If a device could be constructed to reclaim the effort – by which I mean purely physical effort – put into constructing Voynich decryption non-theories, I reckon it could probably power Grimsby (population “88,243 in 2011”, according to Wikipedia) indefinitely. Add in the additional effort expended to construct ad hominems against people who are deemed to be opponents of said non-theories, and you could probably power Cleethorpes (population “nearly 40,000 in 2011”) too.
Sadly, such advanced energy-harvesting technology remains beyond even Silicon Valley’s greatest egos minds, so for now the best we can do is to throw some more theories onto the fire to keep us Northern Hemisphereans warm through the (oddly late) winter chill.
Ata Team Alberta
A four-year-long “family project” (the Ardiç family, i.e. Ahmet Ardiç, Alp Erkan Ardiç, Ozan Ardiç, etc) calling itself “Ata Team Alberta” (ATA) claims (in a YouTube video) that it “has deciphered and translated over 30% [of] the manuscript”, and has submitted “a formal paper of the philological study […] to an academic journal in John Hopkins University.”
The team claims that Voynichese is nothing more than a kind of “Turkic language”, written in a “poetic” style that often displays “phonemic orthography”: they mention f33 as being particularly “rhythmically matching”. Well… anyone who wants to have a look at what they’ve done can fast-forward to 5:02 in the video, which is where their tricksy character correspondence tables start to appear.
Incidentally, when mildly pressed by the Toronto Metro, Lisa Fagin Davis assessed Ata Team Alberta’s efforts as “one of the few solutions I’ve seen that is consistent, is repeatable, and results in sensical text”. Which is, of course, a somewhat peccable (if perhaps slightly maculate) opinion to be holding.
According to this news report, Ahmet is now flying to Turkey to consult with Old Turkic specialists (presumably because all the young specialists are busy). Perhaps he’ll have more to say when he returns.
Gerone Wright
According to Gerone Wright, “it was almost as if I believed in myself that if I studied this text long enough, I would actually know what it means“. And so here’s Gerone telling everyone in the world (via the magic of YouTube) how the Voynich Manuscript is all chemistry, stem cells, genetics, and stuff: and even how some of Q13’s diagrams illustrate ovaries, fallopian tubes and fibroids (etc). Almost, anyway:
The point of including this video here is not that it casts any obvious light on the Voynich Manuscript, but rather that (a) most broadly similar YouTube Voynich theory videos seem to have been done by confused men sitting on cheap sofas in badly-lit sitting rooms wearing only their tighty whities (and that’s not really something that has ‘shareable’ written all over it), and (b) unlike almost everyone in (a), at least Gerone seems to be vaguely aware that what is powering his particular decryption is not so much cryptologic or historical smarts as intense self-belief. Which alone is a rare insight to be blessed with.
Viktor V. Mykhaylov
After sixteen years of effort (yes, four times as much as those Ata Team Alberta wimps), Viktor Mykhaylov of New York has written a book about his Voynich decryption, entitled: Mystery of Senzar. And once again there’s a freshly-minted 2018-vintage YouTube video:
Sample translation of f1r: “Do you graze a goddess-cow? Where? Is this the former deity of the Sun?” And before long: “Have you born this goddess – Eye?”
Aye, indeed. Mykhaylov describes his decryption as follows:
The Manuscript was written in ancient forgotten Senzar language, like mix of Vedic Sanskrit and Devanagari, which was before them – Proto-language. The Manuscript was written in November-December 1417, in Vilnius, by Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Rus-Ukraine, Lithuania, Zhemaytia, Mlodovlakhia (Moldova), Gregory (Gavryil) Tsamblak (Samvlah), and his monks specially for the Queen of Bavaria and Bohemia Sophia, who was the wife of King Wenceslavs IV. This Manuscript was written because Queen Sophia considered herself a goddess Ra.
Metropolitan Samvlah by order of Grand Duke Vytautas, and King of Poland Jagiello, was the head of the largest delegation (about 300 participants) to the Cathedral in Constants. Among all participants were the ambassadors from Saladin – Ayyubid dynasty – An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub.
All of which may be oddly familiar to those who remember John Stojko (“Letters to God’s eye: The Voynich manuscript for the first time deciphered and translated into English”, 1978), who similarly proposed that Voynichese was some kind of proto-language from Ukraine. (I vaguely recall that Stojko lived and died in New York state as well, but I’m not 100% sure of this.) Incidentally, the “Cathedral in Constants” Mykhaylov is referring to here is actually the Council of Constance (1414-1418).
(And yes, I know that Saladin lived from 1137 to 1193. But let’s not bicker over mere details, OK?)
But then Mykhaylov goes and spoils it somewhat by skiing so far off-piste that nobody else can reach him:
Thanks to reading this Manuscript, I received the key to understanding and explaining the origin of all religions, and their names, that existed and now exist, the origin of all tribes and civilizations, and their names, those that existed and now exist, the origin of all languages that were used and that are used now on Earth. I will display all this information in my books, on which I am now working.
Oh well! 🙁
It feels almost unfair to the Turkish family to group them with the other two. Clearly different caliber.
Koen: is that because you think the Turkish family approached the problem more plausibly than the other two, or because you think they’re closer to the truth?
Thank you, didn’t know Grimsby and Cleethorpes up to now 🙂
Note to self:
Do NOT read any of Nick’s reviews of Voynich theories while drinking coffee.
Failure to heed this simple rule will result in substantial effort to clean computer screen and nearby desk environs.
Jim: glad to be of service. 😉
That’s all wonderful, but it’s not that easy. The turkish thing he is presenting may have something in common with the VM today. Unfortunately, today’s spelling and the Latin alphabet have not been introduced until 1923 by Ata Türk.
Therefore also Turkish (Ottoman Empire) is written around 1400+ Arabic script and from right to left.
Therefore, for me this solution is highly unlikely, even if today’s Turkish in the representation has a lot in common with Latin. Probably attributed to the Great Roman Empire.
Nick: It seems that Grimsby is forever unjustly titled the Queen of the north and Cleethorpes it’s attendant maid in waiting, which is most unfair to the point of distraction. This disrespect refers to your deliberate omission of that other fine town on the Humber with the much greater history and a not too big, not too small median population (55k) of fine Lincolnshire ‘pheasant pluckers’. We’re referring to juicy Scunthorpe of course and though it continually gets uncomplementary and undeserved reviews, it does leave your nominations for dead by comparison. How could you dare to compare old Scunty’s St. John’s steeple with that phony renaissance monstrosity in the form of the Great Grimsby Dock Tower, with it’s fake swallowtail Merlon’s and all. In future you might be inclined to nominate our town but don’t forget the N. whatever you do.
Dear Nick Pelling
These theories really do make me smile… and probably makes everyone smile who take the idea of deciphering the manuscript a tiny bit seriously. Nick, you wrote several articles on these ludicrous voynich theories recently, and I am rather sure that in the first few days it was clear for everyone that all these very optimistic methods will never lead to the final solution that can be applied to the entire manuscript.
I am being the reader of your blog articles for a very long time, and surely I can state that I have seen some very intriguing studies on the imagery and on the possible social and cultural background of the creation of the V. Ms.
But regarding the the cipher text… I would suggest that we must all focus on what it can be and not what it cannot ever be, because it will take an infinite period of time to sort all these pieces of bull crop into different categories. Once you write the criticism on a theory, 10+ new theories will be published somewhere on the internet.
Sadly, not many people mention the facts that really do exclude the possibility of a linguistic method… The unnatural repetition of some “words” and of their variants can much easier indicate the presence of roman numerals than of any known grammar structure… in such a way, the initials (“gallows”) shapes before almost every paragraph may not contain any meaning by themselves, but they might be the first element of a group that forms a single ciphertext character. Etc.
