Are there good clues as to what direction and order the strokes of each Voynichese character was drawn?
I'm a word and language nerd who has studied Chinese and Japanese as second languages, including the closely related writing systems for both. The key to mastering Chinese characters is mastering, and adhering to, the rules about how strokes are drawn. These rules were formulated over centuries of the brush and paper becoming the preferred writing media in China, and ensure that the result is as legible and aesthetically pleasing as possible. In short, for those curious:
[*]Every character is a uniform sized square, no matter how many strokes
[*]General progress in writing a character is from the upper left corner of the square to the bottom right
[*]Ticks and tails can go off in any direction, but straight lines should only ever be drawn left to right and/or top to bottom
[*]Begin an enclosure, draw the interior, then close the enclosure
As with really any writing system, reading cursive Chinese characters is really a matter of recognizing the order in which the strokes were drawn. Draw them differently, and the character will likely be hard to read.
I've never learned to do calligraphy in any script or language, and I'm certainly not as versed in it as many of you here who have looked at a lot of old manuscripts. But it's on my list of things to learn when I retire, and it's an art I've always had an appreciation for. The argument was made in the basic character decomposition thread that the scribes of the VMS were likely used to writing cursive, not book hand, and the VMS character set looks cursive-ish. This should be helpful, then, for looking for the stroke qualities typical of the pen's starting point, ending point, and general direction.
Which brings me to my next question: Do we have any good idea what kind of writing utensil the scribe used, and how it was likely wielded? This should be an easy question for our paleography gurus here. I only bring this up because the writing utensil and medium of choice had a major effect on the development of most scripts. The Chinese script, as I mentioned, was shaped by the a revulsion to pushing a paintbrush against its bristles, by a hand that never made contact with the paper during the writing process. The Thai script was designed to be easy to scratch on palm leaves. If the VMS represents a lost script of perhaps a lost language, it is possible that it was a script originally designed to be written with a different type of utensil on a different type of medium. This could explain why it is left-leaning and not full of strong vertical lines. Also if the traditional writing medium was not durable, and the users of this script had no custom of putting writing on anything durable (or even making anything durable at all) due, that might explain why only one item has been found that uses it.
In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., focusing on the specific subset of zodiac labels, Rene observed that words that are very common in the text do not appear in labels.
In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., considering the whole set of all labels in the manuscript, I observed that common words are very rare in single-word labels, but more frequent in multi-word labels (bottom of this post).
In this thread, I will try to collect some more information about multi-word labels. It is not a huge set, so it should be relatively easy to examine it in detail. My ambition is to also consider other manuscripts, seeing what readable labels can suggest about the labels in the VMS. I expect I will make errors, but I am sure that the subject is interesting and maybe others will carry on the task with more accuracy. Rene's approach of focusing on a single section is likely more robust, but for this first post I considered all the labels together. Separately examining label subsets is one of the things I hope to do in later posts.
In order to have a first readable manuscript to compare with, I have transcribed the labels in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (see attachment). I encountered a number of difficulties in the process:
* I opted for expanding all the abbreviations I could interpret, so that the text in the labels can be compared with normal Latin. This was not an easy choice, and I understand that a diplomatic transcription would have had its advantages too.
* The labels are written in several different hands. I only considered those that seemed to me reasonably close to the hand who wrote the main text.
* Labels are often interrupted by the image of a plant. I considered the two halves as a single label.
* Labels sometimes occur on two lines: I considered these as two distinct labels (I understand that this is also what Voynich transcriptions do).
* In a few cases, there are labels for illustrations that were never drawn. I still included these in my transcription.
* It is not always clear what should be considered a label. For instance, some include as many as seven words.
In total, 232 labels were transcribed.
I compared the set with the 1023 lines marked L (label) in the Zandbergen-Landini VMS transcription, both ignoring and considering uncertain spaces (commas). A handful of labels corresponding to special characters were ignored.
The following histogram compares the number of words in the sets of labels. The numbers are presented as percentages: keep in mind that the VMS has many more labels than Egerton 747. Single-word labels are about 888-926 (with and without uncertain spaces) vs 147 in Egerton 747. In the VMS, labels with 4 or more words are extremely rare (at most 4 in total) and will not be discussed in this post.
