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Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - Printable Version

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RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - DONJCH - 11-06-2018

JKP,

Hey, look, I was being perfectly straight - in truth I am already in awe. Having scanned through Capelli a couple of times, fluency with scribal codes and different scripts is clearly a lifetime endeavour in itself. Not to mention, I have read through all your blog and it's beautiful work. Your comparative diagrams and summaries are particularly excellent.


While I have your ear: you say there are 3 variations of EVA-m type characters resembling -cis, -tis, and -ris.
Are these covered by Extended EVA characters 166 and 174 or are they something else again?


Also, I looked again through Meister and found 2 examples of a character consisting of looped small L's with crossbar.
One on P35 in a cipher from Modena dated 1435 and another on P50 in a cipher from 1424.


What do you think of these as possible precursors to EVA T?

I just cannot come to terms with our elegant tall gallows arising from a little squashed fly like tis etc!
I'd rather go with Pi actually.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - nablator - 11-06-2018

In BNF Lat. 8513 Magistri Burini epistola de secretis mulierum the final 'tis' are similar to EVA-k or z.
 
161r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

[Image: image210.png]

This "ch" looks like EVA-k or z too but it has a descending vertical part that just happens to be separated.

[Image: image110.png]

Explicit epistola magistri Buri(ni) de secretis ...
scripta per manum Johannis de Choysiaco. Amen

144r You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(3rd line)

[Image: image310.png]

sempiterni(ta)tis abscribit

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - DONJCH - 11-06-2018

Nablator,

Interestingly the signature on the following page has 3 of them!
The contrast between the script in the text and in the signature could not be more stark.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - -JKP- - 11-06-2018

(11-06-2018, 12:21 PM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

While I have your ear: you say there are 3 variations of EVA-m type characters resembling -cis, -tis, and -ris.
Are these covered by Extended EVA characters 166 and 174 or are they something else again?

Don, the truth is, I don't even use EVA, I developed my own fonts. I have glanced through enough versions of "EVA" to understand that there are MANY different opinions about how to interpret the glyphs, and no real consensus on some of the variations. I noticed some versions of EVA recognize ris and cis but left out tis (ris and tis often look very similar in medieval manuscripts, as do cis and tis in early medieval manuscripts, so perhaps not everyone notices that there are three variations).

There are actually more than 3 variations in the VMS. There is also a character that looks like EVA-d with a straight back. It resembles the short-cis sometimes found in Latin-alphabet documents. It has to be figured out whether this allies more closely to EVA-d or to EVA-m. I probably have some statistics on this, but I have run so many statistical tests I can't hold them all in my head any more. When a question comes up, I have to look them up.



Quote:What do you think of these as possible precursors to EVA T?

I just cannot come to terms with our elegant tall gallows arising from a little squashed fly like tis etc!
I'd rather go with Pi actually.

When the abbreviation symbol for "-is" is added to capital-I (rhymes with eye) to create "Item" (in German, French, Latin, or Italian), it looks exactly like EVA-k. In certain hands, the French word "Il" also looks like EVA-k. It's really not much of a stretch to base EVA-t on EVA-k as a variant if one is designing an alphabet (or scribal system) for one's own purposes.

But, to be honest, I am also inclined to keep Pi high on the list because there is a great deal of overlap between Greek and Latin scribal abbreviations and quite a few philosophy, theology, language, and science scholars learned Greek in the Middle Ages.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - -JKP- - 11-06-2018

I keep forgetting to mention that ascenders with loops in both directions (like EVA-t) were quite common in Semitic kabbalistic texts and Latin texts on magic. Some of the symbols represent the stars or the names of angels, others are talismanic symbols for averting demons, as in this example:

   

At one point I taught myself the symbols so I could read the demon-related scripts but it was a few years ago and if you don't use it, you lose it, so I would have to look up the meanings again. They can be found in both western and middle-eastern manuscripts that deal with spirits and magic.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - Koen G - 11-06-2018

Well spotted on the signature, Don James Charles Henry, there's another one on the following page. This guy put random "gallows" all around his signature.

   


JKP: I've been looking around a bit more and it remains hard to find the loopy abbreviations together with pi-shaped ligatures in the same script. This might be another argument to consider Greek pi.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - Antonio García Jiménez - 12-06-2018

I appreciate very much your work. It is true because I know what it is to read hours and hours so many medieval masnucripts looking for some clues. I want to tell my experience: At the National Library of Spain where I work, during months I was looking into dozens of manuscripts, most written in Latin, and I realized that some letters were similar to the glyphs of the Voynich. I thought that would end up finding the solution. But one day, I closed the book that I had in my hands and I told me myself: Many learned men were familiar with manuscripts and scribal conventions in the Court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, in the XVII century and they didn't find anything. I thought that if they couldn't decipher a manuscript from the XV century, I won't do it in the XXI century. 
  And suddenly there is light. I thought: they sent the Voynich to Kircher because suspected that the text was a language like hieroghyphs, something visual rather than phonetic, and Kircher believed to have deciphered the egiptian hieroglyphs.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - -JKP- - 12-06-2018