In such a way, the V. Ms. could be a verbose cipher that will be very difficult to solve. Yet I believe that instead of pointing out the flaws of existing theories, looking at the text from a different angle of view can already be the first step forward.
With these thoughts in mind I wish good luck and success to the readers and the fellow hobbyists who are striving to solve the voynich cipher.
Best wishes,
a random 19 year old crypto-dabbler from Hungary.
Nick: both, really. Let’s assume that Voynichese encodes a natural language without a “mathematical” cipher, but perhaps with positional variation etc. In that case, it is not likely to be a common European language, based on statistics alone, and an agglutinating language would be more likely. As a number of current researchers hold, a Turkic language would be an excellent candidate.
I’m not saying that it must be Turkic, but on a scale of possibilities it’s relatively high up.
And their methodology, well I can see from the video that they use real dictionaries instead of google translate, so they’ve got that going for them. The text from the plant page they translated looks really impressive, but of course this is worth nothing if we can’t inspect their methodology. I’m afraid it might be a case of “too much freedom” again. So until we know this, I reserve my judgement.
John Sanders: Scunthorpe was in fact my first choice, but its population was slightly wrong for the point I was trying to make. Just so you know. 🙂
N. Varadi: the point I was trying to make was simply that we are, unfortunately, in the middle of a “Golden Age” of bad Voynich theories.
Yes, I should do more posts about constructive issues: but it’s getting harder and harder to even introduce these in 1000 words, let alone explore them properly. Which makes blogging about cipher mysteries quite difficult. 🙁
Nick: One thing that you write a blog post on, if you are so inclined, is your Voynich intellectual “Journey”. Maybe you have dealt with this elsewhere. You could answer:
When you first heard about the Voynich.
What were your initial impressions.
What was your thinking during those early days of research.
Something I have already expressed interest in is the process by which you arrived at the theory you present in “The Curse”. (This could be potentially useful to me in putting my research into perspective.) There is typically a tendency to present the finished result of a period of research rather the steps that were gone to develop a theory to its final stage.
May we look forward to a revised edition of ‘The Curse of the Voynich’?
I’ll go with the team from the ‘big Apple’ for half a crown each way; let’s see both Mike and Stoji are with Queen Sophia which seems sound from an historic/regional perspective. Then I’ll have a saver on their near neighbours the Voynich’s including Lily’s mum Mary Everest/Boole just to put across a non intellectual, merely sentimental viewpoint. Do I standby any of this as a total commitment?….Not in a New York minute!…
What you know about historic Turkish alphabets? How many kind of Turkic languages lives now? Before Ottomans or during Ottoman period Turks are not used only Arabic alphabet. Atatürk have been introduced not only latin alphabet he introduce the alphabet which alphabet created based on historic Turkish alphabet.
Could you please show me any Latin single word or text in English, French or German languages written material older than 2000 years old with matching today’s Latin characters. We are reading Etruscan text in Turkish and we call them “ön Türkler”, “öntürküz”, or “En/An Türküz” . We are reading Sumerian texts in Turkish an we call them “Som Eri”. Etymological roots of English, French or German are contentious. Please do not give any place for racism and randomness in language research and look carefully for all possible alternatives and hypothesis.
Sorry for my broken English. Our main dictionary source is “An etymological dictionary of pre-thirteenth-century Turkish by Sir Gerard Clauson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)”. However %21 of the words can be translatable with using any Turkish dictionary. Currently 30% of the manuscript book translated in Turkish. Our goal is translating the all book. This is not a hypotheses. This is reality. If you want to read the material please just change your alphabet table estimation with ours, and try again. Or you can continue to work as you follow. Good luck.
Ardich: actually, what you are describing is exactly an hypothesis, and moreover one that so far seems to be to be essentially no different from the hundreds of other Voynich linguistic theories I have had presented to me. The burden of proof is on you, and I hope you carry that burden well, particularly given that you started your Voynich theory here in terms of “racism”, something that doesn’t sit very well with me.
Ardich, it’s absolutely ridiculous to mention racism—it has *NOTHING* to do with rejecting or accepting various language hypotheses, including Turkish.
Linguistic solutions, especially substitution codes, have to be proved on linguistic grounds and there are very significant problems in using substitution codes that have to be explained before a natural-language hypothesis can be accepted.
It’s strange that so many researchers who claim they have found solutions in Czech, Slovak, French, Italian, Latin, Sanskrit, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, English, Welsh, Russian, Finnish, and other languages, think they are being attacked on personal grounds. It’s the METHOD and the OUTCOME that are being critiqued, not the person who did it and not the language they are using.
Ardich: are you able to give us your thoughts on the blonde-haired bathing beauties and their part in your equation, with or without reference to the simple Turkic language connections that your team have so eloquently outlined for us? This is in respect to the far-reaching aspects of the language and its adherents who spoke variations of it historically (written or not), from Persia to far-off Japan; moreso concerning those perhaps more isolated fairer skinned speakers in the subcontinent of India and the like.
The VM is really not special apart from the text. If I summarize all the clues in the book and bring them under one hat, so I come to the place of origin somewhere between Milan and Trieste on the Alps. Probably Habsburg Teritorium.
Now I have to ask myself how does the Ottoman language get there. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but rather unlikely.
Problem, exactly in this corner meet 5 languages on each other. Italian, German, Slavic, Latin, and Ladin (Veneto, Rätia, Tyrol, Lombardy)
That’s the facts, and I can not change that.
@ John, nice that you also noticed with the blond hair.
It would have been easier to draw dark hair with the same ink than to later color it with yellow.
But still I do not see any with dark hair.
In addition there are the tiaras and the bonnets ( Gebände ), where the bonnets are already out of fashion around 1400, they are there. What makes me rather on a rural environment than a larger city suspect.
You have to be careful about evaluating the underlying language on the basis of the illustrations. Blonde nymphs might mean western origin, but don’t necessarily mean western language. There is often a “mismatch” between the language and the illustrations:
– When manuscripts were created to represent a certain location (e.g., Jerusalem), sometimes local color and costumes were used (e.g., northern European) and other times the illustrators drew what they thought people from that region might look like and might wear (sometimes dark skin and elaborate turbans, etc.).
– When manuscripts were created for patrons, sometimes they were quite different from those created for other purposes (both in content and the colors, styles of dress, architecture, etc.). Since the patron was paying for it, the illustrator and scribe provided what they thought the patron would prefer.
– When manuscripts were compiled by missionaries, they often used cultural symbolism from the missionary’s homeland combined with a completely distant and different language. Thus, missionaries from central Europe quite frequently transcribed eastern and African languages with new character sets that they invented to represent the sounds of the local language. Intermediaries creating or assisting with the creation of trade manuals (references for merchants to intercommunicate with other cultures) did this as well.
In other words, a medieval manuscript can visually symbolize one culture and still include language from a different culture.
Readers may miss the fact that -JKP- has taken ‘European’ as his default, so when he says ‘when manuscripts were created…’ he actually means ‘when European manuscripts were created…’ because many of the habits he describes don’t apply to other cultures’ manuscripts.
I know it is difficult for someone in the 21st century not to think of a hand-written book as something like a personal notebook, created by a single individual and reflecting his or her personal thoughts and view of the world. This expectation is one that has marked the history of Voynich studies, mainly as an accident of history. The manuscript was brought to light by Wilfrid Voynich at the very peak of the cult of the individual and a widespread idea that the European male was the pinnacle of social and cultural evolution. Ergo, a fascinating manuscript, to be worthy of the attention (and the big bucks) which Wilfrid wanted, and the kudos which Friedman thought his due, was expected to have content originating at the time the present manuscript was made.
None of that is necessarily so at all.
The content might be partly older material and partly later material. There could be centuries’ distance between composition of the text’s written part and its pictorial part. Think, for example, of the difference in date between text and imagery in a fifteenth century French psalter.