I also examined the position of the most frequent word in multi-word labels. In order to assess the frequency of the text in Egerton 747, I typed about 1000 words from those parts of the transcription of the manuscript published by Iolanda Ventura that are available on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Of course such a small text is not enough to measure frequencies, in particular with Latin that has so many different word-types. So I relied on a composite lexicon made of the small fragment from Egerton 747 and more extensive parts of the Vulgate Bible, Virgil's Aeneid and Mattioli's commentary on Dioscorides, collecting a total number of words (tokens) comparable with that of the Voynich transcriptions (about 38,000 words).
Most common word in two word labels
The following is the position of the most frequent word for labels made of two words. The counts for two-word labels in the three sets are:
While in the Tractatus the most frequent word tends to appear in the second position, in the VMS it tends to appear in the first. In the Latin text, the two positions typically correspond to different stypes of plant names:
* Most common word in the first position (the less frequent case). The name of the plat is made of a noun and an adjective, both words make integral part of the plant's name. E.g.: pes leporinus (hare's foot)
In other cases, the first word is the generic type of plant and the second word the specific name: arbor abiete (arbor=tree, abiete=fir: fir tree) herba vitis (herba=plant, vitis=grapevine: grapevine plant)
* Most common word in the second position (twice as frequent as the other case). Typically, the first word is a specific plant name; the second word is an adjective that identifies a variant of the plant "family". Examples: centaurea maior (greatest centaurea) papaver nigrum (black poppy) vitis alba (white vine) centaurea, papaver, vitis are plant names maior, nigrum, alba are generic adjectives that are obviously more common words.
In most cases (68%), 2-word labels are made of a noun followed by an adjective: of course, both words are in the nominative case and agree in gender and number. Labels that consist of two nouns (6%) also are in the nominative case and tend to have the same gender. A few cases feature a first noun in the nominative case and a second one in the genitive (e.g. sponsa solis, the wife of the sun).
A possible task for future posts could be checking if 2-word labels in the VMS exhibit signs of extensive concordance (e.g. sharing the same suffix).
Most common word in three word labels
Counts of three-words labels:
16 ZL VMS ignoring uncertain spaces
27 ZL VMS with uncertain spaces
17 Egerton 747
The Tractatus only shows that the most common word tends not to occur at the end: it is frequent both in the first and central position.
* Most common word in the first position. 6 of the 8 occurrences follow the pattern "nomen herbe/herba X".
* Most common word in the central position. 4 of the 7 occurrences present two different names for one plant, separated by a disjunction ("sive" / "vel" two occurrences each).
f.18r.1 brusci sive bruscus
f.40r.2 fragia sive fragula
f.74v.1 tapinum vel pinea
f.92r.2 sauma vel brachteos
* Most common word in the last position. The only two cases actually are labels that are split on two lines (f.5r, f.52v).
The VMS shows a preference to present the most common word in the central position. It is tempting to speculate that this might be due to the presence of a disjunction, but this does not seem likely. The most obvious check is seeing if the central word in Voynich 3-word labels tends to be constant, or at least clearly biased towards a limited set of choices, but this is not the case. Among the 27 labels in the ZL-with-uncertain-spaces transcription, only two words repeatedly appear in the central position, and each only appears twice: ar and char. They also appear consecutively in one of the labels:
<f69r.9,&L0> dcho char ar
Also, nothing as simple as the "nomen herbe ..." pattern seems to occur in Voynich 3-word labels.
If the text in the Voynich is highly structured, but meaningless then wouldn't it in fact have been easier to just use a simple cipher to write text that was meaningful. Why would one prefer a meaningless text to one which was written in a cipher unless one had no knowledge of ciphers?
I have noticed a behaviour that is easy to succumb to and quite common and that is the practice of scouring manuscripts for images that look very loosely similar to the image in the Voynich that one is interested in and then postulating a relationship. It is perfectly reasonable to look for a correspondence to images in the Voynich amongst other sources and sometimes this can be very productive, but it should not be pursued to the extent of the man spotting Jesus's face in a pizza. I think, as with Nick Pelling's block-paradigm idea, we should not doubt the extent to which the output of the author's work was original and that a given drawing in the Voynich may not have a parallel in another manuscript.
