I’ve just watched a sort-of-mostly-interesting voynich.ninja interview with Adam Lewis, whose senior thesis at Puget Sound I mentioned here a few days ago.
However, one particular part of his argument (as presented in the interview, at least) made no real sense to me at all: that even though the Voynich offers (Lewis says) a decent-sized corpus of text to work with [in fact, it’s possibly the largest ciphertext from the pre-machine-cipher era], its text style is somehow too ‘samey’ for linguists to find the weak link in (and hence crack).
In fact, we have (at least) two ‘languages’ to work with, better known in Voynich circles as Currier A and Currier B (named after the distinguished US code-breaker Captain Prescott Currier, who first noted them in the 1970s), though it remains an open question as to whether or not they are closer to ‘dialects’ than distinct ‘languages’ per se. Hence I’m not entirely convinced by Lewis’s argument.
Regardless, might there be some subtle thread (whether linguistic, cryptological, or whatever) connecting two different blocks of text that we can trace between the two pages they appear on? Might we be able to find a tentative internal Voynichese text match (be it ever so small) to cast some faint light on both parts, in precisely the way that Adam Lewis asserts that we cannot?
Well… I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth attempting, so let’s give it a go, eh? 🙂
Three Pages, One Plant?
I believe that most Voynich researchers would agree that – very unusually – a single plant seems to appear in three separate places in the manuscript: f17v, f96v, and f99r. Long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers may also remember that I posted about these pages back in 2013.
Note that identifications of the plant are somewhat nebulous and unsure:
* Dana Scott – wild buckwheat (Ellie Velinska tends to agree with this, or perhaps bryony)
* “biologist from Finland” – – Rumex acetosella? or Smilax aspera (=common smilax) or Smilax excelsa. Or Dioscorea communis / Tamus communis?
* Peter – Tamus communis or Smilax aspera
* MarcoP – Cadamosto’s “vitis nigra” (black vine) commonly “tamo” (“vitis nigra tamo dice lo vulgo”), i.e. Tamus communis
* JKP – suggests many different plant matches
* Kieran Coughlan – Creeping Nightshade (Solanum Dulcamara)
* Edith Sherwood – yam (even though yam is post-Columbus) – and she thinks she can see Leonardo da Vinci’s signature hidden in its hairy roots. As always, make of that what you will.
(Doubtless there are many more to be found, but that’s the point where I lost interest.)
Codicologically: even though f96v and f99r would at first appear to have had a pair of pages inserted between them at some stage (i.e. f97 and f98), they ended up facing each other in the Voynich’s final state. Moreover, f96v is the last page of quire 17, and f99r is the first page of quire 19: my best reading (that I put forward in 2012 in Frascati) is that there was never any such pair of inserted pages, but that instead someone else had previously misnumbered the final two quires (Quire 19 and Quire 20), and that the two extra pages there were added to account for the ‘Quire 18’ that was never actually there. Perhaps none of this is actually important: but I think there’s a good chance that – contrary to their final folio numbering – f96v and f99r have sat facing each other for some time, perhaps even in the original gathering order.
Anyway, comparing the blocks of text reveals something I think is rather unusual, and which may possibly come as a surprise to many who look more at the drawings than at the text: that even though they share the same plant drawing, they really are – when you look a little closer – very different indeed from each other.
f17v
1. pchodol.chor.fchy.opydaiin.odaldy
2. ycheey.keeor.cthodal.okol.odaiin.okal
3. oldaim.odaiin.okal.oldaiin.chockhol.olol
4. kchor.fchol.cphol.olcheol.okeeey
5. ychol.chol.dolcheey.tchol.dar.ckhy
6. ockhor.or.okaiin.or.otaiind
7. sor.chkeey.paiir.cheor.os.s.aiin
8. qokeey.kchar.ol.dy.choldaiin.sy
9. lcheol.shol.kchol.choltaiin.ol
10. oytor.okeor.okar.okol.daiir.am
11. qokchey.qokaiir.ctheol.chol
12. oy.choy.kaiin.chckhey.ol.chor
13. ykeor.chol.chol.cthol.chkor.sheol
14. olor.okeeol.chodaiin.okeol.tchory
15. ychor.cthy.chshky.cheo.otor.oteol
16. okcheol.chol.okeol.cthol.otcheolom
17. qoain.shar.she.dol.qopchaiin.cthor
18. otor.cheeor.ol.chol.dor.chr.oreees
19. dain.chey.qoaiin.cthor.cholchom
20. ykeey.okeey.cheor.chol.sho.odaiin
21. oal.sheor.sholor.orshecthy.cpheor.daiin
22. qokeee.dar.chey.keeor.cheeol.ctheey.cthy
23. chkeey.okeor.shar.okeom
A list of mildly distinctive features of f17v might well include:
* the “ol.olol” repetition on line 3
* the single-leg gallows on line 1 (possibly a Neal Key?) and on line 4. (Might line 4 in fact be the start of a second paragraph?)
* note that the single-leg gallows on line 17 also looks like it might be the top line of a paragraph
* the “qoain” on line 17 (this appears only 7 times in the manuscript) and “qoaiin” on line 19 (this appears only 23 times)
* the “autocopied”-like choldaiin/choltaiin pair on lines 8 and 9
* chol appears 11 times (as itself and within other words)
* chol.chol (line 13) appears 39 times in A pages but only a single time in B pages
f96v
1. psheossheeor.qoepsheody.odar.ocpheeo.opar.ysarorom
2. yteor.yteor.olcheey.dteodaiin.sary.qoches.ycheom
3. dcheoteos.cpheos.sor.chcthory.cth.ytchey.daiin
4. dsheor.sheey.teocthy.ctheodody
5. tockhy.cthey.ckheeody.ar.cheykey
6. yteeody.teodar.olchey.sy
7. sheodal.chorory.cthol
8. ycheey.ckheal.daiin.s
9. oeol.ckheor.cheor.aiin
10. ctheor.oral.chor.ckhey
11. sar.os.checkhey.socthh
12. sosar.cheekeo.dain
13. soy.sar.cheor
Here:
* the four single-leg gallows (p) on line 1 could very easily be flagging Neal Keys in some way (e.g. [p] + “sheossheeor.qoe” + [p])
* there are only three instances of “yteor” in the whole manuscript, and line 2 has two side by side
* the way that “s” is used as the first character of lines 11-13 gives the appearance of being filler in some way (e.g. a null)
* there’s also an autocopyist-style diagonal set of “sar”s on lines 11-13 (sar / sosar / soy.sar) that also looks like filler
* the repetition of ctheodody and ckheeody on lines 4 and 5 makes it look as though ctheodody may have been a miscopying of ctheody
Hence even though the use of ‘language’ superficially appears similar to f17v (Currier-wise), there are very few actual similarities.
f99r, final paragraph
1. tolkeey.ctheey
2. ykeol.okeol.ockhey.chol.cheodal.okeor.olcheem.orar
3. okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey.daiin.okeols.aiin.olaiir.oolsal
4. qokeey.okeey.qokeey.okesy.qokeey.sar.sheseky.or.al
5. yshain.yckhey.octhey.dy.daiin.okor.okeey.shcthy.sh
6. ychor.ols.or.am.airam
Here, “qokeey.okeey.qokeey.okesy.qokeey” on line 4 is exactly the sort of repetitive garbage that reduces attempted linguistic decryptions to mush while simultaneously giving heart to hoax theorists and their CompSci tables.
A vs B, again
We can try categorize these three pages by revisiting Currier’s original notes on A and B,:
(a) Final ‘dy’ is very high in Language ‘B’; almost non-existent in Language ‘A.’
(b) The symbol groups ‘chol’ and ‘chor’ are very high in ‘A’ and often occur repeated; low in ‘B’.
(c) The symbol groups ‘chain’ and ‘chaiin’ rarely occur in ‘B’; medium frequency in ‘A.’
(d) Initial ‘chot’ high in ‘A’; rare in ‘B.’
(e) Initial ‘cth’ very high in ‘A’; very low in ‘B.’
(f) ‘Unattached’ finals scattered throughout Language ‘B’ texts in considerable profusion; generally much less noticeable in Language ‘A.’
Additional observations noted by Rene Zandbergen:
(g) The very frequent character combination ed is almost entirely non-existent in all A-language pages.
(h) The very common character combination qo is almost completely absent in the zodiac pages and the rosettes page, but appears everywhere else.
(i) The common character combination cho does not appear in the biological pages (and the rosettes page), but it does in other B-language pages.