Now, whether or not people wish to keep those ideas, I have to say the internal evidence doesn’t support it. And since (obviously) the pigments cannot be earlier than the parchment’s date, the first time the figures’ hair was coloured with yellow pigment rather than black, blue or whatever, is when the final (present) copy of the work was made.. or later.
It is an error of logic to try determining the nature of the imagery from some figures’ having yellow hair. It is an error of unchecked assumption to imagine that every figure in the manuscript – or even most – are supposed to be literal pictures. Think about it. If you applied the same criterion even to medieval Latin Christian imagery, you’d be going around trying to find when and where human beings used to have wings sprouting from their shoulders, or trying to hunt the historical record for a person named ‘Justice’ or ‘Liberty’.
In the end, it comes down to checking ‘what everyone thinks’ to see how much of it is guesswork, inherited assumptions, a-historical, anachronistic, and so on. And then accept nothing which you can’t track to some specific person’s original setting out of evidence and reasoned argument.
Saying that in our present manuscript, someone painted hair yellow is not grounds for suggesting they are all German, or Russian, or even vowel-less Ukrainians. 🙂
Diane: all I can say is that using “it ain’t necessarily so” as a ‘logical’ starting point is a particularly sterile way of building historical arguments. You need look no further than Richard SantaColoma’s collected works to see how (not very) far that can carry you. 🙁
Diane, I was responding specifically to comments above me about the blonde hair—I did not introduce the topic. My point was simply to point out that imagery and text (in the VMS) cannot be assumed to be in synch with one another until evidence is found to confirm it. Images and text may have been penned by different people from different cultures.
My first example was an example. It does not mean Europe is the default for all the examples (or for my ideas about the VMS). It means Europe is the default FOR THAT ONE EXAMPLE. I don’t know how often I have to keep repeating to you that I search worldwide every time I look at a specific aspect of the manuscript and that I have not made any decisions about where I think it was made.
.
I do have some idea of where the writers of the marginalia learned to write and I do think that the exemplars (in a variety of media) for the zodiac imagery were at least partly from northeastern France but that does not tell me the cultural background or homeland of whoever created the text, nor does it tell me whether there is any underlying meaning (or a specific language) behind the text, so you don’t have to keep steering the topic around to make us all look like we are idiots and can’t see beyond Europe. I live 5,000 miles away from Europe and I’ve spent more time studying Asian, African, and Native American cultures than I have European cultures.
It’s not the blond hair alone. There is much more to see …….
Headdresses, hairstyles, clothing, architecture, battlements, crowns, plants, rings, crosses, orb (if it really is one), latin scripts, etc …..
All these are indications of the local environment. Clearly, that does not say anything about the language used, but it limits the possibility.
Example: I can not say that it is not Hebrew, but the book is certainly not from the Middle East.
Sure, it could also be a commissioned job, but then he certainly was not paid. Contract work is exclusive and expensive.
I find it hard to believe something when I can not see a single indication. And certainly not if everything indicates.
Just as little do I think of the flatlands (Po Valley), since the number of soldiers killed by swamp fever has changed with the help of the crown doctors of military doctors. The plants do not occur in the wetland. It was that he has dried them in a pharmacy signed.
From where I stand as a rank non intellectual outsider, I seem to be seeing a bunch of smart folks suddenly agreeing with each other, but looking for ways that make it seem as if they were not. We did discuss some time ago about the likelihood of unrecorded pre Columbian exploration to the New World, for example which although seemingly fanciful, must not be taken lightly and that does not necessarilly mean Europeans. I’m quite sure that Arab traders and heaven forbid, the Chinese had the vessels and navigational savy equal to that of the Portugese. In the 16th Century for instance, the lumbering Dutch, with assistance of their all knowing Jewish converso trading partners were setting up shop in places that we historically correct latter day non believers could not imagine. Of course as soon as they all got comfortable in their quaint new settings, they tried their level best to replicate the lives and customs they had left behind so they might not miss home too much. You all know the rest without me having to explain in detail and of course why couldn’t it have worked like that with our original Voynichese emigrants to wherever they chose to re establish themselves in a new place that they could call home.
Nick –
Answer me this: when Wilfrid Voynich said the text was a cipher text, how did he know? Where is his evidence and argument?
Who – before you produced an argument in favour of the text as cipher – ever did?
No-one. They just ‘took it as gospel’ without troubling in the least to ask WIlfrid for his evidence, and a reasoned argument.
Had Newbold done so before setting out to erect his first ‘historical narrative’ on an untested foundation, he might have kept that fine reputation which (unlike the sneers and advice to ‘just ignore him’) is the legacy he finally left behind.
Very sad. Always check the ground before erecting anything, no matter how elaborate and impressive from a distance.
-JKP= – all the statements you make beginning ‘when manuscripts were made…’ are true of manuscripts made in Latin Europe during the later medieval centuries.
They are not all true of anywhere else.
btw, for some reason or other I had an impression you and Rene worked for the same organisation. I had no idea you were a specialist in comparative ethnology. It is a pleasure to see just how many people now emulate the ‘global comparison’ technique which had not been seen in Voynich studies before 2008, and for employing which I was regularly ‘flamed’ (as per Nick’s remarks above) until after 2012, when an increasing number of Voynich people apparently discovered its value : Don Hoffmann, ‘SD’, you, Marco and then Darren. Not sure if that’s in historical order, but it was the order in which my attention was drawn to your efforts.
Nice to know one has made a difference after a century of non-movement.
Diane: I’m the same as everyone else insofar as I can’t speak for dead people, and so your summoning Wilfrid Voynich’s moustachioed ghost to the party here seems a bit pointless.
If your actual argument here is that the Voynichese-is-a-cipher hypothesis is just a load of meaningless words that someone somewhere wrote down once upon a time and that everyone since has blithely taken on face value because they are too blinkered and stupid to consider any other alternative, then you really are more than a small bit foolish, sorry.
Nick – anyone who is talking history is talking about dead people. Do try to focus.
The historical question is this: before you set out a logical argument in favour of the text’s being written in cipher (which I read here on your blog) what evidence had been adduced, and what historical argument offered, for the text’s being written in cipher?
More exactly – had Wilfrid Voynich provided anyone, at any time, with any reasonable argument for the document’s being in cipher, or did he just make the assertion and expect everyone to accept it by reason of his assuming the stance of an authority?
Now, so far as I have been able to discover the second is the historical fact. That no-body interested in the manuscript so much as thought to question or investigate that item – they just swallowed the assertion.
You keep trying to bring back this matter of historical fact to an ad.hominem, by talking about ghosts, moustaches, parties and supposing I’m accusing persons such as John Manley (another ghost, unmoustachio’s I think?) of being stupid.
I am always interested in the way that rationality and its opposite interact in the formation of ‘history’ as presented to the wider world. Lynn Thorndike, for example, was capable of immense and proper detachment in dealing with the unfounded assertions of pseudo-science but he could not keep that objectivity when considering the assertions made by WIlfrid Voynich. In the first case he behaved rationally; in the second he was incapable of attending to fact alone and had to try representing Wilfrid as ‘a moustachio’d villain’.
As I see it, Wilfrid’s story was so very appealing to the need felt so strongly by many of his time to describe everything in terms of social class that it overrode their capacity for objectivity. Debating or criticising the content in another scholar’s work is one thing; trying to prevent any such debate by making persons aware that they too might be treated in that way is certainly a tried and tested technique – and not only in this field of endeavour. But it does not advance our knowledge of the object or its content. I should have thought it beneath you but there you go, you’re only human. 🙂
john sanders: Yes. I am able to give you my thoughts (which is reality since our partial translation) about the blonde-haired bathing beauties and so on.
