The Voynich Manuscript is a dismal reality TV channel, where every participant’s ten minutes of fame segues quickly into an eternity of opprobrium: few people dipping their feet into its toxic slurry get to keep all their toes for very long. I’m sorry to have to say such a thing, but as the modern philosophers Run and DMC put it, “it’s like that, and that’s the way it is“.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, somewhat surprisingly (at least to me), Gordon Rugg has this week returned to the Voynich’s rancid riverside with a fresh supply of podalic digits for dunking. But this time around he’s appropriating its mysteries not to promote the claimed benefits of his “Verifier Method” (a meme which seems not to have taken root), but to promote his newly-patented toy for 2013, that he somewhat grandly calls the Search Visualizer (rather as if he’s inventing a whole new field).

Yet unless I’ve misunderstood it significantly, all the Search Visualizer actually does is:
* draw a rectangle representing an input document
* draw dots on it wherever one of a user-defined set of syllables or words appears, with each dot a different colour.
Thus a SV user can, for example, map out that ‘witch’ and ‘sleep’ appear in different clusters within Macbeth. So far, so facile.

Nonetheless, I (perhaps) hear you ask eagerly, what can the Search Visualizer teach us about – dan dan darrrr – the Voynich Manuscript? Unsurprisingly (given the amount of exposure his Voynich claims gave the Verifier Method all those years ago), that’s the subject of this week’s blog post from him.

Having used SV to draw a lot of diagrams of (in the EVA transcription) “daiin”, “qo”, “dy”, and “ol”, Rugg concludes from the “banding” (basically, section structure) visible in those diagrams that…

It’s completely inconsistent with the theory that Voynichese is a single unidentified language, or with the theory that Voynichese consists of two dialects of a single unidentified language.

If we’re looking at dialects, then there are at least six of them, and some appear to be more different from each other than English is from German, at least on the preliminary results from my work so far (I looked at other German texts, and saw the same distribution patterns as in the book example above).

If we’re looking at a coded text, then there appear to be at least half a dozen different versions of the code, or at least half a dozen different codes producing similar but not identical types of text.

Of course, the main person who failed to grasp that the whole Currier-A-&-B-languages things wasn’t anything like a binary either-or (despite Rene & I telling him several times, as I recall) was, errrm, Gordon Rugg himself. So this is, unusually, a straw man argument where the straw man is the researcher himself (but 9 years in the past).

Anyway, even though his “Verifier Method” (in my opinion) falls well short of David Hackett Fisher’s splendid book “Historians’ Fallacies”, let’s apply it to the Search Visualizer:-

1. Accumulate knowledge of a discipline through interviews and reading.

I’ve read the article and most of his website, too. I’m an IT professional and a computer scientist. I can see what he’s doing: rectangles and coloured dots.

2. Determine whether critical expertise has yet to be applied in the field.

As far as the Voynich Manuscript goes, I don’t see any reference to:-
* codicology (though he’s added an addendum noting that the order of the pages may be wrong in “some cases”, this clearly isn’t reflected in his conclusions, which are almost entirely about the whole “banding” and “sub-banding” thing)
* Prescott Currier’s famous analysis (A pages, B pages, but plenty of intermediate ‘dialects’ too) isn’t mentioned once. That’s right, not once. Anywhere.
* statistical analyses carried out by researchers other than Gordon Rugg or his students.

Sorry, but that seems like a very uncritical, self-contained way of working.

I would add that I don’t see a lot of critical expertise being applied to historical cryptography: what instead appears seems to be a partial rendering of the history to support previously held positions.

3. Look for bias and mistakenly held assumptions in the research.

There’s plenty of bias towards his grille method, as well as naysaying against mainstream historical cryptography (which, let’s remember, he is trying to rewrite to support his particular story).

There’s also bias towards his 16th century dating in the face of fairly rock-solid scientific, art history, codicological, and palaeographic dating to the start/middle of the 15th century, which doesn’t really appear in his presentation.

4.Analyze jargon to uncover differing definitions of key terms.

What Rugg calls “Search Visualization” (drawing a rectangle of coloured dots) surely seems rather a low-grade kind of search. The point about “search” (in the Google sense) is surely that it finds things you didn’t previously know about and includes filters that promote relevance: whereas feeding pre-determined syllables and drawing coloured dots in a rectangle is only barely pattern-matching, and only barely visualization.

5. Check for classic mistakes using human-error tools.

* Using an outdated transcription
* Not filtering out all the embedded comments (is there a better explanation for this than sheer laziness?)
* Relying on computer science alone without integrating genuine historical research
* Arguing from possibility rather from probability or fact
* Not responding to criticism from actual domain experts

6. Follow the errors as they ripple through underlying assumptions.

(Too boring to do if so many mistakes have been identified in steps 1-5.)

7. Suggest new avenues for research that emerge from steps one through six.

Surely a proper academic would be building a tool that would find telling letter clusters for you from an input text, using Hidden Markov Models and all kinds of proper statistical mechanisms? Shouldn’t something like the Search Visualizer be about finding things you don’t already know about, and only then helping you visualize them?

All in all, I find it extraordinarily hard not to get cross about this, because Rugg seems to be exactly reprising what he did all those years ago, once again at the cost of the whole research area. And once again, his driving force appears to be “ask not what you can do for the Voynich Manuscript, ask what it can do for you.” Sad, very sad.

80 thoughts on “Gordon Rugg, the Search Visualizer, and the Voynich…

  1. Indeed, the slurry with the skim on top.

    At the moment – oh, so surprisingly – I’m boiling at the neo-scholastic-ising (not as good as your podalic digits, but you English have a way with the words) – of this field.

    Had I the power, I’d call a new VMS Conference, and not one of the speakers would be involved in Vms ‘research’.

    There’d be a biblical scholar to talk about how to treat perceived similarities between manuscripts, to determine if X (Voynich) came from Y (alchemists’ herbs), or whether both were tangentially related to an unknown ‘A’ =ur text.

    Then there’s be someone from the V&A, or Christies to point out the relevant details in the pharma vessels, show comparative and *relevant* examples, and explain how conclusions should be drawn from this.

    Then, of course, a codicologist – to comment upon and develop from the remarks of the previous two.

