Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his “Voynich Thoughts” website of the Voynich Manuscript’s teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger’s notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I’m sure you want answered is: how did the boy Vogt do?
Well… it’s immediately clear he’s thorough, insofar as he stepped sequentially through all the word-like groups of letters in the major Voynich marginalia to try to work out what each letter could feasibly be; and from that built up a kind of Brumbaugh-like matrix of combinatorial possibilities for each one for readers to shuffle to find sensible-looking readings. However, it also has to be said that for all of this careful (and obviously prolonged) effort, he managed to get… precisely nowhere at all.
You see, we’ve endured nearly a century’s worth of careful, rational people looking at these few lines of text and being unable to read them, from Newbold’s “michiton oladabas“, through Marcin Ciura’s mirrored “sa b’adalo No Tich’im“, and all the way to my own [top line] “por le bon simon sint…“. Worse still, nobody has even been able to convincingly argue the case for what the author(s) was/were trying to achieve with these confused-looking marginalia, which can easily be read as containing fragments of French, Occitan, German, Latin, Voynichese (and indeed of pretty much any other language you can think of).
And the explanation for this? Well, we Voynich researchers simply love explanations… which is why we have so many of them to choose from (even if none of them stands up to close scrutiny):-
- Pen trials?
- A joke (oh, and by the way, the joke is on us)?
- A hoax?
- A cipher key?
- Enciphered text?
- Some kind of vaguely polyglot text in an otherwise unknown language?
How can we escape this analysis paralysis? Where are those pesky intellectual historians when you actually need them?
I suspect that what is at play here is an implicit palaeographic fallacy: specifically the long-standing (but false) notion that palaeographers try to read individual words (when actually they don’t). Individual word and letter instances suffer from accidents, smudges, blurs, deletions, transfers, rubbing off, corrections, emendations: however, a person’s hand (the way that they construct letters) is surprisingly constant, and is normally able to be located within a reasonably well-defined space of historic hands – Gothic, semi-Gothic, hybrida, mercantesca, Humanist, etc. Hence, the real problem here is arguably that this palaeographic starting point has failed to be determined.
Hence, I would say that looking at individual words is arguably the last thing you should be doing: instead, you should be trying to understand (a) how individual letters are formed, and (b) which particular letter instances are most reliable. From there, you should try to categorise the hand, which should additionally give you some clue as to where it is from and what language it is: and only then should you pass the challenge off from palaeography to historical linguistics (i.e. try to read it). And so I would say that attempting to read the marginalia without first understanding the marginalia hand is like trying to do a triple-jump but omitting both the hop and the skip parts, i.e. you’ll fall well short of where you want to get to.
So let’s buck a hundred years’ worth of trend and try instead to do this properly: let’s simply concentrate on the letter ‘a’ and and see where it takes us.
To my eyes, I think that a[5], a[6], and a[7] show no obvious signs of emendation and are also consistently formed as if by the same hand. Furthermore, it seems to me that these are each formed from two continuous strokes, both starting from the middle of the top arch of the ‘a’. That is, the writer first executes a heavy c-like down-and-around curved stroke (below, red), lifts up the pen, places it back on the starting point, and then writes a ‘Z’-like up-down-up zigzaggy stroke (below, blue) to complete the whole ‘a’ shape. You can see from the thickness and shape of the blue stroke that the writer is right-handed: while you can see from the weight discontinuity and slight pooling of ink in the middle of the top line exactly where the two strokes join up. I think this gives us a reasonable basis for believing what the writer’s core stroke technique is (and, just as importantly, what it probably isn’t).
What this tells us (I think) is that we should be a little uncertain about a[4], (which doesn’t have an obviously well-formed “pointy head”) and very uncertain about a[1], a[2], and a[3] (none of which really rings true).
My take on all this is that I think a well-meaning VMs owner tried hard to read the (by then very faded) marginalia, but probably did not know the language it was written in, leaving the page in a worse mess than what it was before they started. Specifically: though “maria” shouts original to me, “oladaba8” shouts emendation just as strongly. Moreover, the former also looks to my eyes like “iron gall ink + quill”, while the latter looks like “carbon ink + metal nib”.
Refining this just a little bit, I’d also point out that if you also look at the two ascender loops in “oladaba8″, I would argue that the first (‘l’) loop is probably original, while the second (‘b’) loop is structured quite wrongly, and is therefore probably an emendation. And that’s within the same word!
The corollary is simply that I think it highly likely that any no amount of careful reading would untie this pervasively tangled skein if taken at face value: and hence that, for all his persistence and careful application of logic, Elmar has fallen victim to the oldest intellectual trap in the book – of pointing his powerful critical apparatus in quite the wrong direction. Sorry, Elmar my old mate, but you’ve got to be dead careful with these ancient curses, really you have. 🙂
Surely the reason for the join in the 2 strokes of the ‘a’ (5,6 & 7) is that it is a ‘c’ connected to the following ‘i’ –
I read ‘maria’ as ‘inci + vici’ – but just as you imply, without a larger piece of text containing words you are sure of to compare it’s impossible to tell
incy wincy spider …….