The answer is:
The author is a traveller. The author has been writing this book throughout his/her journey in Europe, (And he was not alone in the journey.)
How we know this?
The results of our text analysis based from randomly chosen pages demonstrate that the author did code the texts, which can be read downwards and upwards for every first letter of each line, as well as it can be read downwards and upwards for every last letter of each line. In these codes, the author wrote diary entries describing people, settings and events that have nothing to do with science or art. So, we (ATA – Team Alberta) already read some of the coded parts. Thats why we know that all.
Just for general information (which information is not related with Voynich);
We Turks are blonde as other mediterranean people (Such as Italians or Greeks) and we are black haired as other Asian people (or as Italians again). Being a Turk is not related with genetic codes but it is related with knowing Turkish language and loving the nation, and respect for all the other nations or livings if they are not fighting with us on our own land or property. In addition to that, founder-leader of Turkey Mustafa Kemal Ataturk itself blonde-haired and blue eyed.
Today I will share some part of the results of our text analysis in our youtube page.
Thanks
Nick Pelling:
May be using the word as “racism” is not fit very well in this situation. I appreciate all the other works to crack the book. We welcome all opinions and judgements about our work with respect, and we are not waiting from others as rejecting or accepting our hypothesis, if they have no idea about a structure of any Turkic language.
This web-page is not only gives information about the news, or about non-theories or theories, but you are adding your personal opinion with using un-respectful language. I think everyone must choose their using words carefully in public. After writing my name and the ATA team members name you can’t violent our personal rights. This is not your business to inform public about our personality or character by implying with using ridicule language. Because you have no right to define others based on their personality or outside their works for public (especially if you don’t know anything about a person).
What you analyzed about our alphabet characters? How you thing the characters are tricksy? Could you please give us exact, information about the tricksy pattern or characters?, or about what is your knowledge about Turkish languages?
Using word such as _“in the video, which is where their tricksy character correspondence tables start to appear.”, or _“Ahmet is now flying to Turkey to consult with Old Turkic specialists (presumably because all the young specialists are busy). Perhaps he’ll have more to say when he returns.” is a kind of personality judgement about us in public. So, what is your message to public about us with using these words?
The newspaper can inform to public about the news with using news related terminology in a journalistic way is okay for me. Why you want to inform to public about my trip or about our team work with using this kind un-respectful or rude language? I think this is disrespectful and unacceptable. We don’t need your personal opinion hold in derision, if it is not related about our analyzing public work.
It is possible that I may be don’t understand what you are implying or writing because of my broken English. If it is so, sorry about all my the writings in this page.
Thanks,
Ardich: in my judgment, your YouTube video makes it entirely clear how “tricksy” your character correspondence tables and the multiple ways of pronouncing and interpreting the words are. And if anyone wants to see these and form their own opinion, they are more than welcome to view it themselves: and thanks to the oxygen of publicity from this page, they’re able to do that with a single click of their mouse. I don’t tell people what to think here, I encourage them to form their own (hopefully better-informed) opinions.
Finally: if you don’t want people talking about how you’re going to Turkey to consult with Old Turkic specialists, you shouldn’t have told a newspaper that. And if you think “presumably because all the young specialists are busy” is anything but a light-hearted way of finishing off a paragraph, sorry but you’ve got your head stuck up your arse.
Diane: no, what I’m saying is that you seem to be taking ad hominems to an entirely new level here. That is, rather than just be content to attack Rene Zandbergen or me, you now seem now to want to simultaneously attack every single person who has hypothetically treated Voynichese as if it is a cipher as blinkered, intellectually maladjusted, and foolish, and with your justification for this attack being… well, absolutely nothing more than you say so. Great, just great.
People who treat Voynichese as a cipher understand perfectly well that this hypothesis ain’t necessarily so (because that’s how hypotheses work, and until such time as someone actually decrypts it with certainty, it can only be a hypothesis): trying to treat the idea of ‘the enciphered Voynich’ as a socio-historic construction formed by a dodgy book-dealer that nobody bar you has had the good sense to question in the century-plus that followed is just bilge. Thorndike objected to Newbold’s decryption not because it was built upon an inherently faulty enciphered worldview floated by Wilfrid Voynich to con people into buying his manuscript, but because it was pseudo-historical nonsense. And there’s still plenty of that around for others to object to.
Diane wrote: “More exactly – had Wilfrid Voynich provided anyone, at any time, with any reasonable argument for the document’s being in cipher, or did he just make the assertion and expect everyone to accept it by reason of his assuming the stance of an authority?”
You keep coming back to this subject and I can’t understand why.
Wilfrid Voynich was a BOOK dealer, not a cryptanalyst. Why does his opinion matter? All he wanted was a good price for the book, so he made his best guesses and ran with those.
Even the experts in the Intelligence Community were unable to pin down what the VMS text was and they had far more skill and experience than Voynich.
I suppose if you were writing a biography of W. Voynich it might matter. Otherwise it’s a very low-priority time-waster.
Ardich, if you didn’t want the public to analyze and critique your solution, you shouldn’t have posted a very public video.
If you thought everyone would automatically agree with your solution and pat you on the back, that is not realistic.
There are people who have translated the Voynich Manuscript into Indo-Celtic, French, Greek, Russian, Sanskrit, Italian, Latin, Slovakian, Croation, Czech, Spanish, Welsh, Aztec, Arabic, and English, using the same method you are using, and they are just as sure they are right as you are, so you have to *expect* the rest of us to be skeptical until you show us in more detail how you have done it.
So far there is no information on your 60+ “combination” glyphs, so we don’t know if they are genuine combination glyphs or if you are using combinations to try to rationalize some of the problems with the VMS text, which is unusually repetitive and positionally dependent. Even agglutinative languages are not as rigid as the VMS text.
The most translated book is the Bible, followed hard by the VM.
How nice was the time when we talked about Aliens, Atlantis and Präastronautik. 🙂
Nick Pelling:: Your rude answer inform us about you mentality level, and visiting your web page is only time lost.
Ardich: I would expect that you will get the same response from any other website where you arrive mouthing off about “racism” before leaving derogatory comments about the website owner.
But don’t worry, next time I won’t be so restrained. Good luck with promoting your theory!
Personally, I don’t like videos presenting decryption attempts. Are there any online accessable papers on the new theories?
The question what people thought about the Voynich MS during Voynich’s lifetime, and shortly after it, is a historical issue, even when it is fairly recent history.
Historical questions aren’t addressed by making things up, but by researching. In this case, it is reading what these people wrote, and what other people wrote about them. Rickert, Newbold, Manly, Friedman: all have exchanged letters with Wilfrid, and with a host of later people. Books and articles have been written by, and about them, which are easily accessible.
Voynich said several things:
– “it’s a Bacon authograph”. This was already doubted in 1921.
– “it’s a cipher”. Essentially all of the above had the same opinion, but at least one changed his mind. (Going into this more deeply will hit the question how exactly one defines a cipher).
– “it was sold by John Dee”. Generally considered unproven but reasonable, until about 15 years ago.
– “I discovered it in chests whose owners did not know what they contained”. This has been copied for years, and there may have been doubt. Shown not to be true only a couple of years ago.
On one of the pages, I forget which, there is a 5 letter palindrome.
In the Annunaki legend you find the IGIGI.
Some of the images in the script show water courses, which seems to replicate the old Sumerian legend. Which states:
The Igigi were being forced to dig a watercourse. They got tired of it, so they revolted against Enlil, one of the head Anunnaki. They burned their tools and surrounded Enlil’s estate. When the Anunnaki realize that the Igigi are not going to give up the strike, they decide it is time for a new solution to their labor problem—and that solution is the creation of human beings.
Just a thought
Andrew
I agree with Koen Gheuens.
I would like to add that it slightly supports my pet theory of the author being Giovanni Fontana.
