Apart from Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich blogosphere has been far too quiet of late. Even Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Das Voynich Blog” is, despite some intriguing posts in the past, fairly subdued.
And so it is a breath of fresh air to see a new blog from an old friend: long-time Voynich mailing list member Elmar Vogt has recently started up his Voynich Thoughts blog. Elmar has already posted a whole heap of nice snippets, such as the German Wikipedia entry’s comparison of the plant on f56r with drosera intermedia (which I mentioned here and here), a nice comparison of the Sagittarius archer with a drawing in a 15th century woodcut, as well as a circa-1450 head-dress comparison with a zodiac nymph.
Part of me really wants him to put these fragments into context – for the Sagittarius page, for example, how it was suggested long ago that the zodiac motifs might well have largely been copied from a (probably 14th century?) German woodcut calendar; a discussion of the Sagittarius archer’s (probably 14th century and fairly rustic) crossbow; plus a wider comparison of the crossbowman’s headwear with (say) the 15th century “turban” / chaperon as depicted by Robert Campin and Van Eyck.
Yet another part of me simply wants Elmar to fill his blog with that thing he does so very well – which is to use his keen logical eye and pleasantly acid German wit to be entertainingly tart about Voynichological nonsense. Wherever contemporary haruspicators pop up to read their imagined stories into the VMs’ well-scanned entrails, I’ll always be delighted to read Elmar’s commentary.
Trivia time: it’s no great secret that software developer Elmar has long contributed text edits to Wikipedia (such as its VMs page) under the monicker “Syzygy“: but what is perhaps less known is that, as a fan of the Atari ST, he chose this as a homage to the company Atari – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney used “Syzygy Engineering” for their original company name.
Hmmm… I’m not sure he’d be much impressed by the two computer games I wrote for the ST: 3D Pool and Loopz. Oh well! 🙂
“…for the Sagittarius page, for example, how it was suggested long ago that the zodiac motifs might well have largely been copied from a (probably 14th century?) German woodcut calendar…”
Do you have any sort of cite for this? I’m assuming it’s from the mailing list, but I can’t find it using any combination of search terms. My own theory about the Voynich involves German illustrations, and this could be immensely helpful to me if you can recall where you heard about this.
Good question! But rather than squeeze the reply into this small margin, I’ve posted it as a continuation here:-
http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/01/17/german-zodiac-woodcuts
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in http://www.voynich.com/folios/f73v.jpg under the crossbowman there’s a word “9—99–9”. I always wondered if 9’s would have been s,t, and u. So it would be simple cipher with offset in sections.It is simple enuff.
Ah, the “o kees chary ytaly alaly” phrase. It’s true that (e and i aside) there aren’t many doubled letters in the VMs, and that this is one of the 354 instances where y is followed by y (only 40 of which are inside words, though). For comparison, there are only 26 -dd- instances in the VMs.
What I’m trying to say is that the low instance count of “yy” falls well short of being enough evidence to say that y enciphers one of s/t/u. Sorry!
Just an idea.
Don’t be disheartened – hunting for doubled letters is one of the oldest cryptological tricks in the book. Cicco Simonetta even noted (in 1474) that the only word with a tripled letter was “uvula” (because u and v were written the same in Latin), though that may not be particularly useful. 🙂
Voynich researcher Marke Fincher recently posted to the VMs list about the mysterious behaviour of double “d” (basically, it normally appears towards the end of a line), and it is curious observations like this that may well help to find some corner of the Voynich cipher we can prise up.
But the suggestion that Voynichese is a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher was pretty much known to be false as early as 1930 (and the 16th century person who tried to fill out a deciphering column on page f1r didn’t seem to do much better).
Manual cipher are fun. Here one sample:
ryp i togr acodeb nc c eac ookisad ocumentu od sedforimp odep aphy, ntains tablefor lementinga ookco alookup codingand
🙂
Did you manage to decipher the similar-ish one from 1641 I posted up (slightly modified) at the bottom of this page?
Enjoy! 🙂
the sample I added is very simple, with replacement by symbols would be really hard to figure out.
Hint: set words in order by their length….