I just took a decent look at the root of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the first time, and I can't make heads nor tails of it. Well, I can make a tail, which is (I hope) rather clearly suggested in the bottom-right appendage. Tuft at the end and all, like the standard "feline" root tail. There are also tufts of fur indicated along the "body' and the top knot.
What I noticed for the first time today is the pattern that's in the negative on the bottom, as if it's half submerged in waves? I highlighted the area below:
Apart from that, I don't know what to make of the other wiggly looking appendages and the strange angular shapes, nor the thing on top of the root that looks like a hairy square with rounded corners. The leftmost part of the rood is vaguely claw-like, but not terribly convincingly so.
The leaves look relatively realistic. In another thread, JKP suggested Malva, so the image may be based on this plant or a similar one.
The flower though, does not look realistic at all, its size, shape, proportions and components are all off to some degree. The lower pattern is that used for mountains, and above it what I think is "an event in the sky". The "sky" part even appears somewhat elevated above the "land" part. I have no idea about the red structure or a possible meaning of it all.
Has anyone collected data on which pages share most vocabulary? Specifically, I'd like to know when I select a page (for example f1v), which other folios share the most different word types with it?
(Note: both VViews and JKP have written a lot about this subject, and there are also the Sozomeno drawings Rene posted, so see this as an addition rather than something completely new).
While browsing the Très Riches Heures illustrations (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) I noticed that the main drawings on certain pages had been framed with architectural elements. Pillars with statues on pedestals, sometimes wooden bows flanked by two figures spanning the top.
Examples:
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The role of these figures appears to be that of "thematically appropriate onlooker", for example with Job there are living Dead, with David armored knights. There often is a certain hierarchy in the figures' vertical position, with heavenly beings at the top (cfr. VM cloud band figures).
These rich frames are typical for books of hours of the first half of the 15th century. A turning point came in the 1450's with Jean Fouquet, who considered borders a waste of space and treated each manuscript page as a painter would his canvas. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The nymphs in Q13A (using Claston's term) have some similarities with these architectural frames. They each stand like a statue on a base - free-floating nymphs are very exceptional). Some pages use the motif of the wooden beam on top. Some pages use pillars to connect them vertically, though the water makes them more like tubes. My personal impression is that the VM illustrator(s) took the main illustrations and tucked them away in what looks like an architectural frame. While they clearly allude to a style less rich than that of the Très Riches Heures, it is possible that they were imitating this manner of framing.
For me though (and this is where disagreement might arise), they really appear as illustrations in their own right, creating some tension between layout and contents.
I belong to a mailing list for medievalists who work in history of science and history of medicine and one of the members today shared a manuscript that I had never seen before and which made me think of a certain other manuscript that we all know and love.
The manuscript apparently dates from 1497* and contains two texts known as De corpore et anima, and De complexionum cognitione. The first part of the MS shares material with the anatomy section of the Compendium of Johannes Peyligk, a medical text printed in Leipzig in 1499, but the second part, with the diagram that I am interested in doesn't seem to be in that book in the same format based on my very quick skim of an online copy of that book.
You can browse the whole You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (link takes you to the John Rylands Library MS viewer) and the diagram is on f. 20v.
I haven't read the diagram or the rest of the MS in any detail, and it's later than stuff I usually work on, but I was struck by the blue flower-star thing, the wavy lines and the particular way that the information had been arranged.
* The date is on f. 11v of the actual manuscript and says "1497", which fits in with the palaeography. For reasons that aren't clear to me, one of the list members expressed a concern that that date seemed unlikely.
The 2012 celebration of the 100th anniversary of the 'discovery' of the Voynich MS by Wilfrid Voynich took place in Villa Mondragone, on 11 May.
At the time of the event, I already had some doubt about both the year and the location of this discovery.
By now, it is clear that he did not discover the set of manuscripts including the Voynich MS, but he certainly bought it sometime somewhere.
For the year, it really seems that 1912 is right, even though the deal may have been started in 1911. It even seems that the deal may have been concluded in May, but we may never find out for certain. There is a 'Terminus Ante Quem' for 26 June, when two of the manuscripts from this sale were seen in Budapest.
For the place of the sale, I have no more news (yet).
One of the hotels that was recommended to visitors of the Villa Mondragone event was Villa Vecchia, at the foot of the hill on which Mondragone lies (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). I don't remember who among the attendants stayed there. I was in the centre of Frascati. We didn't know then, but this Villa also has a very minor role in the history of the MS.
