A possible way to break down Voynich text

[suter]

Hello Thomas;

     Saw  your  analysis briefly and it reminded me of some work I did a few years back which I shared in the Voynich Mailing List site.

      The issue of constant repetitions of "words" or "word parts " or "letter sequences"  in the VMs was in my opinion consistent with two main elements in  what I thought of as a "cryptocartographic" interpretation. 

(1) In this theory, each full page- including the "text" blocks, is primarily an image of a map.  Parts of the map depicted (and there may be many different  maps in the volume) can be  rendered as  shapes in plants, people, designs, etc; similarly, other parts of the map (perhaps important parts) may be rendered as what seems to be text .  The "text" might, in an exaggerated hypothetical example , be a block which appears as :

Sand Sandy  River smalltree  Hill
Sandy Grass River Hill
Sand Grass  River Grass Sand
Sandy Grass   River House Sand
Bigtree  Grass River Garden Sand
Sand Sandy  River  Sandy Sand 

This "text" area demonstrates a possible reason for  the large redundancy we observe in the Vms; the point being that "reading" the text involves viewing the entire field exactly  as positioned on the page,  just as we view a poem, a calendar or a list.  In that mode,   the Voynichese is "written" a bit like the way a surveyor might record a plot of land or,  perhaps ,  a  text in  "boustrophedon"  but made  only in one direction , the way an raster might  scan an image electronically.


(2)  In the above example, it is  fairly clear  that what is depicted is a kind of "map" of a dwelling  near a couple of trees and hills in the middle of a sandy area ;  the dominant  feature is  a river which passes from "north" to "south".  This feature is  potentially important as pertains to the VMs because in many VMs folios, there are clear patterns of similar "words" which run vertically or diagonally  through the "text".  If the VMs has any consistent  verbal meaning,   these features must be explicable...somehow.

Or so I thought. Haven't been doing much work on this recently.

David Suter