Core conundrums?

[MarcoP]

I had a similar experience as Koen. When I first looked at the Voynich manuscript, everything was strange to me. At that time, I knew very little about medieval  manuscripts in general and medieval herbals in particular. All the plant illustrations seemed weird and the animal or human elements in pages like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seemed just crazy. So I guess that much depends on how knowledgeable the viewer is. The script probably looked strange to me, but to a palaeographer like Helmut it looks like abbreviated Latin; to someone who knows about medieval cyphers it probably looks less peculiar than Giovanni Fontana's cypher alphabet.

There are elements that still are highly original after years of looking at manuscripts: Q13 and the Rosettes certainly are two of them. I find the neat layout and the jars in the Pharma / Small-Plants section also quite unique. The whole tethered-stars theme is also worth mentioning: there are isolated parallels, but the Voynich takes things to a different level.

Many features of the text are unique, but these are things that you can only see with an accurate quantitative analysis, yet they could be the true core conundrum.