    Next an expert in the history of book-binding and -making to comment on implications which might be drawn from a consideration of the quires, especially that part normally hidden by the binding.

    Finally a scholar expert and aged, to discuss epigraphy, and what regions might be suggested by forms used in the Voynich script, and what he or she thought about current definitions of glyph-forms: whether different types of ‘9’ are really different.

    Then an archaeologist to comment more generally on both imagery and depicted artefacts.

    With a considerable amount of good fortune, these experts’ informed and wholly objective comment might turn around the whole field.

    At the very least, if they weren’t too embarrassed to admit having touched this subject, they’d have another paper to publish. (as if!)

    Thanks – the steam-level is now below the red line.

    Diane

    PS – don’t anyone else respond to this for at least a week!

  2. OK Nick –

    you’ve convinced me.

    Diane

  3. Diane on April 17, 2013 at 2:27 pm said:

    rock-solid …. art history … dating to the start/middle of the 15th century.

    or not.

    http://voynichimagery.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/update-on-the-fish-bull-story/

  4. Diane: or not not. 🙂

  5. Diane on April 17, 2013 at 4:35 pm said:

    Pity we can’t have a real talk, over a coffee and I could explain properly the different parameters of the art historians’ work and that of the art analyst.

    I usually use the example of a 13thC german psalter, comparing its description by the holding library, compared to a description in full. In the one case, a person ignorant of the wider context could be forgiven for concluding that the Psalms were composed in Latin, in Germany, and by an otherwise unattested member of the German royal house.

    You could point to the fact that the Psalter was plainly European, plainly in Latin, plainly written in a German hand; that the text nominated King David as composer, and pictured him in what was plainly 13thC German costume.

    Description of a specific manuscript-as-object is essentially a description of its manufacture.

    Not all that relevant when the origin, language and script are quite undetermined.

    I take your word about cipher-related things, though. There’s that.

  6. Diane: the specific Art History technique I’m referring to is parallel hatching (which the Voynich has in various places), which was only really used for a few decades in the 15th century, before yielding to crosshatching.

  7. Diane on April 17, 2013 at 6:04 pm said:

    Nick –

    the way things are, Voynich studies has two options: to abandon the ’32-blink’ or to adopt Rugg’s idea that the reason the text is not understood is that there was never anything to understand.

    Since the evidence provided by the imagery, botany, pharma section, bathy- section, folio 86v is all incompatible with first origins in medieval Europe, there’s no hope for solving the text within that limit.

    I expect though, that some are busy even as we speak investigating certain things *nd*an.

    D*ane.

  8. Diane on April 17, 2013 at 6:39 pm said:

    Nick – our posts crossed.

    You say

    parallel hatching … which was only really used for a few decades in the 15th century, before yielding to crosshatching.

    That is simply not true.

  9. Diane: please feel free to point me to papers, articles, chapters, whatever that proves this wrong. It’s an assertion I derived having read a whole load of different sources on 15th century art history. The two posts that sum my position up are:-
    http://ciphermysteries.com/the-voynich-manuscript/voynich-parallel-hatching
    http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/12/18/pre-1450-german-voynich-possibility
    As always, the main reason I post this kind of stuff to the blog is so that people can prove me wrong and I get to learn something amazing. 🙂

  10. Diane on April 18, 2013 at 7:25 am said:

    Nick –
    if you’d like to give me examples you prefer, I’ll put a post up on my blog about it.

    I really don’t want to argue and write here at (unavoidable) length about questions are being begged etc.

    In the meantime, you might consider the Oxford definition, which manages a nicely neutral tone though the second sentence might have begun ‘In Europe’s artistic tradition…’.

    The use of closely spaced parallel lines to suggest shading. The technique is found mainly in drawing and engraving, but is also used, for example, in tempera painting.

  11. Diane on April 18, 2013 at 9:34 am said:

    May I quote your first sentence?

  12. Diane: egg tempera, too, died out circa 1500, replaced by the tonal nuances of oil painting, a far more rock’n’roll contemporary artistic medium. 🙂

  13. Nick, You are playing, aren’t you?

    Diane

  14. Diane: mostly! 🙂

  15. Diane: quoting is fine. 🙂

  16. bdid1dr on April 18, 2013 at 2:40 pm said:

    Nick,

    Give people enough rope and they’ll hang themselves? Or, perhaps, tie themselves in knots?

  17. Diane on April 18, 2013 at 4:15 pm said:

    Oh bd1dr – how thoughtful of you to mention the nakshatras, but is it relevant to this post, or might it be better posted elsewhere, do you think?

  18. Hi voynicheros. ( little to help and advice you)

    The algorithm is written on page 116. There is written the at Czech language. Have you found (algorithm)
    ——————————————————————

    VM is encrypted and written in Czech language. It is also used gematria. The manuscript describes the Czech history. The manuscript began Silesian piastovna Hlohovská Anna, wife of John II. of Rosenberg. The last entry made last Rosenberg Petr Vok.

  19. There are a number of tools to show positions in the text of specific nGrams, words, and regex strings. Essentially, it’s a matter of formatting search/replace results. Search Visualizer, in that capacity, is appropriate to the article.

    There are more informative visualizations of VMs divisions by Stolfi, Zandbergen, and Kazil. Also, Petr Kazil made comparisons with old German texts. These are no longer available. A re-creation in miniature by the method is on my wiki/website, along with an introduction to a similar but simpler method. Some years ago I published dozens of images by the second method. Edit distance charts are an alternative especially suited to the VMs with its many similar words.

    Sections, however one sorts them out, are definitely not discrete entities. That is one side of the coin. The other side is the presence or absence of specific characteristics. It is correct that sections of the VMs are more different from each other in some respects than modern German and English are different from each other. That applies to several different languages, as I have shown (with no jumped conclusions).
    http://notakrian.pbworks.com/w/page/Density%20of%20the%20most%20frequent%202-grams

    A Markov mimic of the VMs is very good at low k because of the “composites”, yet still has errors at k8. Therefore, any uninformed scheme to stick together glyphs from Stolfi’s categories can not replicate a reasonable version the VMs. No such claims were made in presenting the core-mantle-crust idea. Neither can Markov analyse the format of the VMs.

