Ancient Cryptography

Ancient Texts => Voynich Manuscript => Topic started by: tonybaloney on June 05, 2009, 09:09:37 AM

Title: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 05, 2009, 09:09:37 AM
Everyone under the sun seems to have a theory about this 'cipher' -

It can be found here -
 
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=VCG

before I give my twopence worth -
Aaron is it possible to download the EVA font to use in here?

You'll find it here -

http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/0-1-2007-08-28/evah1_1.zip
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 07, 2009, 03:44:28 AM
twopence worth - ha - maybe the crown jewels

qokeody okeody - higgledy piggledy - helter skelter - flim flam man

I'm like a kid with a new toy !

eyesights not so good - is that really a crown with sparkling jewels or a cap with glittering bells

can't quite see it all yet , nearly there.....

I really should get out more
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 10, 2009, 02:16:20 PM
Cipher, hoax, universal language, unknown plaintext???

Let’s see if we can find out!!

The standard alphabet of the time –

A B C D E F G H I L M N O P Q R S T U X

(J,K,V,W,Y & Z were not included) 2 more characters (abbreviations) were often tacked on the end (‘9’ and ‘&’)

Latin frqcy’s taken from the 1,000 most common Latin words –

I 11.4   M 7.4   L 3.7   B 1.3   

U 10.9   T 7.1   C 3.4   F 1

E 10.6   R 6.5   P 2.9   G 0.9   

A  8.3   O 6.4   D 2.6   H 0.8   

S  7.6   N 5.3   Q 1.8   X 0.3   


(this is only a rough guide as it does not take account of repetition of common words etc. – it will do for now after all it might be in Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, Vulcan or God knows what – it is not in Elgarese!)

Following are the Voynich frqcy’s (I'll do it my way) –

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/voynichalpha.gif)

Print out a page of the VM to it’s actual size and see how small the handwriting is – it does not leave much room for the finer details!!

Anyone wishing to follow and help in this should make a copy of the alphabets on p.164 of ‘The Alphabet an account of the origin and development of letters’ by Isaac Taylor – you’ll find it here –

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Xay6EtteFYwC&pg=PA105&lpg=PA105&dq=t+letter+origin&source=bl&ots=FfDH65hJtz&sig=7TU_uRksA3k4OvKQyZBGk_cCgU0&hl=en&ei=s_kvSqiCJ5qFsAa6vfG0CQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3#PPA164,M1

I had to trace this off the screen as it wouldn’t print out?!

Print out –

f. 148v of “Treatises on medicine” 1145 which will be found here -
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/medieval/treatises.html

& this –

http://www.schoyencollection.com/carolingian_files/ms1542.jpg

isn’t this exciting – more soon   
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 11, 2009, 05:30:56 AM
Hang em high – what are the ‘gallows’ –

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/etc.gif)

Nothing more than 3 letters in a row – first he writes ‘e’ then ‘?’ then ‘t’ and draws the ‘t’ crossbar backwards through the preceding letter ‘?’


So we have e,c and t all looking the same – the combined Latin frqcy of these 3 letters is 21.1% the combined frqcy of all EVA c and h is 20.8% - not only that but ‘et’ and ‘est’ are 2 of the most frequently used Latin words and EVA c & h are the most common combinations in the VM – bingo! So far so good!

It is said that despite all the effort thrown into solving this cipher not a single word has been read – do we now have two?
The very first word on the first page, I believe is ‘Factum 2’ – does that make it three! Lets make it 4 as we can now find ‘este’.
I digress -

Now draw the ‘Irish Unical’ or the ‘Caroline Miniscule’ alphabet (they’re almost identical) with a backwards sloping hand (note the forward sloping hand in bottom half of ‘Treatises on Medicine’ f148v – although this MS is in a different script altogether it clearly shows the difficulty of separating the i’s, n’s and m’s particularly in the sloping hand section – it also shows a likeness to VM f49v with the embellished initials running down the side spelling out another word – I should state here I don’t understand Latin, despite the best efforts of Mr. Sawtell and his cane! it’s the best I can do to make out the odd word here and there – note the middle word in the fifth line up from the bottom ‘ptori’ the little arc over the p presumably is an abbreviation for ‘re’ and the ascender on the end ‘us’ so it reads ‘pretorius’ – the word beneath ‘umdificat’?? the abbreviation above it is to show that this is an ‘m’ imagine continuing that arc down and you have the EVA ‘iin’) more on that later.

Always remember to cross your t’s and dot your i’s

Can anyone tell me what the second word is in the fourth line from the top ‘fe8s’?

Apologies for the quality of the sketches but I haven’t got a scanner and am having to use ‘paint’ & draw with a mouse?!