The main set of documents that the Jesuits wanted to salvage from confiscation in 1873, and which were marked as 'from the private library of P. Beckx' were taken from Rome to a Villa in Castel Gandolfo called the Villa Torlonia, which was also hosting the Jesuit novitiate (moved there from Rome). This set of documents included the well-known volumes of the Kircher correspondence.
It stayed there until 1919, when the the prince of Torlonia decided to cancel the rent of the place to the Jesuits. The collection of manuscripts was taken back to Rome, while the novitiate moved to the above-mentioned Villa Vecchia in the town of Monteporzio Catone. This villa was turned into a hotel much later.
Hi there, Voynichers. First, let me introduce myself: I'm a guy from the Netherlands with a background in linguistics, a general interest in anything to do with language(s) and writing systems, and a tendency to construct the latter myself. I've been a lurker here for some time, a follower of Nick Pelling's and René Zandbergen's sites for quite a bit longer, and generally intrigued by the VM for much of my conscious existence, although I've never done anything serious with it and I don't know what the heck a "Neal key" is even after having read You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. ;)
Regarding the VM text, I suppose I'm largely on the side of most members here: I don't think any of the "solutions" to the text offered thus far have been of much use whatsoever (this is the polite version of my true feelings as a linguist), but I wouldn't dare claiming I have a better clue myself. Safe to say that my cryptology skills don't go nearly as far as my fascination with it.
That said, I've recently been thinking about an idea, and was wondering if you would happen to know if this has ever been considered before (cue Yes it has, you utter noob, leave this to the big kids) or even sounds remotely plausible. I came up with it because some of my conscripts/langs/thingies work on the same basic principle, which you could call a "relative code": i.e., the meaning of a linguistic unit (character, word, whatever) is not determined by its "absolute" value, but by its difference in value with adjacent units.
A simple example to illustrate the principle. Say you want to encipher the word BOOK. To do this, you note the numeric positions of each letter in the alphabet (2-15-15-11), which you then use as steps to be taken forward through the alphabet for each subsequent letter (starting back at the beginning when you get past 26) to get your ciphertext. You need to choose a starting point beforehand; say the letter A. Then, to encipher the first letter of your plaintext (B), you add the value of that letter (2) to the value of your chosen starting letter (A = 1), which in our example gives you 3, which corresponds to C. The C is then taken as the starting point for the next letter, and so on for each step:
A + B = 1 + 2 = 3 = C
C + O = 3 + 15 = 18 = R
R + O = 18 + 15 = 33(mod26) = 7 = G
G + K = 7 + 11 = 18 = R
The plaintext BOOK is thus enciphered as CRGR. Note how the same plaintext character can end up as different ciphertext characters (the first O has become an R; the second one a G), and vice versa (the first O and the K are both enciphered as R).
Should we want to decipher the message CRGR, we must calculate the differences (in terms of numeric value) between each subsequent pair of letters; hence the term "relative code." Counting backwards from the end of the ciphertext, the "difference" between R and G is K, the difference between G and R is O; the difference between R and C is O again; and the difference between C and the letter you chose as your starting point (A) is B. There we are, back at BOOK.
Now this is of course a very simple example, and I'm not expecting the VM text to do anything as straightforward as this or we'd have found out long ago--at least on a letter-by-letter basis. However, could it be the case that something akin to this principle is going on between certain subsequent words (or even larger units)? The fact that so many passages consist of similar-but-not-quite-similar words (pdsheody shdol shey otchdy dshedy soeeedy dchefoey sair shedy sodair) makes me wonder if it would make sense to look at the differences between adjacent words rather than at their surface forms. I.e., not look at otchdy dshedy per se, but at the operations necessary to get from otchdyto dshedy--whatever those operations may be.
Whew. This took more writing than I expected; sorry for that and thanks for bearing with me (assuming you did). Does this make any sense whatsoever, or have I fallen into the most ridiculous trap imaginable? Has this principle been considered before? I'm genuinely curious what you gals 'n' guys think of my idea, and I promise I won't get offended if you burn it to the ground where it belongs. ;)
Thanks a bunch for your consideration, and keep up the great work on the narrow road of sanity!