    Hoopla and false impression of originality doesn’t alter my own similar assessments of the VMs to those made in the blog. I think that holds for many people. No promethean revelations; just a rational position. Two or three people might have other opinions.

  20. Nick, I should have thought to do this earlier. Easy,, tho slightly dishonest disproof about hatching’s being used only for a short time in Europe:
    http://dnodonovan.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/voynicheriana-26-teacher.jpg

  21. and now formally.
    This one’s not too weasel-y I hope 🙂
    http://voynichimagery.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/hatching/

  22. Diane: well… let’s just say I’d prefer it if you could find parallel hatching in a manuscript that art historians largely agree upon. For is not the presence of sophisticated parallel hatching a reasonably good indication that at least some of the drawings were added to the papyrus roll in 1440 or later? :-p

  23. Diane on April 20, 2013 at 4:11 pm said:

    No – that’s precisely the point.

    As I said in that post – because the P. Artemid has been the subject of controversy and no-one pushing the ‘fake’ argument (they being very much in the minority, I mght add) has ever tried to suggest that the hatching is a point in their favour – someting they surely would do if the technique were inappropriate to the papyrus’ C-14 date, i.e 1st-2ndC., it is evident that on this, at least, they must agree that the technique was in use by that time, and in Egypt.

    So, I’m sorry Nick, but the ‘hatching’ argument for the Voynich doesn’t prove the manuscript’s content originated when the ms itself was made.

    And when you add that to the other evidence of non-European origin ~ for the imagery at least ~ the whole assumption of European ‘authorship’ for content as well as manufacture is one that I’m amazed was ever held as long and as with as little scrutiny as it has been.

    Europeans simply did not imagine the sun being reborn from a lotus, and that alone should have awakened people to the likelihood of earlier and external provenance. For content, I mean.

    D

  24. Diane on April 20, 2013 at 4:38 pm said:

    PS –
    ಠ_ರೃ

  25. Diane: it may be that nobody has pushed the hatching argument because they weren’t aware of it. 🙂

  26. Diane on April 20, 2013 at 7:01 pm said:

    That’s the funniest comment that I’ve ever seen on your blog. Really. Now I have the giggles – so unbecoming to my age and grey-haired dignity.
    Thnkx

  27. bdid1dr on April 21, 2013 at 12:23 am said:

    Have faith Nick,

    Any time you want the argumentation to come to an end, I can give you a latin alphabet/phoneme for every Vms character. I can also provide the clerks’ shorthand/abbreviations which appear in the Voynich manuscript.

    What I can’t do is maintain a blog. I have neither the peripherals nor the camera/sound equipment. On various of your other pages I have indicated where sometimes a single VMs character is a phoneme.

    So, if you really are “down in the dumps” (US slang, probably translates roughly to “down in the mouth” English, and probably Aussie’s have a similar expression) and seriously depressed, and “fed up” to boot, give me a nod. If you would like to see my offering “off-line”. Would it be feasible for me to send a “hard-copy” via snailmail to your Compelling Press mailbox?

  28. thomas spande on April 24, 2013 at 10:19 pm said:

    Dear all, How does one distinguish between parallel lines used to create the illusion of folds in a shirt (jacket) sleeve cuff and hatching to emphasize a 3D-like shape? Is this not at the heart of the friendly (I hope) difference of opinion between Nick and Diane? It is hard with my monitor to make anything more of that sleeve than just fabric folds. I doubt that this is what Nick had in mind with his argument on parallel hatching. The VM abounds in the type of hatching that Nick refers to. Cheers, Tom

  29. Diane O'Donovan on April 25, 2013 at 11:01 am said:

    Dear Thomas
    The crux of my (certainly) amiable dispute on the point is the unspoken assumption so common in Voynich circles that was is known in Europe is known only in Europe, and thus that all the unasked (let alone unanswered) and most basic questions regarding the antecedents for its *content* can be ignored by a circular argument, self-referentially European.
    Showing that the technique of hatching can’t be used to argue first origins when and where the manuscript was made points out the problematic nature of the “all-European” position.

    It may even prove to be the correct position, but that can’t be established by anything save evidence, and in my opinion the evidence being cited is.. let me be tactful here… inadequate to bearing the weight placed on it.

    Diane

  30. thomas spande on April 26, 2013 at 8:55 pm said:

    Dear all, Unless one can find an unambiguous example of parallel hatching significantly predating the likely creation of the VM text (I am not convinced by that papyrus example of Diane’s), then I think, Nick’s argument holds for the time being. His point that many may be unaware of this argument I think is not any justified cause for merriment. Nick for instance did not refer to it in his book.

    Nick and others have mentioned perfumery in connection with the VM botanicals and Nick wrote a nice essay on this in 2009, yet some of us (me for example) were evidently unaware of this and neglected to credit it. Or has this become such a part of the accepted canon of Voynichiana that it is no longer needful of citation?

    A cursory glance at the VM botanicals turns up at least 11 examples of parallel hatching: f1v, 3r, 7r, 16v, 23v, 32v, 44r, 45v, 49r, 51r, and 56v, Assume that it did originate in N. Italy, maybe even Florence. This does not prevent it from popping up all over the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Aegean, and Asia minor as the Florentines, Venetians and Genoans frequented these areas either through trade or occupation and were often present at the same time. Even if Voynichers find examples slightly predating or postdating the VM herbals (like the 1461 Armenian-Persian zodiac figures) this is neither a necessary nor sufficient proof for a non-European origin of this drawing technique. Only by finding clear cut non-European examples several generations earlier than the VM botanical depictions, would (maybe?) a skeptical critic be convinced . The parallel hatching has to be used to emphasize texture, e.g. bulging, roundness or convexity. Then we are referring to the same thing. If the herbal depictions are copied from undated much earlier work, then all bets are off. Until such an eventuality is proved however, Nick’s idea of dating the VM drawings by their use of parallel hatching is, I think, the best idea out there at the moment for putting an approximate date on the herbal delinations.

  31. Tricia on April 27, 2013 at 4:29 am said:

    Thomas
    which post is about perfumery?