From this, we can say (somewhat uncomfortably) that:
* f17v is a definitely-Currier-A page (it has lots of “chol” and “chor” instances, as well as cth- words)
* f96v is a sort-of-a-Currier-A page
* f99r is a sort-of-a-Currier-B page
And so we get to the awkward situation I highlighted back in 2013, that A vs B is far too simplistic to be a globally useful razor, and that we also don’t yet have a good ‘roadmap’ for how the ‘language’ used in the Voynich Manuscript evolves and changes through its pages. Which is essentially why I think that Adam Lewis is being too reductive when he claims that Voynichese is too samey across its pages to be crackable – the actual situation would seem to be that Voynichese is actually too unsamey for anyone to get a grip on.
But is there a match?
Back in 2013, commenter Šuruppag suggested on my original page that there might possibly be a very short match between all three blocks of text. Specifically (as transcribed above):
* f17v line 5: ychol.chol.dolcheey
* f96v line 2: yteor.yteor.olcheey
* f99r line 3: keey.keeor.okeey
Šuruppag continued:
A nice little sequence that occurs once in each passage. Seems to show similar pattern and characters.
Perhaps this sequence (possibly the name of the plant?) shows us the evolution of the cipher. Feel free to criticize if you don’t think so.
I would add that there’s reasonably good evidence (I flagged this in The Curse of the Voynich in 2006) that “-y” may mark where a longer word has been truncated: and so “keey” on f99r could very easily be a (slightly) truncated version of “keeor”. In which case we might wonder whether “yt” on f96v is enciphering the same underlying letter as “k” on f99r.
Again, in Curse in 2006 I proposed that EVA ok / ot / yk / yt (all of which appear prominently in label-driven sections such as the zodiac pages, e.g. “otolal”) might well be verbose cipher pairs, whereas EVA t / k (i.e. where not immediately preceded by o or y) might well be some kind of transposition cipher where a different letter gets inserted from elsewhere in the text (t and k are basically interchangeable in almost all circumstances). This makes me suspect here that the last word of the phrase on f99r should actually be olkeey rather than okeey, because “ok” would then be a verbose cipher whereas “olk” would be parsed as “ol-k”.
I also wrote in Curse that I thought not only that EVA e / ee / eee / ch shapes were verbosely enciphered vowels, but that their mapping and use seemd to change between A and B pages. So I for one would not be hugely disturbed if it were to be the case that EVA “e-or” in f96v reappears as EVA “ee-or” in f99r.
And finally, I have also proposed that where Voynichese words start with “d-“, this may well turn out to be a signal that a longer word has been split up into two shorter words. (For example, I suspect that daiin daiin sequences encipher groups of Arabic digits that should be joined together.)
Putting all these fragments together, I wonder if perhaps the three lines (if the various miscopyings were corrected, and the f99r -y rectified as -or, and the words reassembled) were originally supposed to be parsed as:
* f17v line 5: ychol..chololcheey – – – or perhaps “ychol.ychololcheey”
* f96v line 2: yteor.yteorolcheey
* f99r line 3: keeor.keeorolkeey
Hence it seems to me that what might well be going on in the f99r line is that three “k”s are being used to stand in for yt / yt / ch respectively, i.e. that the encipherer is using a transposition (i.e. replacement from elsewhere in the text) cipher trick rather than f96v’s verbose cipher trick to encipher the same plaintext word.
But what then of f17v’s text? My best current guess is that this version may well be closer still to the same small block of plaintext being enciphered on all three pages.
One cipher alphabet, multiple verbose ciphers?
More awkwardly than all of the above, the above seems to suggest that chol in the first page be the same as eor in the second page and eeor in the third page: that is, that even though the Voynichese letters are the same across different pages, the arrangement of verbose ciphers using those covertext letters may well be changing. Is our inability to read Voynichese then largely a consequence of multiple verbose cipher arrangements having been used?
When this kind of Voynichese discussion comes up, I often think back to my late (and intensely argumentative) friend Glen Claston. When he was building up his Voynichese transcription, he often noticed (as he mentioned to me a couple of times) that the patterns and styles of words would “shift” every few lines or paragraphs, as though it internally changed into a different gear or mode. He was never able to quantify this shift more precisely (even though he was a keener observer than almost everyone), but perhaps there lurks at the heart of Voynichese some kind of verbose cipher modality – not enough to disrupt the overall “look” (i.e. of the covertext), but more than enough to throw the decryptor hounds off the crypto-scent.
That is, perhaps what these three lines is trying to tell us is that we should be looking not for a single global verbose cipher key (as might be suggested by the way that the covertext consistently uses a relatively small set of cipher glyphs), but for a number of different (and rather more localized) verbose cipher keys. Voynichese’s covertext may be formed from a single set of glyphs across all its pages, but might the complexity around the different blur of Currier ‘languages’ actually be telling us that there are multiple encryption schemes in use?
If that is correct (to even some degree), what would we need to do to get under Voynichese’s skin? I’ve often spoken of the need to try to map Currier A usage to Currier B usage (to try to identify equivalent sequences in the two parts), but perhaps this is only 5% of the larger challenge, and moroever a step that makes no sense until the verbose ciphers have been even partially mapped – for it could very well be that a part of a single page might well need to be remapped to a different part of the same page in order to be able to parse it, let alone read it. Perhaps the first step should be to try to find examples of Voynich Manuscript pages that exhibit Clastonian multimodality (i.e. where there is an apparent shift in the system within the page), and see if we can quantify how the changes in behaviour work in practice, just so that we can even try to parse what is going on.
Tricky, though. 🙁
My two cents based on the quarter century I’ve been banging my head against the Mss.:
* Initially I thought Herb A vs. Bio B was a case of the Bio B encrypter making different and less variable choices among (verbose) homophone & null cipher elements; my suspicion now is that the evolution from Herbal A to Bio B through Herbal B reflects a key change intended to hide the decomposition of the verbose cipher “word” morphology more effectively, i.e. the really obvious verbose pairs from Herbal A are less frequent in Bio B, and Bio B makes much heavier use of the hard-to-decompose combos involving the Currier ‘C’ glyph.
* Now that I think of it, it’s interesting that the set of high-freq-space-straddling/low-freq-“word”-medial glyph pairs is so similar between Herbal A and Bio B given the other large qualitative differences between them.
* Not sure I agree about key changes within Herbal A, although it’s probably worth revisiting/redoing cluster analysis results to make sure one has a homogeneous sample to analyze.
* While Nick & I (and I suspect various other old-timers) are firm believers in the verbose cipher hypothesis (with some disagreement on details), the academic work on the text doesn’t show much awareness of the idea, let alone be driven by it. So, Nick — how do we move the needle on this? How do we convince other academics that this is that part of the hypothesis search space they should be focused on?
Karl
Karl: it’s an interesting and difficult question, as you know. There is a huge void at the heart of Voynich research, which is a follow-on study to Currier’s studies in the 1970s that nobody has yet done.
But I think the main reason that particular train hasn’t arrived is disciplinary boundaries: the kind of study that needs to be done straddles the line between cryptology and linguistics (Currier himself was both a codebreaker and an academic linguist, a combination that few people know or appreciate), and it would take somebody with a foot in both camps and an open mind to do such a thing.
It would be a big study – it would need to go beyond clustering to contact tables to state machines, and even to codicology and cladistics – and I just wonder who would have the stomach and patience for it?
You’ve written so much interesting stuff here, Nick, it will take a week (or more) to respond to it all. 🙂
I’ll start with the plant drawings, but I need pictures, so I’ll have to do it on my blog.
J.K. Petersen: glad to be of service. 😉
One thing that came up I should perhaps have mentioned is that every time I try to dive deep into the pages to try to make sense of specific pieces of Voynichese text (as here), I almost always end up with grave doubts about the reliability not only of the transcription but also of the text itself. For example: the transcriptions I give here include a number of ‘corrections’ that only make sense if you compare them against fairly deep Voynichese rules. For example, we see EVA e followed by EVA s, and EVA i followed by EVA r, but almost never EVA e followed by EVA r, or EVA i followed by EVA s. I don’t know what these ‘rules’ mean, but I know that they are there.
Small point, probably, but
(i) the protocol is to list the first two or three identifications in chronological order, because those which follow are presumed either to imitate or to modify the earlier. So did Fr. Petersen offer an id for any of those folios? Second, of course is the usual point that a policy of ‘blanking’ my work (which you know precedes most of those you name) distorts the history of how later writers reached their views. Thus, Ellie’s identification of the Centauria post-dates my own, and her reading of it.
Since that is a matter of ideology, and personal policy rather than objective historical method, I won’t expect emendation in the near future.
