While writing about Julian Bunn’s carroty crib ‘otaldy’ yesterday, it struck me that I haven’t properly posted much about the mystery of the Voynich’s cipher for some time.
To which the right reply is: errr, what mystery are you talking about, Nick? I’ll explain…
At the start of “The Curse of the Voynich”, I noted that the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…
…appears almost childishly simple, the kind of thing any competent code-breaker armed with pencil and paper would expect to crack in a summer afternoon.
All the same, despite a century’s worth of lazy summer afternoons since Wilfrid Voynich swooshed it out of the Villa Mondragone, none of the legions of cryptologers who has tried to crack it has found so much as a vowel, a consonent, a digit, a comma or a full stop. So much for it being simple!
To a modern cryptogram solver’s eyes, the Voynich appears to be an aristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext divided up into words) rather than a patristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext unhelpfully divided up into fixed blocks): and its relatively small number of high frequency symbols makes it seem very much like a simple substitution cipher, with a handful of occasional special symbols creeping in. Really, there seems no reason that it should be anything but a simple substitution cipher. But it’s not! Pause for a second to think what the presence of a phrase such as page f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” implies… yup, if that’s written in a cipher, it’s definitely not a simple cipher.
From an historian’s point of view, if the radiocarbon dating of the vellum accurately reflects the age of the cipher itself, it would predate the first known polyalphabetic cipher (Alberti 1467) by 25 or more years. The famous castles in the Voynich’s nine-rosette page clearly seem to have the swallow-tail merlons familiar from 14th and 15th century, pointing to a European (possibly even Northern Italian) origin. Historical logic would therefore seem to imply that that it could only use the kind of simple cipher tricks found in European ciphers in the 14th or early 15th century. But it doesn’t!
To a manuscript historian, words written in the Voynichese alphabet contain a number of shapes familiar from medieval manuscripts: for example, aiir and aiiv are page references to the third (‘ii-recto’) and fourth (‘ii-verso’) page of the first (‘a’) quire, and we see these appear throughout the text. Similarly, the letter pattern ‘4o’ (which I’m sure was a scribal shorthand used in 14th century Northern Italy, possibly in legal documents) appears at the start of many Voynichese words. But their curious usage statistics (-iv words massively outnumber -ir words, for example) tell us whatever these letter groups are, they are not what they seem!
The mystery of the Voynich’s cipher, then, is that everything obvious about it is just plain wrong.
* It looks simple to crack, but it isn’t!
* It looks like an ‘aristocrat’ simple substitution cipher, but it’s not!
* It looks too early to be particularly sophisticated, but it is!
* It looks like a mid-to-late 14th century European technical text, but it’s not!
So, what we have here is a right old Gordian knot, exactly the kind of thing you’d have thought Intellectual Historians such as Professor Anthony Grafton would be queuing around the block to bring their Massive Historical Brains to bear upon. They love historical paradoxes, because all it normally requires is subtlety, nerve and quickness of mind to bring whatever unspoken assumption or presumption happens to be blocking the logic to the surface – the fine hairstrand holding the whole knot in place. “The merest of snips and my work is done! Bwahaha… and back to Princeton I go“.
At least, that’s how the Intellectual History script is supposed to go. In reality, the Voynich Manuscript laughs at people’s puny attempts to untie its cipher’s tangly knot: it’s smarter – in fact, much smarter – than that.
Specifically, anyone who tries to pitch the whole postmodernist it’s-a-hoax-so-it-is brick at the Voynich’s shiny windows deserves to be shot, basically for not taking something so clever seriously. Look, guys, Voynichese has so much structure on so many levels, it’s almost fractal: only gibberish generated by a computer could ever exhibit such a convoluted set of rules.
Ultimately, then, the mystery of the Voynich is why any explanation has to satisfy such an apparently paradoxical set of multidimensional constraints. Lord knows I’ve tried to do this (and I remain convinced that what I presented in “The Curse of the Voynich” will turn out to have got 90% of the way to the right answer, even if the last 10% is still unbelievably hard), but it’s a rare Voynich researcher who faces these full on and still manages to be productive.
