[split] Big f116v spillover thread.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Remember how we agreed that in and iin are digraphs? If this is true, then why waste time writing digraphs/trigraphs instead of inventing a new symbol that would take less time to write?

I did not "agree" that in is a digraph and iin is a trigraph.  That is just a guess, and at this point I have no real evidence to support it.

By the way, the name "trigraph" for iin would be a bit inappropriate because the ii by itself is not a glyph.  The in and iin are better viewed as like single glyphs with disconnected parts.  Like Greek Θ and Ξ.   Or Voynichese ee, in my word model.

Anyway, iin may still be quicker to write than whatever would be the "natural" representation of the same sound in Latin letters.  For instance, if iin stands for the Mandarin final sound -ng, (which is distnct from "-n"), it seems to be a win, no matter how that "-ng" is written with Latin letters.

It also visually matches some You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Then i'm surprised that the plant drawings don't match plants from anywhere, Chinese or European.

Don't they?

For the 30 years since the COT was proposed (not even by me), no one has spent more that a few minutes investigating it.  Everybody -- everybody -- dismissed offhand as nonsense, because "the drawings look European, so obviously the language and subject must be European".

I bet that none of the hundreds (thousands?) of people who tried to identify the plants bothered to look at a Chinese herbal.  If they looked at a comprehensive herbal, with plants from all the world, they must have skipped any plant that said "grows only in Asia".

I just find it hard to believe that handwriting analysis of the marginalia that almost perfectly lines up with the dates of the vellum being produced

The letter style and handwriting of the marginalia does not "perfectly" match those of any manuscript.  That is impossible, because the letter shapes on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are all over the place. 

Correct me if I am wrong, but what Koen and Marco did was

  for each candidate document D:
     for each letter L of the Latin alphabet:
        pick an instance S of L on f116v;
        if D has a letter that looks like S:
           increment score(D)

and then they looked at the dates and places of the documents with largest scores.  But no document got a 100% score!

But that method assumes that the "michiton" text was a meaningful message that someone wrote in his language with his natural handwriting.  If instead the text is an attempt by someone to restore a text that he believed to be from the 1400s the conclusion about the dates cannot be trusted anymore. (The conclusion about the place where that happened still would be significant.)

Moreover, if the text is a meaningless attempt at restoring a lost Voynichse text as Latin script, the method above is already biased towards the 15th century.  For example, when they had to select an instance of "d" on f116v, they picked the first "d" of "oladabad", not the final one, because they assumed that the final letter must have been a "short s" as was used in the 1400s (even though it is too tall for that), whereas that first "d" looked more like a "d" as would be used in that period.  The "poxleber" looks more "poxlcber"; they read the 5th letter as "e" only because they assumed that the "word" must be a Germanic word written with the handwriting of the period. And so on. 

on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there appears to be a drawing of both a goat, and a nymph, the goat matches up with the first and last words, 'poxleber', and 'gaſmich' which are generally believed to translate to 'buck's liver' and 'goat's milk' respectively. ...

As in many other words of that parag, the Restorer was trying to guess the original text, so he picked "reconstructions" that seemed to make sense to him.  But he had very limited success. The readings "poxleber", "maria", "gasmich" are highly strained (as Koen himself admit on the video).  Most of the words just cannot be interpreted.

that long s is almost certainly a long s, as the reading gaſmich, actually means something, what would 'gafmich' mean? In my opinion, Nothing, we don't even see a clear crossbar than an f would have, as well as the fact that first you're taking the liver of a goat, then the milk of a goat? It makes more sense.

The third letter in "gasmich" was read as "s" because they assumed that the word was "gasmich".  But in fact there is a crossbar. It just was damaged, like the top stroke and the left end of the "m":
   
At the very least, objectively -- without assuming the "words" are "meaningful" -- one should say that it could be "s" or "f".

And the drawings of the [thing], the lamb (not goat!), and the nymph are tucked in the margin, beyond the ugly defect on the vellum, and turned toward the edge, rather than toward the text. The assumption that the text is related to them is rather shaky.  They are probably just doodles by the original Scribe...

the two Voynichese words, (aror Sheey) why wouldn't these also be washed away?

Because they are at the lower left corner of the text, and were spared by the spill.
 
All the best, --stolfi