RE: Voynich mnemonics
R. Sale > 13-01-2017, 07:01 PM
Greetings,
Somehow it seems that morning always gets to your part of the world first.
I would say that there are to things going on with heraldry. The first is fairly straight forward. For example, if you look up any of the Catholic popes in Wikipedia, you will probably find an armorial insignia (indicating a person or family) along with a pair of keys, one gold & one silver (indicating the office of pope). Conversely, given the insignia and the keys, one could ostensibly identify the particular pope (though there are a few cases where there were two or three popes in the same family - Medici, Fieschi and others.)
Secondly, there is the matter of heraldic canting. This is a sort of visual pun. For example, a heraldic insignia may display images of several fish that would be identified as pike. However, in the Middle Ages these fish were known as lucies and the surname associated with the insignia might be Lucie, Lucy, de Lucy and so on. So this is a bit more complex, one needs to recognize the image *and* identify it with the proper word in the right language in order to recognize the intended pun.
This second situation seems more like mnemonics to me. The mnemonic image cannot be understood directly, as in the first example. Instead the image needs to undergo the proper linguistic conversion before it can be understood correctly. The image of a dragon, Draco >implies> Dracaena, is an example. Whereas, if all we have is 'Beastie', 'fire wyrm' or whatever, we get nowhere.