Do you? 😉
Yes, I do. I make note of the apparent paradoxes and tuck the notes into my “round tuit file”. Later (often when I’m involved with some other “puzzle”) I find “loose ends” that often lead me back to the original “puzzle”.
Here’s an example. Yesterday, we were “crunching carrots”: I posed the Q re my translation Kastle Kartel.
Overnight, “I slept on it”. What also came to mind last night were some other V ciphers:
Has anyone already commented on the curious exaggerated “P” letters that have two or three loops on the upper bar before it swings back under and to the upright bar?
My take is that the number of loops that appear on the upper section of the bars indicate the bi-fold or tri-fold quires.
I still have a strong hunch that much of the VMS script was enciphered Arabic script. How I follow that hunch is by participating in your great discussion pages!
Cheers, and cheer up! I’m going back to the carrot page now.
Is there a plain text version of the manuscript online somewhere, written using the same transcription alphabet you used?
David: there are in fact several transcriptions. I tend to use the Takahashi transcription pulled out from the interlinear EVA transcription, but a lot of people swear by Glen Claston’s 101 transcription which is also good (but has different issues entirely). Being brutally honest, though, unless you’ve got a really bright hunch about what’s going on in Voynichese, it’s fairly unlikely any of these transcriptions will be able to help. Ultimately, “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” is a mystery, however you try to transcribe it.
Well, the computer needs the text in a readily-readable format before it can crunch it! 🙂
It’s very likely that many of the things naive people like myself might try have already been tried, discussed and discarded. What I wanted to do was to generate a graph that shows the relationships between words in the document: which ones appear before or after others; which ones repeat, which ones occur only in chains with certain others, etc.
Apart from anything else, having the text visualised in this way might yield different ways of thinking about it. Of course, this depends heavily on the way the graphing algorithm works, and could be completely arbitrary depending on the input text, but it might highlight certain features.
qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy
cf 24’24” x 24’24”
..its a format which is fairly common in that context – I mean of measuring generally, not only of length or degrees.
For the ‘feet’ sign above. read sign for degrees, which is not available on this borrowed computer.
bd1dr
I’m not sure about Arabic script, but I do think it’s resembles one ‘Arabian’ script.
Nick, can you elaborate on why you prefer the Takahashi transcription, and what the issues are with Claston’s?
Nick, do you know if the “Romany” had/have a written archive? Has this been brought up before?
David O: I prefer EVA to 101 because it’s a less consciously modelled (and hence more neutral) transcription. However, some of the alphabet decisions were a bit foolish (‘s’ in particular) and there are plenty of forms which it assumes without evidence are the same (most notably the variant ‘sh’ forms). 101 is good in that Glen Claston worked hard from good quality scans and included different letters for a number of shape variants that might have differing significance (the ‘sh’ variants but also a number of others). However, he also imposed a rigid ‘glyph’ template (possibly because of his support for Leonell Strong’s claimed decipherment) which isn’t always a great fit for what we see on the page.
Either way, you end up with problems. But the biggest problem remains that the Voynich encipherer was smarter than all this, and he has given us plenty of tangential stuff to tie ourselves in knots with!
David B: I think what’s missing here isn’t so much a transcription as a page properly summarizing (and giving pointers to) what I think are the most valuable Voynich statistical studies done so far, rather than encourage you to reinvent various wheels. For example, the kind of thing you’re talking about here has been well covered by Marke Fincher: you might want to look at this page: http://ciphermysteries.com/2008/06/10/voynich-linguistic-disproof
Nick, while it may be the case that the text is not written in a natural language, I’m not entirely convinced that the document you cited shows it as clearly as one might hope.
The N(w, D) measurements intuitively seem to be what you would expect. It seems to me that you would expect to find more kinds of word pairs on a large scale than on a smaller scale. It would be interesting to measure the frequency of each unique word pair as D changes, though perhaps there’s only limited information to extract from that. I imagine that’s why the average frequency, ASF(w, D), was used as a metric, though I wonder if that isn’t a blunt tool to use just to get a metric. I suppose you’re really looking for a measure of how much more common certain close combinations of words are than they are found on larger scales.
