The more seriously I took this theory about plant pathways, the more I wanted to find evidence that the herbal section was not a collection of recipes.
To do this, I moved to the functional level and used the most frequently occurring word groups as functional units, as others have done in a slightly different form. I also split the words into prefixes and suffixes and assigned them new functions. The initial aim was not to achieve a correct assignment, but to develop a system that could be compared to recipes.
I then compared the structure of the Voynich lines with about a hundred Latin recipe texts from that period, tried out various assumptions, broke them down into smaller units, reassembled them, and so on. It would be too extensive to describe the process here. Therefore, I will only present the insight I gained from it, which actually has a certain logic even without a detailed list of the steps involved:
No matter how I approached it, the difference between the Voynich structure and the recipe structure was simply too great. Medieval recipes have a much wider range of vocabulary, ingredients, verbs, small subordinate clauses, and variations. The Voynich lines are far too condensed and contain far too little information to be able to reflect this, unless there is a completely crazy coding system that can resolve this discrepancy.
Even when I tried to interpret the words not individually, but as recurring blocks or “functional classes,” the whole thing still did not behave like a recipe corpus. So if the Voynich manuscript is a collection of recipes, it would have to be an extremely condensed and unusual type of almost tabular recipe manuscript—basically something that simply does not exist in Latin, German, or vernacular medical texts of the time. It would fit more into modern technical shorthand than into the medieval herbal tradition. So yes, I can't completely rule out recipes, of course, but based on this research, this scenario seems rather unlikely to me.
At the same time, the text looks more and more like a kind of tabular description of something, at least to me. Based on the images, the most obvious candidates would be plant structures and/or vascular systems. Words that differ only by tiny changes make sense if they fall within the same functional area and form close families. Here, minimal differences in very similar surface forms would simply be “hidden.” Other classes remain separate and stable over long distances.
In this respect, the theory of plant conduction systems gains one or two more points of probability.
On the other hand, it is of course completely frustrating that I recognize patterns but am stuck in that I still lack the missing bridge that would allow me to get from structure to meaning without too many assumptions. But I don't think I'm the only one here...
I think I'll take a little break now, enjoy Christmas without delving too deeply into my AVA
. Maybe I'll post a few more clues for possible conduction systems here, and then in the new year I'll think about how I can make the leap from patterns and context to a plausible system.
Conclusion: The probability that these are recipes has decreased significantly in my understanding. A system of plant descriptions with much less variation, in connection with possible plant pathways, is somewhat more likely.
To do this, I moved to the functional level and used the most frequently occurring word groups as functional units, as others have done in a slightly different form. I also split the words into prefixes and suffixes and assigned them new functions. The initial aim was not to achieve a correct assignment, but to develop a system that could be compared to recipes.
I then compared the structure of the Voynich lines with about a hundred Latin recipe texts from that period, tried out various assumptions, broke them down into smaller units, reassembled them, and so on. It would be too extensive to describe the process here. Therefore, I will only present the insight I gained from it, which actually has a certain logic even without a detailed list of the steps involved:
No matter how I approached it, the difference between the Voynich structure and the recipe structure was simply too great. Medieval recipes have a much wider range of vocabulary, ingredients, verbs, small subordinate clauses, and variations. The Voynich lines are far too condensed and contain far too little information to be able to reflect this, unless there is a completely crazy coding system that can resolve this discrepancy.
Even when I tried to interpret the words not individually, but as recurring blocks or “functional classes,” the whole thing still did not behave like a recipe corpus. So if the Voynich manuscript is a collection of recipes, it would have to be an extremely condensed and unusual type of almost tabular recipe manuscript—basically something that simply does not exist in Latin, German, or vernacular medical texts of the time. It would fit more into modern technical shorthand than into the medieval herbal tradition. So yes, I can't completely rule out recipes, of course, but based on this research, this scenario seems rather unlikely to me.
At the same time, the text looks more and more like a kind of tabular description of something, at least to me. Based on the images, the most obvious candidates would be plant structures and/or vascular systems. Words that differ only by tiny changes make sense if they fall within the same functional area and form close families. Here, minimal differences in very similar surface forms would simply be “hidden.” Other classes remain separate and stable over long distances.
In this respect, the theory of plant conduction systems gains one or two more points of probability.
On the other hand, it is of course completely frustrating that I recognize patterns but am stuck in that I still lack the missing bridge that would allow me to get from structure to meaning without too many assumptions. But I don't think I'm the only one here...
I think I'll take a little break now, enjoy Christmas without delving too deeply into my AVA
. Maybe I'll post a few more clues for possible conduction systems here, and then in the new year I'll think about how I can make the leap from patterns and context to a plausible system.Conclusion: The probability that these are recipes has decreased significantly in my understanding. A system of plant descriptions with much less variation, in connection with possible plant pathways, is somewhat more likely.