Cribs in the Voynich MS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The first is from D'Imperio. Figure 30 on page 108 lists the 'houses of the moon' commonly also referred to as the 'mansions of the moon'. According to traditional astrology there are 28.
Now the astronomical / cosmological figure on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows 28 words each covering a segment of a circle.
This is as good a crib as one can get.

And the uneven width and spacing of the "logs" suggests that the "Artist" started drawing them at about 04:00, with the saral one.  At first he left clear gaps between them.  But, as usual, he did not plan, and the widths of the logs got random but generally larger.  After drawing the first 20 logs, up to okeol at 01:15, he realized that he still had 8 logs to draw but only ~75 degrees of space left. So he started making them thinner and closer together.  But still he had to draw the last three right next to each other, with no gaps.

Since the labels are well aligned with the logs, it seems that he wrote each label after drawing the corresponding log (or maybe the other way around).  

So the list of labels that he got from the Author presumably started with saral, saiir, ... and ended with okeod.  What is the usual order for the Mansions of the Moon?

But it even gets better. D'Imperio's figure shows that the majority of these names start with an 'a'. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the majority starts with Eva-o or Eva-y.

Like most star names, they are probably derived from Arabic names, and the initial "a" is from "al-", the definite article.

There are three or so that start with 's'  and there are also three or so in the MS that start with Eva-s.

In the spoken language the article mutates to "ar-", "az-" or "as-" depending on the first letter of the noun.  So those Mansion names that start with "s-" may have been "as-sXX" in Arabic.

All the best, --stolfi