f17r

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Looking at the entire manuscript we have drawings that don't make sense, main text that doesn't make sense and marginalia that don't make sense. All have in common that they look familiar and are built from familiar elements but in the overall context appear nonsensical.

Yet I think that there are different explanations for each of those puzzling elements.

• Plants: my explanation is that the Author had only incomplete sketches of each plant, like those we see in Pharma.  So, when he decided to turn his notes into a herbal with the format that Europeans were accustomed to, he told the Scribe to make up all the missing details, using existing herbals -- possibly "alchemical herbals" -- as "inspiration".  That would explain why we can't identify any of the plants (except two or three, which the Scribe may have copied from nature or good serious herbals) but we can find many resemblances with other European herbals, "alchemical" or not.
  
• Text: As I just wrote elsewhere, my explanation is that it is an "East Asian" monosyllabic language written in an ad-hoc phonetic script.  The Scribe who wrote it on vellum, however, was European, and did not understand the text. That would explain why the text superficially resembles European texts and has many properties of natural languages, and yet we cannot identify any grammatical structure like that of "European" languages.
  
• Zodiac: My explanation is that the source was an astrological/astronomical text from East Asia, where the Zodiac is traditionally divided into 24 sectors of exactly 15 degrees of arc each, starting in Pisces.  But the Author used European sign icons to make that section more relatable to European readers.  That would explain why Aries and Taurus were split in two, why every diagram has exactly 15 or 30 labels, etc.
  
• Month names: They may be apocryphal, and probably were written by someone who, for some reason, wanted to write them in a language that he did not quite master.
  

And so on...

No matter how much faded ink and water stains there were, I see no way how it could have ended up like this. At least something should have remained intelligible - if it ever was.

But that is my point.  The person who restored those faded/washed-out Voynichese texts did not understand Voynichese, and had not even learned the Voynichese alphabet.  An did not realize that the original was Voynichese, not Latin.

All the best, --stolfi