Voynich cipher crib thoughts…

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Just a quick note on Voynich cipher cribs.

Even though I’ve built up a fairly substantial set of (what I think are) reasonably pragmatic deductions about how Voynichese works, actually finding any way to use those to get at the rest has (perhaps unsurprisingly) proved difficult. To recap, I suspect that…

  • “4o” steganographically codes for “lo” (and perhaps “la” as well, via some subtle letter formation difference we’re too close to the text to notice)
  • “a[i][i][i]v” steganographically enciphers Arabic digits using the startpoint of the apparent scribal flourish
  • “a[i][i][i]r” verbosely enciphers various rare plaintext letters (such as ‘z’)
  • “e[e][e]” and “ch” / “sh” verbosely encipher vowels
  • “-8” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “contractio”
  • “-9” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “suspensio”
  • “8-” enciphers “et” or “&”, as well as for Arabic numeral combination (into large numbers)
  • “t-” directs the decipherer to a horizontal Neal key (usually on the top line of a paragraph)
  • “p-” directs the decipherer to a vertical Neal key (usually down the first column of a paragraph)
  • “k-” and “f-” I’m not sure about. 🙂
  • “ot” / “op” / “ok” / “of” / “yt” / “yp” / “yk” / “yf” verbosely encipher fixed letters (hence their use in labels)
  • “or” / “ol” / “ar” / “al” verbosely encipher fixed letters
  • “cXh”, where the ch’s crossbar strikes through a gallows, enciphers the shorthand stroke “subscriptio”
  • (etc, etc)

Of course, I happily admit that all, some or none of these may well be wrong: the issue I’m discussing here is what to do next if (like me) you happen to think that there stands a good chance that these are right. Basically, where now?

It struck me a few days ago that the “aiiv” pattern has a rough analogue in part of the Florentine shorthand used by Leonardo da Vinci: as I discussed in my post on Leonardo’s handwriting, LdV used “i-with-a-circle” for ‘uno‘, and “i-with-a-circumflex” for ‘una‘. Now, today’s thought is that if (say) “aiv” similarly enciphers “uno/una”, then what would happen if we went looking for words in the astronomical quire #9 (‘Q9’) for words of the form “verbose letter” + “aiv”, just in case they encipher “l-una”, i.e. “luna”?

For example, if we look at the topmost line of f67r1 (the thrice-exalted APOD page, with what is manifestly the moon in the middle), the fourth word along is “osaiiv”. Now, I suspect that this is an example of coyness on the VMs’ author’s part, insofar as “os” probably doesn’t exist in the cipher system (i.e. the pair should actually read “or”), so he/she has used “os”as  a kind of secondary misdirection, perhaps suspecting that “oraiiv” might look slightly too crackable. 🙂

So, might “luna” be the first word in the VMs to be genuinely deciphered? It’s certainly possible, but I’d hesitate running down to the betting shop just yet: all the same, it might help point to ways of sneaking past the pack of rottweilers on the door. The titles of the Q9 planet pages might all be there on their respective top lines, if we but gothink to go  looking for them…

Review of Christopher Harris’ “Mappamundi”…

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OK, moving straight into confessional mode, I feel more than a touch ashamed that I haven’t reviewed Chris Harris’ Mappamundi loooong before now. But… even though I’ve read it twice, I still don’t really know what to say about it. Let me explain…

Sticking to the knitting, it’s a fairly trite starting point to note that it’s an historical adventure, with the main character Thomas Deerham seque(l)strated from the book “False Ambassador”.  In that first book, Harris had his hero travel from England to France to Greece (while trying to travel to the Holy Land) and onwards from there to Morea and finally back to Rome, meeting loads of interesting historical figures (such as Plethon) en route. “Mappamundi” continues in Rome with Deerham’s stealing a Toscanelli mappamundi from his only-just-dead boss (Pope Pius II), before heading fast away north across France. In Paris, he meets the vagabond / poet / trickster François Villon: they cross the Channel & end up in Essex trying it on with an eelwife (please don’t ask). Then they meet Christian Rosenkreutz (yes, really) and steal the Voynich Manuscript, which a thoroughly delighted Rosenkreutz calls one of the “Seven Tomes”. On from there to Cambridge, and Ipswich, and… off to find the lost wisdom of Atlantis, steered by the stars, the mappamundi, the VMs and Rosenkreutz’s clinical madness… and (without giving it all away) onwards from there.

