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No text, but a visual code
RE: No text, but a visual code

Antonio García Jiménez > 01-05-2024, 05:54 PM

Of the many pages with illustrations of plants, one of the ones that intrigues me the most is f65r.

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Only a few glyphs while on the rest of the pages with plants we see a large number of glyphs arranged in what look like words and paragraphs. Why is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. different?

Anyone who thinks that the script hides a natural language or a cipher may have an easy answer: those few glyphs are the name of the plant and the author did not know anything else about it. Neither where to find it nor what purpose it served. That answer, however, seems contradictory to the fact of knowing the name and having drawn it.

For me, simply, the author could have written the entire folio with the script because it is exactly the same to write a few glyphs as it is to write many. The script is an artificial system of combining what I believe are elements of an astronomical code. It doesn't matter how few or many, just as it doesn't matter how to combine them as long as certain rules are followed. Hence it seems that there are two languages (Currier A and B) when in reality what there is is a system that allows flexibility.
RE: No text, but a visual code

Antonio García Jiménez > 08-05-2024, 07:04 PM

Maybe what is needed is to think outside the box. That's all
RE: No text, but a visual code

HermesRevived > 08-05-2024, 07:21 PM

(08-05-2024, 07:04 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe what is needed is to think outside the box. That's all

I think we need to know more about the Lapidary of Alfonso and its system of 360 degrees.
RE: No text, but a visual code

Antonio García Jiménez > 14-05-2024, 06:43 PM

As you say, Alfonso's Lapidary is the greatest parallel we have to illuminate our knowledge of Voynich. It is not only its 30-degree zodiac wheels occupied by figures that represent stars or constellations of stars, it is also the fact that it presents a large number of stones linked to the influences of those stars.

In Voynich they are not stones but plants, and everything indicates that they are also linked to zodiacal stars. There is thus a correspondence between Alfonso's Lapidary and the VM in the sense that both share the same astrological philosophy.
RE: No text, but a visual code

HermesRevived > 14-05-2024, 07:48 PM

(14-05-2024, 06:43 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As you say, Alfonso's Lapidary is the greatest parallel we have to illuminate our knowledge of Voynich. It is not only its 30-degree zodiac wheels occupied by figures that represent stars or constellations of stars, it is also the fact that it presents a large number of stones linked to the influences of those stars.

In Voynich they are not stones but plants, and everything indicates that they are also linked to zodiacal stars. There is thus a correspondence between Alfonso's Lapidary and the VM in the sense that both share the same astrological philosophy.

I am sure you are on the right path Antonio. The work seems to be an account of botany in relation to paranatellonta, the individual degrees of the zodiac (and, specifically, I would add, the solstices and equinoxes and astrological cusps.) But the 'text' is not a linguistic account about this astrology, rather it is made from this astrology, a system of astrological notation.

In my most recent post I compare it to chess notation:

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While the Lapidary of Alfonso provides the model, I think the impetus for the Voynich was Ptolemy, specifically the Brescia Canones (Handy Tables, then in Brescia.) Someone has used that work to do to the plant realm what the Lapidary does to the mineral realm.

We are left with the situation, though, where the Lapidary of Alfonso is one of the great treasures among medieval manuscripts, a work of the highest quality, whereas the Voynich is, as Mr Voynich himself remarked, an "ugly duckling." If the project set out to create some sort of parallel or companion to the Lapidary, what went wrong? Clearly, Team Voynich were not of the same calibre as Alfonso's team of scholars and illustrators.
RE: No text, but a visual code

Ruby Novacna > 14-05-2024, 10:17 PM

Quote:Someone has used that work to do to the plant realm what the Lapidary does to the mineral realm.

Are we to understand that the labels on the "astrological" pages are the names of the plants?
RE: No text, but a visual code

HermesRevived > 15-05-2024, 04:20 AM

(14-05-2024, 10:17 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:Someone has used that work to do to the plant realm what the Lapidary does to the mineral realm.

Are we to understand that the labels on the "astrological" pages are the names of the plants?

If the text is not linguistic, Ruby, then there are no names. Rather labels would be some form of astrological notation that indicates the qualities, attributes and powers, the properties, of the thing labelled. Thus a star, like Sirius, might be labelled 'Hot in the third degree, red in colour, cardinal in nature, of fire in two degrees and air in one, bringer of storms, like unto Mars, and so on, and these might vary according to stellar phases. All the same, plants must be connected to particular stars just as gemstones are in the Lapidary.

(I point out that the Canones of Ptolemy is in Greek and I suggest the alphanumeric Greek notation in that work provided the idea for the Voynich script and language. In that case, our author cannot be unfamiliar with Greek, and Greek may be the background language to the Voynich system of notation. The text, I argue, is best considered 'quasi-linguistic' for this reason. The notation is designed to be evocative of text. )
RE: No text, but a visual code

Ruby Novacna > 15-05-2024, 12:42 PM

Thank you, Hermes!
I have not had the opportunity to read the Lapidary that you cite, its text is not linguistic?
RE: No text, but a visual code

HermesRevived > 15-05-2024, 08:02 PM

(15-05-2024, 12:42 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you, Hermes!
I have not had the opportunity to read the Lapidary that you cite, its text is not linguistic?

No, the text of the Lapidary is linguistic. It is a Catalan translation of an Arabic work. I only know it from the illustrations and translations. Its format is to describe stones and then link them to particular stars. There are descriptions of the stars and their positions such as "...front one of two stars on the left leg of the figure that is half man and half horse, and which looks like it is in front of the three stars at the base of the tail..." for the third degree of Libra, the star probably being Delta Centauri.

If the Voynich is modelled on this, and presents an account of the 360 degrees/stars/naiads, but for the plant realm rather than the mineral realm, we might expect that it contains similar content. But the Voynich text isn't a text. It is something else, some type of notation that presumably accomplishes the same thing: allows the reader to connect the plants to the stars.

Yet the text is a text, isn't it? The author could not have failed to notice that his system of notation looks like a text of words. That must be by design. It is not enough to say it is a system of notation. For me, that is the central mystery. It looks like a linguistic text, but it isn't, and yet this is not accidental.

An answer to that mystery might be supplied by alphanumeric systems like Greek. A work like the Handy Tables of Ptolemy might suggest the idea that if you ascribe letters/numbers to astrological coordinates in the right way the movements of the heavens create words - the cosmic text. This depends upon the view that alphabets and writing are gifts of the gods and of celestial not human origins. (The other thing that suggests this idea, and was current at the time, was the SATOR square.) In any case, I think the Voynich arises from a Latin humanist's encounter with Greek. He knows of the Lapidary of Alfonso, but there is no reason to suppose he had been to Spain to see it.
RE: No text, but a visual code

R. Sale > 16-05-2024, 12:40 AM

On VMs f57v, the so-called 4 x 17 symbol sequence begins with the first five glyphs in EVA: o, l, d, r, v. Examination of the actual glyphs reveals three potential systemic interpretations based on their forms, where each system is also affirmed by particular structural or positional factors.

Greek is alphanumeric: omega x x x lambda
Medieval numerical: x 4 x x 7 [Typus Arithmetica]
Roman numerals: x x x x 5 [inverted in position five]

Do these three numerical interpretations make a workable system?
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