The R(w, D) and ASD(w, D) measures for the VM are interesting, though it’s difficult to tell if the features seen there are due to the language or to other factors, like the structure of the document or the type of content it contains.
The approach raises three questions for me:
1. What do non-Germanic, non-Latin languages look like when measured like this? (Yes, I know he says they look like the others, but it wouldn’t hurt to have one or two in the graphs.)
2. What do they look like if you use certain types of content? To take an extreme example, what do you get if you try to measure the text in a dictionary using this method? What about a song or a poem?
3. How much does this depend on the size of the vocabulary? Thinking about this, someone must have plotted frequency graphs of the words in the manuscript. Something else to check out…
I firmly believe whoever whoever “solves” the Voynich Mystery will have about the same standing and high prestige as the last husband of Elizabeth Taylor, whoever he was.
But how about a natural language that features reduplication? I could say more, but I am marshalling evidence.
Keep smiling, it only gets better.
I rather think that we’ll find the Voynich is itself a key, index – something of that sort.
Page references, as Nick points out, occur throughout the ms.
On transcriptions, I’m surprised that Voynich characters have not been described more neutrally – say by reference to their compositional elements, as a drawing- [not wordprocessing] program might do.
Nick – Am I right in thinking that you regard merlons of this sort as a European invention, created no earlier than the fourteenth century?
Diane: not at all! Swallowtail merlons have a much longer history. They were at their most common then, though.
I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to research the history of battlements, and their various forms of crennelation. The idea appears – so far as I can tell to date – to be an Achaemenid Persian development, adopted somewhat more widely in the post-Hellenistic period, and travelling west along with various techniques of military architecture and archery. But information is largely wanting, probably because military structures are the first to be destroyed. I don’t know that swallowtail merlons were at their most common in the fourteenth century. What does appear to be true is that northern Italians of that period found the style attractive and built numerous examples *which survive* to the present tie. But one can hardly argue from that – an accident of history – that the facade of the building in fol.86v is therefore the facade of a northern Italian building. Very few examples of European use of the swallowtail are not accompanied, in the same structure, by Norman towers, of which no evidence appears on fol.86v. Still, you are much closer to northern Italy than I, and may know an example that lies flanked by such cliffs, and not too far from little mushroom-topped piles of horizontally-striped sedimentary soil. Cheers.
bdid1dr: The P you mention isn’t Arabic, none of the letters are Arabic, that is for sure. 😉
nickpelling: I sent an email to nickpelling.com though I figure you’ve been busy, not sure what one you check most often. I figured I would pass it by you to get your impression.
Not necessarily “Arabic”. While I was googling/researching websites for Nick’s “Blitz Cipher”, I also reviewed several websites concerning the huge variations of handwritten Turkish, Persian, Arabian, Muslim, whatever you want to call the scripts that not only appear in manuscripts but also walls, turrets, whole buildings (inside and out). There appears to be a lot of flexibility within each “style” of writing so as to allow for different levels of learning ability.
To my eyes, Nastalic, or Nast’alic, or N’ast a’lic, seemed to be not only the most beautiful but also most easily read/understood. Another thing I noticed: It appears that most people who learned to read the Koran, were learning by rote, repitition out-loud memorization. How did they learn to write? Did they have to memorize the forms of the letters or did they depend on “scribes” to write for them. If so, did they have to depend on the scribes to make error-free transcriptions? Could it be that the contents of the Voynich manuscript could be “second or third-hand “memory” of what a scribe heard/misheard and then put in writing?
The script I meant is popularly known as zabur script. Otherwise called South Arabian minuscule. The language for which it was used was not Arabic.
You guys can stop using the strong tag so freely. My HTML, rusty when I made the post above, sorry for that. I only meant to put the names in strong tags, the close tag was composed improperly. I attempted to quote in the style of nickpelling.
Your name looks like this, bdid1dr, without strong tags. With strong tags it looks like this, bdid1dr. I used a bad closing tag.
Back to everything Voynich.
It would have been nice if I had the opportunity to study paleo-epigraphy in school for sure, there is a passion for this.
The South Arabian miniscule is very Semetic.