Of all the Voynich novels I know of, you could reasonably argue that Mappamundi sticks closest to what we might expect of the VMs’ pre-1600 provenance. What with its Toulon-Occitan-like zodiac month names, and abbreviated longhand Latin quire numbering that Barbara B claims appears in a herbal rebound in England in the 15th century, and perhaps in England picking up its alleged connection with Roger Bacon; all these details tally reasonably nicely with Harris’ account, some intentionally, some not (I’d predict).

Of course, by now you’ll have worked out that Mappamundi is by no means an airport novel – the absence of (for example) millennia-long secret conspiracies, hidden mountains of ancient gold, mysterious powers over life & death that an unreadable book holds, but which only a Harvard Professor of Assyrian Stuff with eidetic memory can unlock, etc etc should be more than a bit of hint. Nor is it experimental literature (even though it plainly merges real historical figures with hallucinatory ones such as Christian RosenKreutz), nor even Umberto Eco-esque über-erudite historical musings masquerading as high literature.

Actually… when you strip it all back, it’s just a historical romp across Europe, in very much the same kind of line (and indeed roughly the same time-period) as Dorothy Dunnett’s well-known Niccolo Rising series. But whereas I alway got the feeling that Dunnett was trying not to re-write history but rather just to thread her own imagined saga through the countless empty holes in a genuine historical tapestry, the presence of Rosenkreutz and the VMs (and even Atlantis) in Mappamundi moves that book sideways into a rather less clear position.

I suppose what it all comes down to is that Harris’ admixure of the notoriously false with the notoriously uncertain with the manifestly true largely negates the effect of all his careful research: the reader stops trusting the author’s historical eye and empathy. Look, I’m not saying it’s as bad a pseudo-historical trip as Forrest Gump: but it did manage to consistently put me out of my readership comfort zone, which is something you could never accuse Dunnett of, for example.

The awful thing is that Harris’ book-writing craft is so spot-on in so many ways (I get to read countless books by authors whose skills aren’t a patch on his), which makes criticising him for what is only really a kind of implicit epistemological confusion foisted on his readers feel somewhat unjust. But many (if not most) of those same readers will likely have a keen eye for history, and that side of me really didn’t enjoy the ride here.

Ultimately, even though I’m supposed to balance up all these factors and finish the review by rotating my haughty Imperial thumb upwards or downwards, this time around I just don’t know what to do. I loved the Dorothy Dunnett side of it while simultaneously hating the Forrest Gump side of it (which included the ending): and it seemed to oscillate between these two extrema throughout. I guess you’ll have to read it for yourself and make up your own mind, sorry if that sounds like a cop-out. =:-o

The least mysterious manuscript in the world…

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I recently radared a Voynich Manuscript namecheck in a short online blogpost riffing on meaning, love and secrecy. If you manage to get past the author’s densely-textured surface style, there are some good moments in there:

  • “The secret assures us the nearly sure possibility of content but retracts its guarantee at the very limit of its donation. The secret does not only tease, it seduces.“
  • “The secret and its content are terrible adversaries and anyone who confuses the content of a secret with the secret itself is an imbecile.“

I rather like the image conjured up of the secret and the content being at war with each other – it is certainly true that we Voynich researchers spend a lot of time hunting for places where the content overflows the jar, subtly breaking the visual monotony of the ciphertext factory. These are the casualties lining the battlefront of this curious civil war, and are almost paratextual insofar as they comfortably reside on neither side of the line.

For me, the strange paradox that emerges from this is that even though the ciphertext artefact side of the Voynich Manuscript is known as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world”, if its contents ultimately prove to be as hyperrational as I suspect then there should be no great degree of interpretation involved in reading it – no symbolism, no allusion, no internal textual layeredness. That is, perhaps the Voynich Manuscript’s contents will turn out to be the least mysterious manuscript in the world?

