Something just occurred to me while I was looking at Southern German/Swiss manuscripts. The VM September month has a distinctive "small" r after the b, which stands for "er". I do not recall seeing any such abbreviations when looking at French manuscripts; however, it seems to be fairly common in Swiss manuscripts for example. I haven't actually gone back and checked all the manuscripts so I can't really substantiate this impression.
Another indicator for Switzerland as a potential area of origin for the Month names is that the "french" looking forms (i.e. nouembre, decembre, septembre) are found in Swiss manuscripts, however the "german" ones (Augst, Aberil, and to a certain extent Jung and Iollet) are very rarely found as such in French language Manuscripts.
Southern Germany is also another potential area but the Manuscripts from that area seem to use predominantly Brachatmonat, Hewmonat etc... so I am more inclined towards a potential Franco-Swiss area than a proper German one.
2 other ideas:
Another indicator for Switzerland as a potential area of origin for the Month names is that the "french" looking forms (i.e. nouembre, decembre, septembre) are found in Swiss manuscripts, however the "german" ones (Augst, Aberil, and to a certain extent Jung and Iollet) are very rarely found as such in French language Manuscripts.
Southern Germany is also another potential area but the Manuscripts from that area seem to use predominantly Brachatmonat, Hewmonat etc... so I am more inclined towards a potential Franco-Swiss area than a proper German one.
2 other ideas:
- Could we, in theory, match the VM scribal writing using this methodology? A lot of the symbols, such as a,o,l,e,c,q,n are found regularly in other documents as abbreviations/numbers/letters. I wonder if we could match the actual voynichese writing to a macro-area. Would that be worth the effort?
- Off the back of that, could we match the Voynichese on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to one of the Scribes? I am sure there are enough characters in both voynichese marginalia to at least try a tentative identification. Just thinking for example if the marginalia from 116v is, say, from Zurich, and the voynichese in that marginalia is from Scribe 3, then it follows that Scribe 3 is likely from the Zurich area (we can't be sure but I think it unlikely someone would write the whole set of marginalia in a consistent hand and NOT be the author of the small Voynichese passage as well).