  32. thomas spande on April 29, 2013 at 9:21 pm said:

    Tricia, I just googled “Nick Pelling voynich manuscript” and perfumery and up popped some rather old blogs of Nick’s on the subject. Most was ca. 2009. Hope this helps.

    Diane has done more on this recently and from what I can deduce, posits 16 likely components that can be mixed in a number of ways to yield over 1800 individual perfumes. She is quick to point out that these are medieval plants known to the perfumers of that time but have not yet been pinned down as to any VM botanical. I seem to recall a little table of 20 likely ingredients but that has distilled into the ether or my mind was wandering. Cheers, Tom

  33. Diane on April 30, 2013 at 4:11 pm said:

    Thomas,

    That table was just as example of the maths.

    Perfumes were made in medieval Egypt using eastern ingredients but to find exactly which would take many weeks’ concerted work even if the primary sources exist and are accessible.

    I’m ‘off’ Voynich things for the moment.

    Not only because years’ work seems to have sunk silently into the …what was it.. yes, “toxic slurry”, but also by realising how toxified I’ve become.

    More kudos to Stofi, Nick, Wiart and Mazar and those many others who either quit or managed to remain amiable.

  34. Diane on May 10, 2013 at 8:29 am said:

    Rugg’s decision to describe the cc, and ccc, etc. as meaningless filler is just that – his decision. You’ve offered alternative explanations, including their being page numbers.

    Oddly enough it was a bit of Spm which gave me the idea (doubtless sometime, somewhere already suggested) that the cc groups might be neutral replacements for items that were white noise to the copyist, or deemed unnecessary by a person directing the copying. Chinese, Japanese or other characters are one obvious example

    Another might be position-markers (like page numbers or verse numbers) not needed in the copy because only extracts were being copied.

    Another, of course, is that either or both the cc & ii groups are acting as our dotted or dashed lines, indicating omissions or replications or even blessings or bell-ringing.. but omissions made deliberately.

  35. thomas spande on May 21, 2013 at 5:50 pm said:

    Dear all, I am in the deep end of the pool on this one but I think only the “c” in an odd number of those glyphs is a null. I think the others can be assigned as follows: cc=e; c-c=i; c-c* (with a curlicue above the line)=u and c-c with a “)” above the last c is a scribal abbreviation (yet to be determined). This works for a lot of shorter words. It will be noted that none represent a “c” per se. That job falls, I think, to the “4”. The VM glyphs “a” and “o” are actually used for those vowels . This completes the vowels used in the VM. Note that a lone “c” pops up repeatedly and I think can be excluded as a null. Likewise with c-cc, c-c*c and ccc exclude the last c. Some redundancy is present in the VM as I think 89 represents “et” so “8” alone is an “e” as is cc. Some glyphs are Armenian letters or phonemes, like the tipped ? (=ch), that “8-like thing with a rocker on the base (8*) is an “f”. So “8a8*= eaf and stands for leaf (surprisingly not the Latin “folio”; 8a?= each. The backward “S” in Armenian is “S” in Roman BUT in the VM it is usually part of a cunning scribal abbreviation where it can be seen in many cases to be a null c under a “)”, i.e.clearly two scribal strokes. Both scribes use it. What has popped up in my partial decrypts is a surprising amount of plain old English and German. It is the scribal abbreviations or their own “Tironian” note system that lies at the heart of cracking the VM cipher system. Nick was first to point this out. If the usual Tironian notes had been employed, the VM would have been easier to crack and here and there they do appear but the appearance of any T.N. or abbreviations at all was most unusual in the medieval period as Nick again drew my attention to. It disappeared in the writing of medieval Italian as in Dante. The VM was deliberately made to look older textually than it really was.

    There does appear to be differences between the two scribes #1 and #2 (Currier nomenclature) in the scribal abbreviations they use although many are common, like the c”)” combo for the backward “s”. My preliminary take on this is that they are adding their own abbreviations from a common plaintext that they are copying and that might have had some Tironian notes but these were generally removed although a few do remain.

  36. xplor on May 21, 2013 at 7:31 pm said:

    Does any of Gordon Rugg’s work show the natural redundancy found in human language ?

  37. xplor: ah, all I’ll say is that there are plenty of people whose output shows far more signs of excessive linguistic redundancy and over-predictability than Gordon Rugg’s does. 🙂

  38. Hi Nick.

    Gordon Rugg never decipher handwriting. ( manuscript).
    Does not know the Czech language.

    In the manuscript there are no shortcuts !
    The author uses ( writes) a word. ( whole ) ( Full )

  39. thomas spande on May 23, 2013 at 9:17 pm said:

    Professor: Are your referring to Czech Latin?

  40. Thomas Spande. ( Not Latin )
    ____________________

    The manuscript is the not of Latin. The entire manuscript is written in the Czech language. Describes Czech history.

    (secret information) Secrets of the old aristocratic family of the Rosenbergs.
    The basis for decryption is important to know the Czech language. Instructions for decryption is written in many place in the manuscript. ( For example, the first page. A or on the last page. 116 ).
    Instructions are written in Czech language. As a whole manuscript.

  41. thomas spande on May 28, 2013 at 6:16 pm said:

    Dear all, It was “b” who drew my attention to the different forms of “9” that appear in the VM. Initially, I thought the “9’s” with a long curved descender were just scribal flourishes but I am leaning to thinking that they are used to hide a missing following letter, i.e. they represent another scribal abbreviation. I think the standard “9” where the descender does not extend beyond the first strokes of the glyph, represent a “t” and that where a significantly longer tail is seen, that this represents a t[…] where the bracketed letter is missing and might be an “r” for example. I think the backward “s” done with two strokes of the scribal pen, might be “st” usually. It is my hope that these scribal abbreviations ALWAYS refer to the same pair of letters, i.e. the same diglyph, otherwise decrypting the VM will become a much bigger task. In another post at another site, I mentioned “m” with a “)” attached. This was a mistake, I meant an “n” with “)” which would look then like an “i” with the tipped “?”.

  42. xplor on May 28, 2013 at 9:53 pm said:

    Český Krumlov, Bohemia could very well be the source of the manuscript.

  43. Diane on May 29, 2013 at 5:58 am said:

    xplor –

    Are you basing your view on the manuscript’s style of manufacture, palaeography or the range of materials, may I ask?