Review of “The Charlemagne Pursuit”…

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In my opinion, cipher mystery-themed airport novels tend (as I wrote here a few days ago) to be written by (1) “Rack Pack” writers, (2) “Domain Experts”, or (3) “Wannabe Screenwriters”. Having read Steve Berry’s book “The Templar Legacy” (2006) as a warm-up, I recently moved on to his “The Charlemagne Pursuit” (2008), where the serial use of the main character ‘Cotton Malone’ places Berry firmly amongst the Rack Pack. But is he Rack the Knife or Rack the Hack?

The first thing I’d say is that The Charlemagne Pursuit is definitely put together far better than its predecessor, whose cardboard Bond-world characters such as ‘Cassiopeia Vitt’ (who it seems unfortunately reappears in later Cotton Malone books) and ghastly Templar clichés reduced the art of reading from a pleasure to a struggle. Really, compared with the sparky horses-in-the-New-York-museum start to Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar“, Berry’s The Templar Legacy remained ungrippingly pedestrian throughout.

All the same, The Charlemagne Pursuit is no less stuffed with airport mystery fodder – beautiful Nazi-family twin sisters, ancient architectural hints, buried clues, castles, Atlantis, Ahnenerbe, secret submarines, Voynich Manuscript-style documents, professional killers, unlikeable protagonist, etc. Yet what I found most frustrating is that if you stripped out all the history / lost civilizations / Nazi / mad admiral guff, the raw core of the story – Cotton Malone hunting down his dead submariner father, with surprising success – would be basically OK. And so I felt at the end that I’d read a decent-enough 100-page book ripped into a 600-pager by a sustained ingestion of airport novel steroids.

For sure, Berry’s book fully deserves its place in my Big Fat List as probably the highest-profile Voynich Manuscript novel yet: but the VMs is mainly treated as a kind of codicological template to help generate the various mysterious books Berry’s narrative requires along the way, rather than actually engaged with in any interesting or intriguing manner – not actually disdain, but certainly something close to disinterest. And perhaps it’s just me, but there’s also something just a bit desperate about his scattergun constructional style, which comes across not unlike a neurotic parent grabbing every soft toy in turn to try to placate an unhappy toddler. Ultimately, I’d rather read a book with half (if not less!) as many themes weaved together but explored in a more engaging way: but perhaps that’s a grossly unreasonable expectation of the genre, you’ll have to make up your own mind.

In summary, I did enjoy bits of it: but most of it came across as a Nazi-themed rollercoaster ride where you don’t care much for any of the twists and turns, let alone the characters.

Review of David Gibbins’ “Atlantis”…

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This being Cipher Mysteries, I try to read a fair bit of mysterious cipher-related stuff along the way, both non-fiction and fiction. Yet just as you’d expect, most cipher mystery fiction tends more to the ‘airport novel’ end of the spectrum than the ‘lit-rit-cher’ end. Which pleasantly brings to mind (well, to my mind, at least) Elvis Costello’s “God’s Comic” as he finally meets his Maker:-

So there He was on a water-bed
Drinking a cola of a mystery brand
Reading an airport novelette
Listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s “Requiem”

Nicely pitched scansion, and perhaps even more richly ironic if the airport novelette in question happened to have one of those interminably Byzantine two-millennia-long-conspiracy-to-hide-the-truth-about-Jesus’-non-death-on-the-cross plotlines we’re so waerily familiar with now. But I digress!

Wearing my book publisher hat, I’d say you can divide cipher mystery airport novel writers into three quite distinct camps:-

  1. The Rack Pack. People who write strings of pacy, mostly character-driven novels but who scout around for interesting historical stuff to build their fantastical plotting and obscure conspiracies around. (These books tend to suffer from “slabs”, i.e. lumps of undigested Wikipedia-style research littering the text, and to rely heavily on secondary characters who ‘just happen’ to be world-renowned Harvard Professors of Obscure Historical Linguistics etc. They can also be quite hard to tell apart).
  2. Domain Experts. People who happen to be experts in some technical / research field and fall victim to the questionable notion that a particular historical mystery that happens to overlap their field would make an amazing basis for a novel, but then decide to write that book. I mean, how hard can it be? (These books tend to suffer from inexpert plotting, clunky characterization, and non-credible relationships between characters. But at least most of the technical details are right).
  3. Wannabe Screenwriters. People who are terrifically personally ambitious and have a deep love of film, and who see the airport novel medium as a great way to express their high-octane visual imagination, while also giving themselves an outside chance of their books’ being optioned for a Major Motion Picture. (These books tend to be bad on just about every level you can name, but are probably a terrifically good read if you’re the kind of person who has a copy of “Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft” in your toilet).

