us?
Came upon this thing, wasn't quite sure where the best place to post it would be...
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This page and the one before have some examples of medieval numbers and of writing from different language. I'm not sure what is going on upon the particular page I'm showing (astronomical abbreviations?)
In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Rene wrote:
(09-09-2016, 10:22 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Going back many years, there used to be a statement about the word spaces along the following argument:
given that the label words should be individual words, and they primarily tend to appear in the main text separated by spaces, it seems that the spaces are real.
The problem is that I have never seen anyone really demonstrating this.
This would be a bit of work, but not too difficult to do and it might really tell us something.
All labels can be matched with a version of the main text from which all spaces have been removed.
One can then see how many labels are not found at all, and for the remainder whether there is indeed a preference for them to reoccur separated by spaces.
Depending on the result, the situation could of course not be entirely clear.
I tried making this count, as suggested by Rene.
I used Takeshi Takahashi's transcription.
504 different labels consisting of a single word of length 4 or more
235 labels are perfectly matched by words
examples:
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21 labels perfectly match a sequence of words (i.e. they appear in the text split into multiple consecutive words; the beginning and end of the label still correspond to spaces)
examples:
otaraldy .otar.aldy. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
okeeodal .okeeo.dal. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
dolol .dol.ol. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
37 labels occur as part of longer words
examples:
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39 labels are found removing all spaces (line and page breaks included)
examples:
yoraly sheedy.oraly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
tsholdy dtshol.dytal You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
chokaro chokar.okcho You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
172 labels cannot be found
examples:
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47% of the labels simply and directly occur as words.
Labels matching a sequence of words (4%) and labels matching part of words (7%) add up to an 11% of dubious cases, that could be explained both linguistically and by the arbitrary manipulation of spaces between words.
8% of the labels match the text only if spaces are completely ignored.
34% of the labels cannot be found in any case.
47% to 8% seems to me a clear preference for labels to reoccur separated by spaces. I attach lists of the labels split into the different categories discussed above.
I hope that someone else will independently make a similar exercise or at least check my results, so that we can be sure I did not accidentally introduce any major error.
As always, many thanks to Job for Voynichese.com It really makes checking and discussing these things easier!
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Walk careful in the night and dream what you may, Mr. Voynich is your worst nighmare.
I just read about the possibility that the Voynich Manuscript maybe a forgery attempt by Wilfrid Voynich himself using old Calf Skin Vellum. Rich's argument seems strong to me in that the imagery like the galaxy, microscope and Armadillo all come from a later time period. We are all struggling here to find meaning in the text of the Voynich Manuscript and if it is a forgery along with the text representing a giant null. Then how do you feel about your time on this project?
In my opinion the best starting point for a cipher to find meaning in the text is the picture of garlic in folio 99r yet if you go down that path; the languages of Europe make no sense! Perhaps not the best place to start, but it sure does look like garlic.
I'm sure Mr. Voynich would be familiar with this place as he studied there.
Discussing the occurrences of q in the beginning of labels, Sam You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. me to the label list by J. Stolfi. And I see a very interesting thing in this list. The vord qokal, which is one of the vords in the leftmost column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the "mussdel" folio) is also used as a label elsewhere - namely, in f75v.
If we admit that labels stand for words, then this means three things.
1) The vords in the leftmost column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. stand for words;
2) Those words are of the same part of speech. I.e., they are all nouns or they are all adjectives, or etc.;
3) They are likely to represent a homogenous set. I.e., if adjectives, they may be all colours (red, green...) or all perceptions (hot, moist...). If nouns, they may be all planets or all stones. Etc.
I think this may be a very promising clue. Definitely, subject to contextual analysis.
An additional hint is that their number is fifteen. Are any sets of fifteen objects out there in magical or other traditions?
There is a potential spoiler though - this stuff in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. may be not labels but a natural flow of text, just interrupted by those floods...
***
I have an impression that the first glyph of the first vord in the column is hidden from our view by the binding.
I recently made the remark in another thread that there is some relationship between [daiin] and [aiin], and words beginning [d] and [a] in general. Now that I've had time to check my notes I realize that I was somewhat wrong, and would like to here present a correction and an explanation. I hope that other will provide comments on my observations, which I present below in condensed form.
Problem Words beginning [a] are common in the Voynich text. There are nearly 2,000 word tokens beginning [a]. But at the start of lines they are rare. Only around 25 word tokens beginning [a] are found at the start of lines. The most common word type beginning [a] is [aiin], which has 0 occurrences at the start of a line. Most such words are similar.
