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Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
- Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
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Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
Jorge_Stolfi > 17-09-2025, 02:08 PM
Someone sometime posted an image with a list of the 10 Arabic digits from a manuscript, which had two variants for "5", both with a tilde or macron above. Rene conjectured that the tildes could be two "v"s standing for "vel .. vel" (= "either ... or").
But on the bottom right corner of page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is a "mysterious symbol" that looks very much like one of those two "5"s, complete with the tilde/macron.
So perhaps those macrons are just meant to avoid confusion with the letter "y", and the "mysterious symbol" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an original quire or section number, applied before the bifolios were scrambled, flipped, and re-quired.
All the best, --jorge.
[KG: I could not find the post with those digits. If this post is out-of-topic for this sub-forum, feel free to move it.] -
RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
RobGea > 17-09-2025, 02:57 PM
(17-09-2025, 02:08 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Someone sometime posted an image with a list of the 10 Arabic digits from a manuscript, which had two variants for "5", both with a tilde or macron above.
Probably this one,
The Voynich Ninja > Library and Research > Non Voynich medievalia > Voynichy lettering in 1459 manuscript
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -
RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
MarcoP > 18-09-2025, 07:24 AM
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RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
Jorge_Stolfi > 18-09-2025, 11:19 AM
(18-09-2025, 07:24 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While researching scripts with Koen, we noticed early 15th century sources having a similar ‘g’. This one is from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Sweden, 1405), last word “Sigillis”.
Weird. Why would the scribe use a macron instead of making the head of the "g" a bit rounder? Could it be a shorthand for "gn" or "gnis/gnus/gnum/gna" instead, as in "Signis illis" (= "those signs")?
If the symbol on the corner of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is indeed a "g", what could it mean? Are there examples of quires being labeled with letters rather than numbers?
[The Swedish site seems to be down so I cannot see the whole image..]
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
Koen G > 18-09-2025, 01:50 PM
It's just one of the ways to write "g", and I'd say a rather common one. Drawing a separate horizontal line that connects to the next letter is probably much easier than making a circle with the pen. This is also the reason why the line starts at the left vertical stroke but extends way to the right: it serves both to close the top and to connect to the right.
This is, by the way, the exact same way of writing "g" as the one used by the month name writer in "yong", and I bet these were written by the same person. -
RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
Bluetoes101 > 18-09-2025, 10:55 PM
These (maybe/sort of) exist in the VM ,F69v, one of the few exceptions to "there is no punctuation"
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RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
Jorge_Stolfi > 19-09-2025, 01:38 AM
(18-09-2025, 10:55 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.These (maybe/sort of) exist in the VM ,F69v, one of the few exceptions to "there is no punctuation"
Interesting, I forgot about those!
However, since those are the only two occurrences of y-macron in the book, it is unlikely that they stand for digit "5" or letter "g". I would guess that they are ad-hoc abbreviations for some word that starts with y. Like we could write "V." for "Voynichese" in a post, without even defining it.
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Digit 5 as "y" with tilde, and spurious "quire" mark on f57v
Bluetoes101 > 20-09-2025, 11:15 PM
I think what it might show, though many other things also show, is a Latin influence
There are some more, like
What makes these (rare) examples interesting to me is that I've always considered the text a cipher (of sorts) "hidden meaning" is probably a better term, maybe it's an experimental cipher, maybe it's as Antonio thinks - shapes with some abstract meaning, a "visual code". Maybe a constructed language, who knows for sure. But the existence of them makes me think they are needed, and meaningful to the message being written in some way.. even if it was a mistake or a slip of the mind of the scribe and they automatically added them out of habit/by mistake. It seems to me they were at least thinking in terms of language, and the language they were thinking of was Latin, and if the text is in cipher of some sort this wouldn't fit, so it was either a mistake by the writer, or its not a cipher/text with "hidden meaning". Basically they feel hard to place beyond "latin influence".