I do not know someone mentioned any of the following associations? I think need to look for identification You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. among aquatic plants. " The tadpoles" - very similar to the larvae (pupae) mosquitoes.
Such a single unit leaf is hardly can stand alone in the air.
This conversation has gone from Images to Experts and now back to images again. Kind of like ping-pong, isn't it? However I'd like to follow up on Davidsch's comment on Pisces and Cancer pairings. You are correct to point out that the illustration of paired crayfish in VMs Cancer is a possible example of intentional pairing, where as Pisces is always a pair and the artist has no reasonable alternative. Just like Gemini.
With VMs Pisces the concern is with its placement in the Zodiac sequence. Pisces in the initial position is highly erratic. So it's not the medallion itself that is unexpected, but its placement. And it is true that Pisces, as the initial pair, is so expected and so subtle that the pairing aspect totally escapes consideration because the positional aspect is such a surprise. But that pales to virtually nothing when it is discovered that Aries and Taurus have been split into halves. This is an outlandish shock. What passes unrecognized is the presence of pairing here as well.
So let's look at the evidence provided by the illustrations of the medallions of the first five houses of the VMs Zodiac with a focus on pairs and pairing.
Pisces is a pair
Aries is split in half. Two halves are a pair.
Taurus ditto.
Gemini is a pair of twins.
Cancer is a pair of crayfish rather that the much more common singular crab.
Each of these VMs Zodiac houses is a pair. Some natural and some unexpected either in form or in placement. In addition, pairings occur within this sequence. A pair of fish and a pair of crayfish are two pairs of aquatic animals. Two pairs are a pair of pairs. A pair of goats and a pair of bulls are both pairs of land animals and a second pair of pairs. And therefore we have a pair of paired pairs. The Aries and Taurus pairs are also paired again by the method of their construction.
The examples of pairing exist these VMs illustrations. The unusual factors involved in the creation of this sequence strongly imply intentional construction. The purpose of that construction is to put together a sequence and collection of pairs in order to set forth pairs and pairing as an idea, concept, model, and paradigm to serve as a basis for further further investigation.
That investigation now shifts from the primary Zodiac medallions and moves to secondary images, starting again in VMs Pisces with another complex of pairings at the top of the outer ring and then to a relevant, historical complex of images where we have no experts.
I was going to make a blogpost on my web-site, but it doesn't work because of some problems with the hoster, so I just attach two PDF documents in English and in Russian here.
Is the "29" favourite author's number or an embodiment of the Lunar cycle?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. program recognizes alike (Sh) all spelling variations "benches" with an apostrophe. (Codes 33, 35, 37, 43, 51, 52, 53 - V101 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ).
I not urge introduce variability, but this reading disappear codes 217 (5, 8), 219 (6), 227 (19), 243 (7), 185, 186.
If enable apostrophe in the base of the glyph bench it is possible to distort the meaning of the apostrophe as the diacritical mark, because the apostrophe is used not only with a bench and a "c" (5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 19), with the "4о" (1, 2 , 3, 4), "Y" (9, 10), "o" (11, 12) and on the callout 20 (my reading) “she + vertical line + apostrophe + y”.
Moreover, some of these characters are encountered with other classic characters diacritical, trait or point.
Trait - "4o"- code 185, "y" - code 187 (27), "o" - code 195.
Point - "ch" code 224 (22), "y" code 190 (26).
Interestingly spelling 14, 15, 16, 17. According to my transcription is a "word" is written as "vertical line + horizontal line + apostrophe + code 94". !!! (horizontal line + apostrophe) = code 164 !!!
According to my translation method - the apostrophe is a symbol of mechanical action (cut, rip up, crumple). Therefore, the word (21) with two apostrophes I translate - finely chopped peduncles, word (24) - cut into (verb!) top leaves.
If be regarded apostrophe as a hieroglyph (full word), it is clear its single application as a label 18.
Here are the other visual mnemonic devices I think I've found. I don't claim to be the first to have found any of them - if someone wants credit for being first to have pointed any of them out, that's okay with me.
I will send the full list of herb attributions and images of plants to anyone sending me a request and email address.
You don't have to send money or say please.
I think there are nine ID's I still haven't resolved yet. There are about 20 that are kind of shaky. I think the rest (about a hundred?) compare well.
I ask all who request a copy to please note the very pronounced and deliberate placement of many of the words containing the Group I code attributions for the herbs pictured on the different pages (one instance per page per plant image) - at the top, at the left hand side or very near the plant images on the pages - sometimes more than one of the three. About 15% are in the first word on their individual pages. Another 4% are in the last word on their individual pages.
Thank you.
Don of Tallahassee
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It may seem strange coming from me, having been involved in the Voynich MS for more years than anyone else here (to the best of my knowledge), but I regularly perceive that the Voynich MS and the theories surrounding it are taken a bit too seriously.
I don't think it's worth fighting about.
I wasn't going to write anything in the Leo / goat mosaic thread. Neither I nor anyone else has the time to comment on everything.
However, there was a clear request for feedback.
A digression... I regularly get E-mails from people who report some breakthrough in the decoding of the MS, sometimes to the point of a claim of complete translation. In none of these I have ever seen anything that had any chance of being correct.
When pointing out the problems in each case, the reception of this is just not there. The negative feedback is not accepted.
Not rarely, the person is offended, and more often than not, I get the response that, since I can't read the text myself, how can I judge that the proposed solution is wrong. So, then I wonder (but don't write): why ask me in the first place?