All of which is a fairly longwinded way of introducing David Gibbins’ (2005) novel “Atlantis”. From the moment you read that the author “has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life” and that “[this] is his first novel“, you can be pretty sure that this is going to fall squarely into Camp #2 territory.

The cipher connection isn’t hard to work out: the front cover has a gold-embossed representation of something not unlike the Phaistos Disk, though it has to be said that the shapes are upside-down (relative to the real Phaistos Disk) and in a quite different order, while a few other plausible-looking pictogram-style shapes have been added to the mix. Though that’s OK, because these differences are part of the story (which kicks off with a second Phaistos Disk being discovered in an ancient shipwreck, but this time it’s made of gold).

Commendably, the spine of the book has one of the Phaistos Disc symbols (which Gibbins has both as “outstretched eagle god” and as the sign of “Atlantis”, though note that he requires you rotate it 90 degrees to see it even slightly as a bird), making it the only cipher novel I know of with a single genuine historical cipher mystery character shape as its central motif. Please tell me if there’s another one!

There’s actually a bit of literature on this shape, which is #21 in Sir Arthur Evans’ much-noted list of the disk’s pictograms. Here are some of the better-known theories about it proposed over the years:-

  • Comb (Godart, 1995)
  • Weaving comb (Dettmer, 1989)
  • Hoe or rake (Aartun, 1992)
  • Palace floor-plan (not sure who suggested this?)
  • Swedish rock carvings of a team of plowing oxen (Woudhuizen, !?!?!?!?)

More usefully, Balistier (2000) notes that Ingo Pini (1970) pointed out that this particular pictogram very likely has Minoan origins, as evidenced by the similarities between it and a five-toothed comb design found on clay fragment HM 992 (also found at Phaistos, and dating to the 18th century BC).  And here it is:-

HM-992

Clay fragment HM 1992: the five-pronged comb-like shape is on the left

 This striking visual parallel is often cited as proof of the Phaistos Disk’s authenticity, with the only small problem being that it may well be that Luigi Pernier ‘excavated’ them both… but that’s another story entirely.

Anyway, does Gibbins manage to save himself from falling into all the Domain Expert airport novel traps? Actually… no. And what’s worse, from the minute the protagonist Jack Howard (“unlikely scion of one of England’s most ancient families“, p.13) makes “a mental note to email the image to Professor James Dillen, his old mentor at Cambridge University and the world’s leading authority on the ancient scripts of Greece” (p.16), it’s abundantly clear that Gibbins has drunk too deeply from the Rack Pack’s well of clichés. Moreover, from the breathless military helicopter fetishism and Wired editorialese, he has dipped his bucket into the Wannabe Screenwriters’ gadget-strewn watering hole more than a few times as well.

All of which superficial nonsense I could actual forgive Gibbins for (it is, after all, an airport novel, and many top-tier writers have fallen into these same traps over the years). However (and sorry if this is a spoiler) the point near the end where Jack Howard unilaterally fires a nuclear warhead onto the bad guys’ hi-tech hide-out is just not OK by me. Yes, they killed his friends, etc etc: but a nuclear warhead? Really? Really??

It’s at this point the alert reader stops to wonder whether the whole book is some kind of high-camp “The Producers” so-bad-it’s-good joke, or some knowing Alan Sokal hoax on the airport novel genre, or perhaps even some Umberto Eco-esque prolonged literary inversion. Though these all sound fairly unbelievable, the alternative – that the author really thinks that this kind of stuff is OK – is so much worse that it’s not really conceivable. And once you’ve ruled out the impossible…

Hoax astronaut!

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I love this picture from the Porco Cane blog:-

During 1992 restoration work on the Cathedral of Salamanca, this astronaut ensnared by vines was added by Jeronimo Garcia, along with “a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish“, all approved by the appropriate committee etc. Perhaps this will confuse archaeologists a millennium hence? Probably not.

Doubtless more than a few of our problems with the Voynich Manuscript arise from looking at it out of its original context: perhaps it too consists of ancient visual themes peppered with humorous contemporary additions, but we are too far removed in time to see the jokes, let alone get them?

