Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

I suggest you read the threads on this. This specific phrase is closer to German (or old Yiddish) than any other language.

so is German (it's similar to "so" in English)
nim is German (this was a common way to spell it in certain areas in the Middle Ages, now it is spelled nimm and means to take)
gaf means gave in lowland Medieval German, gas can have a number of interpretations, one being "goose"
mich is "me/to me" in German. Some have also suggested it might be short for "milch" for "milk" in German and that is reasonable as consonants were sometimes dropped from words if the word was pronounced that way.

In other words, depending on how gas/gaf is interpreted (as "f" or as "s") it might mean he gave it to me to take (in corrupted grammar typical of a foreign speaker), or so take goose milk (which might be a remedy connected with an incantation).



If it were perfect German, it would have been interpreted as soon as Voynich laid his hands on it, he probably knew German from all his travels, because it is imperfect, we have a mystery to solve. For your information, the official language of the Holy Roman Empire at that time was German, so a lot of people from other areas were in a situation where they had to learn it even if they weren't good at languages, and especially if they didn't know Latin (or didn't know Latin very well).

The text on the first line also shows signs of possibly being German, although I have blogged about other possibilities, but it's hard to deny that the "-pfer" at the end of the line is German, since other languages rarely combine p and f. The second line is more similar to Romance languages, the third is more similar to Latin (some of the words are Latin).




Note that the "i" has a leading serif like the other "i" letters on this folio.


For the record, I can read both French and German (I know French better than German).

Just because all the great handwriting experts of the past say it's nim does not mean that you have to follow in their folly. We are very fortunate that Shakespeare decided to help out by giving us "ubren" because the shape of that n doesn't even remotely resemble what could be the first letter of mur, so that word couldn't possibly be nim! As I have been saying, the dot above mur is just a stray dot like the dot you see down below the letter u. Meanwhile, the ending upswing on the final r faded away as it almost did for the r in ubren. It's a WALL, silly.