Your name looks like this, bdid1dr, without strong tags. With strong tags it looks like this, bdid1dr. I used a bad closing tag ‘<' instead of '</', see.
Checking to see why the bold bug is all.
3rd times the charm?
Does anyone have links to material about the P-value of the Voynich Manuscript language?
Deepthinks: ummm, the P-value relative to which hypotheses?
What I have been trying to say is that the language/dialect that is hidden beneath the the cipher script is very likely NOT going to be rooted in Latin/European/English/French. I mentioned earlier (in the form of a question) Romany-Gypsy?
I know that here in the US some of our earliest Gypsy emigrants used “tags” that were not obvious to our USA eyes.
So, what if the Romany had a full “written” language that was not obvious to other European eyes? Perhaps the Vms could be a “field guide” for navigating, herb searching, Key trading posts (castles). So, it could be an educated Romney who created the overlying VM script in order to communicate with other Romney who would understand the underlying dialect. (Also remember the Romney were/are still traveling traders, if not full-time, at least they have occasional get-togethers — very much like our indigenous people across North America).
Yes, I am finding the “bold face” entry mode very irritating. Sorry ’bout that Nick. deepthink does seem to be apologetic, though.
I took another look at the V script you highlighted at the top of this page. Just that particular segment has a “rhythm”:
dumpety-dumpety-dah-dumpety-dumpety-dah…..
Chant? Poetry? Curse?
Nick–apologies for piggybacking on your site to reply to bdid1dr. I’m a fan of your work, and looking forward to meeting you in May. I thought I’d respond to bdid1dr’s question regarding the Roma, since I spent a bit of time pursuing this angle when I was in Prague last summer. First off, a bit of bad news: as you are probably aware, there is no record of Romany having a written culture during this time (this does not preclude the possibility of the Voynich being an invented/secret script to record the Romany language, of course). The reason I was following this possibility was that I’d catalogued a number of intriguing but inconclusive similarities between some VMs imagery and iconography from India (http://voynichsources.wordpress.com/25-2/), which is of course where the Roma first originated. Interestingly, Roma first appear in the Prague environs about the same time as the VMS carbon dating. A few more interesting facts: I believe Romany is an agglutinative language, which might lend it some superficial morphological similarities with VMs words. It is one of the few Indian languages that uses articles, which can be written as a proclitic (I can explain why this has interest for VMs labels if you’re interested.) Furthermore, the VMs script bears some superficial similarities to some Indic scripts, both in orthography and, depending on how you look at it, word length (Indic writing is typically abugida). Also, cryptography was more advanced in India than Europe. There are other intriguing links that could be listed here, but there are some rather significant issues to overcome as well. Always fun to speculate, however.
Reed: if Voynichese was a super-early written Roma, there are countless features of Roma (not least of which its vocabulary) that I’m sure we would see reflected in its archetypical word structure, rather simply than in aspects of its labels (which for all their intriguing statistical interest take up only a tiny fraction of the whole document). Doubtless you’ve wrestled with this problem already… but given that it’s the rock every single language hypothesis ship founders upon (if not actually sinks), it would be remiss of me not to say. =:-o
Also: lots of Indian fun in your voynichsources page… though of course Indian written culture has an almost limitless amount of material to work with for anyone really, really wanting to find parallels. All the same, the astrology parallels given aren’t at all unexpected, because a great deal of medieval European astrological materiel ultimately came from Indian astrology sources, so there may well indeed be twisty historical strands that connect them all, though not necessarily in the kind of super-direct way that would be useful. :-/
See you in May! 🙂
Hi Nick! Thanks for writing–yes, you are right about features of morphology and syntax that should appear throughout the VMs. For instance, if Roma is a Indo-Aryan language, we might expect to see ‘reduplication,’ which is a syntactic feature of those languages in which syllables or words are repeated, either identically or with a slight difference, for various reasons (for emphasis, for instance)–perhaps an explanation for your repeated sequences of words in the VMs. Ditto on the agglutinative morphology, which might possibly be seen in VMs word structure. About the labels, my only point was that if we agree that labels are likely to be nouns (a reasonable conclusion), then you’d see a limited number of articles affixed to the front of the word (for instance, I believe the Romany definite article for uninflected masculine singular is an “o,” so label words might be expected to often begin with this letter (as indeed they do in the VMs). I’m not sure even an exotic unencrypted language such as Romany would display the right statistical properties, however (digraph entropy comes to mind).