You’re sloping backhand Early Gallic uncial, Irish uncial or  Caroline miniscule (Carol was the name of my first love – 45 years ago – funny how the mind works - I digress) should look like the following –

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/slopinghand.gif)

The second row – sloping back hand
Third row – add a few flourishes
Hey presto – the Voynich alphabet (give or take a couple of errors)

Here’s an example where the scribe is copying the top line -

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/credoquia.gif)

The second line is his sloping back hand with Latin abbreviations
The third line he adds his flourishes – possibly after finishing the line or possibly as he went along
Fourth line is just the third shrunk down to look more like the Voynich script size (it’s still too large)

Compare MS 1542 – the final line ‘Accepta sit in conspectus tuo’ (I think it says) – I just want to draw your attention to the ‘ect’ in there – also look at the letter R’s – all start below the base line just as the EVA L does, this is why I put it as the R – this MS also shows how a capital letter was used at the start of a paragraph (usually more embellished than here) – what are all those dots with a tick over them, are they some kind of punctuation?? – what is the bar over the bold V near the end of the first paragraph, it struck me that if the bar went under the V it would look similar to the unusual bold red symbol on VM f1?? –

To be cont’d.


Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 11, 2009, 06:51:33 AM
I’ve convinced myself the foregoing is how the VM was written – it explains the flow of the script etc.
In the alphabet given the D & S (& possibly the B) characters look very similar – the C & E also – I, M, N & U present the usual problems – not sure what he’s done with the H – and some of the flourishes may be ascenders – a C or E with a flourish or ascender can also look like an L etc. etc.

Now can we read it?

For simplicities sake in the following I have replaced all prefix ‘9’ with con (it could be ‘cum’ or ‘com’) and all suffix ‘9’ with ‘um’ (could also be ‘us’)

VM f.1 Factum 2 connai ai amam estor estoi emtici connoi estordum/estorsum loirum entai oium nan etmam estai aic/aie emtai dai/sai ......

Oops – it was going so well!

Several possibilities –
the above may mean something to somebody (it means nothing to me)
it’s gibberish (all made up like the plant drawings)
it contains a simple cipher (such as swapping vowels around etc.)
it contains null words
I’ve got it all wrong

Of the above 5 possibilities, the only one I can discount at the moment is the latter – further investigation needed
To be cont’d
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 11, 2009, 09:29:50 AM
Regarding the plaintext R (EVA L) – this is definitely R as it starts below the base line – I’ve just noticed that EVA R (bottom right first diag) also starts below the base line some of the time – this should also be considered R in those instances

On VM f.67v is a circle divided into 12 (possibly months/Zodiac signs) counting round from the one slightly left of top centre to the 10th segment it plainly says ‘Octobare’ yet the other ones seem to make no sense –

Me thinks this scribe is having a laugh like with the plant drawings?!

He doth task me
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on June 11, 2009, 10:17:11 AM
Still not seeing the Octobare in that, but, for what it's worth, it looks like there is a similar word on the Libra page (left side of the p 73 spread). It's found three women back from the woman with the crown on the outside circle.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 11, 2009, 10:58:14 AM
f.67v in the perimeter outer circle at 7 o'clock - looks like 'occo8aic' - which reads 'octobare' with the alphabet previously given - I'm not just looking for individual words here and there to fit - I just think the tenth month in the tenth position a bit too coincidental.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on June 11, 2009, 11:07:05 AM
Yes, I know what you're looking for. If you look at the page across, it looks even closer, with octobar in the tenth position (under a yellow moon). I mentioned the libra "star" (woman) because if there is a correlation between the starting letters and a star name, you might be able to correlate the other stars, thus refining an alphabet.

On that note, the word in the third position of the facing page (under a red moon) could be Martius or some variation thereof.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 11, 2009, 11:58:18 AM
Phil - exactly which pages are you referring to? please give page numbers
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on June 11, 2009, 12:02:24 PM
I thought we were looking at page 67.

Hopefully this link will work to show you the pages I was looking at.
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006194&srchtype=ITEM

I might not have seen your word as your page reference number is different. I was just looking at the corner of the page.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on June 14, 2009, 03:09:51 PM
Sorry, I haven't figured out how to be automatically notified of new threads and their replies, but notification for this thread is on now. I'll look into the font thing, but I'm not sure if one can choose custom-installed fonts when posting. Usually such fonts have to be installed on the user's machine.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 15, 2009, 02:55:33 AM
(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/alpha2.gif)

Having practised with a quill pen and managed to get ink blotches everywhere ... although leaving a lot to be desired the above is probably nearer the mark than previously given – though I’m not happy why the P is capitalised in the middle of words (think its probably F as well and it doesn’t matter how many loops) & are the ‘gallows’ that start a word the same as those that don’t?? – above clearly shows why there are at least 2 ways of forming the ‘8’ so its no use analysing them as all the same.