Voynichese vs Marginalia – the nature of unreadability…

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Even when I’ve shown the VMs’ marginalia to some very clever, very experienced historians / palaeographers, you can see that there’s a easy stopping point tempting them: that because they are unreadable, they must necessarily be cryptographically unreadable.

But the two types of mark are manifestly not the same: they have quite different types of unreadability. That is, one seems intentionally unreadable, the other seems unintentionally unreadable. But even this overloads the word “unreadable” to breaking point, obscuring the core difference between the two which is this: that one is easy to apprehend but tricky to comprehend, while the other is easy to comprehend but tricky to apprehend. Alternatively, you can pitch this as “legible but obfuscated” vs “illegible but sensible”, if you think that helps. 🙂

What I’m clumsily trying to point out is that ‘unreadable’ is one of those words that really gets in the way of inter-domain collaboration, by offering up domain experts an easy alibi to avoid engaging with the VMs’ many problematiques. In the case of the VMs’ marginalia, the real reason an expert palaeographer should stand clear is the absence of a proper codicological analysis of the key pages supported by some state-of-the-art scans. Whereas this lacuna can be filled (in time), writing the marginalia off as necessarily cryptographic (and perhaps uncrackably so) is just crabwalking out of the way.

But perhaps I’m wrong, and the pragmatic reason historical experts feel comfortable manufacturing reasons (such as the above) not to get involved is that there is a fusty stench of unfunded academic death perceived to be lingering in the air above the VMs, by which I mean that they collectively think there is much more to lose by getting involved than there is to gain. Though in many ways such a view would be fair enough, few are brave enough to admit to it. Personally, I believe that there is an enormous amount to gain: but that the widespread (and arguably dominant?) contemporary practice of history as simply a close reading of fragments of historical texts is what gets in the way, as this does not give historians the tools to deal with a primarily non-verbal text situated outside most of the stylized art history mainstream.Creating alibis is much easier than having to face up to gaps in your core methodology.

New Romanian Voynich theory…

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Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript’s plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian?

Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there’s a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief Wikipedia page), which is not terrifically far from the VMs’ timeline. And others have fleetingly suggested Romanian before: Kevin Knight’s well-known slides showed a machine-generated match for “VAS92 9FAE AR APAM ZOE ZOR9 QOR92 9 FOR ZOE89” [the first few words of f1r in Prescott Currier’s transcription] as Romanian (though admittedly Knight qualifies the auto-generated Romanian plaintext as “nonsense”). After all, Romanian is merely one of the many Romance languages, and we’ve had no shortage of those proposed.

So boldly step forward “Secret Sauce”, a member of the Ssssshh (“Super Secret History”) group of “less motivated and (less) enlightened Illuminati”, who all hail from Arizona somewhere utterly secret indeed. Except that their town “starts with a T and has an ASU in it“. Their image gallery shows clearly that the group has between four and five members, presumably depending on whether or not the waiter is taking the photo.

So far, so non-Romanian: but step through their “‎Doorway to the Origin of Never Told Ancient Secret Knowledge” (i.e. “DONTASK”)‎ and you’ll see that they take the radial labels on f67r1 (the famous APOD page) to be month names (ticking clockwise around from the double line in the outer rings) and use them as cribs into the underlying language. After looking at lots of month names in different languages, Secret Sauce noted that “traditional Romanian (or a closely related language) used terms for October and November which started with the same sound (B)“, and so concluded that enciphered Romanian would be a “likely candidate” for Voynichese’s plaintext. Follow this through and you get (if you squint a bit) a verbose-cipher-like set of correspondences between Voynichese and Romanian. Though it has to be said that quite a few Voynichese letters are marked up as corresponding to multiple plaintext Romanian letters. Nonetheless, here’s the start of Voynich Manuscript page f1r as deciphered into Romanian:-

Special-Sauce-Voynich-transcription

…(etc) which Special Sauce somewhat hopefully renders as…

There are many gifts (which have been) set aside to bestow upon (us) in return (for our) humility.

We journey through (life) in passionate servitude (to God).

(Our) Heavenly Mother has chosen to reward (us).

