The roger bacon cipher is based on groups of 5 letters which can be substituted by alphabet letters
The problem is that we also have VMS words that are smaller or bigger.
We could also take 1 specific letter (gallows), or a group or letters (the e,h,S) or any other combination.
Or we can remove the space character in one or more combinations.
Is there anyone out there that performed intensive computer calculations on those possibilities ?
There is the "arc" symbol in the VMS represented as extended EVA &163. (There is also &140, I'm not sure what's the difference between the two, but it seems that &163 is the one I am referring to).
It is quite rare, but it is encountered, for example, three times in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the "index" column to the left.
This symbol is quite attractive for the analysis purposes in that it is clearly a single symbol, and not any combination/superposition of simpler symbols.
What makes this symbol extremely interesting is that it is used as a standalone label in f80r: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
So: either this stands for a number (why would a number be associated with this object?)
Or: this stands for a one-character word (could those who explore the language hypothesis advise whether any languages, besides hieroglyphic-based, have one-letter nouns?)
Or: the cipher is encoding a multi-letter word into a single character of the ciphertext.
In further studying the paint vs. line problem, I decided to trace the lines of the three "swimming" creatures on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
For the full account you can check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I'll put the most important stuff here.
Problems with this image in the manuscript:
In some places, the lines are covered in the thick, green paint, making them harder to see
…or totally impossible to see.
The color, white background and green water don’t “follow the lines”. This results in a confusing patchwork crossing the borders of the creatures in various places.
At some places where the green paint dries at the edges, it creates a darker line which can be mistaken for a creature outline.
Some parts, like the tails on the blue and the red one, have been totally covered in “water”.
So I traced all visible lines, and this is the result:
Some observations:
Red and Blue have forked tails like Green.
Red has a ridged back.
Blue has a saw pattern on the top of his snout and a line pattern on his back.
Yellow has a forked snout. It’s small, but clear upon close inspection.
[font=Lora, serif]This leads me to believe that Green, Blue and Red belong to the same “class”, the forked tail might represent "fish tails". That doesn’t mean that these three are fish, but the forked tail communicates that they were seen as something like that, i.e. associated with a watery habitat. They are distinguished by three different patterns: Green has dots running across his flank, Blue has a subtle pattern of lines on his back, and Red has a ridged back. Whether this means that they are different species, I don’t know.
Yellow has been given a different tail, a fuller body and a different neck. His stance seems to suggest hostility or fear towards Blue, and perhaps also Red and Green.[/font]
In order to communicate covertly, it is necessary to use some sort of hidden system. In order to communicate clearly the system itself needs to be rigid and unambiguous. Too many linguistic interpretations have problems with ambiguity.
A linguistic translation of VMs symbols in the common suffix transcribed as EVA -ody involves finding a linguistic equivalent for the three symbols, but with no apparent clues to provide a starting point other than just being an apparent suffix.
The White Aries Mechanism is a text delivery system. The patterned markers in the two circular bands of text of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. clearly function as a workable method to designate specific segments of text. The whole of the heraldic identification is only a demonstration of what a *very* long way the author was willing to go in order to emphasize the significance of these patterned markers.
A text designation system was constructed in the White Aries illustration to deliver a specific segment of text, the Golden Key. But how to read it??
Not through an alphabetic translation system, it seems, but through something slightly different. A system intended to specify letters. A letter designation system. Take the suffix -ody and turn it into numbers according to the positions in the Seventeen Symbol Sequence from VMs f57v. The Eva symbols o, d, y would convert to 1, 3, 15. What seems to be missing in that numerical sequence? To me, the number 5 is implied, as in 1, 3, (5), 15. A sequence 1, 2, 7 might imply 14. The symbols are used repeatedly, according to fixed rules, but they produce different results depending on the sequence. The author then is free to use the individual sequences to create an apparent structure: prefix, root, suffix.
The big question, of course, is what do the the implied numbers map to? Does it have to go back through the Seventeen Symbol Sequence and the come out in Greek? That would be a beast!!!! If the author had the same mastery of languages as we might presume from the heraldic demonstrations, then the doors are wide open.