(ii) second point, also probably of little interest is that your three examples do not show the same plant: you have confused stylistic similarities with similarity in content. The pictures which include tendrils (of the bean and grape type) describe vines as such. One of the pictures you’ve included, though it also uses a ‘sorrel-like’ form for the leaf, and the plant also has berry-like fruits, is depicted as a scrambler and not a vine.
Not sure that will make any substantial difference to your linguistic/cryptological argument, of course.
@Nick, small correction. These are 2 different plants.
The upper one probably (Dioscorea communis). In folk medicine, the plant was former u. a. used against rheumatism and bruises, hence the French name “herbe aux femmes battues”
The middle one (Smilax aspera) or also (Smilax medica) found earlier use in the treatment of syphilis.
Since the name Smilax medica mainly concerns the use of the root, it is not surprising that it reappears in the register VM at the roots.
For our little fellow readers, Smilax apera are also the favorite berries of the Smurfs. But do not eat, both look very similar, but one is poisonous.
Plain ordinary old bindweed or Calystegia Sepium should cover the creepers which of course can be found in North Africa, all of temperate Asia and Europe sans Britain. Only introduced to the New World in recent times and though considered noxious, it is historically known for its edible and medicinal properties. On the off chance that it is one of the very similar looking wild sweet potato creepers, than all bets are off because it is native to the Americas, well north of the border and far from Pima or Navajo country it seems. Note that there are many and varied varieties of both of these convulvus plant forms including small or large variagated leaves and even buttercup type flowers of different hues.
Nick wrote: “I don’t know what these ‘rules’ mean, but I know that they are there.”
Yes they are.
Those attempting substitution codes would be wise to heed your words.
Diane: I didn’t “blank” your work, I just felt so disspirited when I reached Edith Sherwood’s page (which began “One of Nick Pelling’s blogs focused my attention on investigating the finer details of the VM, particularly on Folio 17v, where I was fascinated to find the concealed name of the artist“) that I lost the will to look any further.
As to whether or not the two plants are the same, it’s an open question. As you have taken to saying recently, SantaColoma-style, it ain’t necessarily so.
To: Peter M. and John Sanders:
Am not disputing your herbal information but am just inquiring if you could enlighten us as to which herbals you use.
Thanks !
J.
Nick: Very interesting post indeed!
James: My field excursions this morning being most enlightening, I formed my opinions based on these. However, I had no means of checking the subterranean root systems for comparison to the VM sketches. Also there were no berry pods in evidence which could very well be subject to seasonal trends, though you can rest assured I’ll maintain a constant vidual in my future daily foraging. I did notice quite a deal of ant activity around the infrequently placed flowers and buds between the leaf/mainline branches if that helps. My situation is very tropical and currently we are in the dry season, though native plants still flourish along the uninhabited bush trails that I walk daily.
PS: I guess passiflora foetida could have some claims, though heaven forbid it’s native to the New World regions and we certainly wouldn’t want to be there would we?…..
JKP: thanks for the blog post reply, much appreciated.
The counterargument that should be made – leaf-shapes aside, a point which I completely accept – is that these three drawings are remarkably similar to each, and form a cluster of drawings that is unlike (I believe, anyway) all the other plant drawings in the Voynich.
Both sides of the argument are guilty of making presuppositions about the nature, intent, and knowledge embedded in the herbal drawings, so we’re not yet in a position to argue either side as strongly as we would like. :-/
@John Sanders.
“…it’s native to the New World regions and we certainly wouldn’t want to be there would we ?”
Well I would, being very much impressed with Botanist Dr. Tucker’s intriguing hypothesis.
My excursions are to the Internet where I can view and download herbals which pre Internet would have been impossible to even find unless one were a millionarie.
I recently found the Fuchs herbal (beautiful colored illustrations) but had to download the damned thing a page at a time over a few weeks, all over 900 pages of it and then assembled them into a .PDF. How there can be “copyright” restrictions on a 500 year old book, I have no idea.
Gerade’s “History of Plants”, and Hernandez’s herbal, among several others, are all roughly from the Voynich era or thereafter and therefore of interest to me as possibles of influence on the Voynich author(s).
PS Can we be sure that Calystegia Sepium might not have existed in the MesoAmerican regions ? Weather perhaps more accommodating down there ?
Interesting that related species do just fine in New England (most certainly not a tropical area !! I’m from Rhode Island) .
Thanks
Ja.
There is an interesting shift for the two paragraphs on page f57r. The first paragraph uses words like ‘cheody’, ‘sheody’ and ‘qokeody’ whereas the second paragraph is using words like ‘chedy’, ‘sheedy’ and ‘qokeedy’. In fact the first paragraph contains 12 words ending with ‘-eody’ but no words ending in ‘-edy’ whereas the second paragraph contains 10 ‘edy’-words but no ‘eody’-words.
Torsten: thank you very much indeed, this does sound very much like the kind of thing that Glen Claston mentioned, and which never seemed to him to be explainable purely as a result of a change in subject matter. Looking for eody on voynichese.com also suggests f66r and f66v, though your suggestion of f57r seems to be the strongest exemplar.
f17v has a very strong pattern with eol, though f39r, f87r and f90v2 are arguably even more distinctive. f31v and f58v are both worthy of attention here too.
f52v has a similar pattern with eor.
For chol, f42r seems to have a per-paragraph pattern.
For chor, f42r (again), f47r, and f52v.
Once again, thanks very much! 🙂
@ James R. Pannozzi
Personally I have kept plants of Switzerland. They cover the northern and southern parts of Europe. Prevailing through the 2 climate zones of the Alps.
But also the parts near to France (Jura Mountains). All correspond in about 8000 flower species.
Now the comparison with the plants in the VM. I was actually amazed how exactly most plants in the VM are actually drawn. 60% are very authentic apart from small mistakes.
The determination by the medieval herbs and healing art was pretty simple with about 700 examples.
Without today’s Internet, that would certainly not have been so, if at all possible.
Now I work on the Italian flora. Apart from coastal areas I do not expect much new.
For many herbal books, the determination would not be possible without text.
Who would think that this agrees with VM f94r if you can not read the text. (Botrychium lunaria).
And all the plants drawn in the VM grow around castles with dovetail battlements.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1922190954670216&set=gm.1288142147962250&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Before heading off on my field trip this morning, I already harboured doubts about the various types of bind weed and now I’m convinced that adherents to the Calystegia Sepium including myself may need to look further afield for answers (or maybe not). The leaf and bud bearing tendrils of sepium do not produce berry clusters at their tips, for that is decidedly not their function in such dedicated convolvus plants. These slender tips are purely for outreach and entwining purposes (clockwise or counter depending on hemispheres) so that any fruits developing thereupon would only serve to impede the function. Now when I used the term ‘maybe not’, I would be tempted to suggest that perhaps our sketcher may have mistakenly seen one plant, where there could well have been two; namely the vine and it’s entwined host, the latter being a berried trailing shrub for instance. Of course a shrub would be most likely to derive it’s nourishment from a standard tap root but that is not to say that our botanist, following the vine source, only located a subterranean tuber under the shallow subsoil and not the other plant’s deeper root system….More work is indeed required to come up with another variety of tip fruiting, non convolvus trailer bush, but without the cling spines of the type known as Smilax Aspera.
Nick
JKP has provided a nice blog-post, very helpful.
It is no criticism of his effort, I hope, to comment that when working through the botanical section – a detailed analysis of about 40 folios, of which I happened to include the same three among those I published – I found that the construction of these images follows certain consistent rules, which I was then able to explain and classify.
The pictures are quite consistent in the way they inform the reader of whether the subject concerns plants that are vines, scramblers, aquatic or waterside plant, and whether they are trees or not. It’s no deep, mysterious or occult system, any more than such differentiation is in our own tradition of painting.
It was an early error to presume the plant pictures form a medicinal herbal – an assumption based on nothing but a false analogy. Even in the western tradition you can find vegetable imagery in all sorts of other contexts and other media.
It is not a catalogue of materia medica. And when the makers meant a vine, they showed a vine and its tendril. When it wasn’t a vine of that sort… they didn’t.
I do wish it were possible to explain that this isn’t a ‘Voynich theory’; I’m simply provenancing and describing imagery on an artefact using the same methods as we do in any non-Voynich environment. Of course there we don’t have an atmosphere which suggest that ‘anyone’s guess is just as good’.
And thank-you Nick for adding that note about feeling exhausted. In print this might come over as sarcastic, but I mean it honestly. Such things make a difference.
I have looked at f57r some years ago, for exactly the same reason that Torsten mentions here. The idea to test was that both paragraphs provide the same text, but in two ‘dialects’ or ‘cipher versions’.
An interesting case for what you call the block paradigm.