On wikipedia one can read that he called himself a magus (although a citation of that is needed) and that he was influenced by older scientific works from Greece and the Arab world.
So my extended pet theory is that
1) The author is Giovanni Fontana. He did all the illustrations and used a simple cipher.
2) The encrypted text is a copy (of a copy..) from the medieval Islamic world. It’s written entirely in Turkish.
3) The botanical section is a copy from this book -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materia_medica#/media/File:Dioscorides_De_Materia_Medica_Byzantium_15th_century.jpg
4) The first line of f116v reads: Pax liber Simon Si,, Trifero, a last name that only occurs in Catania, a university town since 1434 located on the island of Sicily.
I’m so amateurish, I did not even look what language the Byzantium book was written in. This one is in Greek.
Nevertheless, the drawings of that book should be compared to that of the Voynich manuscript.
Folatt –
“a Genoese fleet, which in a remarkable example of forward planning had left Europe on 1 5 July and docked at Mağaracik (Suwaidiyah; Port St Simeon), the port of Antioch, on 17 November, brought more supplies..”
from: Jonathan Simon et.al., The Crusades: A History (p.37)
Simeon is not used much by the Latins, who tended to hear it as the more familiar ‘Simon’ and as far as I’m aware it was Nick (who will surely correct me if I credit him in error) who first read that word as ‘Simon’.
http://ciphermysteries.com/2009/06/23/por-le-bon-simon-sint-what
The “Mystery of Senzar” clip has died, but there’s still a version on Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/258420600
A reasonable discussion averted via snark and hubris.
Hi all
I’m not sure and I’m tired. I just got news of this video on Youtube and I stopped working on it a long time ago because I simply dont have time. I dont have time to form an opinion about this video, and atm also not the knowlegde.
I recommend my blog I made a long time ago for some inspiration and to make some sense of 86v and I think I found something there.
I know this is a cipher community but personally I doubt if its cipher, but cant exclude that option. I believe in Latin abbreviations. At least I used to.
Anywayz, I hope you enjoy the blog and sorry I stopped working on it. Personally I think each and every character of the VM has to be studied closely, especially when it comes to the pen-strikes, in other words, in what order each character is written.
I believe in a linguistic approach but it would take one person a lot of time to deduct the options. If noone can translate it, you need to start to deduct what words cannot mean. To see the several 89 as numbers while they were common abbreviations in Latin, gives me enough clue that people should look in that direction. But common rules and several exceptions can make a language very complex. Try the modern chattalk? BRB? CYA? TTYL?
To save writing space/perkament it makes sense to me they would use abbreviations a lot.
Anywayz, I will always keep an eye on the developments and if I ever have the luxury of growing old and reaching my ever raised pension age? I will continue to try and solve it if noone else has done that already.
See you around 😉
Best regards Wouter
ps here is the blog: http://voynichdiscovery.blogspot.nl/
This could have been a really rewarding thread without the ad hominem comments, arrogance, and cynicism. I thought the invitation to Nick Pelling to clarify or backup his claim that ATA’s claims were “tricksy” was a reasonable one; unfortunately, it’s an invitation Pelling declines. Ardich at least had the honesty to admit his error in using the term “racism,” though his admission went unacknowledged as did his other questions and comments. Sadly, snide remarks, self-proclaimed wit and cleverness win the day over humility and authentic dialogue.
Albert Loan: in the good old days, I used to be thrilled by the appearance of a genuinely new Voynich theory – even if the theory itself was wrong-headed (which was, of course, almost always the case), the observation, reasoning and evidence used to construct that theory might be of interest. Reviewing such a theory was an interesting exercise not in forensically understanding what went wrong, but in trying to grasp the excitement and inspiration that brought that theory to life.
Somewhere along the line, however, this ceased to be true: I think that this because people who start purely from a transcription (say, Takehashi’s EVA transcription) have bracketed out all the discovery phase, which is actually the interesting and revealing bit. Those who engage primarily with Voynichese (rather than with the Voynich Manuscript) end up with naive, sterile, superficial, broken theories: they think they can fast-forward past all the difficult stuff, but they can’t.
You simply have no idea how many of these train-wrecks I get presented with, and so often now by media-savvy people with PhDs: the late Stephen Bax was but one example of many.
What I want to say to these people is: yes, you’re a clever person, you exercised great ingenuity to construct this theory of yours, but I can’t see any way to solve the deep problems that it suffers from on so many levels, I have no choice but to say that it’s no bloody good.
I could explain – at length – the hundred-plus things that don’t work, but (a) the burden of proof is on them, (b) I’m not their parent, and (c) I can’t sensibly scale down my own research time sufficiently to take on the burden of disproof on behalf of the whole world. 🙁
Right now, I’m far more interested in looking at Antoine Casanova’s latest theory: even though I already know that it is wrong, Casanova genuinely understands the mystery of the Voynich in a way that Ardich clearly does not, and so his work offers something worth reviewing in all the senses of the word.
Hope that makes sense.
As a computational linguist and ethnographic fieldworker with a qualification in mediaeval literature I have eagerly followed the unfolding romance with the VM, particularly the original and enthusiastic contribution by Ardich and the assessments by Donovan and Petersen, spiced by Pelling’s disparagements. No romance without blondes, who, as Ardich correctly points out, are not necessarily a mark of Nordic origin or indeed of anything geographical or ethnic, being rather common in the Balkans and Turkey, where they are said by locals, no doubt tongue in cheek, to be a trail left by the crusaders. Looking forward to the next installments.
@Dafydd
Was soll ich jetzt mit dieser Aussage Anfangen ?
Bei 217 Sprachvarianten und das alleine im allemanischen Sprachraum, und davon sogut wie keine im elekrtonischem Wörterbuch erfasst. Da hilft kein Computerprogramm. Hier ein Beispiel, es sieht italienisch aus, ist aber deutsch.
http://oschpele.ritten.org/?site=10&list=A
Was nützt Dir hier Völkerkunde? Ein Volk, aber 200 Sprachen.
Qualifikation in mittelalterlicher Literatur. Dann solltest Du wissen, diese Dialekte waren aktiv, wie gesprochen so geschrieben. Das hat sich erst mit der Einführung der Amtssprache ( Hochdeutsch ) geändert.
Die unendlichen Möglichkeiten im Universum, und VM.
I have a question regarding the botanical drawings,iam a layperson of things like this,so please excuse me if my question is seemingly irrelevant or somewhat backward,but I noticed a similarity between the plant selphium/silphium, that the Greeks spoke and wrote of,that the Egyptians also had a hieroglyph for,I wondered,just maybe,if the the glyph for this plant might match one of the glyphs in the manuscript?I wondered if a potential link to deciphering or it’s origin might be found there,however tenuous?
This is just my opinion (one opinion), Donna, but it’s my belief that the majority of the VMS glyphs are based on Latin characters, ligatures, numerals, and scribal abbreviations. I also think that a small proportion may be based on Greek numeral and scribal conventions (the Greeks had several systems for writing numerals, some of which were benched and stacked).
Coptic Greek characters also have a small resemblence. These were Greek characters adapted to write Egyptian and were also loosely adapted to the north in some of the early Balkan-region languages, with a few of the characters also showing up in old Russian scripts (I’m thinking mainly of the shape for A that was written with a stem on the top and no crossbar but it is a rare character in the VMS, not one of the common ones).
Most of the VMS glyphs can be identified as Latin (some of them very clearly so when they are written both in-line and superscripted and the same positions as they occur in Latin). The ones that seem more allied with Greek (in my opinion) are the ones with tall ascenders and benches. Benching did occur in Latin (the long horizontal macron through ascenders was fairly common), but the concept was more common in Greek than in Latin scripts (the Romans adapted many scribal traditions from the Greeks). Benching also occurs in Amharic but… it does not cross the ascenders and is used in a very regular way underneath certain shapes, so it is a little less like the VMS than the way benching is used in Greek scripts.
