Aside from a post I have intended to write on the topic of motivation for the Voynich manuscript creation (still in progress, sorry), I have learned something interesting in the past few days, and I especially wish to hear from those who know Bavarian and German about what they think (sorry, to avoid misunderstanding, I will post it here than in other threads).
This is about that “Botrus” reading of the label for Pleiades on page f68r3 that I had introduced earlier in this thread. I am now certain that the rendition of the word is not motivated by a cipher trick primarily, even if it is a secondary motivation for it.
Rather, I now think it is a phonetic rendition of how the term would have been pronounced in Bavarian dialect around Tyrol. In other words, someone who preferred to express her text in a Bavarian or local dialect of German is writing a Latin/Greek expression for Pleiades (i.e., Botrus), in her local dialect. She is using Latin abbreviations to express a Latin word in a Bavarian/Tyrolian dialect.
In a way, the choice may be even politically intended, since she may have wished to express matters in one of her preferred (mother) tongues. She was a daughter of Henry of Corinthia (House of Gorizia) and Anna of Bohemia; she grew up in a Bavarian-Austrian cultural context.
I now believe that it is not reasonable to think someone would need to go to a great length to cipher a label for an image that clearly says what the label supposedly stands for.
I think what is happening in that label is simply a phonetic/vernacular rendition of the term in a local or personal dialect, where the ‘t’ is simply not pronounced and is deleted. From what I have learned this is a common practice called “lenition” and it appears that it was particularly present in Bavarian and South Tyrolean dialects at the time where hard consonants were softened or even deleted altogether.
So, if she meant to say Botrus and even considered the phonetic rendition of it according to the dialects she knew as a way of ciphering things a bit (which in this particular case I doubt it would have been necessary as a primary motivation, given the image association), she would have pronounced it like “Bowrus” or Borus, or, actually, simply as “Boarus.” This, according to the Occam's Razor rule, is the best and simplest explanation for what we see in that label.
The transformation of an o to an oa itself signals such a lenition is in progress (she is writing it as she is pronouncing it and the a after o shows it is a phonetic preference). In “intervocalic lenition” (which is in fact what I think is happening here, a term you can google to learn more about it) a consonant between o and r can soften to a d or even not be pronounced, and therefore not be written down in a phonetic rendition of the term. It is possible even to consider the ‘oa’ shift as a regional characteristic for Tyrol in the 1300s-1400s.
When we try to understand the Voynich manuscript language, we tend to expect that the spellings be as exactly as we find them in formally written books, rendered in academic Latin or Greek. But, for a personalized handbook of a Countess Margaret trying to understand her life in an astrological and cosmic context and wishing to leave it as a keepsake for very important personal and political reasons, it is reasonable to expect that her astrological autobiography and legacy of accomplishments would be expressed in one of her preferred, beloved tongues.
I am thinking the finding that Bavarian dialect uses shorter words may have to do with Bavarian speakers' preference for and tendency to omit consonants when possible near vowels to make them shorter and softer—but this is just a guess and specialists can correct me.
I am now more confident in claiming that by reading Botrus/Boarus, associated with the Pleiades image on f68r3, I have read a word in the Voynich manuscript itself (not just a marginalia) for the first time. Even the rendition of batin as baiin (daiin) (meaning "inner" or occultation or esoteric, the soul of a plant or star or anything ...) can now be explained by following the same Tyrolian/Bavarian dialect rule. I leave it to language experts to consider what the implication of this finding can be for understanding the VM text.
For more information about how vowels and consonants have been treated in German historically, these may be worth looking into by the experts (since it is outside my field, I have not read them, or carefully but appreciate the details in which they have treated the subject):
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