The result I obtained was that this did not work in any obvious way.
It still leaves open the less likely possibility that it might work in a very complicated way.
Rene: I guess I’m more inclined to think that the underlying explanation for the difference will turn out to be that the cipher system can somehow operate in different ‘modes’, and that we’re perhaps seeing subtle artefacts of a shift in mode within these different pages. Of course, this might all just be random (i.e. where the explanation is overfitted), but we have to hope that there might be some kind of rationality driving this, right?
Another way of looking at the same thing might be to look at the recto and verso of the same folio. If they appear to have been written at the same time (which we could even test by analyzing the ink) and yet each side seems to employ a completely different system, that too might be evidence of modality.
Nick wrote: “The counterargument that should be made – leaf-shapes aside, a point which I completely accept – is that these three drawings are remarkably similar to each, and form a cluster of drawings that is unlike (I believe, anyway) all the other plant drawings in the Voynich.”
Nick, the drawings you pointed out as “different” have something in common with other VMS plants—habitat.
As a botanical example, Digitalis/foxglove (which is tall, with bell-shaped flowers) and Cyclamen (short with distinctive leaves and potato-shaped bulbs/corms) look NOTHING alike, but they grow together. They are buddies.
The plants you highlighted in this blog grow in fields and disturbed areas. They need more sun than VMS stem-whorl plants, BUT… they usually grow in the same general areas. They are neighbors.
.
The VMS stem-whorl plants form another cluster. This particular leaf-adaptation is found in Lilium, Trientalis, Paris, Spigelia anthelmia, Equisetum, and Lysimachia, and is very evident in the VMS:
http://voynichportal.com/2013/07/19/large-plants-folio-5r/
Plants with a stem-whorl adaptation frequently grow in forests and forest margins—places that are damper and shadier than the VMS hastate/sagittate/heart-shaped plants but, as I said, they are neighbors.
…
If we assume the drawing on 99v is Rumex, Convolvulus, Bryony, or Polygonum (rather than the more exotic Dioscorea or other yam-like plants), then 99v fits well with other VMS field plants such as Viola, Centaurea, Cichorium, and Tragopogon.
I could keep talking about this for hours, but I don’t want to swamp your blog. I defer to you 🙂
Rene and Torsten: here’s something else I noticed just now when trying to find ch/e-related patterns at voynichese.com…
(k, kch, ke) = (10845, 1093, 3904)
(t, tch, te) = (6872, 992, 1812)
(p, pch, pe) = (1620, 752, 5)
(f, fch, fe) = (499, 193, 4)
(ok, okch, oke) = (6097, 592, 2509)
(ot, otch, ote) = (3866, 566, 1296)
(op, opch, ope) = (578, 344, 2)
(of, ofch, ofe) = (168, 75, 0)
(yk, ykch, yke) = (740, 114, 320)
(yt, ytch, yte) = (605, 118, 195)
(yp, ypch, ype) = (93, 63, 0)
(yf, yfch, yfe) = (28, 12, 1)
Hi Nick,
the most obvious part of your statistics coincides with an observation by Currier. He said (as transcribed by Mary D’Imperio, and converted as needed to Eva by me):
“These two, p , f, are never, ever, anywhere in the manuscript, followed by e. ”
Now it isn’t exactly “never, ever, anywhere”, but it is close enough. Currier used this point to argue that p/f are not variant (aberrant) forms of t/k. I think that that does not follow, but that’s another question.
Another statistic that jumps out is that, for each line in your table, the sum of the second and third number is roughly about half the first number.
For f and p this means that the lack of following ‘e’ is compensated by more ‘ch’.
There is a clear rule at work here, which (as always) can be tentatively explained in many different ways.
Nick, you state: Here, “qokeey.okeey.qokeey.okesy.qokeey” on line 4 is exactly the sort of repetitive garbage that reduces attempted linguistic decryptions to mush while simultaneously giving heart to hoax theorists and their CompSci tables.
Repetition to the point of “redundancy”, the term for this common and pervasive feature of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican rhetorical style, is a hallmark of “huehuetolli” the speech of the elders in Nahuatl. There is nothing mushy about it.
Nancy Farriss in her work Libana: El discurso ceremonial mesoamericano y el sermón cristiano (2014) cites the following 17th century example of this feature in footnote 75 on page 37. …yoho bechi xolo / yoho cochi quixi / yoho bella quedia…
As an example of how the convolvus vines entwine their host, either clockwise or counterclockwise depending on their location in a zone north or south of the equator, see Rene’s VM text site comparison scans for MS 35v and accompanying Paris Bn Lat 6823 f60r. It’s easy to see on the latter scan how our upright host is enwrapped by the vine thereby confirming its hemispherical position whilst the other poor blighter seems to be stuck right on the equator.. and whilst we’re over this way I have to admit that I really see no similarities in the two sets of plants depicted as far as similarity goes..Would anyone know whether Wilfred had a name for his shop in London per chance as all I can come up with is Levetus which I think may have been his forwarding agent.
Hi Nick,
yes, the text of the VMS is highly structured on glyph level.
A second example is that ‘lk’ is very frequent, but not ‘lt’ or ‘lp’ (‘l’ in front of ‘k’ occurs 1080 out of 10934 times or 10%, ‘lt’ 1.5%, ‘lp’ 2.5 % and ‘lf’ 7.7%).
Another example is the position in a line. The glyph ‘k’ is much more frequent then the glyph ‘t’. But as the first glyph in a line ‘t’ is much more frequent then ‘k’. Also ‘p’ is more frequent then ‘f’ in this position than you may expect by there numbers (‘k’ is used 129 out of 10934 times or 1% in line initial position, ‘t’ 6%, ‘p’ 24 %, ‘f’ 8%).
John, in Voynichese letter-precedence, yoho bechi xolo / yoho cochi quixi / yoho bella quedia would be written:
ohoy chccbai olox / ohoy chcoai quaiaxain / ohoy ccllab qudaccai
😉
I must say, I’m certainly not as confident as I once was about the AU given date range for our MV velum and I’m almost certain that Diane and others might concur. If Rene could give more detail about the control and it’s origin I might feel more comfortable in acceptance of the result, though our little ‘ugly Duckling’ might have come from Timbuktu or Machupicchu for all we know. Had we been interested in the age of a ten million year old piece of python poo, it wouldn’t be a problem, but six hundred years is just yesterday in the time frame that we seem to be discussing. Just to add insult to injury, my old Wiki pal informs that two volcanic erruptions occurred in the 13th and 15th centuries which effected carbon exchange rates of plant life in Europe for up to four hundred years until normal deterioration levels came back on line in the 19th. When the doctor tells you that you’ve got some incurable disease, the immediate thought is to get a second opinion, I wonder if the good folks at Benecke gave that any consideration.
John, the foliation and two primary sets of marginalia are paleographically consistent with the radio-carbon dating. It’s not proof, but it does add to the evidence.
J.K.P……. That was prompt and I thank you, perhaps I’ll get some sleep tonight afterall. I had been tossing and turning about the location of le chateau Tony Averlino in 1444 and whether or not Wilfred Voynich was still in London around or1914, or had moved over to his low carbon pad in the Waldorf Astoria by the outbreak of WW1.
John, I do hope that you don’t believe that wikipedia understands things better than the radio-carbon dating community.
Anyway, if you go to my web site, hit the ‘Search’ button and type ‘carbon’ you will get a more detailed explanation.
@ Nick and pals : My memory bank is getting shaky. However, I seem to recall that I identified this garden plant as being psyllium seed. This plant may have also ended up in the “pharmacy ” garden. Historically, and right up to the present day, psyllium seed was used as a laxative.
So, I will skim through B 408 ‘ s contents (folio by folio) to see if I am 1nce again being repetitive.
bd
@Rene, zum Thema Kohlenstoffdatierung. Gibt es eine Untersuchung vom Buchdeckel ? Oder hat man überhaupt eine zeitliche Vorstellung wann das Buch in etwa gebunden wurde ?
@Rene, on carbon dating. Is there an investigation from the book cover? Or is there any idea as to when the book was about to be bound?
Peter,
der Buchdeckel wurde nicht datiert, aber er stammt aus dem 18. oder 19. Jh. von den Jesuiten in Rom. Er ersetzt einen älteren Deckel aus Holz, wahrscheinlich mit Leder überzogen.
The cover has not been radio-carbon dated, but we know that it was added in the 18th or 19th century by the Roman jesuits, replacing an earlier cover of wooden boards, probably covered with leather.