  44. thomas spande on June 14, 2013 at 8:20 pm said:

    Dear all, In the spirit of bullet #7 above: Does anyone care to weigh in on a thesis of Diane’s that the VM has a non-European origin. I share that view also but having a language evidently written and read from left to right (LTR) and top down is rare East of Suez. Most of the languages (like Arabic languages, Hebrew, Syriac) there run RTL, Armenian is an exception but maybe there are others we should be considering? There seems no end to arguments as to why one writing style is preferable to the other. Assuming a right-handed writer, one might think that LTR would be natural as the writing hand would not cover the work but this has been challenged from many directions and one common idea has to do with the part of the brain involved in writing and reading that would seem to favor RTL. The inks evidently had little to do with it either. Hebrew, for example, was written with a carbon-based ink and might have been easier to smudge yet their scribes wrote RTL. All the diacritical marks of Arabic languages and Hebrew also must have taken a while to make and dry, yet RTL is used. Some early Greek was RTL but then switched, going through a period where lines varied RTL and LTR. The European languages are uniformly LTR and based on Greek via Roman but then one wonders why? Most of the rest of the literate world is going RTL? To cut to the chase, what candidates for the VM can be found based on the assumption that the scribes were used to writing LTR? Armenian is one (I can hear an audible groan) but are there others?

    The VM “zodiac” pages are really calendar-based and have a 30 day calendar mixed with zodiac symbols. Were there other traditions besides the Armenian that used a 30d month? Why split two months into 15d periods and leave the others as 30d. Every day seems uniquely named? I think Zoroastrians did this in addition to the Armenians who were influenced by them.

    There is I think, the incorporation of the “&” on many pages, yet this was rare before printing (ca. 1470) and non existent in 15C Armenian. But here it is in the VM, mixed in with known Armenian glyphs like the tipped “?” (=”ch”), the symbol for “f” that looks like a modified “8” with a rocker at the base, “a” and “o” (Armenian used one or the other but not both at the same time) and “4”. Armenian did not use “m” and “n”, yet they occur frequently in the VM as they did in Latin.

    In my test decrypts, I find NO “q” or “w” and I think the VM is in Latin (as do most Voynichers) but perhaps Latin of the Czech variety which generally avoided those two glyphs, considering them “foreign”,

    How certain are we that the apothecary’s jars are glass? Nick has some good evidence to that conclusion but how might ceramics be excluded?

  45. xplor on June 15, 2013 at 12:09 am said:

    A scribe would be literate. They would be able to read and write in the language they are using. A copyist would not have to read only know how to draw the letters. Illiteracy was very high at the time the book could have been written in Italy, even among priests. The translation movement did not reach
    northern Italy until much latter. They were paid by the letter so it was in their interest to leave the mistakes in there.

  46. Diane on June 15, 2013 at 1:22 am said:

    Hi Thomas
    When I talk about the content’s ‘origin’ I’m talking about the distance between first enunciation and current presentation – i.e. in the Vms.

    A fifteenth-century Psalter, though made in France by an Italian Christian, would still be of non-European origin.

    It is the imagery in the Vms which leads me to think that the content in the Vms, while much of it seems to have been ancient Mediterranean, returned to that environment rather late – I’m positing 12thC.

    For all I know, though, the script could have been created in the early 15thC, specially for the Vms and to record whatever language(s) the contemporary user/s knew.

  47. thomas spande on June 17, 2013 at 5:15 pm said:

    To “eplor” et al., I think that the two scribes copying the VM are certainly literate. They are both using many scribal abbreviations, some in common but some used by just one or the other. If those scribal abbreviations were in the plain text, there would likely be uniformity. Here and there classical Tironian notation is used or may remain just from force of habit, certainly implying they knew Latin. They know that language and “then some”. They are using many Armenian glyphs and many that appear to be invented. Some like the inverted Greek gamma (lower case) and a very odd inverted “V” with a bar atop it, seem to have been invented althought it is possible they are among the hundreds of Tironian notes. The inverted gamma appears as a Tironian note in one version of the Magna Carta. The gallows glyphs stand out as likely not Tironian nor any common medieval language and appear to be a total invention by the copiests (or in the original plain text)? Nick has produced the most compelling evidence that the VM is, at least in part, copied. Julian Bunn has done a computer tracking of the gallows and someday I plan to go over his plots to see if there is a difference in frequency of use between the two scribes. At first glance I am guessing no.

  48. thomas spande on June 17, 2013 at 5:51 pm said:

    Diane, I see your point but still wouldn’t it be rather strange to have all that non-European imagery and have it end up in some likely Latin-based manuscript. Is there ANY clearly northern Italian or European imagery at all in the VM, some of which one might expect to show up? I wonder a bit about some of the architecture in the 9-rosettes page? Perhaps that was added later but they look European to my eye, and also those apothecary’s jars, whether glass or ceramic. All those blondes?

  49. Diane on June 17, 2013 at 7:34 pm said:

    Thomas,

    Seems to me that the reason the manuscript’s quires are such a mess may be that what we have has been compiled from texts initially produced in the pecia system.

    Stationers had responsibility for the business, which saw texts pulled apart into separate quires, or copies made as gatherings, these then rented out anyone who wanted to make a copy.

    The system ended earlier in the north than in the south, and in the south less than 20 yrs after the Vms C-14 date.

    Part of the legal responsibility of stationers was an obligation to buy copies back. So students could take their home-made work-books (if permitted to remove them from their school or university) and sell them back to the stationer.

    Because the Vms quires are of the same size, yet show no signs of trimming (I take that on faith because Rene said so), it seems likely that we’re looking at a fairly small area, where quires had that standard size. But if I’m right, that would also imply that the differences between languages ‘A’ and ‘B’ may be due to students (or others) employing variant sets of ‘tironian’ style abbreviations.

    This idea would also allow for finding two or even several ‘hands’ within one of the ‘languages’.

    .. or they might be different languages.. or one person might add signs for vowels where another didn’t… but the pecia sounds reasonable to me.

    PS by one of those co-incidences bid1dr and I lit on the ‘pecia’ within a week or so of each other. So when two females agree you know it will be a tough one to argue against!

