02-02-2016, 07:39 PM
(02-02-2016, 04:27 PM)Anton wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... a homogenous set of folios would (as we might reasonably expect) demonstrate more or less similar sequence of "descriptive blocks" relating to certain topics, like (most roughly):
1) this plant is called XXX
2) this plant is associated with such and such days of month
3) this plant is associated with such and such stones
etc.
An important point. But let me digress a bit first. In the 1990's the herbalist Sergio Toresella likened the the Voynich MS herbal illustrations with those of the alchemical herbals. Now other herbalists do not agree, but it certainly led me, at the time, to look at these MSs more closely. This page of Philip Neal gives a good intoduction:
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The same 98 herbs appear in each of the MSs, and they are copied quite consistently. They're interesting, as they are partly imaginary (or at least barely recognisable) herbs, as Marco already indicated. Furthermore, their illustrations are worse, esp. more simplistic, than those in the Voynich MS.
What is relevant for this topic are the descriptions (or recipes) for each of the herbs. These are usually in Latin or vulgate. The length of these texts is quite comparable with the length of the sections in the Voynich MS herbal part. They also vary in roughly the same way.
However, the one thing that really jumps out is that these texts are full of standard word combinations and short phrases, which is completely lacking in the Voynich MS.
Examples: "ad sanandum" appears in about every second recipe, as does: "accipe folia istius herbe", where folia is sometimes radicem or something else.
This is a real problem.