@ Peter M
In relation to the question as to whether a medieval manuscript was assigned to be bound at all, the purpose and further use of it determinded its becoming a bound book or not. Furthermore the kind of manuscript itself determinded the kind of binding, and from precious bibles or ‘books of hours’ to simple psalters and housebooks everything was possible.
Lots of manuscripts were never bound, others decades and even centuries later than their origin, always dependend of the importance their respective owners dedicated them. Taking also long periods of war and plunder into consideration, it is not much of a surprise to find, for example, a 13th century codex bound in a 16th century maculation.
For the VM the time and kind of binding is undoubtedly of importance, but for its origin the carbon dating still remains the only reliable source.
Danke Rene und Charlotte, so kann auch kein Rückschluss über den Deckel auf das Pergament gezogen werden. Sozusagen als zweite unabhängige Altersbestätigung. Ich denke mal, dass steht auch für die Bindeschnur.
Thanks Rene and Charlotte, so no conclusion can be drawn over the lid on the parchment. As a second independent age confirmation. I think that also stands for the tie-string.
I think Google always does not translate correctly
JKP and those discussing the plant-pictures. It has to be kept in mind that the idea of ‘realism’ even as a basis for drawings and sculptures etc. made in western (Latin Europe) comes relatively late, and that the usual way we read a picture to define its place of origin and genre is not by matching objects in the painting to ones in our pre-defined theoretical environment for the picture but by identifying the style of drawing. That’s the first and obvious difference between say a tenth-century picture of a lion and one made in the sixteenth century.
It is true, as Tiltman said in summing up the Friedman group’s efforts that there appears to be no parallel in the western tradition of plant pictures even to as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and he didn’t try to limit that statement to herbals.
To treat the pictures first as pictures before assuming that they are drawn in a western style, that they form a ‘herbal’ etc. is a sensible and conventional way to treat any picture.
I’ve been banging on about this for quite a while, and have tried to teach Voynicheros the usual approach and methodology – but alas must still offer one of my own posts as example of the results it gets in treating this manuscript’s pictures.
So – as one instance in demonstration –
https://voynichimagery.com/2014/11/11/folio-33v-lotus-like-plants-updated-part-1/
D. O’Donovan wrote: “JKP and those discussing the plant-pictures. It has to be kept in mind that the idea of ‘realism’ even as a basis for drawings and sculptures etc. made in western (Latin Europe) comes relatively late, and that the usual way we read a picture to define its place of origin and genre is not by matching objects in the painting to ones in our pre-defined theoretical environment for the picture…”
Diane, you are speaking theoretically.
I am speaking from experience and a lifelong interest in plants. I have collected herbarium specimens for many years, have cataloged more than 21,000 plant species in a detailed database that includes their habitat, origins, distribution, historical names, and their modern and historical uses.
I can recognize about 60% of medieval plant drawings on sight, without looking at the labels, even some that are badly drawn. Not all of them—sometimes the same plant is drawn multiple times with insignificant variations, or the drawings are excessively stylized, but that is not the case with the VMS. Each plant is detailed and individual. They can be narrowed down to a short-list of possibilities.
There is a certain illustrative and botanical approach in the VMS drawings that can be discerned if one is familiar with plants and studies EVERY VMS plant *in relation to the others* (this means printing them ALL out and laying them on a big floor, shuffling them around so the commonalities are more easy to discern, and studying them in this manner for several years).
There are certain specific parts of the VMS plants that have been respected in terms of their relation to nature, and other parts that are given leeway for mnemonic or creative expression, regardless of other traditions.
.
The VMS has a large number of plants, enough that the illustrator’s *approach* to plants can be discerned if one takes the time to look at every VMS plant, in the context of the corpus as a whole. Thumbing through it and identifying a plant here or there does not yield this kind of insight.
I respect the VMS plant drawings. Even though the illustrations are not expert, they exhibit a better understanding of plants and plant husbandry than most herbals of their time.
@ PeterM,
if you’re not happy with Google, try deepL, it’s not perfect but better
http://www.deepl.com/translator
I find that Google translate between English and German is not too bad, but it clearly has a problem with ‘Deckel’.
Indeed, the cover tells us nothing about the origin of the manuscript.
It is not entirely clear how much of the binding was replaced by the Jesuits in Rome. For this question, see also here:
http://www.voynich.nu/extra/sp_descr.html
(especially towards the end).
JKP
I’m not sure where you get the idea that I’m speaking theoretically. I began in this field in 1975, in Japan, with a study of the system informing colour shifts in Mughal art. I went on to take a second degree specialising in the archaeology of industry and fine arts and have only recently retired.
I’m afraid you have relied a little much on the sort of group-rumour which begins, and feeds itself, and reinforces itself without any pause to reflect whether the foundations are solid enough.
Pretty much what happened when Wilfrid Voynich’s narrative was first asserted, then believed, then increasingly padded out with more and more hypothetical stuff.
I expect about 9 out of 10 Voynicheros believe what they’re told (in an authoritative tone) on both subjects. 🙂
Good luck to you, all the same. No one could say you’re not a very hard worker, and I quite envy you the number of quotable pics and things that you can call up in short order. Seriously. I seem to need a lot longer to think things through.
Now for Nick’s ease, I’ll let the conversation pass on to newer matter.
Thanks to Helmut and Rene, I’m going to test the new translator.
I Read your page about the bond, now I’m a little smarter too. I hoped for a little bit more, but this has already been worked on down to the smallest detail.
Zandbergen write : Indeed, the cover tells us nothing about the origin of the manuscript.
Champolion write : The cover front ( Beinecke 408 ) is written.
Top left : 6461.
Top right : Z. I. L. I. 8.
🙂 So it is written in Czech language = Žili 8. 🙂
🙂 It means in English = Lived 8. 🙂
And the eighth (8) was Eliška of Rosenberg.
Who was born as an 8 child. In 1466.
In the manuscript he also writes that he is 8.
Remember the ants. 🙂 🙂 🙂
Nick. You have the bad characters.
f 17 v.
1. pchodol. chor. fchy. opydaiin. adaldy.
2. ycheey. keeor. cthodal. okol. adaiin. okal. = bad.
______________________________________________________________
Good characters ( f 17 v ).
1. Poco8oe. ocoR. Pocq. oPq8am. o8ae8q.
2. qocccq. ltccoR. oHco8ae. oltoe. o8am. oltae.
_____________________________________________________________
Ok – I give up. Could JKP or someone else who has seen it kindly point me to the paleographer’s report or opinion quoted by JKP:
“… the foliation and two primary sets of marginalia are paleographically consistent with the radio-carbon dating.”
Clearly, I’ve missed that palaeographer’s report; I had no idea we’d found one willing to comment, let alone since the radiocarbon dating was done.
Obviously a must-read. Anyone able to point me to that report – I’d be most grateful.
I haven’t finished writing it up yet, Diane, it’s very extensive. I’m working on it.
I have hundreds of comparative samples processed through a mathematical analytical engine.
It’s not easy to write up and illustrate nine years of research in a few hours. The introduction alone is pages and pages because most people, even good researchers, even many good historical researchers, have little or no background in paleography. It’s necessary to establish the groundwork and provide examples so people are well-equipped to evaluate the data that follows.
It’s also not easy to lay out the many necessary comparisons and examples. Medieval “alphabets” went far beyond letters. It takes about 40 slots to characterize the most basic set and that has to be multiplied by the number of individual examples.
If it could be done in a few pages, I would submit it to a journal as a white paper, but some things cannot be explained in a few pages, so I’ll release it as a PDF.
.
I know almost nothing about astronomy, alchemy, or post-graduate-level biology, but in the areas of handwriting, calligraphy, medieval scripts, foreign alphabets, as well as media production, software design and development, data visualization, data management, and analysis, I have professional expertise. FWIW, I’ve also developed fonts for some of the biggest companies.
That’s more than I wanted to post publicly, but I know you’re going to jump on me and ask what credentials I have so there you go.
D.N.O’D: Me too; We’ve both obviously missed the connector.
I would try this on the pages with the elephants 🙂
https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f55v/0.772/0.901/4.78
https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f99v/0.972/0.748/4.50
Find the elephant in the room 🙂
@Ellie
Nice of you to mention the elephant. With a little imagination, I’m sure you can recognize one.
But did you notice that it is one of the few plants with a blue root? This could indicate a water, bog plant.
The size of the sketch in relation to the other plants also suggests its importance.
If it is really a water plant, it should not be difficult to find it among medicinal plants.
@Peter M
My personal feeling is that the text around this “plant” is related to the text in Harley 1585 about use of elephant blood for “medical” purposes 🙂 It is just a feeling – not even a theory…
http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_1585_f067v
If looking for a crib – it is probably best to look for plant drawings where at least few people agree on what the plant could be rather than a plant about which everybody has their own idea. Also, it would be nice if the plant appears under the same name in texts in different languages.