    😀

  50. thomas spande on June 17, 2013 at 10:14 pm said:

    Dear all, (particularly Diane and “b”), I was following the argument that parts had been removed and rebound and some had just gone South but I thought this had happened to certain portions only and maybe for the benefit of Kircher or other “experts” who might help figure out the VM. Now the whole thing is in play? What about the page numbering? I argue that the reason the “0” looks smallish and weird is that it came from a language that had no “0” but was improvised by using the letter “o” in its place. Arabic or Armenian would fit and maybe a few others also.

    BTW I missed a major LTR language that I think Diane has been polite enough not to belabor and that is Coptic. It is based on Greek but has some extra glyphs.

    Back then to the “dissassembled-reassembled ms” position.. Hard not to agree (particularly when two spirited women espouse it). But my thinking is that the page numbers were added when the VM was still in the hands of the creators as that weird little “o” instead of an “0” might argue. The Arabs or Armenians and likely Copts were just winging it for a “zero”. Also a piece of marginalia at the front of the VM is “ff” which I think meant the same in Latin as it does now: “as follows”, but is in Armenian cursive (those weird “8” like glyphs with the rocker on the bottom). I just assume to make the disassembly-reassembly work, that the pagination has to be added much later. Could be. I will not hold my hand over a candle on that one. Cheers, Tom

    ps. I know the “zero” was a tricky concept for many to get their heads around and I don’t think was in general use until late Renaissance. Nick can probably give us an accounting for this concept as I recall from his book, charts of the numbers used for pagination,showing different hands at work, as I recall. It was here I first noticed the tiny “0’s”.

  51. Diane on June 17, 2013 at 10:51 pm said:

    Hi Thomas,

    My previous was in response to your comment-before-last.
    You say:

    Wouldn’t it be rather strange to have all that non-European imagery and have it end up in some likely Latin-based manuscript.

    ~Is it written in Latin?

    Anyway, ‘antique’ images occur all through European art. Crucifixion hasn’t been practiced for a while.

    More seriously, when Pseudo-Apuleius arrived, even the set conception of ‘the page’ was adjusted in copies, to keep more closely to the form of their exemplar.

    ~ Is there ANY clearly northern Italian or European imagery at all in the VM, some of which one might expect to show up?

    Well, actually, I think southern more likely for first arrival but in any case it comes down to cause and effect. And definition and stylistics: how does a Mongol or Egyptian picture of a goat differ from a northern Italian picture of a goat?

    ~ blondes.
    Using a yellowish pigment for the hair is part of the present manuscript’s codicology, like using parchment 225×160.

    You could speculate about cultural reasons.. a belief that all stars have shining hair, or that angels are all blonde, or (less likely) something more political or more personal.

    Sometimes motifs remain impenetrable.
    Do you know why images of owls sometimes appear in European herbals and medical texts?

    btw – I’ve just found evidence that an important Herbal with several points in common with the Vms is not (as was earlier thought) an ‘Italian’ work; the European who made it adopted a custom (which he clearly did not understand) and which makes it all but certain that herbal is a close copy of some Muslim-Persian work.

    ~ I wonder a bit about some of the architecture in the 9-rosettes page..

    I expect that all the box-form structures on f.86v were added to the original [exemplar] about the twelfth century; it’s part of the reason I date return of the matter in the Vms to the mid-12th to mid-13thC.

    ~ Those apothecary’s jars, whether glass or ceramic …

    ?apothecary jars? What apothecary jars?

  52. xplor on June 18, 2013 at 12:05 am said:

    Thomas , You are way ahead of me. I am still looking at Emperor Rudolf II and need to back 150 years to the time the text was copied. Did the book belong to one of the last three astrologers ? We know that Jacobus Horcziczky de Tepencze was a jesuit and Rudolf believed in religious tolerance. Did you notice the de Tepencze signiture in the book does not match any of his known signitures?

  53. thomas spande on June 18, 2013 at 5:10 pm said:

    Diane, By apothecary’s jars, I am referring to those objects on the left margin of the “pharma” section. I don’t think they are microscopes or little kilns for alchemical operations. I agree with Nick that they are likely apothecary’s jars and each meant to contain the herbs laid out to their right. I think they are coiored to indicate earth, fire or water. Nick argues in his book that they likely reflect the skills of Venetian glass blowers and has indications that they would be up to this. I need more convincing as all seem to be opaque and labelled. I am inclined to think they are ceramic and refect the potter’s skills.

    On those everpresent blondes. Maybe as you argue, they are symbolic of something, like chubby angels? When symbolism enters the argument, then “all bets are off” as to meaning, or rather “anything goes”! Some Armenians were blonde (but not many) . I hold out the hope that fair hair is a reflection of some reality but “whose” and “where” are the key questions.

    I think the VM is in Latin as some test decrypts turn up words like “est”, “eam”, “ean” but mixed in are German words like “nacht”, and the English “each” and “[l}eaf”. I am leaning to the idea that the VM is written in a “macaronic” language which incorporated Italian, French or German (usually) with Latin.

    BTW, You had a very good idea on comparing the folio sizes of other medieval parchment books. The Bodleian has ca 40 single vellum pages of Armenian work from the middle ages. Ten of these vary from 152 to 178 mm in width. Evidently it was an Armenian custom to put a single vellum page into another book to “protect it” in a superstitious belief. Most of the Bodeian medieval Armenian collection is on paper unfortunately.

  54. thomas spande on June 18, 2013 at 5:19 pm said:

    To “explor”. I am not at all following the ownership of the VM nor that erased signature on page one. Diane and Nick both have expertise in this area. I do wonder though how that erased signature was spotted. Evidently Voynich was scanning folio pages with a UV light and picked up a palimpsest and I wonder if he did not spot some other things as well, like maybe some weirdness with that alleged “colophon” at the end. A colophon is usually written by one or the other of the scribes but not here. It is in a totally different hand and uses a bit of Voynichese and some European glyphs. Sorry I cannot help you more. Cheers, Tom

  55. Diane on June 18, 2013 at 6:10 pm said:

    Thomas, I think the containers looked pretty much as they’re drawn, and they do not resemble any pre-1435 European pharmacy (or other) containers that I’ve seen, especially the more ornate type.

