A noob needs help: A lot of questions

[Kaybo]

I have a lot of questions and I try to read to all of the things here. But maybe someone could help me with one or the other question I have. (If this is the wrong sub, please move it, I do not use Ask an Expert because I though that were more questions to experts in a specific field, like botanic)

1. Has anyone analyzed the vertical letters in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ? If you look at it, then its a typical schema for astrological tables and the days of the week. Like a-f, then there is a paragraph sign and it repeats. If you kick out the paragraph signs you get 23 letters, which would be an alphabet. Other letters are introduced in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which also introduce the cz (ch) and the aiin symbol. Which could be a combination of letters and phonemes. Are there any ideas about that already?

2. On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there are words beside 2 or 3 characters. Anyone looked for this words in the text? Or in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ? What about the words in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the zodiac signs? Did we see them often in the text?

3. The zodiac signs. Anyone has seen circle diagrams with zodiac signs in the middle elsewhere? Can the words under the signs be translated or matched to known letters?

4. Anyone has links to other foldouts at that time or a little bit later?

5. And of course I need any information that links the manuscript to Portugal (Spain) Iberian.

[Mauro]

2. On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there are words beside 2 or 3 characters. Anyone looked for this words in the text? Or in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ? What about the words in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the zodiac signs? Did we see them often in the text?

You can check the position of every word on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (not a perfect transliteration, but mostly good enough (it's Takahashi's one iirc))

[nablator]

3. The zodiac signs. Anyone has seen circle diagrams with zodiac signs in the middle elsewhere? Can the words under the signs be translated or matched to known letters?

4. Anyone has links to other foldouts at that time or a little bit later?

Just type "zodiac" or "months" or "foldouts" in the Search box and you will find discussions about good parallels and words.

For example:

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[Kaybo]

2. On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there are words beside 2 or 3 characters. Anyone looked for this words in the text? Or in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ? What about the words in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the zodiac signs? Did we see them often in the text?

You can check the position of every word on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (not a perfect transliteration, but mostly good enough (it's Takahashi's one iirc))

Thank you. Probably there is no page or resource that collects interesting findings about the manuscript. It seems everything is hidden somewhere here. 

For example the word dshedy is nearly purely used at the beginning of a row. Which would indicate that rows in paragraphs have there own start and are not continued text over the paragraph.  If people worked for 30 years on this manuscript, there should be a list or something with this systematic findings.

And another thing. If you look at the start of a paragraph there is always a paragraph sign, voynichese includes this paragraph signs into the word. Of cause you can't find these words nowhere else in the text. But if you delete the paragraph sign you will find these words, because the paragraph sign is not part of the word and that is some kind of obvious for me. But probably a lot of other people have found this out too, why everyone must repeat everything, no wonder there is no progress.

Edit: Just to clarify, the voynichese site is absolute great.

[MarcoP]

The single most informative source is Rene Zandbergen's site voynich.nu

It's a large site and fnding things is not always easy. Anyway, the manuscript has been studied for over a century, so it's unavoidable that the volume of published observations and theories is quite large. Everything you read on voynich.nu has been carefully collected and reviewed by Rene, so searching through it is certainly worth the effort.

A simple way to search the site is adding site:voynich.nu to a google search.

Some links:

About parallels for the zodiac diagrams: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

About month names added at the bottom of the medallions: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

About line initial words like dshedy: unluckily, there's only a place-holder at the bottom of this page: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You can refer to this post by Emma May Smith: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

About characters apparently added at paragraph start: see "Grove words" here (by Jorge Stolfi): 
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An excellent but now very old and partially outdated introduction: Mary D'Imperio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1978). It would be great to have a "revised edition", or something that could authoritatively replace it, but I don't think it exists at the moment.

[Kaybo]

Thanks, that helped a lot.

I have some more questions. Ich watched the video You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . 

So we have very few symbols, but we have a text of around 40.000 words that contains more than 6.000 different words. If I am overstretching the video, than one could say the minimal number of an alphabet is 18 or something. Now this few symbols in voynich can create a text that has as many different words as an English text of this size. How can that be? 

Did anyone tried a reversed method, coming from a Text to get voynichese? So go backward to identify the rules that would be necessary to create such a text from any language? 

Like
The sunflower is a tall, bright plant known for its large yellow petals and dark brown center.
qoshol chy shol choraiin chplanty chknownaiin chor yolor chpetaly daiin.

[bi3mw]

Did anyone tried a reversed method, coming from a Text to get voynichese? So go backward to identify the rules that would be necessary to create such a text from any language? 

I started this thread on the subject:
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[Jorge_Stolfi]

The single most informative source is Rene Zandbergen's site voynich.nu   
About parallels for the zodiac diagrams: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

By the way, Beinecke MS 255, cited by Sniezynska-Stolot via Rene, " is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at the Beinecke site.

While maybe it was not of "commercial" quality, it is too neat to be really a "notebook".  It looks more like a set of copies of other texts made for the owners' own use.   It was clearly written by several different "professional" or "semi-professional" scribes, with very different handwritings and conventions.  One scribe put the red sentence(?) marks in red ink, within the text and on the left margin, that I saw on other manuscripts of the time; they seem to have been a scribal standard, like black round item bullets on today's documents.  Another scribe instead used large black font on the head line of each parag.  Some wrote in two columns, some in one column...  Sometimes the scribe left blank spaces for figures that were never drawn.

Thirty years ago, the equivalent of that "notebook" would be a stack of photocopies of disparate articles and book chapters made by a grad student while researching his thesis

But I saw no astrological diagrams there.  Maybe they were in the other manuscript cited by Ewa, "Beinecke MSS 227", that Rene says it must be a typo and indeed does not seem to be there.

All the best, --stolfi