In fora like this, getting no response at all, to something that one perceives as important, is certainly frustrating, but this is completely common to all discussion boards about the Voynich MS. Many times, people read it, digest it, but don't have much to add to it. Maybe they don't know whether it makes sense or not, and then not saying anything is quite a reasonable thing.
When honest criticism comes, then this can be negative. This should not be interpreted as a personal insult.
Mail messages tend to be relatively short, so they may seem more direct.
I do strongly object to the statement I read yesterday that I am:
Quote: attempting to maintain the now eight-year campaign to suggest that I am irrational, or inconsistent, or illiterate, or 'out for glory' or any other among the useless and pointless stream of memes
This is imaginary and uncalled for. Simply not true. I do hope that that sort of thing stops here.
In the lion thread, Koen said:
"The problem is of course that the Voynich MS is unusual.
I have seen several different arguments related to that:
- It is unusual, so it is probably a modern fake
- It is unusual, so it isn't European
- It is unusual, so its author probably was unusual (i.e. mentally abnormal in some way)."
I'd like to add another possibility.
- It is unusual, so it is a puzzle. Not just something mystifying and confusing, but a riddle to be solved.
Evidence:
The radial illusion that alters the interpretation of heraldic orientation in VMs You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - White Aries.
The three page construction of the papelonny pun.
The unique placement of objects in the White Aries illustration to create objective, positional confirmations.
The unique connections to historical church tradition.
It's all in the VMs. As a matter of fact, much of it is in there twice. It's paired. It's part of the pairing paradigm. It's intentional because it's not shown twice by accident. It's a pair of questions. What is your response to the VMs presentation of the Genoese Gambit? Do you know the tradition of the cardinal's red galero?
The combined use of heraldic canting and intentional positioning of specific images reveals a level of sophistication on the author's part that many investigator's are yet to fully realize, myself included.
This is in response to a post from Sam G. in the Leo thread, but maybe it's worth starting a new thread on this.
(I hope that this isn't actually making Anton's effort more difficult rather than less.)
Sam G. wrote:
Quote:Anyway, as I'm sure you are aware, the expert opinions are very strongly against the view that the VMS text is a ciphertext of any kind. Most notably here you have William Friedman, John Tiltman, and Jim Gillogly, all three of whom studied the VMS for decades and concluded that it was not written in cipher. Maybe you can find a cryptographer somewhere who thinks that the VMS is a ciphertext, but you won't find many, and certainly you won't find one with the reputation or demonstrated codebreaking ability of any of these three.
As far as professional linguists go, you have Jacques Guy, James Child, and more recently Stephen Bax who, although differing in the particulars, have clearly stated that the VMS is written in some unusual natural language, and is not encrypted. I believe there are some other linguists who have expressed this view in the list archives, and I am aware of no linguist who has ever expressed any other view. So we have unanimity here among several experts.
So I think it's clear that if we are going to decide, based on the translation/summary of some casual remarks from an art historian posted on the web possibly even without her knowledge, that depicting Aries as a goat is nothing out of the ordinary, then surely the nearly unanimous opinion of many expert cryptographers and linguists who have put an enormous effort into researching the VMS text must carry an even far greater weight. The VMS is not encrypted, and it is written in an unusual, otherwise unknown natural language.
Now, I know I have seen you express the view that the VMS in fact is a ciphertext, although interestingly you do not state this on your own website. I'm sure I could dig up the references if you want. That means that you hold a view that is completely in contradiction to expert opinion, despite your stated view that expert opinion should be respected.
So, from the standpoint of your view that the VMS text is a ciphertext, perhaps the idea that there is nothing unusual about the illustrations and no need to posit any foreign/ancient influence in the VMS might make some sense.
But how do we possibly reconcile a 100% medieval Western European origin for the VMS with the fact that it is written in an otherwise unknown language?
Should the fact that the VMS is written in an otherwise unknown language at all influence our ideas about what is and what is not possible regarding the origins and meaning of the illustrations, and of the content more generally?
I can't go into all of it....
I am fully convinced that the conclusions from Friedman and Tiltman (that it's not a cipher) are not to be challenged.
The key point is, though, what they mean precisely with 'cipher'.
Nowadays, Nick Pelling is clearly in the 'cipher' camp. However, he may have a wider definition of cipher than what Friedman and
Tiltman intended.
From the area of linguistics, there isn't nearly as strong an expert opinion as in cryptography.
One of the statements I clearly remember from Jacques Guy is that, for him, the Voynich MS demonstrated a huge weakness in linguistics, in the sense that he could not think of a test that decided whether the contents are meaningful or not.
For me, after well over 20 years, I am not even certain that there is a meaningful text behind it.
If not, the question between cipher or language disappears.
My tendency is, however, to expect meaningful contents, but I would not be in the least surprised if someone some day demonstrated that there isn't. I have myself found several clear indications that the text is not arbitrary, which suggests a meaning. However, there are also places in the MS where the text looks exactly like arbitrary 'filler' material.
Another prediction that may well never be verified:
if one day someone explains how the text was generated, and there is a meaning behind it, I expect that the method will be relatively straightforward, and one might even be arguing whether this should be called a cipher or not.
I agree with Helmut's point. Indeed, all comparison statistics (from plain texts) have been made based on printed texts that have usually been spell-checked and certainly have no abbreviations. This is of course convenient since this can be done fully automatically.
One would have to be able to make statistics based on handwritten texts, that may not have any orthograpy rules, and may be abbreviated.
This, of course, would require a very significant manual effort, and it can be done in many different ways.
![[Image: Bower-ms.jpeg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Bower-ms.jpeg)
