03-03-2016, 05:38 PM
(03-03-2016, 09:39 AM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't remember reading that Stephen assumed a particular word order or the absence of morphological variation.
About the relevance of the first word in a page, he was explicit in his 2014 paper (A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script):
p.11: "Characteristics of mediaeval herbals: ... the plant name is frequently the first word of the accompanying paragraph".
Having looked at more herbals than I can count (and not just those that are illustratred) I would say that it's frequently the first two words. Even in the very old Greek herbals, plantname agrestis, plantname domestica, plantname sijlvatica (sylvatica/silvatica) were common naming conventions.
I'm sure it was noted when Voynich first discovered the manuscript, and in the 1940s code-breaking attempts by expert code-breakers, that the first characters on each plant page are patterned differently from the rest of the text on the page. It's common sense to examine whether they might be names. So far no one has decoded any of them.