Getting into the quicksand has been fairly easy, so far. Getting out may be more difficult. I could be sitting here for a while. Any suggestions?
.
There seems to be a sentiment that it is especially the painting that makes some pages of the manuscript look rather "ugly."
The guy who did the lines wasn't too bad at his job. But then he or his colleague (or someone else entirely) came along with a large, bad painting brush and ruined various perfectly good drawings.
I was inspired by Rene's comment in another thread to take a look at places where the lines and the paint appear to tell a slightly different story. Just to name something, if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. hadn't been sloppily painted, we would see more clearly that the horizontal cylinder te person is holding on to has two vertical bars as well. In this case, it seems clear that the linework was done first, and then the painting. The opposite would have been weird and impractical.
But then I saw You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Note how there is no actual outline of the leaves. If this was an uncolored sketch, the leaves would only be suggested by the "hooks" lining their edges. Could this suggest that the leaves were painted first, and then the hooks were added? Or that the hooks were drawn with the full knowledge of how they would be painted later? This suggests a close coordination between line and color.
Why is this important?
Well, take a look at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for example. The blue one was originally drawn with a long tail, which is entirely painted over. The tail being entirely submerged seems unlikely: the rest of the picture suggests shallow water.
If we assume the painter was either the line artist himself or his colleague, this would leave open the option of self correction. For example, maybe they wanted to draw a hippo and someone told them that hippos don't have such long tails, so they painted over it.
If, however, we assume the painter was some independent, manuscript ruining oaf, the self correction option would be ruled out entirely.
I do not know if this is the place, but i would like to ask some specific questions about his research and his paper (2014?)
Can not find another site where i can do this, i could try to email, but perhaps this works as well. Let's try. Is this the correct section?
I did not know about the paper until it was mentioned here, und i've read most of it this week.
It's an excellent approach and well written piece of research. Some points i do not fully understand and
other things i wonder if they can be improved.
Here is my informal translation of a passage from “Il Giardino Magico degli Alchimisti” by Vera Segre Rutz (pag. L -LIII).
As the pessage itself makes clear, this subject is not related with Alchemical Herbals in particular.
Images from Alchemical Herbal BNF 17848 (many thanks to Rene!).
I attach a slightly processed detail from the Naples Dioscorides f 78r (but the illustration is very dark, not easy to read). If someone had a link to the Vienna Dioscorides f 126r, I would be interested in seeing if it is clearer).
In addition to the geometrical simplification, there is another factor that contrasts naturalism and appears very strange to the modern eye: the prominent zoomorphic and anthropomorphic elements. Often, these elements correspond to analogies that are also expressed in the name of the plant, for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [Christ's Hands] (cap. 46), a kind of orchid [in Italian] still named “manine” (small hands) and scientifically “Orchis dactylorhiza”, because its roots remember the shape of a human hand. The plant named You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (cap. 34) has been associated with the fish “lucius” (pike) and features a large fish as a zoomorphich root. This phenomenon begins with the Naples Dioscorides [600 – 650 ca] [footnote: in the text of Dioscorides the small flowers of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are described as similar to masks and they are illustrated as anthropomorfic in the Naples manuscript]. [In the alchemical herbal tradition] it extends to many plants, and sometimes this cannot be linked with the contents of the text. With the exception of “herba You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.” (cap. 3) the anthropomorphism or zoomorphism happens in the roots. Once again, the ancient Dioscorides manuscripts, from Wien and Naples, provide precedents, with the root of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. presenting a human appearance. Vegetal images with anthropomorphic or zoomorphic roots appear in a number of medieval botanic manuscripts, of the same age but not directly related with the alchemical manuscripts [the earliest dated alchemical herbal was written in 1378]. For instance, Florence ms Palat. 