Hi Nick,
From the self-professed skeptic to the self-professed expert 😉 —
I fully agree that my essay did not yield definitive results, and since I’m neither a paleography nor a linguistics expert, I’m the first to admit that this study has it’s flaws. I simply did it because apparently nobody else has, I did it best as I could, and it’s not intended as the final solution, but as a stepping stone for someone more knowledgable. I’d be happy to help anyone more knowledgable with their survey. (I may not have the shoulders of a giant, but with a little luck it won’t require a Newton to see a bit further than before…)
I did actually pet the idea of identifying the different “hands”, and thus assigning different possible readings to what superficially looks like the same letter (remnants of that in subsection 4.2.4), but in the end this turned out to be unwieldy, providing an even more complex matrix of possible readings.
As for the emendation theory, I wouldn’t completely rule it out, but the question remains (to which you have yet to give a convincing answer, IMHO): Why are even the emendations unreadable? Wouldn’t their purpose be to close the gap between the readable remains of the original text, and wouldn’t they fill the gap with something which makes sense?
Cheers,
Elmar
P.S.: I don’t quite grasp the first sentence of your last paragraph — is there a negation missing?
Elmar: my preferred explanation is that a period of nearly 200 years may well separate the date of the original marginalia from the date of the emendations: and I would also be unsurprised if the original turns out to be in (for example) Occitan or a similar dialect that would have left the emender thoroughly bemused even if the ink hadn’t faded as well. Faded text in an unknown Romance language – a double whammy. Wherever the emender saw something like a fragment of a language he/she recognized (whether Latin, German, Voynichese), he/she “corrected” that word or phrase to the best of his/her ability. It’s not cryptography, it’s not an oral polyglot tongue, it’s a conservation nightmare. 😉
PS: negation typo fixed, thanks! 😉
I had the joy of reading Elmar’s paper yesterday. I think it’s great as what it is; a reference document and stepping stone. I like the way the different letter readings are formatted in the matrix-like constructions, but it’s probably not the most useful way to go around if you want definitive answers.
I had a quick thought about the macrons in the month names – is there really no available documentation for where and when this practice was used (specifically for month names)? Were macrons simply so widespread that it’s impossible infer anything from this?
Christopher: I guess I must be in the “definitive answers” business, then. 🙂 And yes, overbars were a widespread scribal practice: Elmar’s brief discussion on pp.8-9 (contraction macron, nasalizing macron, double-letter vinculum, long vowel, u/n disambiguation, umlaut replacement) catches most of them, but there may well be further uses out there in the wild. All the same, it seems likely that the zodiac name overbars are simply nasalizing macrons, turning (for example) “octe[-]bre” into “octembre”.
You might also find my 2004 page on the zodiac months useful, although note that I’d now read the April month name as “Abéril” (i.e. a heavily nasalized “Apéril”). Though Sean B. Palmer also posted a similar zodiac month name page in 2004, Elias Schwerdtfeger seems to have picked up on neither of these: of course, they all ultimately stem from Jorge Stolfi’s investigative work more than a decade ago (but you knew that already).
Alright, cheers.
Hi Nick and Elmar! I’ve always harped on the need for paleographic study, so I like Nick’s approach; in fact I think that’s what we desperately need for Voynichese itself.
Does anyone – Nick, Elmar, or anyone else – know any genuine Latin paleographers whom we might interest in this? This is where academics could play a crucial role!
Don’t have the time to comment further ATM…
Dennis
Dennis: unfortunately, I suspect applying Latin palaeographic principles to Voynichese may not help a great deal. Even if we have a full-on palaeographic analysis of the strokes (ductus), where can we go with that? Even if this could be used to identify some kind of affinity with an existing system (say, mercantesca, or a particular hybrida), this would always be a very shaky, contentious piece of evidence.
Whereas for the marginalia, I think that there are quite a few good reasons to think that these were originally written to be legible – for example, the f17r marginalia look very close to readable, so it could well be that a different kind of scan might be all we need to make sense of them.
Hi Dennis,
my experience when talking to real experts about the Voynich MS
in their particular area is that they are very careful with their
statements. We amateurs tend to jump to conclusions because
we lack the overall picture and background knowledge that they
have.
I had one historian familiar with old MSS look at f116v and he said he
was reluctant to make any statements about what it says. He was not
a trained paleographer, but I think that this is the sort of response one
could expect. Still, I agree it would be interesting.
The point is: we can speculate about everything and it is
fun. Trained / experienced / professionals just don’t go for that quite
as much.
Hi Rene,
Also “when talking to real experts about the Voynich MS in their particular area“, I’ve found that many have a strong tendency to jump to negative conclusions, which isn’t the same as being cautious at all. I think the VMs stretches our ability to do cross-domain reasoning under conditions of uncertainty right to the limit: perhaps this (more than anything else) is what makes it the Everest of problem solving. =:-o
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
The thing is to ask retired experts. Employed experts are bound up in the ‘don’t-look-now-and-I’m-not-worried-but-certain-people-out-there-have-their-academic-long-knives-at-the-ready’ syndrome. Or more simply: they daren’t be wrong, so they say as little as possible, and err in caution. So find a retired expert, preferably a Reader (don’t know the US equivalent) whose reputation is secure, or at least someone at the carefree age of 80 and over. Then you’ll get a lifetime’s knowledge without quite so much caution: if you have the right sort of introduction.