Quote:This latter method for transmitting secret communications was already sufficiently well known in the Middle Ages, as examples from the aforementioned Stenography work by the Benedictine Abbot Johannes Trithemius clearly indicate.
A small point, but it's not stenography (which means to take dictation, often in shorthand), it's steganography (hiding a message within other distracting information).
And, as mentioned in my earlier post, this is completely wrong.
Quote:The position where the abbreviation character 9 never however occurs, in common medieval utilisation, is at the end of the word.
...The author of the Voynich Manuscript has skilfully utilised this strict regulating system of Latin abbreviation methods for their own purposes: In deviation to all valid rules, they also position the abbreviation character 9 at the end of the word ...
Wrong. Blatantly wrong.
The 9 char is placed at the ends of words more than any other position. There are numerous manuscripts that use the 9 symbol at the ends of words several times per sentence. And not just in Latin, also in Greek, Italian, French, German, English, Czech, Spanish, and other languages.
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He then tries to liken the 9 at the end to a different abbreviation (the symbol that looks like a rotated "m" or a "z"), but he has assigned the meaning of the rotated-em symbol to the 9 symbol when it is at the end. He probably misunderstood something in Cappelli.
Well, now I know he misunderstood Cappelli, because he wrote this (which is also wrong):
Quote:If one takes into account the various Latin declination possibilities, there are well over 40,000 cases (counting according to a search engine for Latin vocabulary with the meaningful name Enigma, which we will learn more about later in this book), in which a Latin word ends on the letter [i]e[/i] followed by any preferred final consonant (mostly [i]m, n, s, r[/i] or [i]t[/i]), this thereby clarifies why we so frequently encounter this character at the end of words in the Voynich text.
He has misunderstood the meaning of 9 when it is at the ends of words. At the ends it does not mean "em" or "en" as he suggests. It is usually "um" or "us". When scribes want to add the "m" or "n" , they usually use a straight macron (a form of abbreviation symbol) above the letters, or sometimes a connected tail (a connected macron that swings up and back). They do not use the 9 character for this.