The Modern Forgery Hypothesis

[eggyk]

I think, I mean, that anyone trying to argue that Voynich could not, or would not have, or even, likely didn't have knowledge of the month name forms in the zodiac pages of the Voynich manuscript would be hard pressed to show why. There were several easy and close ways he could have seen them, and he had a great interest in ancient manuscripts... obviously.

Could voynich have seen 'jong' on an astrolabe in a museum in london, and then seen octebres in a collection in paris, and then seen an aberil from a single poem printed in the 19th century, technically yes. But if everything in the BNF library now counts as "may have likely been seen" by Voynich then there isn't much that won't be found in some way. How likely that is then becomes a matter of how likely it is that those rare examples were picked out of the thousands of other manuscripts and sources. 

If the month names were "mars, apuril, may, jung, jullet, septembre, octembre, nouembre, decembre", I would condede quite happily that it was likely that he could have been aware of such forms, even though some are non-standard. Perhaps another way of putting it is this hypothetical scenario:

Let's say Voynich did have access to the full BNF library, and let's also say that he specifically took an interest in french calendars and sought them out unhindered (would this actually have been the case, by the way?). Based on what we have found, if he were to have seen 200 books of hours, what are the chances that he would have come across the month name forms as written in the VMS? Obviously mars, may, sept, nov, dec are basic. Octembre + knowledge of em -> ē is also reasonably likely. Augst was common german so that's easy. The ones we have left are aberil, yong, and iollet.

jong (technically yong but lets just say jong to give the best chance at success here) is practically a zero chance. 'joing' is a rather low chance, with only 3 or 4 clearly displayed BNF joings in everything we've found thus far. He would then have to choose to omit the i too. And as we mentioned previously, iollet seemingly doesn't exist anywhere.  

All of this assumes a specific attempt at perusing french language calendars in particular, when there are hundreds or thousands more calendars in latin. If we change the scenario to "400 calendars from france, at random", the chances are even lower. If we change it to "1000 interesting manuscripts at random" the chances are extremely low, in my opinion.

But that is my opinion, and I suspect we will have to agree to disagree on the likelihood that these things occured. I don't think it was likely, but I agree most of the forms are possible to have been seen anyway. That is also seperate from the likelihood that these forms would be chosen given that he saw them, but that is a matter on which both of us can only speculate. I mean, technically voynich may have owned a one-of-a-kind calendar with all of these forms, or got lucky and found them all in the first 5 he saw, you know? 

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That is why sources that are linked to voynich himself, or to those he was close to, are far more convinving for me personally, so I appreciate your example. If you actually were to show that yes, many of the rare month name forms were in manuscripts owned by people that voynich knew personally, the liklihood that he would have seen them is far higher. Given the relative rarity of some forms, any genuine link to voynich personally is therefore relatively unlikely and deserves attention. 

I think you would agree with me that -seperate to theorems- the likelihood of him finding something in a huge national library is quite a lot different to finding something his friend/colleague personally owned. Just like the microscope images were readily accessible to voynich, calendars owned by friends would likely have been as well.