The incredible unravelling of the Voynich Manuscript

[-JKP-]

Hello, Paul, welcome to the forum.

Some thoughts...

 But the situation in Spring is however completely different. From the end of March to the end of May, most of the work in agriculture has to be done, where the soil has to be loosened, ploughed, cleared of weeds, fenced in and fertilised, the seeds have to be sown and many other things have to be completed. Therefore, when Aries and Taurus which both represent this time each occur twice, then this could simply be due to the large number of activities which have to be listed and which then required two zodiacal drawings.

I agree that month's labors were a highly recurrent theme in medieval manuscripts, especially in almanacks, psalters, and books of hours that included illuminated calendars.

Keep in mind that the duplicated zodiac figures (the Aries and Taurus figures) have 15 nymphs in the circles surrounding them, in contrast to the other non-duplicated ones that have 30 each. So, the duplication may not mean "more" in a subjective sense, they may simply have been spread out as two halves of a whole.

Also consider the fact that harvest time is very busy in terms of agricultural work and yet the harvest months were not duplicated.

This finding leads to the conclusion that the character with ascender at the beginning of a paragraph must have an independent, special meaning (and also because otherwise every paragraph would have to be "bent" linguistically to a beginning with these four initial characters). One possibility would be that these characters are used here as abbreviations for classification comments such as topic, thesis, paragraph or comment. 

Another assumption, however, is that the consistent utilisation of characters with ascenders as initial letters for page and paragraph beginnings is basically just an element of design and/or deception within the context of the cipher which was utilised. Unless the word in question still commences in any event with a character with ascender, it was simply preceded by such a written character without any semantic content.

It's my belief that most of the ascenders, the "gallows" characters at the beginnings of paragraphs are probably pilcrows, for a variety of reasons (I've blogged about this). I am less certain about the red initials on folio 1r being pilcrows. They may be ornamented initials (I have a 95% finished blog about the "red weirdos". I have already pointed out their similarity to Greek and Spanish letters, but I have more information I need to post so people can review the idea).

 

According to some (ambiguous) results, the word sequence 8ain, which occurs so frequently, could stand (apart from one other meaning) for the Latin word “deinde” (then, next, thereon…).

 

But completely detached from any concrete solution: It is at least probable that in a text without any punctuation there must be some kind of instrument to structure individual trains of thought. The recognizable paragraphs in the manuscript are far too long to do without a structuring instrument. I don't mean a full stop, since sentence ends are usually clear, but rather an element as a substitute for the funciton of a comma, semicolon or colon.

 

In this respect it is likely that at least one of the frequently occurring character strings stands for such a function.

We're swimming in ideas for "daiin" (I have numerous ideas myself). It may take a while to sort them all out and determine which idea works best. I'm still on the fence about it (I see so many possibilities it makes my head spin).

 

 

Nobody likes ambiguity (perhaps apart from politicians and lawyers  ). 

But when it comes to a writing

 

a) that often has the same character sequences one after the other, as it does not occur in any real language

b) that probably comes from a time, when an ambiguous system of abbreviations with regard to individual signs that can only be resolved in context was the order of the day

c) where it was probably the intention of the author to invent a secret code as complex as possible,

 

shouldn't then not every solution that claims a 1:1 solution for the individual characters be viewed critically.

I think many Voynich researchers agree that 1:1 substitution does not produce natural language. I certainly don't think so.

Might there be abbreviations and ligatures? Yes. The challenge is to figure out which ones they are and what they are.

For example, the problem with interpreting 9 (EVA-y) )in the same way as it was used in Latin is that it is MUCH too frequent, even though it is positioned in the same way in the VMS as it is in Latin. Expanding it to a variety of endings doesn't entirely solve the problem. It's still too frequent. It might not be an abbreviation at all... it might be something else, but that road sometimes leads back to problems like low entropy and 1:1.