The first one, 55v, looks like a Cthulhu to me. But we are only trying to get to a “block paradigm” here right?
-JKP-
Thanks for the clarification. I’m always grateful when writers save my time by making clear these distinctions. I mean adding ‘in my opinion’ or ‘I think’ when it’s an idea of their own, and properly noting and citing their sources if there’s an objective ‘outsider’ basis for the case they want to make. Keeps everything clear, and transparent so you know it’s not a ‘theory-first’ backwards argument.
Please don’t think I’m accusing you of being the only Voynich writer who states personal notions or impressions using a form that suggests objective fact.
One reason I still read Nick’s blog is that he is a very clear-thinker on that point.
Trouble is, we also get the opposite case: specialist evaluations and opinons treated as if they, too, were hypothetical, theoretical and based only on personal impressions.
I will look forward to reading the post where you make your case. Thanks again for the clarification.
Haha! I like the Cthulhu idea. 🙂
For 55v, I was thinking tapir as a possibility, except that they are far eastern.
It does resemble the elephant shrew, which is a small African critter related to elephants and aardvarks.
The plant on 55v looks like broad-leafed garlic (allium ursinum) known as bear’s garlic. There is another wild garlic, known as elephant garlic, but its leafs are not as wide. I think that it is possible that the author of the drawing knew the bear garlic as elephant garlic. Common names change through time and from one place to another 🙂
http://gernot-katzers-spice-pages.com/engl/Alli_urs.html
https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f55v/1.098/0.455/1.93
It’s also possible the critter in the 55v root is a boar. That are quite a few plants (like cyclamen) that boars particularly like to eat (also many plants with “boar” or “pig” in the name). And then of course, the possibility of elephant is still there.
Elephant garlic is actually a leek, so it doesn’t have cloves. The leaves do look somewhat like 55v. It has a poofy seedhead (rounder than the VMS drawing, but fairly similar) and a rounded bulb somewhat like a fat shallot (it’s not big and round like onion), but the roots are quite short and narrow, somewhat insignificant.
Allium ursinum (bear onion/bear leek)—the one that Ellie mentioned—resembles the VMS drawing more than elephant garlic/leek because the leaves are narrower at the bottom, and the flowers are more upright umbellate and closer in shape to the VMS drawing than elephant garlic/leek. It’s actually high on my list of possibilities… but the roots are rather short and insignificant.
.
There are two plants called Hieracium cymosum and Cineraria campestristhat have base whorls of lanceolate leaves, long stalks with a puff of flowers, and stringy roots. They are widely distributed through Eurasia. I don’t know if there’s any association with boars, elephants, or tapirs, but the leaves of Hieracium cymosum are a bit fuzzy and fuzzy leaves were often compared to the ears of animals.
The roots are longer and stringier than Allium ursinum, but not as much as the VMS drawing.
Helichrysum is a diverse group and quite widespread. Some species have basal whorls, most have a long stalk with a puff of flowers, and the roots of some of them are long and stringy (e.g., Helichrysum fruticans). The European species tend to have small leaves running up the stalks, but some of the African species (e.g., Helichrysum nudifolium) have smooth long stalks, long sringy roots, and the shapes of the small tight flowerheads are quite a good match for VMS 55v. A few species of Helichrysum are in the medieval herbals, but they tend to be the ones with leaves on the stalks.
JKP
I’d prefer to respond to your comments elsewhere. But you have posted them here, so I’ll try to keep it short.
JKP (said) …. I have collected herbarium specimens for many years, have … a detailed database …
D (says): There are official plant identification databases. Flow-chart format. Just type in the details of your specimen as you go.
JKP: I can recognize about 60% of medieval plant drawings on sight, without looking at the labels, even some that are badly drawn.
D: What is ‘badly drawn’? If you mean not approximating a literal or ‘photo’ likeness, that’s not bad drawing; a photo-fit is a ‘bad drawing’.
JKP: even if the drawings are excessively stylized but that is not the case with the VMS.
D: The idea that a drawing is ‘excessively stylized’ presumes literalism as the default. That presumption is anachronistic for most botanical imagery across most of the world before 1438. What makes it worse , in this case is that all the internal evidence converges on a period of about a century earlier for the last substantial recension of the manuscript’s content.
So – forget ‘realism’ unless you’re talking pre-Constantine for first enunciation.
In order to read the intended sense of a picture, including what you call an ‘excessively stylised’ plant-picture it is necessary first to identify the style in which it is drawn, and preferably the cultural context in which it was first drawn (we call that the first enunciation of a drawing). It is the set of conventions proper to that time and environment which – being learned – allows the picture to be read correctly. Sometimes the correct reading is “purely decorative”.
JKP: Each plant is detailed and individual.
D. On this point you are mistaken with regard to the Vms.
JKP: They can be narrowed down to a short-list of possibilities.
D: Of course they can, once you’ve recognised the visual language and conventions which govern the image, and so which parts can be taken literally and which not. During the pre-modern era, pictures were no more a matter of individual self-expression than the form of the written language was. Knowing how to see the ‘cues’ in a picture that tell us its time and place of first enunciation. That’s what a specialist in comparative iconography is a specialist in. (more or less).
But the history of Voynich study has it’s funny side, sometimes.
Before publishing my analysis of folio 33v back in … 2014 I think it was… I took it for vetting to one of the curators of a notable SouthEast Asian collection of art in Australia. He asked why I should ask him to confirm so obvious a detail as the ‘lotus motif’ which as we both knew could hardly be mistaken for anything else.
I explained that no-one had noticed it before, despite the manuscript’s being an object of curiosity to some of the brightest brains in Europe and England since 1912.
The only explanation I could offer for no-one’s having noticed that f.33v used the lotus motif for the ‘flower-heads’ was that all but a few Voynicheros since 1912 have been so busy being certain they had no time to ask questions like that.
He thought it a great joke.
Even funnier is that not a single person, in four years, has paid a scrap of notice.
Sounds like a fabulous database tho’. Really.
African origin or blood that was traded to other parts?
I think I remember seeing a cuttlefish drawing in a manuscript somewhere,
but this guy fits the bill rather nicely. Mean lookin’. Compared to the others
anyway.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/535717318160110121
Herbalism is another one of my (many) lack of expertise’s in this Vms field. I
am quite interested in fiction that is definitely about or *might* be
about the MS. Influenced definitely by Wilson’s Return of the LLoigor
on this probably I must admit. I was asking someone else this, but did
anyone else here ever read V. by Pynchon, about the Maltese uprisings of
1919, and Stencil and ever wonder… hmmmm.
Dear all, Has no one noticed or commented on the plant depiction at the bottom of f99v? Here the foliage resembles the head of an elephant.
When in doubt, it is always possible to propose a sacred connection. A major Hindu god is the elephant god, Ganesh. Note the plant identification in Voynichese on f99v appears nowhere on f55v, so for starters, f55v and f99v appear to be different plants, but maybe dedicated, honoring or sacred to Ganesh?
BTW, I don’t think many Voynichers appear to be aware of, or appreciate the intrusion, of yin-yang symbology in the depictions of many of the herbal/spices/plants of the VMS. The blossoms seem limited mainly to the colors, blue or red/orange (yang=sky=male) and (yin=earth=female), respectively, and the directionality of pant roots or blossoms, to the right or left, exclusively.
My late wife and I when travelling and noting what appeared to be children’s toys were always annoyed to have them officially pointed out to be “votive offerings”! Easy catchall, but didn’t kids of way-yesteryear have playthings?
On that irrelevant note I close this post. Cheers, especially to Diane O’D down there in Oz who will soon have a reason to celebrate the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day.
Tom
Tom: I’ll pass on the herbage for f55v & f99v, but for the fauna I’m looking at a fair depiction of a brontosaurus, albeit with an eye on its rump quarter, then again it could be a five legged octopus. As for 99, I couldn’t go past the elephant of course, and one can’t help but notice that it is fully decked out with Hindi festive regalia…My goodness, hope I’m wrong about old Bronto as I don’t think there would have been too many around circa. 1404/38AD, leastwise above high ground..Cheers js
Thomas, yes, the elephant-head on 99v has received quite a bit of attention.
All the animalistic roots and leaves have had quite a bit of discussion, with researchers trying to figure out if they are symbolic or mnemonic (or something else), and whether the shapes relate to the name, function, or some attribute (e.g., smell, taste) of the plant.
D. O’Donovan wrote: “I explained that no-one had noticed it before, despite the manuscript’s being an object of curiosity to some of the brightest brains in Europe and England since 1912.”
