Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[Ahmet Ardıç]

[This word can be seen for f95r1 and f95r2, the plants are not liverworts.] 

We read this plant name on page f101v1-102r2. I don't know, maybe I misspelled the page name.

   

> ÖFLÖR / ÖFİLÖR: ÖYFE+LÖR "Marchantia polymorpha / Umbrella Liverwort" or "Hepaticae / Bryophyta", or "a kind of beautiful looking grass that grows on the shores of the water" as described in the dictionary. <

Frankly, some of the plants whose names we have read in this manuscript resemble to some plants that are meant to be expressed. But, such as like you, we did not resemble some plant drawings with their original images too. In addition, we could not find photos of some of the plant names we read in VM. If there are botanists who know the Turkish language and work on Old Turkish, these people can make more inferences. In other words, this type of research actually should be some team work for more than one area.  

On the other hand;
1- The components of the plant name ÖYFELÖR (ÖYFE and LÖR are) mentioned separately in today's dictionaries. In other words, a compound word in the form of ÖFE+LÖR does not exist in existing dictionaries. But both of these (and some synonyms for this plant names) are seen as the names of separate plants. For example, the meaning of the word LÖR (lör grass) in dictionaries as like "a kind of beautiful looking grass that grows on the shores of the water" expressed in the description.
 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Note: Since I shared the web-links of dictionaries where the meanings of other words can be seen in my previous comment where I explained this word, I did not feel the need to share them here again.)

But we could not find the Latin equivalent of the name of this plant (LÖR / LÖROTU). When we couldn't find the Latin name, we couldn't find the images, because when we search for it in Turkish on google images, images of a cheese type whose Turkish name is LOR come up. So any plant images are not coming up. This is due to the fact that the images of some plant species have not yet been uploaded to the google system. In this case, we are investigating whether the word ÖYFE itself and its synonyms (meaning lung and liver) are used as plant names. Normally, finding plant names with these names (ÖYFE+LÖR) is already a very small possibility. But surprisingly, the name of the plant we are discussing is written as a compound name by the author. Both parts of this name compound that adjoining each other, turn out to be the name of some separate plants. This is actually a good surprise in the probability space.

Later we saw that one of these components is mentioned in two different plant species. Moreover, the Latin names of these two plants are shown in dictionaries. We compared the results with the author's drawing and choose the most similar. By the way, the other name (+LÖR) cannot be included in this search. Because there is no image for LÖR although this plant name shown in dictionaries. That's why we say that Turkish-speaking botanists and linguists should make this comparison together. We have shown that these two name-words overlap with three different plant names. Matching should be done by a botanist who also knows what the LÖR plant looks like.

2- The author did makes some experiments/works by cutting different parts of different plants and joining/graft them to different roots or plant stems. Then she/he must probably be naming them herself/himself. Remember, I said that there are different plant names in the compound name of the word we are examining. We have already shown them in dictionaries. (We do not know whether these experiments by the author were successful. In other words, even if she/he was not successful, she/he may have drawn her/his expectations about the new species that will emerge, as completely imaginary.) In other words, she/he may have drawn this plant by imagining what kind of plant will emerge when she/he puts two different plants together. (So that's a possibility, and I think the author may be was trying to root some algae by transporting them to her/his made environment she/he had prepared in the land area.)

3- The author is a traveler. And she/he is not traveling together with the hundreds of plants she/he draws. Therefore, most of the time she/he must be drawing real plants as much as she/he can remember in his memory. Therefore, for some plant drawings, it may not partially coincide with the photographs we have. However, we think that she/he drew some other plants realistically and those are matching with the photographs we have.

4- The author's ability to paint may not have given her/him the ability to draw realistically.

5- We think that the author's purpose was to encode some military information in writing as a first target. Therefore, we guess that the author was not necessarily concerned about drawing plants realistically and that's why may be she/he not care much about that drawing was realistic or not just because of this was not primary purpose.

6-Some times in Turkic languages, the same name can be used to describe different plants in different dialects of Turkish. (There are linguistic reasons for this and I will not go into detail here.) As an example; The name ŞALAK can be used as the name of melon in one regions, but it means watermelon, or cucumber, and/or zucchini for some other regions.

What is clear is that there are three plant names here, and we have not found the Latin name and image of one of them. Even if we have all of this information, another plant may have been named by this name in a certain region. For this reason, botanists and linguists will have to look at whether there may be other plants with the same name in Turkish.

We certainly never target or promise that we will eliminate all unknowns parts about VM on our own.

It should be noted that we are sharing about the early results of an ongoing study. Of course, some details need to be checked over and over again.

Sorry for my broken English and thank you for reading.

Kind regards,