It’s possible to find a shape here or there that is similar to one or two shapes in other alphabets, but they tend to be ones that are common to many alphabets (S shapes and P shapes, for example, are found in many alphabets). I have not found any alphabets other than Latin (and a bit of Greek) where there is an *overall* similarity in a larger proportion of the glyphs IN ADDITION to how they are positioned in tokens.
Donna – and just as another opinion.
I think it likely that someone who had been trained to write in one script (say, Coptic, or Greek or Latin) was trying to transcribe material from sources foreign to him. It’s almost as hard for a non-native speaker to write like a native as it is to speak like a native, and it is usual to revert to more familiar methods (such as abbreviations).
The problem with the glyphs that have rising ascenders is they are characteristic of Latin scripts in the early medieval centuries but not by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – at least in Latins’ works.
And of course if the writing were basically Latin Christian, you’d expect the images to employ the visual language of medieval Europe – and they don’t.
D.N. O’Donovan wrote: “And of course if the writing were basically Latin Christian, you’d expect the images to employ the visual language of medieval Europe – and they don’t.”
This, of course, assumes that the illustrations and text were created around the same time (or that there was some cross-knowledge among those who added the text and the illustrations).
It’s possible the text was added 10 or 30 years later, by someone other than the person who designed or penned the drawings. It’s even possible that whoever added the text didn’t fully understand the drawings.
I think they probably were done around the same, perhaps even by the same person, but it’s probably not a good idea to assume so without some kind of evidence.
JKP – the default with medieval manuscripts is that text and illustrations are set down within a short space of time. If someone wants to offer a formal argument – with evidence as reason for it – then of course it will make the manuscript unusual in yet another way. But for heaven’s sake, you can’t go around quibbling about text versus images unless there is evidence which demands that conclusion. Besides, I understand that those who claim to be able to determine such things assert that the ink used for the drawings is contemporary with the script. Not an argument I’d feel competent to make, or to dispute, but there you are.
by the way, it’s probably a good idea, when you address comments to a person, to add their name to the message. Saves confusion and getting replies from the wrong individual. Or, I suppose, you can address everything to Nick since it’s his blog. 🙂
Many manuscripts were left unfinished (the death rate was high) and then sometimes spruced up (or labeled) 50 or 100 years later. There are telltale signs that the VMS may not have been finished either.
In most cases, medieval manuscripts were penned and illustrated by different people (and often painted by a third person) and I saw an examples, just recently, where the manuscript repository explained how drawings had been added inside rubricated initials significantly later than the production of the manuscript (as confirmed by scientific testing).
A fairly high proportion of herbal manuscripts (to cite just one kind of example) were unfinished and the labels were added decades or a century later, as noted by palaeographers and bibliographers.
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Diane, my personal feeling is that the drawings and text were probably created at the same time, maybe even by the same person, but I try not to let my personal feelings get in the way of the various scenarios that are possible and should be considered until we know more. There are at least two different sets of handwriting in the main text, so there had to have been more than one scribe. I’m also pretty confident that there were at least two people who did the painting. This was a group project. My gut feeling is that it might have been a family project, but I could be completely wrong so I’m staying open-minded about it—maybe nuns made the VMS.
I also don’t assume that whoever created the drawings had the same cultural background as the person who added the text. There are many examples of cooperation between Christians and Jews in the Middle Ages. Jews often were scribes for Christian manuscripts, Jews sometimes hired Christian illustrators. Arabs, Jews, and Greeks were often hired as translators. There were significant Greek enclaves in Provençe, Florence, and the Veneto…
Europe was multicultural.
JKP – I’m so glad to see that it should now be so widely understood that the ‘white wall Europe’ idea is finally crumbling and in favour of real-world perceptions as regard the range of people who (a) were in fifteenth century Europe and (b) were in a position to record information which may, or may not, have had its origins in medieval Latin Christian culture. As Nick might recall, I have spent almost a decade repeating and illustrating that point.
Of course, all the rest of what you say is pretty well known, but the difference is that most manuscript studies begin by observing particular discrepancies and then, after researching those, may come to conclude that a given manuscript has been later taken up and completed, or added to. Evidence first. Hypothesis as optional mid-stage. Conclusion .. that’s how it usually goes.
The problem with Voynich studies is that its foundation has lain in attitudes better suited to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first (the ‘white wall Europe’ notion being one), and that from the same roots, the habit of creating fictions/speculations/hypotheses first and only later seeking for something to lend them plausibility. In 2010, that habit was virtually ‘standard method’ and has been another point on which I’ve been taking up the pen, now, for quite a long time.
I think it rather a pity that the voices which opposed – twice – my trying to open a discussion of methologies in the forum proved those which were attended to.
Still.. the tide turns eventually despite Canute. 🙂
Diane, I have never assumed the VMS was unicultural or even that it was produced in Europe. You know that. I’ve said it repeatedly for as long as I’ve been talking about the VMS.
I do however, believe some of the exemplars are European. I think there’s pretty strong evidence that the exemplars for the zodiac section are of European origin.
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As for the plants, the exemplars for **most** European plant manuscripts were Mediterranean.
A significant portion of medieval herbals were copied, translated, and created in the Naples/Salerno/Montecassino area (some of them at the medical schools) using Greek and sometimes Arabic sources (especially Dioscorides, Circa Instans, Theophrastus, Pliny).
They were transported from there to Lombardy, the Veneto, and Paris (possibly by traders, medical students or professors), where additional copies were made. Some were transported to England in the early medieval period, possibly brought back by crusaders.
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In other words, it is questionable to generalize European herbals from c. 1,000 to c. 1450 as “Latin Christian”. Many of the included plants didn’t grow in the north. They were unfamiliar to Europeans in the 14th and 15th centuries. Some of the herbals were copied in Greek (obviously this is not Latin). Many of them were translated by Jewish translators. Most of them have no Christian content. In terms of how they are drawn, the ones that faithfully copy the Greek or Arabic exemplars could not really be characterized as “Latin Christian” either, even if the plant names were translated into Latin.
It wasn’t until later in the 15th century that Europe started paying serious attention to local plants, and not until the 16th and 17th centuries (when botany emerged as a discipline in its own right) that there was an overall transition to using specimens rather than copying and re-copying ancient text and drawings about Mediterranean plants.
@JKP
I don’t agree with your statement.
The Romans brought most of the cultivated plants to the north. Some are wild, others can’t survive without cultivation.
Question: When did parchment records start? What was it like before, and how many books did you know before the 4th century, before the Roman Empire collapsed?
Many medicinal plants have been known for over 2000 years (Central Europe). The oldest is proven to be 4000 years old.
Peter, there are numerous plants in the medieval herbals that cannot tolerate cold. They die with the first frost.
How many balsam trees, lemon trees, orange trees, bdellem trees, or aloe and ricinus plants do you see in northern Germany, France, England or Scandinavia or in the Swiss or Italian alps? These warm-climate Mediterranean plants are common in medieval herbals (which also included a number of trees).
Except for recent species that have been bred to tolerate colder climates, they have to be grown in greenhouses or indoors, as house-plants.
I know the Romans brought plants to the north, but the plant books that were prevalent in the Middle Ages were not created by Roman soldiers, colonists or wall-builders, they were copied from southern sources (mostly Greek) that were based on Mediterranean plants, many of which cannot grow in the north.
There isn’t any dispute that medieval plant drawings up until the mid-15th century were primarily based on Mediterranean plants (Dioscorides, Circa Instans, Pliny, etc.). The ones that were familiar to northerners were plants that grow in both hot and cold climates (like Viola, Crocus, and Cichorium).