(12-06-2018, 09:10 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I appreciate very much your work. It is true because I know what it is to read hours and hours so many medieval masnucripts looking for some clues. I want to tell my experience: At the National Library of Spain where I work, during months I was looking into dozens of manuscripts, most written in Latin, and I realized that some letters were similar to the glyphs of the Voynich. I thought that would end up finding the solution. But one day, I closed the book that I had in my hands and I told me myself: Many learned men were familiar with manuscripts and scribal conventions in the Court of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, in the XVII century and they didn't find anything. I thought that if they couldn't decipher a manuscript from the XV century, I won't do it in the XXI century. 
  And suddenly there is light. I thought: they sent the Voynich to Kircher because suspected that the text was a language like hieroghyphs, something visual rather than phonetic, and Kircher believed to have deciphered the egiptian hieroglyphs.


I think it is important to figure out the relationships between Latin scribal conventions and the VMS script because it may yield clues as to which glyphs are individual glyphs and which glyphs are combination glyphs.

The Latin abbreviation for "-is" (a loop with a tail) is applied in the VMS as it is in Latin, at the ends of words and frequently at the ends of lines, and is ALSO added to a variety of glyphs, just as it is in Latin. It is not always ris or tis or cis, sometimes it is EVA-y + "is". If that is so, then maybe EVA-k and EVA-t are simply uppercase versions of the same "is" symbol and PERHAPS meant to be understood in the same way as the lowercase versions.

What this tells us is that EVA-m might not be one glyph, it might be two pieces, with different meanings, joined together, with each part meant to be understood differently.


One of the big problems with figuring out Voynich text is deciding whether a benched gallows character is one glyph, two glyphs, three glyphs, or four. If it follows scribal conventions in terms of construction, then it is probably three or four components, rather than one glyph.

The morphology of the glyphs DO follow Latin scribal conventions. The position of the scribal glyphs DO follow Latin conventions. Whether their deconstruction (whether they are combination glyphs) is meant to follow Latin scribal conventions is what I've been trying to figure out.


So, what you must realize is that whether they are individual glyphs or combination glyphs is every bit as important to YOUR theory as it is to anyone with a linguistic theory. You cannnot translate the tokens unless you know how many parts are within each one.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - DONJCH - 13-06-2018

Koen - This guy is a real gallows freak isn't he?
To me these are the best replicas of a VMS gallows in this thread because IMHO SIZE MATTERS! Wink
Is signature guy the same as the scribe though? 

I agree with your comment to JKP, which is why I was trying to narrow down a type of script/letters/abbreviation to give a proper VMS gallows, rather than randomly searching through thousands of documents.

This approach could also show an evolution of the gallows and indicate a possible place/time, rather than hypothesising a single creative jump.

This is the sort of thing I was talking about (Capelli)
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See 3rd line down, 2nd column, "collio" = collegio

Also Meister
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9th character on 2nd last line - cipher from Milan 1435

and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
1st column line 13 "che" - pp with crossbar - dated 1424

JKP: Can you link to a page with the "Item" character? No need to sweat the formatting etc.

NB tried to post a cutout of the isolated word, looked fine in draft but full page of gobbledey gook when posted.

RE: Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs? - MarcoP - 13-06-2018

(09-06-2018, 10:16 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So I just decided to open a random manuscript - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - and was able to find the following correspondent glyphs. Mostly the ones in the "final abbreviations" category.


Would the following conclusions be correct?

  1. EVA-l is rare as a non-numeral.
  2. EVA g, m, s, y, n are not particularly rare and generally used for abbreviating.
  3. Benches are not particularly rare and are generally ligatures.
  4. It's harder to find regular use of (2) ánd (3) in the same manuscript? (this is just from my very limited experience).
  5. Gallows still lack a decent parallel that coincides with (2) and (3).
What I mean with (4) is that in a "flowy" hand like the one below (early 15thC Spanish) you'll get the abbreviations and flourishes but not really the benches as they appear in the VM.

Hi Koen,
I have added what seems to me a good enough "bench", the "cr" ligature in "lucrum", You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., right column, line 15.

   

There also are a few "ci" that could match ch. Parallels for Sh are typically harder to find. I don't have the impression that your points (2) and (3) typically do not appear together, but my experience is the same as yours, so who knows?

I want to thank you again for this thread. I find the subject intriguing and I think there are a number of things worth discussing in this context. I must definitely read something about medieval scripts, at least enough to understand basic classification criteria.