Frequencies – considering the ‘9’ will represent 2 letters as a suffix & 3 letters as a prefix – and the ‘gallows’ probably 4 letters – & EVA ‘sh’ 3 letters, 4(qu) 2 letters – the percentages all change – promising is that Q now falls around its correct 2% mark but O is still double what it should be!! (some early ciphers only altered the vowels)

Aim at the moment is to try and decide what the characters actually are when the flourishes are removed – what is a flourish, what is an abbreviation mark etc – only then can we decide if it’s a cipher or not – if it is I think it will be of the simplest form as others from the period are – just need to get rid of all the confusion.

Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on June 15, 2009, 07:48:28 AM
I dug a bit deeper into the document over the weekend, and noticed that there may be something on this page:
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl/oneITEM.asp?pid=2002046&iid=1006187&srchtype=ITEM

If you look at the second ring, you have a string of 16 characters -- all different -- that repeats four times. At the very least, it does draw out some continuity in that you can see some character variations.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 15, 2009, 09:16:12 AM
Yes it's very curious - almost as if he's writing out his alphabet for us - but what has he done with the EVA 'a', 'i' , 'n' & 's'?  - also writing the 4 sets under one another 2 of the 'F' characters have a loop left and right and 2 have only one loop (strangely enough I had just come to the conclusion that the F & P might be the same for reasons based on frequency and here it is again) - I had looked at this page only briefly before - it is certainly very informative.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on June 15, 2009, 10:26:18 AM
Yes I noticed that too. I'm wondering if the box-edge would flourish that way naturally. Going from a 90-degree angle to a rounded flourish like that seems like it could be a natural hand-movement. It's also interesting that the fourth-line "h" gallows has the same type of flourish which would identify it incorrectly as a "ll/ls".

The more I look at it, it looks like both gallows glyphs are penned from the bottom of the right-side and wrapped up and around.

Also of note is that "2" character is repeated again in an extra position on the fourth-line which might give away an extra substitution.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on June 15, 2009, 06:58:34 PM
...and with any luck...

Woot. That's got it.

These glyphs are taken directly from the text and were just cleaned up a bit.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 08, 2009, 02:44:58 PM
Upon further consideration –   â€“ thinking the Voynich has too much repetition, too close together , ‘words’ repeated several times in the same paragraph, certain ‘letters’ only occurring at start or end of ‘words’, words or parts thereof that look like numerals etc –
could it be similar to this:-

STAR. – Isa. ii., 1-5; iv.-vii., 14-16; ix., 1-7; xvi., 5; xi., xxii., xxv., 6-12; xxvii., xxviii., xxx, to lxvi. Jer. xxiii., 5-8. Hos. iv., 17. Matt. xxvi., 26-28. Gen. lix., 10. John xviii., 31; xix., 15. Matt. xxvii., 24-25; xxiii, 37-39. Luke xix., 41-44; xxiii., 27-31. Mark xiv., 53-64. Heb. iv., 15. Isa. liii. Gen. xiv., 18. Psa. cx. Heb. v., i. to xiii. Psa. ii., xxii., lxix., xvi., xxiv., xiv., lxviii., lxxxix. Cant. Acts i. to iv. Rom. i. to xi. Rev. Exo. xix., 1. Cor. x. Num. xxiv. Deut. xviii-xxxii. 2 Sam. vii. Job. xii., xix., xxiii. Prov. iii., 30; xiv., 10; xx., 24. – 1. The Book.

Or this -
231AXXI 84BXV 129BXX 211BXVI 212BXLVIII 2AXXVIII 232BI 29AVIII 188BVIII 31AII 92AII 17BXLIX 69BXXIV 156BXXXIV 107BXXXIV 176AXXXIX 41AXIII 263BXIII 266AXXXIII 20BII 167BXIX 232AXXXIV 236BXIX.
Both from that wonderful book ‘The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers’ (still sells about 1 book per month – sales yet to reach 3 figures!!)
I think something along the above lines would certainly have characteristics like the Voynich and would explain why all the sophisticated computerised attacks and analysis thrown at it have failed to solve it
So I went to the library in search of how they used to write Bible references etc. – Pope Sixtus seemed a good starting place . . . and stumbled upon . . .
ADD 39660 ‘Satirical History of the Popes’ 1464 –
below is the reign date given on each page for each Pope (sorry, can’t afford photo copies but I think it’s a pretty accurate representation)


(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/popesnumerals.jpg)


In 1 we have EVA ‘ch’ – in 2 & 3 EVA ‘Sh’ (well very nearly) – in 5 EVA ‘qo’ (also a mix of Arabic & Latin numerals as in the Voynich quire numbers)

For beginners – the final ‘i’ of a number is written as a ‘j’ to avoid an extra ‘i’ being added by some devious person – what looks like a backward sloping ‘b’ in 5 is the way they used to write ‘v’ – in 6 it says ‘annus primus’ (year first) & in 7 ‘usque’ (until)
For experts - If anyone knows what the little marks in 2, 3 & 4 above the m,cc & x mean please tell me – in the meantime I assume they merely designate them as numbers as opposed to letters with which they could be confused (in certain circumstances!?)