    Like so much else in the Voynich, they make sense best when compared with objects which were made east of the Caspian and during the earlier centuries AD.

  56. Thomas: what I argued then (and now) is perhaps a little more nuanced. For one, I don’t really believe that all the paint on the “jars” reflects the original state of the manuscript. For two, I never argued that all the “jars” were glass, just a few of them. I’m also still quite sure that the two quires are out of order, as the “jar” shapes do seem to follow a sensible progression if you reverse their order (i.e. Q19 then Q17).

  57. thomas spande on June 18, 2013 at 10:27 pm said:

    Nick, I will note these two points and annotate my copy of your book accordingly. Maybe the earth, fire, water colors (my guess) were added later or the colors strengthened?. They are all apothecary jars if I recall your position correctly but is that not 100% certain? I may have overstated your position as I evidently did on their all being made of glass. Apothecary’s jars finally made the most sense to me, after I played around with some alchemical furnaces that seemed hard to defend. BTW, There were three more vellum sheets of medieval Armenian writing in the Bodleian collection that hit the range 6-7″ (152-178mm) in width . The B.L. is still non metric (like the US or A) which surprised me.

  58. thomas spande on June 19, 2013 at 6:18 pm said:

    For those who care about “medical jars” or “apothecary’s jars”, here are some links to Syrian and/or Persian and/or Egyptian earthenware or majolica.

    http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/WF003252/12thcentury-syrian-medicine-jar

    http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display.aspx?id=4070
    (Syrian or Persian 13C)

    https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=379849248775653&id=243060875813069

    Syrian or Egyptian, late 13C or late 14C

    http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/medm/hd_medm.htm
    Tuscany 1425-1450

    http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/23.166
    Sienese majolica, 1515

    Diane will note that some lie W of the Caspian but I guess Syria and Persia overlapped in the middle ages.

    Just making the point that some very fine non-glass jars did exist in the middle ages.

  59. thomas spande on June 19, 2013 at 6:57 pm said:

    On the number “zero”. Books have been written on the concept of zero and a quick summary is: Only positional arithmatic systems needed it. A system like the Romans where V was always just 5, never 50 or 500 could not benefit. But a number system based on counting using squares as on a counting board needed something to indicate a null character, i.e. nothing on a particular square.. The East Indians are credited with making it popular (the Mayans also had it!) and it was picked up quickly by the Arabs, eventually hitting Italy in ca 1200 AD in the calculation books of Fibonacci. The key point as concerns the VM is that the miniscule “zeros” for folio numbers are drawn as “o’s” but that was commonplace in the early period when zero began being used. So nothing to write home about on that score. The Armenians worked with no zero but used letters for powers of ten and macrons for really big numbers..

  60. Diane on June 20, 2013 at 3:50 am said:

    Thomas – the key to those containers and their origin is that (a) not one has handles (b) apart from simple red cylinders, even flat-bottomed containers are set on feet or footed stands and (c) there are rings of small circles drawn near upper and lower rims.

    Put all three characteristics together and that’s the type you’re after.

    Given the close connection between this section and the botanical section – well, depending on whose botanical ids attract you, you should find them in the same area, time and people/s.

    hint: you won’t find them in the fifteenth-century Mediterranean.

    F

  61. thomas spande on June 20, 2013 at 9:31 pm said:

    Diane, I was merely emphasizing that earthenware was also used for apothecary’s jars. They are not close at all, I will admit, to the jars in the VM pharma section. They medieval Italian ones were often of the shape called “albarello” which had a slight concavity on the walls indicating they could be easily grabbed down from a shelf packed with them. That is not seen in the VM either. Some medical jars were decorated with pseudo-Kufic lettering and this got me off onto pseudo-Arabic where there was a lot of sort of make-believe arabic used in Christian motifs during the 15thC. Many Italian painters of the Renaissance doing the virgin or various saints decorated the robe borders or halos with pseudo-Kufic. Some looks vaguely like the gallows glyphs of the VM but I won’t go further into this at the moment as I suspect I am not the first to notice this.

  62. xplor on July 1, 2013 at 4:28 pm said:

    Interesting read:
    “Probing the statistical properties of unknown texts: application to the Voynich Manuscript”

  63. Joao on July 31, 2013 at 2:43 pm said:

    If you visualize the entire manuscript with exciting vision you see that a great deal of good work and an unimaginable amount of time was spent in elaborating it. In my opinion, If the VM was written to be a forgery with the intent of getting money off academic scholars, why such elaborated manuscript ? (it could had much less pages). Why had it been so profusely designed with images of unknown flowers, mysterious irrigation systems and crypting text? Any academic value? Do the scholars would pay for such an enigma, even if supplied with the decode key? It doesn’t make sense at all. One thing we could think it could be true it is the fact the VM being sold as a withcraft book for collectors or crazied alchemists who believed in Evil. But the manuscript being a hoax is quite difficult to believe. You can almost feel that there was an enormous dedication and pleasure while making it…

  64. tricia on August 2, 2013 at 4:58 pm said:

    My antidote for swampy-feeling – just thought I’d share.

    http://amancalleddada.blogspot.com.uk/

  65. Jethro_K on October 14, 2013 at 7:29 am said:

    Found this.

    Mrs. Friedman said
    “All scholars competent to judge the manuscript … were – and still are – agreed that it is definitely not a hoax or the doodlings of a psychotic but is a homogeneous, creative work of a serious scholar who had something to convey.”

  66. SirHubert on October 14, 2013 at 9:18 am said:

    Well, up to a point. We now know from C-14 and other tests that it’s a mediaeval object rather than a modern forgery, so it’s not a ‘hoax’ in that sense.

    I’m surprised that Mrs Friedman or any other competent scholar felt able to comment on the creativity of the scholar (singular!) who produced it, given that neither she nor anyone else was able to read a word of it.