586 (XIV Century) from Spain-Provence, Laurenziana ms Redi 165 and the very similar herbal in the Gambalunghiana Library, Rimini. This aspect has been explained as “drolerie,” i.e. as a purely decorative phenomenon, or as a derivation from the Arabic figurative culture, linked with legends and tales of oriental origin that had a wide circulation. We think the reference to the Arabic tradition is mainly relevant for the stylization and geometrization of botanical shapes, but it is vague in relation with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic roots. … Arabic botanic illustration is a little studied field, not very accessible to Western researchers, but from the sources I know, I would not say that the Arabs introduced specific zoomorphic or anthropomorphic iconographies. The anthropomorphism or zoomorphism of plants, in particular of roots, which are believed to have the higher pharmaceutical efficacy, is part of a magic-based idea of the vegetal world; it is a sign of the recognition of a personality of the plant, of its own powerful vitality. For the same reason, we find [in the text] prayers to be addressed to the plants, prescribed as a condition to benefit of their more or less occult powers. The magic-animistic view of the vegetal world has ancestral origins and is clearly mirrored in the language about plants. Anthropomorphic or zoomorphic metaphors are among the main universal principles in the classification of plants, with Italian names such as “bocca di ...” “lingua di ...” “piede di ...” “zampa di ...” “coda di ...”, in Latin “pes ….” “ungula ….” “lingua ….” followed by the chosen animal [in English houndstongue, houndstooth, snapdragon, cat's tail]. The human and animal body is the main model in the conceptualization of the natural world: a universal anthropologic phenomenon of particular importance for the idea of nature as animated, inhabited by demons and by plants having their own soul. Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic elements in the alchemical herbals visualize a magic and metaphorical mentality, which has left deep traces in our languages in the popular names of plants.
See also the Naples Dioscurides You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Segre describes the flowers of Lonchitis as anthropomorphic, but they look like dog heads to me.
If we assume that the Voynich text is linguistic in nature, what alternatives are there to concluding that the script is an alphabet?
It is often considered that you can split most scripts up by the way they work into one of three groups:
1. alphabets where characters represent individual sounds;
2. syllabaries where character represent whole syllables; and
3. logographic systems where characters represent whole words.
The size of the character set is often taken to be diagnostic: alphabets have from 20 to 50 characters; syllabaries have from 50 to 100 characters; have logographic systems have many hundreds or thousands of characters. The number of characters thus reflects the number of underlying items which the characters represent: language have more words than they have syllables, and more syllables than they have sounds. Knowing that the Voynich script has 20-25 characters, we can rule out the language having only 25 words or 25 syllables, whereas 25 sounds is realistic.
Of course, not all characters must represent sounds. Some may be punctuation or ideographic. Also, some characters may represent more than one sound depending on the context. But the basic principle of any given instance of a character standing for a single sound should be mostly good. The question whether the script fully represents all kinds of sounds (that is, an abjad without vowels) would be unanswered, but abjads are still a kind of alphabet.
We might also have the count of characters wrong, however, with there being more or fewer distinction than we currently make. But there is no way a decrease in the number of characters would make an alphabet less likely, and any increase would have to be substantial before we could being to consider syllabaries.
What alternatives are there, if we believe the characters are a script to represent language, other than the script being alphabetic in nature? I'm genuinely looking for evidence to shake an assumption I've had for a long time.
(Note: I understand that the linguistic nature of the text is an assumption, but that's not the topic of this thread.)
I'm still relatively new to Voynich studies (couple of months) so there are some peculiarities I still have to learn about. I noticed on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a row was added left of the text, and some (rather modern looking?) numbers. Is there a consensus about who did this or what it means?
I made some speculations about the eagle root on fol. 46v here
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D'Imperio describes it as "a bird with spread wings: an eagle!" in An Elegant Enigma. I have the plant id as costmary (Frauenminze) - in the old herbals we see it as the herb of Virgin Mary. I found couple of examples of Mary mixed with eagle with spread wings. I was wondering if somebody knows by chance any similar examples from early 15th century.
Thanks in advance.
![[Image: traced.jpg?w=720]](https://herculeaf.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/traced.jpg?w=720)