@JKP
I’ve written that some don’t survive without cultivation. They’re not winter-hard. But that doesn’t matter, you just grow them again in spring.
It doesn’t help if you list what doesn’t grow in the north, but what grows.
Today, pears, cherries, apricots, wine, mirabelles, even peaches grow normally. All brought by the Romans 2000 years ago.
England is a very special case. The gardens are world famous. Not because of the golf lawn, but because plants grow where actually nothing should grow. The English mild climate.
With the VM are approx. 50% and more of the plants where in the south like in the north naturally wild grow. 20% from gardens are wild. The rest…no idea.
But to the question, how many books you have seen from the Roman time, you have not answered. But probably none.
The way you write, you underestimate the old Roman Empire. Not everything comes from the Greeks.
Just as in the Middle Ages Latin was the language of the learned, so it was Greek for the Roman scholars.
To come back to this about the dying of plants in winter, I see the reason why in the zodiac part the nymphs are in baskets.
Women as symbol for plants ( flowers ).
Peter, I was not talking about the VMS plants.
I wasn’t referring to culinary plants either. I was referring to medieval plant manuscripts because I was responding to Diane’s “Latin Christian” comments in relation to medieval herbals.
Peter wrote: “But to the question, how many books you have seen from the Roman time, you have not answered. But probably none.”
I have gone through the Anicia Juliana Codex many times. It is from the very end of Roman times, but it is in Greek, not Latin, and it is copied from Mediterranean sources (the Ebers Papyrus from Egypt includes many of the same plants).
Medieval plant books were not about culinary plants—culinary plants were not seriously documented until the 17th century (e.g., Aldrovandi). They were not about ornamentals either—ornamentals were not seriously documented until the 16th century (e.g., Bessler).
They were not about local plants either, although a few of the Mediterranean plant drawings were sometimes substituted with a similar species better known to the local illustrator.
Most of the medieval plant books were about Mediterranean plants with medicinal value (this, of course includes some plants that were also culinary but they were primarily documented because they were thought to have medicinal value). Most of them were copies of old Greek references (Dioscorides, Pliny, Circa Instans, Historia Plantarum, etc.) based on Mediterranean plants.
This is a bit of a simplification but, to sum up… plant books in Europe in medieval times were
• mostly secular,
• mostly copied from Greek sources and to a lesser extent Arabic sources,
• mostly transmitted through Salerno, Naples, Montecassini, and southeast Spain to Lombardy/Veneto, England and Paris, where additional copies were made and distributed through the rest of Europe (note that Lombardy was part of the Holy Roman Empire/Germany at the time).
• mostly copied by medical students, professors, and apothecaries as part of their professional studies, and by local workshops for the libraries of the nobility.*
In other words, the majority of medieval plant books in Europe at the time could not be characterized as “Latin Christian” in content or origin.
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*The “alchemical” herbals came later. They were not widely distributed in the early 15th century. Most of the ones that have survived were created after 1440.
By the way, my feeling about the VMS plants is that they are not specifically medicinal plants.
I am also fairly sure they are not toxic/poisonous plants.
I tried to figure out if they were plants specific to female ailments, or were abortifacient or used for birth control, but the ones that are recognizable do not generally serve these functions.
I tried to figure out if they were magical plants (those specifically used for charms and incantations), but there doesn’t appear to be much evidence for that idea.
I think some of them might be culinary plants, but there is so much overlap between culinary and medicinal plants it is hard to know for sure.
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As for specific plants, this is why they don’t look to me like they are all medicinal plants…
The palmate-leaved violas were not considered particularly valuable as medicinal plants. People at the time preferred Viola odorata (which has heart-shaped leaves different from the VMS Viola). Viola tricolor and its look-alikes are less common in medieval herbals than V. odorata.
Also, Tragopogon was not considered particularly valuable for medicinal use and was only occasionally included in medieval herbals. It was mostly a culinary plant and it is in the VMS.
It seems to me that the VMS plants might serve a variety of functions and may not all be in the same category. In fact, the small-plants section might even be a historic attempt at categorizing them.
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My best guess, at least for now, is that the more naturalistic VMS drawings might be plants from a specific garden or local region. It’s my belief that the person who drew them knew a few things about plants and wasn’t just blindly copying, so it’s possible that he or she documented plants from a specific piece of land.
If it is a local garden, then it’s more likely to be south or south-central Europe than northern Europe, because some of the plants can’t tolerate frost (e.g., Ricinus). But… if it also includes plants from other medieval herbals, then it’s hard to know, because most European herbals were copies of Mediterranean plants.
J.K.P.,
‘Latin Christian Europe’ refers to that part of western Europe whose *governance* was Christian, and of the Latin rite – as distinct from the Byzantine-, Syrian- or Coptic- etc.
It doesn’t mean that every text produced there was written in Latin, or about religion, though in fact that common language and cultural environment usually is reflected in one way and another, in any work first produced in the Latins’ domains.
I know that, Diane, but you use the term very liberally (and very frequently) to generalize (and criticize) everyone’s Voynich theories, thus painting them all with the same brush (and painting all the examples they bring forward with the same brush also).
It’s much too broad a term to hold up as a criticism of everyone’s viewpoints and the examples they bring forward to explain their ideas about the VMS, ideas that vary considerably from one researcher to the next and don’t deserve to be treated as though they were all the same.
Medieval manuscripts sometimes take their content from a variety of sources. Medieval scribes came from a variety of backgrounds. People traveled. There were immigrant colonies. Yet you constantly use the term Latin Christian, Latin Christian, Latin Christian as though it were a weapon against people who mention European sources or European examples.
They are talking about SPECIFICS, not Christian governance, and certain specifics might in fact be European even if some aspects of the VMS turn out NOT to be European.
In this context, the term Latin Christian does nothing to clarify the picture or to help further the research.
Most of them are also represented in the VM by means of the medicinal herb encyclopedia.
At least 4 of the VM plants are toxic. Certainly Ricinus, Bella Donna, Einbeere, Zwergholunder (Sambucus ebulus 95v2). If (95v1) is actually the monkshood, it belongs to the most poisonous in Europe. He was responsible for most of the poisonous deaths in the Middle Ages. 2gr. are enough.
There are such where allegedly with woman problems were used. But there are also mystical ones. Actually there is no correct line where one could pursue in the VM. It is simply well mixed.
PS: The Ricinus is also growing here. Not wild, but in gardens. Maybe it has something to do with the climate, or with the proximity of the sea. ( Heat accumulator ). I take then times a pair photos if it stands in the snow.
Peter, What I was trying to figure out was if there was an overall theme for the VMS plants.
Medicinal plants frequently include toxic plants, but the main intent of many of medieval herbals was to represent medicinal plants (both toxic and nontoxic), not to create a book specifically about toxic plants.
In the end I decided there probably is not an overall theme. There appears to be a mixture of plants in terms of how they were usually used in the Middle Ages.
If the VMS were specifically for medicinal plants, it is less likely that a palmate Viola and Tragopogon would be included.
If it were specifically for culinary plants, then Cannabis and Ricinus would probably not be included (there is castor oil, but it’s mostly used in ointments and diarrhea remedies, not as a food).
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After looking into it for a long time, my feeling is that the VMS includes plants with a variety of uses. This would be consistent with medieval gardens (especially noble and monastery gardens), which often had a section for ornamentals, a section for food, and a section for medicinal plants.
Some of these gardens were arranged according to the astrological properties of the plants (e.g., the ruling “planet”). This is something I was particularly interested in because medieval manuscripts describe medicinal plants as being more effective on certain days of the month, or having to be picked when the moon was full, or when certain stars were visible (this information was sometimes arranged in charts). Unfortunately, since we can’t read the VMS, and the folios might be out of order, it’s difficult to determine if the plants are arranged according to astrological beliefs.