About the connections between European and Indian astrology, you’re of course correct. However, European astrology does not divide each zodiac sign into a light and dark segment of 15 ‘tithi’, each represented by a star and a female deity–something that does seem to resemble the VMs. Also, some of the more odd images of the VMs (such as the woman being swallowed waist-down by the fish) seem to be iconographic tropes in Indian astrology/cosmology. And I personally think my explanation of the conch shell image is rather more persuasive than the medieval douchebag :). Cheers!
Thank you, Reed and Nick, for giving my Q’s some consideration and lengthy response! Oh, and thanks for so politely overlooking my references to Romany (people) and Romney (sheep)! Sometimes, I actually read about the one while spinning the other’s fleece!
Nick, Dianne, Reed,
When it comes time to do more research on battlements and merlons (wouldn’t it be great if we could actually identify the V’s castle) y’all might want to check out Patrick Lockerby’s website (if you haven’t already).
Back to my carding and spinning (NOT Romany.
Nick, Diane, Jim:
Any chance of finding paintings/drawings of Prague Castle’s structures (battlements/towers) as they would have appeared in the 13th-14th centuries? Something to compare with the palace-castle front in the VMs.
As I bid adieu to Nick a little while ago, I referred him to Castle Karlstejn, just a few kilometers from Prague. It’s a fair match to the VMs Rosette “Kastel Kartle” (my “take” on the script).
I’m off on some other voyages of discovery, now. So long! Keep on keepin’ on!
Salut !
Looking closely at this group of words I propose to replace the third letter in words 2 and 5 by another letter, because it is different from the third letter words 1 and 4.
Also the fourth letter of words 4 and 5 is different from the fourth letter of words 1 and 2, it may be “o”.
If we replace it will become “qokedy qo?edy dal qokody qo?ody.”
Chercheuse: the (EVA) k-shapes look extremely similar to me – may I ask you what precise letter shape differences you are referring to? The idea of steganography is to make things that are different look the same to everyone except the people who are attuned to noticing the differences. 🙂
If I number four “qokedy” from 1 to 4, in the first and third, the left foot of the letter “k” is straight, whereas in the second and fourth, its upper part is clearly leaning toward the right
Nick, Chercheuse:
I arrived at my reading of the famed (notorious?) qokedy sequences (as they appear on the Rosettes pages) by first visiting Nick’s referral to the “Carrot Museum” article. One of the ‘castle’ rosettes had that sequence written beneath the ‘portal” of the castle. So, I read the phamous phrase from right to left — and came up with Kastel Kartle. So, I went looking for castles which pronunciations would resemble that spelling.
Closest I found was Castle KARLSTEJN. There you have it — for what it is worth.
BTW, the Rosette I refer to is the upper right hand corner of the opened folio.
You may need to set your magnification levels pretty high to see what I saw.
bdid1dr –
I don’t think that you’ll ever find a concrete version of the merlon’d structures on fol.86v. The location, though, is somewhere in Asia Minor, and judging from the way the cliffs are depicted, and the proximity of what can only be the ‘chimney’ pinnacles of Cappadocia, I opted for Hierapolis as the original site meant.
Diane:
Re your Q at top of this section (item 17)re cliffs mud piles and swallowtail merlons/castles:
On another post just the other day, I mentioned the hot springs near Capri and their being described in one of Kircher’s tomes. I’ve done so much posting re Kircher’s enormous archive, you may be able to backtrack on my trail. Primary ref.was the castles that appear in the “Rosettes” pages (uppermost right corner palace/castle). Fun!
I’m a “hot spring” visitor as far back as the ’80s. My favorite hot spring is a 25 foot high hot waterfall, by which one gets pummeled while climbing the ladder up the cliffside. Once one wades through the hip-deep pond/overflow to where the hot creek has created hollowed-out lounge chairs, a hot pummeling of neck/shoulder/back ensues.
