I'm only just now seeing the Reddit post. I was assuming it was a short announcement, or the same preview that was on the Amazon listing, but apparently not.
These are three very common abbreviation characters (et 9 tur). It's not uncommon to see some of these common abbreviations at the ends of alphabets in medieval pen tests (especially the 9 char). He says "strangely enough". If medieval script is unfamiliar to him, then it would seem strange, but anyone who reads medieval script thinks of these characters as normal.
Speaking about these abbreviations (several paragraphs, in fact), Weiler writes:
The 1940s Study Group looked into this much earlier than 2017. One of our forumites posted their chart of the common Latin abbreviations. It's not perfect, a few small errors, but the general concept is correct and it would have been much harder pre-Internet to gather this kind of palaeographic information. They clearly looked into the possibility of the VMS having these kinds of symbols/abbreviations/ligatures.
Weiler posted a chart of some of these common symbols. I've written numerous blogs on these subjects with many examples coming directly from medieval manuscripts (Weiler seems to be relying almost entirely on Cappelli).
Helmut, Searcher, MarcoP, Lisa Fagin Davis, and several other Voynich researchers (including me) are familiar with these common abbreviations. You can't read or translate manuscripts without knowing them. Weiler appears to have discovered them quite recently and he writes as though they are unknown to the Voynich research community. Maybe his notes are directed at non-Voynich researchers, but it's clear that we have many researchers who understand this subject better than he does.
Quote:But what was however concealed during the initial presentation of this secret code alphabet is a special feature, which we can see in the last characters of the cipher: Strangely enough, the alphabet does not conclude with the letter z, rather more it lists three additional characters, namely abbreviation characters for »et«, »us« and »tur«.
These are three very common abbreviation characters (et 9 tur). It's not uncommon to see some of these common abbreviations at the ends of alphabets in medieval pen tests (especially the 9 char). He says "strangely enough". If medieval script is unfamiliar to him, then it would seem strange, but anyone who reads medieval script thinks of these characters as normal.
Speaking about these abbreviations (several paragraphs, in fact), Weiler writes:
Quote:I determined, a few weeks later on, that I was not the first to do this. As early as 2017, a British researcher published a study paper regarding the Voynich code, which concluded that it had been based on the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum.
The 1940s Study Group looked into this much earlier than 2017. One of our forumites posted their chart of the common Latin abbreviations. It's not perfect, a few small errors, but the general concept is correct and it would have been much harder pre-Internet to gather this kind of palaeographic information. They clearly looked into the possibility of the VMS having these kinds of symbols/abbreviations/ligatures.
Weiler posted a chart of some of these common symbols. I've written numerous blogs on these subjects with many examples coming directly from medieval manuscripts (Weiler seems to be relying almost entirely on Cappelli).
Helmut, Searcher, MarcoP, Lisa Fagin Davis, and several other Voynich researchers (including me) are familiar with these common abbreviations. You can't read or translate manuscripts without knowing them. Weiler appears to have discovered them quite recently and he writes as though they are unknown to the Voynich research community. Maybe his notes are directed at non-Voynich researchers, but it's clear that we have many researchers who understand this subject better than he does.