(09-12-2025, 08:33 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (09-12-2025, 07:52 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Examples of alphabets created by outsiders are the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. alphabet and possibly the Georgian Alphabet by the Armenian Medieval linguist You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.; and the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (~1830)
I wasn't asking for examples of alphabets. All alphabets have been created by some people for some people and I think this would normally be a lengthy process and mostly in some teaching context and accompanied by copious notes.
Most alphabets evolved gradually over centuries or millenia. Those examples I quoted were
phonetic alphabets created for a language X by an outsider who was not a member of the X-speaking people. It is still not totally like Voynichese according to the COT, but it is a good way towards it.
And you have Ricci's proto-pinyin, which is very close to the COT in many ways, including the motivation -- create an alphabetic script for a language that already had a native script, but one that was too difficult to learn. The main difference with Voynichese-according-to-COT is that it used Latin letters and diacritics, instead of newly invented glyphs.
Quote:Quote:There is tons of visible retracing, in the text and in the illustrations.
I know of only two examples of retracing in the text of the MS. I've seen all the images you posted, unfortunately, to me they don't look even remotely convincing.
Well, what can I say? Okay...
But please pick a page...
Quote:Again, this is your interpretation of what is "decorative" and what are the "contents". I can name a lot of distinctively European things in the imagery. 1) European castle.
The castles in f85v2 may indeed be contents: the Author wanted them because there were castles at those places, in whatever real, imaginary, or allegorical place that map is meant to depict.
But the details that make those castles look European, as far as we can tell, are just decoration: the author's sketch probably said only "a castle goes here", and the Artist drew
his notion of what a castle looked like. Or quickly leafed through his books until he saw a suitable castle, and copied it.
On the other hand, there are the six round towers at the center with bulging spherical tops that support the starry heavens. I bet you will say that
that must be just decoration, right?
Quote:2) European dragon.
Yes, the
format of the Herbal section of the VMS is clearly drawn from that of European herbals, and it seems that dragons in European "alchemist herbals" were usually drawn next to plants that were supposed to cure snake bites or repel snakes. We can discuss how exactly that section was created in another thread. Here, again, for all we know the Author specified only "put a dragon on this page, near the root", and then the Artist drew a dragon as he knew it, or cribbed from some book.
Quote:3) Quite European Zodiac figures 4) European cloths. 5) European hair styles.
The nymphs, the stars, and the central figures of the Zodiac are just
decoration. Like the pictures of humans and animals and stars in any European astrological manuscript. Whatever information the VMS Zodiac diagrams convey, it would be conveyed just as well without any of those figures. That is, the
contents of each diagram is only the list of 15 or 30 labels, the circular text, and the implied correspondence of that data with a specific Western Zodiac sign.
The drawings and labels of the bits of plants in the Pharma, and the labels on the jars, must be
contents; the drawings of the jars are just
decoration.
The
contents of the Bio illustrations may be the obvious organs, the topology of baths and pipes, the number of nymphs in each pool and their labels, and some symbolic value to some of the the animals and objects that appear. All else in the drawings is likely to be just
decoration provided by the Artist.
And so on. If we focus on the
contents of the illustrations, ignoring what is probably just decoration, we see very little that could be considered specifically European. Maybe the T-O map in the Northeast rosette? Anything else?
Quote:Can you name anything of Asian origin?
I already pointed out the division of the year in 12 sets of 30 degrees
or 24 sets of 15 degrees. And starting the year with Pisces. And a section with about 360 entries, without figures, of about the right number of words per entry...
Quote:I'm asking for what would it take for me to consider a theory that has basically no grounding in hard evidence.
I can't help if you dismiss any evidence I present with a generic "there may be other explanations".
The opposite of the "Chinese Origin" theory is a theory too, the "Not Chinese" theory, or specifically the "European Origin" theory. The opposite of the MRT is the "Every Ink is Original" theory. Shouldn't you demand had evidence for those theories, too?
All the best, --stolfi