Ennyway, as far as I could tell those hot springs near Capri have been in use for centuries. Perhaps you can find castle ruins nearby that fit your description?
Nick & Diane,
See my posts #29-30 on Esther Molen’s commentary (re her interpretation of the Michitonese being almost a word-for-word match with Kircher’s standard “greeting” to the readers of his tomes).
Phlagraean Fields — The particular subject that Kircher was referring to when he was writing on the healthful benefits of hot water. He prefaced his writings with the phrase that Esther Molen recently translated from the opening lines of the Michitonese (f116).
I am going back to Stanford and OU’s extensive Kircher holdings to see if Kircher used that greeting with each and/or every topic he was discussing. (?)
Also, I’m hoping that some of Reed Johnson’s recent contributions to the discussion re India origins of Romany (and the pictorial comparisons he made) might also lead to more pictorial comparisons with the Balnealogical sections of the VMs.
It is looking more and more like Kircher may have inherited the VMs from Rudolph II’s extensive holdings of Crown property, paintings, curiousities, manuscripts and all, that Rudolph’s successor transferred to Karlstejn upon Rudolph’s death. Wikipedia has an excellant bio. on the Hapsburgs.
Nick, I’m sure you’ve written here somewhere about Nicholas Bion, but since the search doesn’t turn it up, here’s a link with lots of nice pictures.
http://www.duke.edu/web/isis/gessler/collections/crypto-nicolas-bion.htm
Diane: no, hadn’t seen that cipher disk before, a nice little object! 🙂
Cipher wheels with numbers are interesting…as they could address a combined verbose polyalphabet solution which would satisfy the entropy issue..and provide for the EVA “dai???” etc
Trithmeius had one as well in his Clavis Steganographie (pg 53 in the link towards the end)…the issue is finding a historical example that switched between letters and numbers without ambiguity…
http://books.google.ca/books?id=gQdCAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=trithemius&hl=en#v=onepage&q=trithemius&f=false
Yes, the disks can be very helpful with encryptioning. Do they work as well with handwritten/handprinted documents, if one is unsure what letters (alphabets) are being written?
bdid1dr,
Not sure I understand your question…cipher wheels and tabula recta were tools for polyalphabet ciphers. The keys which changed the alphabets varied, with published methods by Alberti, Trithmeius, Porta and many others. As far as the Voynich is concerned there is very little appetite for a polyalphabet solution based on cipher wheels etc due to the entropy values and strong word structure found in the VMs…I’m still playing with it though, trying to resolve the ambiguities.
In Nick’s intro note above, re the frequent ‘4o’ ciphers that may be “shorthand”.
How about words like quorum, quotas, quake …
Now I’m posing the possibility that the “4o” (or even just the “4” character is the substitute cipher for the “Kw” sound. Another “K” sound could be represented by the cipher “c” if it appeared thusly:
“cc” or “c-c”. ????
Another more recent “shorthand” I’ve seen is “chk” for Czechoslavakian, checkbook, checkmark……
I am still somewhat puzzled by all of the various attempts to decipher what appears, to me, to be an-all-handwritten document written in at least two different “hands” and two lanquages. The michitonese section has a “Latin” base. Proof of this can be found in any on-line edition of Athanasius Kircher’s voluminus publications (being held in various university libraries). Whereby Kircher begins each topic section with the phrase that begins the michitonese section of the VMS: “Cherish liber….. etc. This tells me that Kircher “took credit” for most, if not all of the publications bearing his name, from his various Jesuit missionaries’ reports.
I’m getting the idea that the VMs was very likely just one of many Ms’s submitted to Kircher. This particular document may have been written by a “missionary” writing in the language used by his “parish” rather than Latin.
So, find the base language, HANDWRITTEN, so that the script can be compared with samples of handwriting from Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Russia, India, Pakistan, maybe even Poland? Find a “Greek”, a Muslim base, Russian, whatever, written in lower case HANDWRITTEN base. On another post, not too long ago, I mentioned a gentleman who has hand-written an entire dictionary of his home language. He has also hand-written the BIBLE in FOUR languages.