Forgiveness (is) the gateway (to) a wondrous celestial land.

(There is) a grand home in paradise (in which) to live.

(etc etc)

Even if I am somewhat impressed at seeing “yt” and “yp” translate to “h” and “p/pa” (respectively), I have to say I’m getting more than a hint of a Stojko / Levitov buzz off this. Which is to say that more or less any transliteration could be rendered into a stream of nearest-match word fragments, corrected into nearby target language words, the grammar fixed, lacunae filled, organized into short punchy sentence-like blocks, and then all translated and resequenced into something almost resembling language. This is broadly parallel to the the way that the liquid substance dished out by the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser to Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

Even if you do manage to overlook this kind of non-workingness, the problem then becomes that this kind of approach inevitably doesn’t scale up to a full-length document the size of the VMs: John Stojko couldn’t really explain why anyone would write such repetitive historico-religious “Old Ukrainian” nonsense on such a large scale, and the same would seem to be true here.

So… sorry, Special Sauce, but I don’t think you’ve cracked the secrets of the VMs yet. But here’s a modern-day secret that you might like!

Voynich marginalia: French Secretary hand?

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Following on from yesterday’s post on Elmar’s marginalia PDF, I’ve once again been looking really closely at the Voynich marginalia. I’m using the modern kind of fuzzily-overlapping codicology / palaeography / linguistic methodology that sometimes gets mentioned online (but which may be more to do with university administrators’ desire to collapse three history lecturing posts into one) to try to model the underlying hand, one careful stroke at a time.

f116v-letter-a-analysis

Yesterday, I decomposed the ‘a’ into what I think its constituent strokes are: a curved ‘c’-stroke (red, above) followed by a zigzaggy ‘z’-stroke (blue, above). Now here’s a collection of ‘l’ shapes (and note once again that these are consistent across the various marginalia, just as the “pre-upstroked topless p” marginalia character proved to be back here)…

voynich-marginalia-letter-l

…and the two constituent continuous strokes that I think make up the ‘l’ shape…

voynich-marginalia-letter-l-strokes

My reasoning is; that you can see where the ink pools slightly at the overlap (right at the top); that it’s always easier to do downstrokes than upstrokes with a quill; that the NE-to-SW end part of the second (blue) stroke sometimes crosses over the vertical stroke (most notably in the “por le bon” instance); and that the vertical downstroke seems evenly inked from top to bottom, consistent with a single long stroke.

Similarly, here’s how I think the ‘topless p’ character was stroked, with the second (blue) stroke pushed upwards, which I guess accounts for why it stops short:-

voynich-marginalia-letter-p-strokes

Now, the real question is: how can we use this basic codicological and palaeographic knowledge to help us? Tentatively, I suspect we can now identify the hand as a kind of “French Secretary” hand (as shown on this page on Dianne Tillotson’s excellent site) with perhaps just a hint of Italian mercantesca (as illustrated in this paper by Irene Ceccherini). The two-stroke ‘a’ with a peak-y arch seems quite distinctive: probably the next good step would be looking for old-fashioned palaeography books in Gallica, see what kind of a literature there is on the subject.

Anyway, good luck looking for French Secretary hands with topless p-shapes (but be careful of the keywords you use on Google, you may get something of a high ranking surprise)… 😮

Elmar’s new Voynich marginalia page…

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Self-professed Voynich skeptic Elmar Vogt has been fairly quiet of late: turns out that he has been preparing his own substantial analysis on his “Voynich Thoughts” website of the Voynich Manuscript’s teasingly hard-to-read marginalia, (with Elias Schwerdtfeger’s notes on the zodiac marginalia appended). Given that Voynich marginalia are pretty much my specialist subject, the question I’m sure you want answered is: how did the boy Vogt do?

Well… it’s immediately clear he’s thorough, insofar as he stepped sequentially through all the word-like groups of letters in the major Voynich marginalia to try to work out what each letter could feasibly be; and from that built up a kind of Brumbaugh-like matrix of combinatorial possibilities for each one for readers to shuffle to find sensible-looking readings. However, it also has to be said that for all of this careful (and obviously prolonged) effort, he managed to get… precisely nowhere at all.

