JKP, Johannes Albus was also reading p's in the last line, in 2012.

W.r.t. poxleber, apart from being an invective, it was really used in ancient recipes.

In the so-called Zürcher Arzneibuch ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) there's a recipe including:
'so nim des pocches lebere'.

Someone has mentioned the loss of the descenders before, I think, if I remember right it was ReneZ and I was sceptical, but at a second look I am not so sure any more, one of the reasons is that I doubt the VMs had a binding before the Jesuit binding, whatever other people may tell us.


1) Let us say the descenders of the p‘s are missing, then the descender of the n is missing as well and you have the same n as in the second word


2) If you have p‘s, you could read „p[ro] alsen p[ro]b[i]ren“, alse is a name for Artemisia absinthium and probiren is try out, a mixture of Latin and German, something like „Try it out in place of A. Absinthium“.


Just a possibility

Completely unrelated to the current discussion, google turned up this. Apparently some Marix Moriz had a daughter in 1654. Without a doubt irrelevant, though "Fix Marix Moriz" does sound like a decent healing spell 

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Eva Moriz was born to Marix Moriz and Unknown.
Eva was baptized on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1654, at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Eva lived at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

JKP wrote:

Quote:And then I noticed, the "v" in val8en may not be a "v" at all. Look at it. Look at the "p" in porta8, now look how there is a ghost of an ascender underneath the "val8en" p that looks like it's been wiped away. These might not be "v" letters at all. Look at the "v" in "vix". That is a conventional "v". That's a commonplace way to write it and it does not match the ones on the last line.
Is it possible that val8en isn't val8en at all, but possibly pal8en? If those two strange-looking "v" letters had descenders, then they are quite normal, conventional "p" letters in both angle and shape.
...
It would be nice to have confirmation from the text as to the meaning of the words if indeed one or both of those are the letter "p", but it doesn't really help much. It's just as cryptic as before. Now... if those "p" shapes had a small vertical line on the descender that's almost wiped out, it could make a difference, because then you have the abbreviation for pre- or pro- (which are frequently at the beginnings of words) and the second word could be perbren (which is German for pearls) but...it seems unlikely that pearls would be mentioned in this context.
The first word is problematic because we don't really know what that figure-8 represents. It looks a bit like d or s, but we don't know that for sure. It does appear to stand for a consonant. It could be peralden/peralsen/peralden/proalden/palden/palsen, none of which makes much sense, or the 8 might be who-knows-what. It's not even 100% certain that's an "e". It's written differently from the other e letters. It almost looks like a VMS c with a tail except the tail is cut off and the "n" doesn't match well to the other n letters either. It's a truly odd combination of shapes at the end.

Let us suppose that the "8" substitutes the same letter, let it be "s". We have: dabas, portas and valsen or palsen.
I don't know if it was mentioned earlier that the word "palsen" can mean You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Bulsen can mean You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or, if I understand correctly, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (from Latin "vulso"). And, as I correctly understand, the word "palsen" was used in medieval recipes in Germany.

All very interesting ideas!

Are we actually certain that German is involved here? I take it that it is especially the -en endings that suggest with high probability a Germanic vernacular?

(03-01-2017, 08:00 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are we actually certain that German is involved here? I take it that it is especially the -en endings that suggest with high probability a Germanic vernacular?

Nope, not absolutely certain. The "anchiton" line is closer in sound and structure to Romance languages, but parts of the page are a mix of Latin and a sort of pidgin-German, and most of the last line has a German structure to it, as does the line at the top.

Those two words may not be German/Yiddish. They could be made up or they could be something related to Germanic languages that isn't expressly German or... something else less obvious.

Also I have a thought about the words: "pbren" and "al?a". Maybe, they contain a ligatured "l" (li, la, lu, le). So, is there a possibility that the "pbren" (ubren?) could be read as "pluren", You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or "plaren", which mean "to roar" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) or "a roar", "to cry" or "a cry" ?

If those are pees, then there are so many possibilities....

For example, if the p is pro (which was very commonly abbreviated as "p") then pro alsen is one possible reading. "alsen" or "halsen" is the neck or throat... so... if it were Latin and German or Latin and Norse, one gets "for the neck" or "for the throat".

I hoped that multispectral images might provide evidence towards the missing descenders in the last line, but actually they (at least as published in Nick's blog) did not, to my opinion. So, ceteris paribus, I'd suspect v/u there, and not p.

When discussing the last line, the two important things to remember are:

1) part of the last line is not in Voynichese, apparently for a reason - as if translation from German to Voynichese was a tedious process, so the scribe was lazy to encrypt the whole line.
2) the "so nim gasmich" begins with "so", so it is basically stipulated by what is written before "so". It is not simply "nim gasmich", but it is "so nim gasmich".

As I suggested earlier, I strongly suspect aror sheey to be either a quantitative characteristic (in which case aror is likely a numeral) or a modus operandi (in which case sheey may designate some part of the body).