Classical astrology in the text of the Voynich zodiac?

[-JKP-]

Yeah, I hear ya. The script follows a certain structure, that's for sure. My main reason for dismissing many proposed 1 to 1 substitution solutions is that they don't account for that.

What I still don't get though (sorry) is what the difference would be between what you describe in the roots section and a list like oakroot, beechroot, yewroort...

You can, that's closer to what I think is actually happening, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a name as an identifier (oak- beech- yew), it could be hot-root, hot-wet-root, peppery-root or... spring-root, fall-root, winter-root or... as Wladimir has long-since pointed out a combination of the names of parts that are used medicinally. Getting away from nouns, labels in some parts of the manuscript could even be verbs (for example, it might not say Philomela, it might say running, raping, saving, weaving, spinning) but I suspect the majority of labels in the VMS are noun-combinations (attributes) as opposed to verbs or "name" style labels.

Instead of looking for Pisces, Cancer, Leo (which is what the marginal writer did and what many others have done), look for the attributes of that sign or its relationship to other things in medieval cosmology as Marco illustrates in the above example and it's easier to see the patterns in the letter combinations.

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Maybe it's easier to explain this with a visual example...

In Chinese, you take a character like this (two versions of a similar concept, top and bottom):


Okay, the main concept is on the right. The radical (modifier) is on the left.

These two character-combinations both mean sister but notice the chars on the right are different for each one, as they are different versions of the idea of a sister.


The radical on the left means woman/female. Combined with the character on the right indicates a familial (blood) relationship.

The character on the bottom right can mean a number of things, like lesser, or farther, and when you combine it with the radical for woman, then you get a younger (lesser, smaller) sister or it can also be used to mean a "friend-sister" (one who is not blood related).


So the one on the right is the concept, the one on the left is the modifier and many of these characters are expressed verbally by a single syllable—there's a lot of meaning packed into one sound and when you put two sounds together, you get a related concept which can be different if you combine it with something else.

The VMS has many of the same characteristics.


In English we say dog for a grown dog and puppy for a young one. In some languages they say dog for the grown dog and young-dog for the young one rather than making up a new word for the young one (they don't have words like kitten, puppy, cub, foal, etc.). This means a large number of concepts are expressed with a smaller number of syllables or words and it seems to work perfectly well.

It's possible the VMS uses  a similar system and thus doesn't require an extensive vocabulary. As in old Hebrew, Chinese, and many other languages, a "root" word with modifiers or combinations of root words could cover many individual words.


How could we do something similar in English? Well, taking the example above, let's say the syllable sis stands for sister and we use a 1 to stand for blood relations (or older sisters who came first) and a 2 for non-blood relations or those who came after (younger sisters). Thus we have sis1 and sis2.

Now, if I were to write bro1 and bro2 you would immediately know what I meant without me having to explain it.