You see, we’ve endured nearly a century’s worth of careful, rational people looking at these few lines of text and being unable to read them, from Newbold’s “michiton oladabas“, through Marcin Ciura’s mirrored “sa b’adalo No Tich’im“, and all the way to my own [top line] “por le bon simon sint…“. Worse still, nobody has even been able to convincingly argue the case for what the author(s) was/were trying to achieve with these confused-looking marginalia, which can easily be read as containing fragments of French, Occitan, German, Latin, Voynichese (and indeed of pretty much any other language you can think of).

And the explanation for this? Well, we Voynich researchers simply love explanations… which is why we have so many of them to choose from (even if none of them stands up to close scrutiny):-

  1. Pen trials?
  2. A joke (oh, and by the way, the joke is on us)?
  3. A hoax?
  4. A cipher key?
  5. Enciphered text?
  6. Some kind of vaguely polyglot text in an otherwise unknown language?

How can we escape this analysis paralysis? Where are those pesky intellectual historians when you actually need them?

I suspect that what is at play here is an implicit palaeographic fallacy: specifically the long-standing (but false) notion that palaeographers try to read individual words (when actually they don’t). Individual word and letter instances suffer from accidents, smudges, blurs, deletions, transfers, rubbing off, corrections, emendations: however, a person’s hand (the way that they construct letters) is surprisingly constant, and is normally able to be located within a reasonably well-defined space of historic hands – Gothic, semi-Gothic, hybrida, mercantesca, Humanist, etc. Hence, the real problem here is arguably that this palaeographic starting point has failed to be determined.

Hence, I would say that looking at individual words is arguably the last thing you should be doing: instead, you should be trying to understand (a) how individual letters are formed, and (b) which particular letter instances are most reliable. From there, you should try to categorise the hand, which should additionally give you some clue as to where it is from and what language it is: and only then should you pass the challenge off from palaeography to historical linguistics (i.e. try to read it). And so I would say that attempting to read the marginalia without first understanding the marginalia hand is like trying to do a triple-jump but omitting both the hop and the skip parts, i.e. you’ll fall well short of where you want to get to.

So let’s buck a hundred years’ worth of trend and try instead to do this properly: let’s simply concentrate on the letter ‘a’ and and see where it takes us.

f116v-letter-a

To my eyes, I think that a[5], a[6], and a[7] show no obvious signs of emendation and are also consistently formed as if by the same hand. Furthermore, it seems to me that these are each formed from two continuous strokes, both starting from the middle of the top arch of the ‘a’. That is, the writer first executes a heavy c-like down-and-around curved stroke (below, red), lifts up the pen, places it back on the starting point, and then writes a ‘Z’-like up-down-up zigzaggy stroke (below, blue) to complete the whole ‘a’ shape. You can see from the thickness and shape of the blue stroke that the writer is right-handed: while you can see from the weight discontinuity and slight pooling of ink in the middle of the top line exactly where the two strokes join up. I think this gives us a reasonable basis for believing what the writer’s core stroke technique is (and, just as importantly, what it probably isn’t).

f116v-letter-a-analysis

What this tells us (I think) is that we should be a little uncertain about a[4], (which doesn’t have an obviously well-formed “pointy head”) and very uncertain about a[1], a[2], and a[3] (none of which really rings true).

My take on all this is that I think a well-meaning VMs owner tried hard to read the (by then very faded) marginalia, but probably did not know the language it was written in, leaving the page in a worse mess than what it was before they started. Specifically: though “maria” shouts original to me, “oladaba8” shouts emendation just as strongly. Moreover, the former also looks to my eyes like “iron gall ink + quill”, while the latter looks like “carbon ink + metal nib”.

Refining this just a little bit, I’d also point out that if you also look at the two ascender loops in “oladaba8″, I would argue that the first (‘l’) loop is probably original, while the second (‘b’) loop is structured quite wrongly, and is therefore probably an emendation. And that’s within the same word!

The corollary is simply that I think it highly likely that any no amount of careful reading would untie this pervasively tangled skein if taken at face value: and hence that, for all his persistence and careful application of logic, Elmar has fallen victim to the oldest intellectual trap in the book – of pointing his powerful critical apparatus in quite the wrong direction. Sorry, Elmar my old mate, but you’ve got to be dead careful with these ancient curses, really you have. 🙂