The statistics for the first characters of words at the beginning of lines are rather divergent as a whole. The characters [y, d, p, s, t, f] occur more often, the rest less often, than in the main text. For [p, f] and maybe partially [t], the cause is the well known phenomenon of Grove Words. For [y, d, s] the cause is unknown.
Although we should not expect the text of the manuscript to be completely flat and the same throughout, we should still seek to explain variations. That's the most likely place we will learn something new. So we should presume there is a reason behind the lack of words beginning [a] at the start of lines, and that the reason is discoverable.
Argument
An hypothesis for explaining both the lack of [a] beginning words and the high occurrence of [y, d, s] beginning words could be that those letters are added to the beginning of [a] words.
It is impossible that [y] is added to the beginning of [a] words, nominally because [ya] strings are rare but also theoretically because they are likely very similar characters.
The character [d] could be added, but words beginning [da] are not hugely overrepresented at the start of lines, though there is some tendency toward this in Quire 20. It could be partially responsible for our observations.
The character [s] is the best fit for this role. Of around 1090 word tokens beginning [s], about 470, or 43% occur at the start of lines. For words tokens beginning [sa] the figures are about 190 of 510 that occur at the start of lines, or 37%. These are obviously more common at the start of lines than we should expect, with an excess of around 120. Their occurrence in the main text suggest that they are also valid words normally.
Conclusion The lack of words beginning [a] at the start of lines may be caused by an unknown process which adds [s] to their beginning. This would also explain the high number of words beginning [sa] in that position. The same process may cause [s] to be added to words beginning [o], as words beginning [o] are less common at the start of lines and those beginning [so] more common.
If the existence of a process of this kind is accepted we would look to generalize to explain the presence of words beginning [y, d] too. The character [d] is especially interesting as it has already been implicated in the lack of words beginning [a].
The balance of evidence is plainly in favour of the manuscript's having been manufactured somewhere in Europe during the fifteenth century.
At present the date-range 1405-1438 is the most objective for that manufacture, but as regards the manuscript's content and especially its imagery, there has been a noticeable absence of open investigation or enquiry, despite the various indications which have been recognised since the 1920s that the content does not present as of medieval European character and origin.
Accepting the obvious fact that the 'Germanic' theory is the one which has been most consistently and enegetically promoted for the past ten years and more, and that most people interested in this manuscript will be fully familiar with its propositions and items proffered in support, this thread is, specifically, about matter which comes from the rest of the world - beyond the boundaries of "43 degrees North, 5 degrees East".
We have already seen Linda mention the Yemen; Koen and Sam G. discussing Syria and North Africa (including Egypt) and of course I make no secret of believing that whatever the language of the written text, the evidence is overwhelming that the imagery did not originate in the Latin culture of medieval Europe.
With all due politeness, may I ask that those adhering to the 'germanic/central Europe' proposition contribute their ideas to the many other forums and threads in which that theory is constantly re-presented?
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I am often a bit confused when people argue about whether the VM text is a cipher or not. It is not at all clear what is meant with a cipher, and where the line is drawn.
I made this thread in the hopes that especially those "old timers" who have been involved with the text might clarify a few things for me.
When someone says "it is not a cipher", I guess they mean that no uniform system was used to purposefully transform an understandable text into something that needs to be "deciphered" by the reader - right?
On the other hand, it seems like not many people believe that this was a "normal" script that was used by a community in their everyday writing (like Latin, Greek, Arabic scripts).
Let's consider this hypothetical scenario. This is not something I (or anyone?) believe, it is just a thought experiment:
A relatively small community lives somewhere in central-southern Europe. Their language or dialect is different than that of those around them. This was not uncommon in the times before standardization and the eradication of "les patois". Their language is entirely unknown to us, and it was likely an isolate like Basque. Somewhere around the 13th century, they adopted the Latin script for writing in their own language, though over the centuries they made numerous alterations to express different sounds. The result was Voynichese. Since they were a small community, they only produced a small amount of manuscripts, and their language and script were wiped from the face of the earth when the renaissance desire for national unity started imposing standard language forms within national borders. Only one manuscript remains today, and nobody knows how to read it.
So my question is: only looking at the origin of the script, is such a scenario possible? Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this? And if it is not possible, then is it a cipher? And it if is neither, then what is it?
![[Image: CsCX-NiUAAEpnaL.jpg]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsCX-NiUAAEpnaL.jpg)
![[Image: CsCYURsVIAAFTk5.jpg]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsCYURsVIAAFTk5.jpg)