J.K.P
I’m sure that if spoke of Byzantine, Coptic or Syrian Christian culture, or of ‘Arab’ culture or of earlier Roman or Greek Hellenistic you wouldn’t object.
So why object to this classification -which simply describes the cultural and intellectual traditions of western Europe.
I know a number of Voynicheros initially thought the term only referred to books written in the language of Latin, so I make a practice of costantly clarifying the sense of the term, writing e.g. ‘western European Christian (‘Latin’) culture” and so on.
When the description is not unremarkable, I fail to understand your apparently objecting to it – are you of the opinion that this one small sub-set of manuscript studies should have another description created, especially for internal use?
You also seem to imply that criticism of theories in the conservative tradition is one of those things a person *ought not* do and doing which is evidently imagined a mark of poor intelligence or inferior moral character.
This habit among theorists adhering to the oldest and most Eurocentric traditions of this study is one I’ve also had reason to criticise, and not least for the implied hypocrisy implied by the way adherents of such theories attack the character and motives of any who fail to adhere to the same basic approach and opinions. I realise that a more ‘matey’ sort of feeling is much appreciated – I should appreciate receiving a little more of it myself, sometimes.
But in the end, my position is that of Jim Reeds and his first group of fellow investigators. They described themselves first and foremost as “Friends of the Voynich manuscript.”
Hear! Hear!
I’m not objecting to the classification. I’m objecting to the way you use it.
Besides the fact that you bring it out in a critical way whenever anyone mentions possible European influences in the VMS, I do NOT think it does a good job of describing the cultural and intellectual traditions of the time period in which the VMS was made.
For one thing, only a very small percentage of the population spoke Latin. The Roman period ended 800 years earlier. Latin was fast disappearing, so much so, that those who knew it were scrambling around to find substitutes and, not long after the creation of the VMS, were inventing “universal” languages in order to try to preserve some way for people from different nations to communicate.
There was a great increase in the 15th century of manuscripts (including Bibles) written in the vernacular.
For another, the VMS was created on the cusp of the transition to the Renaissance, humanism, and a very significant change in scientific thought.
For a third, these constant references to “Christian governance” are not helpful to researchers who are trying to understand a manuscript that could have been created by a person with Christian, Jewish, Pagan, Islamic, agnostic, or atheist views and who could have lived in more than one culture at different points in his or her life. It was not uncommon for Europeans in the medieval period to spend 2 to 5 years traveling around northern Africa and the Middle East, and similarly people from other cultures traveled and lived in Europe. Something can have traces of other cultures without originating in other places, like European herbal manuscripts that largely were copied from Greek sources. Or French manuscripts from the early medieval period that show eastern influences.
So why not let people present their findings without jumping in with these not-very-useful “Latin Christian” generalizations. Just because they report that they have found something similar to the VMS that originated in Europe does not mean that particular person is assuming the VMS originated in the same place as the exemplars, or that it was necessarily the product of one culture.
JKP – not sure who the potted history bits are for; to see you presenting a sort of wiki-summary of my own work will surely strike some of the oldest of the old-timers as a little ironic. But it’s not the first time it’s happned and I am happy to see signs of change in the wind.
At the same time, I’ve seen nothing in your own work to suggest a theory other than one which assumes the culture of Latin Europe as its bedrock and any non-Latin (i.e. non western European Christian) “influences” as if they were ancillary and so tacitly implies that some Latin must have been the authority which selected the material and so on and so forth. But what if the only Latin (western European Christian) ‘influence’ is the style of binding, the addition of clothes for some of the ladies in the month-diagrams and bits of post-manufacture marginalia? Did you know that most of the Italian Adriatic was effectively a series of foreign colonies by the fifteenth century? What if the informing sources were ones which a visiting merchant left behind after dying of plague? What if it’s one one the books which a Nestorian bishop, ordered to Rome when he was en route to India, had taken from him before he was burnt as a heretic? What if…
Even the history of Latin (western Christian) Europe has entanglements. And I think history may show that it was an unreasonable attachment to the Wilfrid-Friedman Eurocentric theory which longest and worst held back an understanding of this manuscript. I have heard one advocate actually say they refused to listen to any suggestion of Asian character for the manuscript’s content, or any of its imagery. Which of course is a problem, since that influence is demonstrably present in some details. Asia begins at the Bosporus.
The difference between us is that when I criticise methodology, or classes of theory, or point out historical errors and so on, your criticisms are always personal and boil down to a peculiar sort of moral judgement – as if ‘bad people’ can’t have “good info.” Anyway, let’s not bore Nick and his readers any more. By all means have a go at my posts to voynichrevisionist. Pity it can’t be a roundtable discussion about the important things like palaeography, iconographic analysis, book-binding and so on.
D.N. O’Donovan wrote: “…I’ve seen nothing in your own work to suggest a theory other than one which assumes the culture of Latin Europeculture of Latin Europe as its bedrock and any non-Latin (i.e. non western European Christian) “influences” as if they were ancillary and so tacitly implies that some Latin …”
You know what? I am really sick of people putting words in my mouth that are not there, and I am extremely disappointed to find you doing it, DIane.
You are reading all sorts of assumptions into my research THAT ARE NOT THERE.
I have lost count of how many times I have had to say this…
I DO NOT ASSUME THE CULTURE OF LATIN EUROPE AS [the VMS] BEDROCK of the VMS. This is YOUR broad-brush interpretation of other people’s research, and I’m particularly disappointed that you would characterize my research this way because I always search worldwide (for alphabets, for zodiacs, for plants, for design patterns, etc., etc., etc.) and I have repeatedly told you that.
I have also said this OVER AND OVER AND OVER to you and to others…
If I find a zodiac figure in a European exemplar that matches the VMS it does NOT mean the person who drew it was European. THIS IS AN ASSUMPTION and it is wrong to assume that I am making unsupported, premature leaps of logic.
ANYONE can copy a European exemplar regardless of their ethnic/cultural background, so it tells us ONLY that the person saw a European manuscript and was familiar enough with European culture to do a reasonable copy. It doesn’t tell us who they are, where they’ve lived, or who their parents were (their parents might have been immigrants from a different part of the world who retained their ancestral culture within their home life).
If I find origins of Latin script in the VMS glyphs, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THE PERSON WHO WROTE IT was European, or even that they could read Latin. It tells us only that they were familiar with Latin glyphs and scribal conventions (which can be learned or simply copied regardless of your ethnic background) or that they chose to use them for some particular purpose (e.g., obfuscation, cipher, misdirection… who knows what the motivation was behind the VMS glyphs).
Chances are that if they knew Latin scribal conventions that they also knew some Latin, but I don’t even assume this, because there’s no evidence for it yet.
It’s too early to have theories.
I offer observations on specific items and on patterns that I have discerned, all of which are subject to revision as I discover more. I DO NOT KNOW where the VMS originated or the cultural/ethnic background of the person who created it so stop generalizing about my work based on YOUR assumptions.
What is the matter with people that I have to keep saying this about two dozen times per year? Does everything have to be black and white? Does everything have to be decided BEFORE doing the research?
This is bass ackwards. LEARN about the manuscript before forming theories.
Life is not so compartmentalized or simple that we can make so many assumptions about something that we can’t read.
Diane, your summary of my views is way off the mark.
i am Turan and Turkish and that is nowhere near TR, there is not even some sort of similarity. Those are pretty much the hanging baskets, poisonous plants in tune with astrology. Stop playing pls. That’s what causing the disease in town centres.. And this is the concept.. omg
Thanks to Turan’s comment, I have now seen an old reply by ‘Jk’ protesting indignantly my observation that all his work presumes a Latin-European default/bedrock, and saying with emphasis:
“ANYONE can copy a European exemplar…”