The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[eggyk]

I was going to reply in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I think I would probably derail the conversation there, so i'm answering here 

But I also note that, in this very thread in fact, we see an example of my "Voynich Theorem #1" being borne out... for most of the examples being discussed are admittedly and demonstrably either owned by Voynich, or somewhere he is known to have visited, and even, a couple, a short stroll from his Florence Libreria. That is another important aspect of this... it is not just that these comparisons are compelling, it is that they were either in print by 1910, or somewhere he plausibly, or is known to have, visited.

I wanted to discuss the month name marginalia and ask for your view regarding them. 

The month name marginalia represent extremely unusual forms to use as a forger. Even with the internet, digital libraries, access to 100s of examples and a dedicated search effort some of the forms are exceedingly rare to find. No matter who he was forging "as" (bacon, tepenec, anyone else), the forms make no sense to use. We would expect the forger to use at least semi-common forms from a plausible language. 

I do not believe it is likely that Voynich would have easily come across these forms. In fact, it is extremely likely that he would have come across and used one of dozens of other rare (but less rare) forms instead. While searching for these, i've come across almost everything you can imagine: juillet, jullet, julet, juingnet, juinget, jungnet, jugnet, jules, jullé, julh, iuylol, even an extremely rare joingnet or joignet. Not a single jollet has ever been found, other than a lone "joilet" that I had to request from the BNF library. 

Aberil is much the same. There are loads of abril, abrel, aberel, abrillen, abrellen floating around, but actual usage of "aberil" is almost non-existant and highly unlikely to come across. 2 of the 3 aberils we have (aberillen) are actually direct copies of an extremely old poem (and are nestled within 700 pages of text). The only other places we've seen aberil are in farmer records, where the people writing were far less educated and more likely to phonetically write their dialect. 

Additionally, the french sections correlate to eachother. The areas that most used 'o' in june and july (eg joing, joingnet) correlate strongly to the same areas that used 'octembre'.  

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So, admittedly this means that whether or not the forgery hypothesis is true, something unlikely has occured. Either: 

1) Voynich happened to find extremely unusual month name forms in 2 different languages, and decided to mix them 
or 
2) Someone who spoke both a northern french dialect and an allemannic german dialect (alsatian, swabian, bavarian) wrote using both languages
or
3) Two seperate people (who both learnt to write in the exact same style, or at the same school) wrote the month names in their own dialects: one in northern french, and another in alemannic. 

None of these are provable of course, and we currently have no full or partial sequence that mix this way. However, we do see some unusual / relevant french forms near Metz, and also some relevant german forms near strasbourg. These really aren't that far away from eachother. However, the forgery hypothesis requires that voynich came across extremely rare forms two times, and then happened to choose those two sources instead of all of the other, less rare forms he would know existed. 

Considering how rare these forms are, what do you think the liklihood was that he would come across them in his stash?