  67. SirHubert,

    I am not surprised about the words of Mrs. Friedman. The VMS looks like a normal text, paragraphs look like normal paragraphs, sentences look like normal sentenches, and words look like normal words with prefixes and endings, especially if you accept that they may have been written in shorthand, ligatures or like entries of a nomenclatura. I have even located an epilogue. Even if the text would have been written in Greek and you would not know any Greek, you would identify the text as a normal text, but written in an yet unknown script. No one would doubt that Linear A – which is not yet deciphered – would be a hoax. Differently from computers we are able to Judge from the presentation, if something is real or not.

    Menno Knul

  68. Diane, Thomas,

    If the VMS would be a German product, it would be Obvious to make the jars of earthenware. Now we are convinced that the VMS is a North-Italian product, it would be more obvious to think of glassware. You can find many beautiful examples of apothecary vessels on the internet. In 1291 the glassblowers of Venice were urged to leave the city for Murano because of the danger of fire. This complies with my dating of the origin of the VMS 1250-1350.

    Menno Knul

  69. Menno: …yet some of the “jars” depicted are apparently transparent and clear, which would date them to after 1450.

    The strings of painted dots are also a good indication that these were in some way modelled on those done in Murano (if you go to the glass museum in Murano, you should see quite a few), but I don’t know of any examples of strings of painted dots on glassware before 1450, let alone 1350.

  70. Nick,

    I would not know of the painted dots, but the glass industry of Venice and Murano dates back to the 13th century. The painted dots you refer to could easily be coloured glass dots made during the glass blowing process. This is still a known technique.

    When Constantinople was sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, some fleeing artisans came to Venice (Wikipedia).

    For your information: the last 15 years of my profesional life a have imported Bohemian airtwist glassware from Czech Republic and Slovakia. There they learned the art of glassmaking from Murano. So I was very much interested in the history of glassmaking in Venice.

    Menno

  71. I agree the line of dots (bosses, actually) are definitive. I agree with Menno that the work carries refences in the imagery to the century mid-twelfth to mid-thirteenth. Nick is perfectly right that painted dots on Murano do not occur until after 1450.

    Such bosses are attested as a regular feature in cylindrical, and in ornate handle-less containers for centuries before that time.

    I’d link to some examples but Nick needs high level anti-spam at present.

  72. SirHubert on October 14, 2013 at 12:24 pm said:

    Menno: Linear A tablets have been found at several sites in the context of a number of professionally conducted archaeological excavations. (Which is more than can be said for the Phaistos Disc, I might add). I take your point, but the Voynich Manuscript’s provenance is much, much more tenuous and I can entirely see why researchers working in the days before C-14 tests would consider the possibility of it being a recent hoax. After all, Voynich himself was asking an awful lot of money for it.

    I also agree with you that the text looks very much as one would expect a meaningful text to look. That’s why it’s such an appealing and exasperating challenge – it really does look as though it’s just crying out to be deciphered or translated. Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with a generally accepted translation, and that is why I think Mrs Friedman may have been premature to comment on the originality of the content!

  73. SirHubert: personally, I don’t see any problem at all with using the 17th century correspondence in the Kircher correspondence archive as a basis for roundly dismissing “20th century hoax” claims. And having provenance going back as far as the Rudolfine court is actually pretty good going: many old manuscripts first appear at auction only in the 19th century, with nothing much of provenential substance before that. It’s just that in this particular case we have a hunger for better provenance that the manuscript’s internal evidence struggles to satisfy.

    Elizebeth Friedman was a professional code-breaker with decades of experience at breaking hand ciphers, and with a long interest in the Voynich Manuscript. Dismiss her comments as premature at your peril! 😐

  74. SirHubert on October 14, 2013 at 3:16 pm said:

    Nick, I don’t want to get bogged down in this. I do know who Elizebeth Friedman was and I have a healthy respect for her abilities. I just don’t see how she – or anyone else – could comment on the originality of the manuscript’s textual content when she couldn’t read a word of it!

  75. The Friedmans couldn’t help imagining one, brilliant, European male “auteur” – the times they lived.

    Otherwise, Friedman makes a valid point. The material analysts who detect forgeries and fakes, and define genres – of epigraphy, parchment, pigments, bindings, iconographic analysis etc. never seem to doubt the work at all, do they?.

  76. SirHubert, I did not mention the Phaistos disc in my comments, though I know very well, that some people regard the disc as a hoax. As I have a special weakness for hoaxes, I have of course tried to decipher the disc, but alas I could not get further than the helmet head, in Greek ‘kefalos=head’, which sign occurs at the end of words only, maybe meaning ‘kai = and’ in Greek or ‘-que in Latin’. If my observation is right, the language of the disc is Greek. This would exclude a hoax.

    By the way my attention has been drawn to the VMS, because it was advertised as a hoax. It is not. If it is a code, can only be decided, when we know more about the script.

    The word doaro = taurus in the constellation of the Pleiades (f67s) could be the key to decide that the VMS is not a coded book either.

    Menno

  77. SirHubert on October 14, 2013 at 9:26 pm said:

    Diane – exactly, thank you.

    Menno – I wish you nothing but good luck with the Phaistos Disc, although there isn’t really enough of it for one to analyze properly. Historically speaking there are very good reasons for doubting that its language will prove to be Greek, but the same used to be said of Linear B, of course.

    Incidentally, Linear B shows that Mycenaean Greek did indeed append the suffix -qe to mean ‘and’, cognate with the Latin -que. However, we know that Mycenaean ‘q’ almost always comes from an earlier labio-velar (*kwe- or *gwe-), which the Latin form confirms in this case. It is therefore extremely difficult to assume on linguistic grounds that an earlier Greek form for this particle would have been ‘ke’ as in ‘kephalos’.

    Apologies for the brief thread-hijack and for being a little dull about Elizebeth F.

  78. SirHubert,

    It is beyond the scope of this blog on cipher mysteries to go into details with regard to the Phaistos disc, especially the linguistic pro’s and contra’s. However important to me is, that it is too easy to call some text a hoax, because we do not understand the meaning and the structure of a certain text and that is relevant to the VMS. Therefore I am grateful for the Montemurro analysis, which shows, that the text is meaningful.

    Menno Knul

  79. Menno, I’ve just re-read the comments to Nick’s post of Jan 14th. Not sure I should have let Aleff’s use of the term ‘intuition’ stand. 🙁

    Also, have you seen the Byblos syllabary?

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