No text, but a visual code

[-JKP-]

It could be, although it would be more convincing if you showed some examples of the abbreviation of Radix with this glyph in books of herbs or any kind, not only astronomical ones.

This is the busiest time of year for me workwise. I simply don't have time to look up examples for you but the abbreviation (and fully written-out word) is common in books of medicine and apothecarial matters. If I come across some good examples, I will post them.

Because the problem is that if we agree that most of the Voynich glyphs are derived from Latin letters and abbreviations, the consequence is that  the scribe reused them and gave them a new function. If they kept their Latin meaning, long ago that the VM would not be a mystery. 

Many people disgree about Latin being the origin of most of the Voynich characters but they mainly seem to be people who are not familiar with Latin letters, numbers, abbreviations, and ligatures. Everyone who knows medieval Latin scribal conventions is familiar with the following characters. They are common:

a o e c d l k y ' g m r s ch n u

These are less common, but they are not rare. I see them intermittently:

sh q x v

I am not sure about the idea behind the VMS i char. I don't know whether the shape is based on 1 or i or a generic minim or something else because it's not common for it to lean back in Latin scripts. The Latin r char was sometimes leaned back, but not usually i.


The gallows characters are a little different. They are not directly taken from Latin (except possibly k, which is common in languages that use Latin characters), but since they are similar to k they might be combinations of common Latin shapes. Obviously t is very similar to k (and t does show up occasionally in Latin manuscripts, but it is not common).

It is my feeling (and I can't prove it because there aren't enough benched characters to be sure) that the idea for benching may come from Greek. As I've written and illustrated in blogs, stacking and benching are common in Greek numerals, and Greek letters were often stacked (combined like monograms) in places where space was constrained or where it looked artistic. In other words, benching and stacking were normal concepts to Greek scribes. It's one of the few scribal conventions that was not adopted by the Romans. Putting a loop on the upper-right corner (as in f) was also common in Greek but was only partially adopted into Latin (as in the "-is" abbreviation).


It was not unusual for students to learn both Latin and Greek. I have come across the Greek alphabet (and accompanying numbers) in many different Latin manuscripts, so anyone with a university education was probably familiar with the Greek alphabet even if they were not fluent in Greek.