A Cusanus Ladin Hypothesis

[Hermes777]

I'm glad you've found that seasonal metaphor for Voynichese text patterns interesting.  You write:

The metaphor offered by Feaster is much the same as I have suggested for the content of the text. This is the best or most useful metaphor Feaster can think of.... Feaster’s metaphor is too agricultural. There is no evidence of agriculture in the Voynich manuscript. This is a common mistaken assumption. 

Bear in mind that I meant this as a metaphor (as you say) rather than as an identification of actual subject matter.  I don't think Stolfi meant to imply that the meanings of Voynichese characters have anything to do with a planetary crust, mantle, and core either.  But of course its status as a metaphor doesn't mean some aspects of it *couldn't* be interpreted more literally.  (As an aside, I find myself thinking now of the notes I keep myself about when and where I find particular wild mushrooms.)

Something you wrote earlier in this thread caught my attention:

The text of the manuscript consists of LISTS of vords. Vords are grouped and arranged meaningfully in these lists, and according to a method, but there is no grammar. (It has about as much grammar as a phonebook. It is compiled.)

You went on to identify each line as a list and each paragraph as a collection of related lists.  Do you have any further thoughts about what kind of "method" the formal structure of a list/line might reveal?

*****

Thanks for your reply, and your work.

Yes, you offer the metaphor as a metaphor, a tool for further exploration of the text no different in application than Stolfi’s planetary layers metaphor. Not to be taken literally.

But the metaphor conforms very neatly to my thought experiments on the matter and I am suggesting that it might not be too far astray. It might be close to the operative idea guiding the shape and system of the text. My thoughts were in that neighborhood, namely the text as a system to record data of a (less agricultural) nature regarding a particular landscape. So it caught my attention that you turn to such a metaphor as the most adequate to embody the patterns you observe in the text.

I regret I don’t have any solid ideas on the method by which lists might have been compiled. I can only suggest the implements of measuring are likely to be the weight-scales and the water clock, counting devices and devices used for surveying, in period. I point to methodology (and epistemology) provided by Nicholas of Cusa’s curious little work Idiota de Staticis Experimentis as highly suggestive.

But that concerns what measures to take and how – and the idea of compiling an inventory of such data for particular regions - not how they are recorded and compiled and assembled into a text. (Let alone with a unique set of glyphs for doing so.)

My guess has been that vords, lines and paragraphs are meaningful units based on TIME. The work is essentially calendrical. I think the underlying tables of data in the plaintext would be organised in units of time. (That mutability within recurring cycles.)

The main unit would be the day (or zodiacal degree, daily solar increment) – counted as a dawn. A line = a day? Some calendrical cycle might be the uniting pattern (that generates vords and other structures as epiphenomena.) The larger frame would be the year, the full annual cycle. 

As for the formal structures of lists/lines, I suspect the whole thing is isomorphic. I note well your suggestion that “labels” may be short lines. So, conversely, lines are long “labels”. The same structures at dfferent scales?

This sort of isomorphism is very traditional and based in seeing things in terms of ratios and harmonies. The basis here would be the equation one day = one year. This, in traditional cosmologies, allows such parallels as one lunar cycle = one Saturn cycle (28 days = 28 years), for example, and a host of other conveniences.

The “entanglement” you describe reminds me of the (related to isomorphism) harmonic mean in Platonic cosmology whereby the elements of the cosmos are bound together by “strong bonds”.