What more can I say? Nobody seems particularly interested in being able to HEAR Mr. Bislim read his manuscript aloud in four languages, as well as watch his slide show that shows photos of the handwritten document pages. He would probably jump at the chance to read/interpret the VMs.
Nick,
See my latest post on your “Alternative VM page” (posted just this am (Wed) 14 March.
I’ll leave another note, here, so you might understand my latest referral (#50 above).
I visited Beinecke’s hoard again. This time I was hoping to, maybe, find a manuscript that would match Vrancic’s publication. What I did find, however, ms#662, which was a “mermaid” bowing a lute-like musical instrument; a cat strumming a guitar/lute, a woman’s torso on a lion’s body, and a man wearing a tight-fitting red garment, climbing a treetrunk/ladder.
So, do you think it’s worth a prowl through the Beinecke to see if there might be some ms’s that would shed more light on the Voynich’s language base?
Nick, Reed,
I first commented about those strange images that I found in Beinecke Ms 662 — on your reactivated “2011 Polish Page” — on page l of this year’s (2012) posts.
I am just trying to keep the “trail” open so that y’all can compare with Reed’s recent contributions to the discussion re possible “RomanyIndia associations with the VMs.
There might be some slight association of Beinecke Ms 662 with our mystery Vms?
In re items 51-52 above:
It was a pig strumming the lute. The woman’s torso was in the shape of an ogre’s head attached to the lion’s body.
The reference notes for Cue’s ms called these wierd creatures “grotesques”.
Cue apparently had a school/tutored students in the art or manuscript pictorial enhancement. They didn’t call them “Book of Hours for nothing: It appears that there is a “theme” for nearly every hour of the days and nights. (?)
Diane!
I am SO dizzy backtracking on your posts re Nicholas of Bion (Bishop of Cues)! We now have to wonder if there is any connection between Cue of Paris (and his school/workshop for manuscript illuminations. If you haven’t already dove into the Beinecke references, I hope you will–soon! Not that I’m twisting your arm or anything like that………..Actually, the illustrations are quite beautiful, grotesques and all!
Diane, Reed, Rene,
Do any of you know why Nick has not responded to my latest posts on his “Alternative Voynich Page”? Am I “in trouble”?
bdid1dr: Nick’s just been tied up on real-world stuff. 🙂
Ciao!
%^
A more gentle “good-bye”:
arrivederci !
Bd –
Search the blog here about Nicolas of Cues (=Cusa) or read ‘The Curse…’
Nick did so much work on the man’s history, library, friends and colleagues and so on.
I only knew of his astronomical work, and added notes here to amuse Nick with the links I’d brought up. Not a topic that I’d claim as a contribution to Voynich studies, though.
delicious irony: a couple of days ago one of the ‘its-a-hoax’ faith community actually quoted you:
“In reality, the Voynich Manuscript laughs at people’s .. attempts”.. and then ended.. “which in my opinion proves its a fantasy”
Thought you’d like that story (fact!)
Diane: it is a nice irony, indeed. 🙂 What such people (whoever they are) know about the nuances of historical proof is normally embarrassingly small. The bigger picture is normally that these are people whose education has been dominated by science, and who try to infer (from the apparent lack of scientific proof) that the VMs must be a hoax. It’s a tragedy, really – and why isn’t my son being taught the trivium and quadrivium, eh? 😉
“The famous castles in the Voynich’s nine-rosette page clearly seem to have the swallow-tail merlons familiar from 14th and 15th century, pointing to a European (possibly even Northern Italian) origin”.
I don’t see that this follows. Anyone who’d seen such merlons ~ as they might have done from the 12thC on ~ might ornament a drawing this way, as sign of.. whatever they liked… Can’t be a structure standing in northern Italy, I think. It’s placed on the sunrise side of the spiral (sea, I think) and en route between Cappadocia and the south-eastern Mediterranean.
But that is good ~ isn’t it? Gives you more historical elbow-room.
Diane: that’s all “European”, ain’t it? Northern Italy is merely where it all spread out from, so it’s just a matter of probability at this point in the reasoning chain. 🙂