You mean no one had written about it (to your knowledge). I’ve written up much less than 1% of the things I’ve noticed, so I assume that’s true for many other researchers.
It’s also possible for some observations, that no one agrees.
Either way, one can’t make assumptions about what people have noticed, only what they have reported.
It’s usually the little things that matter.
Why do two people draw similar, though nobody would draw like that?
Why does the frog have the same characteristics?
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2013944922161485&set=gm.1529838067125989&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Or what could that be? It’s certainly not a plant, but what did it lose? I have such a hunch. It occurs in medicine and in the food industry. Even the color comes down to about.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2013537692202208&set=gm.1528774753898987&type=3&theater&ifg=1
No, it’s not a cube vegetable, nor a Russian salad.
And no ….
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2013644822191495&set=p.2013644822191495&type=3&theater&ifg=1
And certainly not Cubozoa 🙂
Maranta — aka: Arrowroot .
bd
Make that an edible (per B. Maranti (a Venetian physician).
My reference is from book seven of the “New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening: (volume 7).
bd
Peter M.
In the pre-modern era, people drew a thing the way those around them expected to see things drawn: more exactly, to see the conception of something given form in a drawn line rather than a written one. So how something’s drawn tells us something about the current object, though not necessarily about the origin or significance of what was being drawn.
The way the frog is drawn is the way people drew ‘frog’ – the idea of a frog – and it’s one of those things that drawn just about everywhere in this way (among other poses). The key to the image on folio 101v-3 as was (now refoliated as ‘101v (part) and 102r’ – is not the frog itself but the context in which you see it.
I have actually treated that matter while working through the botanical section of the manuscript in 2011-12, though it wasn’t published through voynichimagery at wordpress. Come to think of it, the easiest thing to do is just transfer that post from the other source to voynichimagery.
Nice frog. Lives in Kerala and climbs these canopy trees to a height of 20 meters, where it sings in the canopy like the vox dei apparently.
Isn’t page 99r, third line of roots, second from the left, the elephant root?
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/imagenes_manuscrito/manuscrito174.jpg
@bdid1dr
It is certainly not a plant. When I saw it, it occurred to me right away because I’ve already seen it.
I suspect it is potassium hydrogen tartrate ( Weinstein )
It grows but is not a plant
@D.N.O’Donovan
I mean the graphic similarity of the face front.
Seen in the pure sample book of ( Reiner Musterbuch 1300 )
Here is an interesting example:
Since f38v was already considered as a possible ivy, f35v could actually be wine.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2029470613942249&set=p.2029470613942249&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Nick: I would agree that the 2nd and 3rd plant drawings must be the same. However whether the 1st is the same as the other two is more debatable; it might be. It could be a related species. The fact that the 2nd and 3rd look almost identical and the 1st looks a little different makes one wonder. Also why would the same plant appear twice in the herbal sections? Also why if the same plant appears twice would it have the same text, that would seem superfluous? I am not saying it couldn’t be so, but it is far from certain.
Mark: you have to be careful that you’re not allowing your assumptions about how the text works to cloud your vision of what you see in front of you.
Nick: In this instance my ideas, not assumptions, about how some aspects of some of the text may work really didn’t come in to play at all. I was just thinking about the plants, not that I think plant identification can necessarily take us further, but it is something to ponder.
Nick: If you are interested in such things you might want to compare:
Folio 39 verso – Page 77
Folio 94 recto – 3rd part – Page 170
They do look very similar.
Nick: What makes me question the match up is mostly the difference in leaf shape between the 1st and other drawings. The 1st drawing could be the more accurate rendering of leaves and the other simplified. However it is certainly true that the bottom two have distinctly arrowhead shaped leaves whereare the top drawing has more curved leaves with a much less distinct arrowhead shape.
This illustrates the difficulty in matching plant drawings up whether internally in the Voynich herbals and recipes sections or externally with other herbal manuscripts.
One thing that is possible in the instance that one sees possibly the same whole page plant in the earlier folios and also in the later folios is that rather than mere duplication, which seems pointless unless the drawings or the text have been improved, could be that the herbal drawing contains information about finding the plant, whilst in the whole page plant pages in the later(recipes) folios are instructions for usage as we see with the recipes. Nevertheless one would hope to have the plant name duplicated.
Matching plants up is a pain, so I was wondering if I could make things simpler with a spreadsheet, though I haven’t quite got a clear idea of the columns, maybe:
Folio(If recipe page position)
Shape of leaf
Shape of root
Kind of flowers/Berries(Colour?)
Kind of Branches
There may need to be more specific columns e.g. “round/pointed leaf”, “many/some/one root” etc. Obviously there needs to be consistent terms used in order to match them up. One does not want too many columns nor too few, so that by and large most plants can be reasonably well summed up in order to make them ready for a more careful manual comparison of drawings. Obviously if the plants have similar properties on the spreadsheet then manual comparison of drawings can happen.
Maybe someone has already done this??
This could also be useful when comparing plants with other manuscripts to see where the best matches are.
My attempt at thinking of some other plant properties from having look at the herbals:
Leaves no points/some points/many points
Leaves emerge from root/from branches
Leaves small/large/none
Leaves droopy/not droopy
Leaves clumped/separated
Hairy/non-hairy Root
Bobbled/non-bobbled Root
Berries/no berries
Small/large/none flowers
Simple/complex roots
Simple/complex leaves
Obviously even if two plants are the same small variations in the drawings may not mean that they match up perfectly in all properties. However these should make the process of identifying similar plants for direct comparison easier as a spreadsheet can be sorted by a series of columns or some code can be run to identify similar entries. Obviously in the process fine tuning which are the most useful properties/columns to include can be done.
Any suggestions for the most useful columns/properties to have could be of value. Are there standard plant/herb classification properties that I should be using? I don’t know if this kind of thing has been done for known herbals.
I did some googling for a visual plant/herbal classification scheme that I could use. However, although my search was far from exhaustive, I could not find anything particularly useful.
So I have listed a few other features that I have observed from looking at plants in the different parts of the Voynich.
Leaves have smooth edges or fine variation in their edges.
Leaves have curly leaf edges or spiky edges.
Leaves with complex edges, where the leaf edges are more fractal e.g. small curved edges within the larger curved edges, or leaves with simple edges.
Long leaves or short leaves.
Upward pointing or side pointing or droopy leaves.
Thin or thick roots(Thick roots can often be illustrated as animal legs or bodies).
Paddle or non-paddle roots.
Curly or straight roots.
Spread out or more clumped roots
Droopy or straight stems.
Simplifying the list to a minimal set of properties will be difficult; I suppose I start with a long list and throw some properties that I don’t need out or merge properties. Should many properties be boolean? i.e. the plant has it or doesn’t “Yes” or “No”
What a pain in the neck doing this will be!
Nick, I realize that the names in the signs of the zodiac are not the same ink, but the names are alemanic. Whether this is another unknown person is less important to me at the time than it can be German. It is only a small pebble more in the mosaic to the place of origin.
@JKP
To your plant mentioned by Voynich Ninja. Probably it is this.
This plant has almost extinct in Central Europe.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2297089763846998&set=gm.2136537569789366&type=3&theater&ifg=1
Addendum: It would be possible Sherardia arvensis, because kindred
Mark wrote: “Leaves have smooth edges or fine variation in their edges.”
Yes, they are called leaf margins (serrated, smooth, toothed, hairy, etc.) and in botany they are very important identification details (“keys”).
In the VMS, for the plants that are naturalistic (which is not all of them), the margins are quite accurate. So are the veins.
Whoever drew them paid attention. There’s even one plant that has slightly outcurving toothed margins that are somewhat specialized to a plant that looks like the rest of the VMS plant. It is a detail many people would miss. It’s not even very visible in photos, you have to know the plant.
I think whoever drew the plants (or at least the naturalistic ones) may have grown plants (rather than just collecting them) because dried plants tend to lose some of these details (they sometimes even change shape when they dry).
JKP: Have you compared->
Folio 39 verso – Page 77
Folio 94 recto – 3rd part – Page 170
They look very similar. The biggest reason I was interested in defining plant properties was that I thought it could help identifying other plant similarities whether between the recipes section and the herbal sections, but also between the early herbal pages and the late herbal(maybe recipe) pages.
Many of the large plants are repeated, in slightly lesser detail, in the small-plants section. I matched up several of them years ago, but many of them don’t have enough detail to know for sure. I have a list somewhere, but…
I don’t know how hard it would be to find it. I always intended to blog about it.
