Mark Knowles > 12-11-2019, 05:07 PM
(12-11-2019, 03:51 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You think that's a 4???.
Larger scans are not going to make it clearer. They will simply distort your perception of what a quill pen can do on textured vellum (which isn't very much at this scale).
RobGea > 12-11-2019, 05:14 PM
Mark Knowles > 12-11-2019, 05:18 PM
(12-11-2019, 05:14 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Spend enough time looking at the TIFF image with massive zoom and you will soon be seeing letters in the grain of the parchment,
just like what happened with Newbold.
Anyway its patently obvious that the horizontal bar underneath the 1st of the 3 glyphs is a 1 tilted thru 90 degrees,
then the alleged 4 is a 9, followed by a 1 then a latin upsilon doing duty as 0.
Giving us the date '1910' when Wilfred Voynich forged the VMS and put the date as his 'forgers' mark' in plain sight in the middle of a flower.
Koen G > 12-11-2019, 05:48 PM
(12-11-2019, 04:32 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.More data is always better than less data. Larger scans mean more data.
Mark Knowles > 12-11-2019, 06:31 PM
-JKP- > 12-11-2019, 10:46 PM
Mark Knowles > 12-11-2019, 11:28 PM
(12-11-2019, 10:46 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They didn't write 4 with the loop so small that it looks like a hook. They wrote it with a loop (the loop could be sharp or rounded). All you have to do is look at the 4 shapes on the same VMS folio to see that the little stroke with a hook is proportioned and written differently:
If one were to interpret the scribble as 4157, then I have to point out that they didn't write 5 or 7 like modern numbers either (it was uncommon to see the modern 5 or 7 in the early 15th century). Here are examples from the early 15th century and the late 15th century so you can see the transition to modern numerals (note that if you look at actual manuscripts, modern numerals for foliation or indexes were usually added at the time of binding, which was often a century or two after the creation of the manuscript).
Note how the numeral 1 often has a hook:
Quote:Note that the 7 was not written with curves, this came later (when fountain pens were introduced, which gave more control over the pen). It was usually two rather severe lines. Occasionally the top curved, but they didn't add an "s" curve to the stem as we sometimes do now.
Quote:Mark, it's more than a decade since Nick wrote Curse and I get the impression that he's always reading, always learning, so whatever he thought about this subject in the past might not be what he thinks about it now.
Quote:If you consider how tiny the text is (the Beinecke scans enlarge the image quite a bit), then whatever creates a lighter spot within a line might just be a bump in the vellum where less ink took hold. If we went through the whole manuscript with a magnifying glass, we could probably find bits of numbers and letters in many of the tokens that are nothing more than artifacts of the substrate.
Quote:I am reluctant to try to interpret something so small.
-JKP- > 13-11-2019, 12:52 AM
-JKP- > 13-11-2019, 05:42 AM
Wladimir D > 13-11-2019, 06:15 AM