Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

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Thanks, but you have not yet answered my question: To which languages do the words 'aberil' and 'abiril' apply? Is there a historical record of the use of those specific spellings?

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Yes, I did. As I said, if you evaluate it in isolation (without taking the other months into consideration), Ab[e]ril can be Spanish or French.

I also pointed out that there's nothing unusual about the extra vowel ("e") being inserted. In the Middle Ages they often spelled things the way they said them, either adding or dropping characters and sometimes the same word would be spelled three different ways in the same paragraph. After reading hundreds of these manuscripts you get a feeling for which kinds of variations were common or normal and which were not.

Is there any chance the final 'l' could be an exaggerated 'e'?

It's reasonably clear that the ending is "ril". The "r" is completely normal. The undotted "i" is very common. The "l" is written in the looped style common to the time (it's more typical of late 15th and early 16th than to early 15th).

What do you think of "octebre" on folio 72v instead of "octubre" or "octobre"? My Latin text has "astrelogi" instead of "astrologi". Just a coincidence? Are you able to clearly distinguish between the "br" in "octebre" and the "be" in "aberil"?

• Pisces is "mars" (the ess is inherited from Greek sigma and this form  is quite common at the ends of words).
  
• Green Aries is "ab'ril" and the squiggle can stand for a number of things in Latin script (er, re, ir, ri, r, e), so in this case, it's aberil or abiril.
  
• White Aries is the same "ab'ril" (aberil or abiril), it's just that the squiggle is less clear and the shape of it might be more explicitly showing "e".
  
• Taurus is "maÿ" which is a transitional form. It represents "maii" except that a terminal-i was often given a tail (which makes it look like a "j" to modern eyes). When i without a tail is followed by i with a tail (a descender) we get the shape that evolved into "y" as we know it.
  
• Red Taurus is the same as Taurus "may" and since this was the period in which ii/ij/ÿ had almost finished transitioning into "y" it's not uncommon for the dots to be dropped and for it to look exactly like a modern "y". Note that the tail of the "y" arcs to the right. This is very important. Certain regions swung the tail to the left or the right somewhat consistently, so it can sometimes be used with other information to help geolocate the handwriting.
  
• Gemini is "ijon9/yon9" which is yonus. The character that looks like a "g" or "9" at the end is one of the most common Latin abbreviations. It is frequently used at the ends of words to stand for "-us" or "-um". If it's hyper-abbreviated text, then it can even stand for "yonius". It depends on the scribe. This, of course, is June.
  
• Cancer is "iolleo" and as there was no such letter as "j", the "io" makes a similar sound to soft-j (not the hard-j we use in English). Soundwise, this is similar to Spanish iullio but slightly rounder, and is July. In Spanish/Portuguese and various Galician and Provençal manuscripts, there are many different spellings for July, although using an "e" rather than "i" is less common. "iolleo" definitely leans more toward Spanish-related languages than French.
  
• Leo is augst which I see very frequently in old Swiss-German and German manuscripts and which is not typically Spanish or French.
  
• Virgo is "sept'br". Long-s, messy e, normal p, blobby e, normal Latin apostrophe standing in for "m", Gothic b, and the superscripted leaning "r" is an abbreviation for "er/re" and probably represents "re" here. French for September. It's not likely old Catalan, they tended to drop some characters and here would likely have dropped the "p". It's very interesting to read old Provençal verse because many of the harsh sounds were dropped to create sounds that were very sonorous (and were reported to be so), which would make perfect sense for a land of lyric poets (the original troubadours). Galician also sometimes dropped letters.
  
• Libra "octe'bre" - completely normal and readable abbreviated Latin for octembre (French).
  
• "nove'bre" is quite clear. The line above the e is a normal Latin apostrophe for "m" (as in octe'bre), so we get French novembre. Note that the last "e" on a couple of the months is a bit more ornate than usual. It's possible this person learned both cursive and book hands, because this is not a cursive "e", it's a calligraphic "e" (book hand). This is not unusual. John Dee, as a familiar example, was constantly switching between cursive hand, note hand, and calligraphic hand.
  
• "d'c'bre" is messy writing, but it is still pretty readable if you are familiar with Latin abbreviations. d, then the squiggle stands for the missing "e", then a messy c that almost looks like "e" but I'm pretty sure is "c", then the squiggle/apostrophe standing in for "m", then a normal "bre". Again... French.
  

Where would they use a crazy mix of Spanish and French (and German for August) in the 15th century? In the borderlands between France, Switzerland, and northeastern Spain. There were many dialects in this area and some major trade routes moving north-south through the Burgundian connections along the French border. The coastal area is still culturally and linguistically diverse.

Note also that language groups sometimes get "split". For example, in the medieval Veneto, some of the words were more like Spanish than Italian, harking back to earlier times before several waves of colonists moved in between Venice and Provençal and Spain. Language groups also migrate. Certain languages were brought to the Mediterranean islands by colonists who exterminated or absorbed the earlier settlers.

The scholars who broke the Voynich code (my theory) had the following quirks in their handwriting from the viewpoint of printings and printing errors: frequent confusion between the letters 'u' and 'n' and occasional confusion between the letters 'r' and 't' and between the letters 'G' and 'C'. They used 'v' for 'u' at the beginning of words and 'u' for 'v' in the middle of words. The 's' looked close to an 'f' except at the end of a word when it could look like an 's' or a 'z', but 'S' looked like 'S'. A 'c' could sometimes look like an 'x', and a 'c' before the letter 't' could look like a cursive 'E'.  The letters 'i' and 'y' were freely interchanged. They also used 'i' for the letter 'j'. They sometimes wrote the letters 'on' as an 'o' with a bar on top.

Using v for u and u for v (or alternating them) was completely normal in the middle ages. Also, "i" was used for "j". The one that looks like a "j" is an embellished "i". You are correct in that "i" and "y" were freely interchanged, sometimes even by the same scribe in the same sentence.

I'm not sure what you mean about scholars who broke the Voynich code. No one has broken the Voynich code yet.

I'm impressed! I have copied your response and pasted it into my notes for future reference.

The real problem I have with "aberil" and "abiril" is that it inserts a hard consonant between vowels, effectively creating a new syllable, which, to me, seems inconsistent with the way the Romance languages evolved out of Latin.

I've noticed that there was enormous confusion on how to represent the letters "u" and "v", a dilemma which does not seem to have been definitively resolved until sometime between 1623 (First Folio) and 1632 (Second Folio) as now we see that "haue" has become "have".

I suspect that the author of the Voynich months was someone who did not like this confusion and decided to resolve it, only he went the wrong way, that is, he went contrary to how history would eventually resolve the issue, choosing instead to write "v" for the letter "u" and "u" for "v".

With that possibility in mind, the Voynich handwriting for April could be interpreted as saying abriue, which is a real word:

si se ferirent enz trestuit abriue que uenir cuident de lautre part a garison

Sure, this abriue probably means "opened" but I would be willing to bet that it was pronounced like "abril".

Back in those days, in places such as John Dee's England, there was no consistency in spelling like we have today. I've seen the same word spelled as many as three or four different ways. At times, an author would even deliberately alter his spellings of the same word in a single passage to impress the reader! It was all based on pronunciation, and in that context, abriue is fully plausible.

Any thoughts?