Most of my plant IDs were done in 2008 after I spent almost a year simply studying HOW the plants were drawn, and it’s so long ago, I have to dig through my old hard drives on my old old computer that isn’t even connected to the LAN to find some of the early research (not early compared to other Voynich researchers, some of whom have been around since the 1990s, but early for me).
I do think it is important. The fact that they match (and sometimes are drawn in the same way, which removes any doubt about them being the same plant) means there’s a connection between large and small plants—that it’s part of a bigger picture.
To me the small-plants section looks like a classification system (roots, leaves, etc.). If it is, it’s one of the earliest ones ever illustrated. I’ve had a difficult time finding anything like it that was organized this way and was this extensive. I think it may be historically unique for its time.
P.S., I never call it a recipes section. It could be many things.
Maybe it shows which part is used.
Maybe it shows which ones are stored or processed in certain ways.
Maybe it shows plants that are classified in certain ways.
Maybe it shows plants that are under the influence of specific stars.
MAYBE it shows recipes (it’s certainly possible, perhaps even the best explanation), but I don’t think we know enough to name it yet, so I call it the small-plants section (as in small plant drawings, not small plants).
As for 39v and 94r, there are lots of plants with fernlike leaves, even many that are not ferns.
The leaves on the two different drawings are arranged quite differently, but their general shape is similar, so they might be come from similar plant families.
At one point I also organized the VMS plants so that those with similar morphology were together and posted a blog with an example of one of the groups that has visually similar qualities.
Oh, hang on, by recipes do you mean the dense-text folios at the end? I definitely don’t assume those are recipes.
They could be proverbs, bloodletting days, charms, a journal, any number of things (including recipes). but it’s definitely too soon to know.
I usually call those the starred-text folios but I don’t even know if those are stars (they might be pointy flowers).
I suspect the best shot at any kind of crib in the text would be to compare the texts of pairs of (herbal, pharma) folios with matching plant (part) drawings to try to pull out plant names. This is complicated by (1) whether some glyphs are fungible variations (Currier F/P, for instance), (2) whether spaces are word boundaries, and (3) how uncertain/repeatable transcription of spaces is.
Looking for plant names in the VM.
Why it’s so hard to search the VM for the plant names. Apart from the fact that it is the right plant, it must also vote with the region and the usual name there.
Example:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2335443753344932&set=pcb.2234287276681061&type=3&theater&ifg=1
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2335445263344781&set=pcb.2234287276681061&type=3&theater&ifg=1
And what about when it goes in a completely different direction?
Personally, I got away from the berries in the first instance.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1581822172040431&set=g.504064963036643&type=1&theater&ifg=1
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2300718016817506&set=gm.2145127908930332&type=3&theater&ifg=1
As a result of my current foray into the small plants of the pharma pages and their relationship to the large plants of the herbal pages I have given some thought these illustrations.
Nick says “Three Pages, One Plant?”
I am inclined to think at the moment that we have “Three Pages, Two Plants”
or actually “Four Pages, Two Plants” or possibly even “Five Pages, Two Plants”.
I initially thought the drawings represented one plant, but the different specific representation of the leaves and the slightly different representation of the root amongst other things makes me question that. So how are they so similar despite these differences? Could they be closely related species? Could one be the juvenile form of the plant and the other the adult form? It all seems quite strange. One has to ask why the author reproduced the page twice if it was merely the same text for the same plant as Nick suggests, what purpose would that serve?
If you wonder why I mention 4 or 5 pages rather than 3 then amongst the small plant pages you can see a clear representation of just the arrowhead leaves of one plant and on another page possibly the longer root of the other plant.
Mark Knowles: “If you wonder why I mention 4 or 5 pages rather than 3 then amongst the small plant pages you can see a clear representation of just the arrowhead leaves of one plant and on another page possibly the longer root of the other plant.”
This is the impression I have so far of the VMS plant drawings (my best guess… so far)…
If the large plants and small plants serve different purposes (which I suspect they do), then the large-plant drawings may be for identification purposes (they include all the parts, even if some are stylized or mnemonic), and the small-plant drawings emphasize which part of a plant is the important part—the part that is used.
Both sections would be consistent with medieval traditions. There were manuscripts where the whole plant was drawn to aid in identification (there sometimes was also textual information on the “qualities” of the plant or the uses of the plant) and others where they showed only the parts of the plant that were used.
This dichotomy continued with 16th-century plant books. Some of the early printed books emphasized the parts that were used (roots were sometimes omitted, flowers were sometimes omitted, depending on the plant), and some of the early herbarium specimens were mounted to document a plant’s existence, and for identification, but often included no information on the use of the plant.
There were also books that were intended for both purposes (identification and information about the use of the plant), but the VMS is fairly clearly divided into two plant sections, so the sections may be there for different reasons.
.
In a different vein… there were also “model books” to help other artists draw dragons, castles, people, plants, etc., but the VMS doesn’t have the look or feel of a model book. It is much more focused and structured and includes much more text than was typical for model books (many model books had no text or only a few labels), so it seems less likely that it is a model book.
JKP: The question which occupies me is what we can say about the labels attached to the small plants. In the examples you cite in other manuscripts where only part of the plant is illustrated what does the label attached say, is it the name of the plant as a whole or the name of that specific part of the plant or something else?
Whatever the label represents in other manuscripts it doesn’t follow that it represents the same in the Voynich, however it might help to indicate what the small plant labels in the Voynich most likely represent.
JKP: To put it simply if in 20 other manuscripts the labels against small plants represent the name of the plant then it is not an unreasonable working hypothesis that the labels against the small plants in the Voynich also represent the plant names. I haven’t studied such manuscripts, but from those that others have presented on Ninja it appears that they are the plant name. If however it turns out that the labels sometimes say something else that would also be useful information.
The labels next to plant names in medieval books of plants are nearly always the plant name, in one language or another. I can go through medieval plant books and even if it is zoomed out, so that the label is unreadable, I can tell you the names of most of the plants.
If the labels next to the plants in the VMS were plant names, they would probably have been deciphered long ago. Labels are one of the easiest things to decipher (especially if they are nouns) if they are related in some way to the accompanying drawing.
But the “labels” in the VMS small-plants section are not structured like plant names. They are not as varied, plus the glyphs are not as positionally varied. In fact, they are more similar in structure to the “labels” in the star sections and the zodiac-figure section than they are to traditional plant names.
JKP:
You say: “The labels next to plant names in medieval books of plants are NEARLY ALWAYS the plant name.”
What are they when they are not the plant name?
You say: “If the labels next to the plants in the VMS were plant names, they would probably have been deciphered long ago.”
This relies on a whole lot of assumptions about Voynichese that I don’t think we can make. From my inspection of the small plant labels they very frequently do seem to be quite structurally varied. Saying that they can’t be names as they appear so strange is to me a bit like saying Voynichese can’t be meaningful as it appears so strange. Using the plant drawing, especially with the small plants to find the plant name and the decipher the label is far from trivial even if we can be confident that the label is indeed the name.
JKP: One question we can ask is “If the small plant labels are indeed the plant names then what can we infer from this about Voynichese?”
On rare occasions I have seen annotations next to the plant as to what the plant is for rather than the plant name (e.g., for bite of dog) without much other text (or with the other text as a paragraph block separate from the annotation). Most of the time, however, it’s the plant name (not always the correct plant name).
Mark wrote: “This relies on a whole lot of assumptions about Voynichese that I don’t think we can make.”
Maybe not that some people can make. I’ve been studying the labels for 12+ years and I think I can make the statement that I made above based on what I know so far about the structure of the labels.
The only reason I haven’t written this all up is I have too many projects going and can’t find a big enough block of free time to finish some of the more challenging write-ups. I typically work about 70 to 80 hours a week (I’m running a business so I have to wear many hats), so squeezing in Voynich research means giving up sleep.
JKP: Well without seeing an argument to justify your position I have to operate on the basis that there is no such argument. I appreciate your circumstances, but especially when it comes to the Voynich I am reluctant to take anything on trust.
I wonder whether matching then logging small plant to large plant matches and near matches is the most tedious Voynich task there is. Maybe that is why all previous attempts seem so half-hearted. Nevertheless this indicates to me that there is probably plenty of relatively straightforward, intellectually speaking, work to be done on the Voynich that hasn’t yet been done even if it is very time consuming.
I think I have matched around 110 small to large plants, but I have also logged alternative matches for other plants as well as those with no match. What I have done so far feels like a Herculean task, but there is still plenty to do tidying up and then applying some kind of join to the spreadsheet in particular and finally investigating the implications of the data, which the part that I am really interested in. Anyway that is me bemoaning a very boring job and the most boring part.