Opening a medieval book you only have one page number for the 2 pages in front of you – generally each page is divided into 2 columns of text – so any type of book reference would have to include at least the page No. and column No. (i, ii, iii, iiii)

The number 40 seems to have many religious meanings - 
http://www.archimedes-lab.org/numbers/Num24_69.html

to be contd.....
next time the connection between the suggested later date for the colouring in and the gallows
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on October 08, 2009, 04:00:41 PM
Ah, neat! I definitely agree that there's a lot of grouped up characters in the manuscript. Who knows, perhaps it's some kind of roman numeral math book on calculus and astronomy. Or just a very lengthy way to encipher messages.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 02, 2009, 05:22:19 PM
I now believe the VM to have been composed in the following way -

     |     |  \  | \\  | \\\ | \\\\
c    |  a  |  b  |  c  |  d  |  f  |
cc   |  e  |  g  |  h  |  k  |  l  |
ccc  |  i  |  m  |  n  |  p  |  q  |
cccc |  o  |  r  |  s  |  t  |  v  |
ccccc|  u  |  w  |  x  |  y  |  z  |

Iv'e just amended the above grid -(I put in the wrong one before) - boon

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/how.jpg)

In the first stage above the author writes his message in cipher using only 2 letters the ‘c’ & ‘i’ –
in the second stage above (highlighted in red) the author cunningly disguised it to resemble an old manuscript -
the gallows substitute for rubrication (this is why one appears at the start of each paragraph); the EVA q is a
modification of the forward slash that appears in many old MS’s (I’ve used it as a word divider in the above but
I think it was originally used more in the sense of a comma??); the other ascenders, serifs, ligatures etc. represent
different abbreviations –
In the third section I’ve just removed the coloured highlights to show how much it resembles the VM!!!

Although I’ve shown it written in a grid above, from the frequencies it seems more likely to have been written as below -

             quire 1 qty   Italian expect
c          a        200      170
cc         b        112       13
ccc        c        151       65
cccc       d        126       54
ccccc      e         79      171
ci         f         39       14
cii        g         18       24
ciii       h          2       22
ciiii      i/j       18      163
cci        k         95        o
ccii       l         73       94
cciii      m         38       36
cciiii     n         98      100
ccci       o        180      142
cccii      p         35       44
ccciii     q          5        9
ccciiii    r         31       92
cccci      s         54       72
ccccii     t         31       81
cccciii    u          8       44
cccciiii   v         17       30
ccccci     w         12        0
cccccii    x          8        0
ccccciii   y          5        0
ccccciiii  z         14        7

I did the above on quires 1 to 4 - only about 6% of the groups did not conform to one of the above combinations
The above match leaves a heck of lot to be desired but note the l’m’n’o’p’q comparison!!! (a keyword may have
been used)

Obviously I’ve gone astray with the ‘e’ somewhere – it is not clear to me yet exactly in what way the enciphered
message should be divided up – we have too many cc, ccc & cccc and not enough ccccc – it also looks as if the ‘k’
should be another substitute for ‘i’

This all resembles a version of a Baconian biliteral cipher – although not published until 1623 Bacon invented it
in 1576-9 whilst in Paris – if the VM is by Bacon or a contemporary to whom he may have shown his cipher then
the alphabet will be one used around 1600 and will not look exactly like the one given above the main difference
being the last 5 letters – probably u doubling for v and w and depending on the authors native language.

Still some way to go – I haven’t abandoned all hope just yet!
   
All the above tends to indicate it was a fraud perpetrated on the King knowing he would pay a tidy sum for an old
MS – which begs the question – what if anything could be the underlying plaintext that wouldn’t lead to a swift
beheading if deciphered?

Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on November 02, 2009, 06:00:07 PM
Wow, that's a very solid hypothesis! I hope it holds up! :D
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 03, 2009, 05:20:27 AM
Oops - just noticed I put in the wrong grid for enciphering that message
(too many bits of paper) - corrected it now.

"very solid hypothesis" - it's sweet and simple - explains so much - I really like it !
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 04, 2009, 10:52:29 AM
Having only just noticed that EVA y is also probably a ‘ci’ combination (I had assumed it to be a c with a descender
disguise, but now it seems obvious - this is why its so often at the end and not in the middle)- I did the count again ....

The following count is based on Takeshi transcript replacing EVA n,r,l,m,I with i; o,h,d,s,g,c, with c; a,y with ci; and all
gallows k,t,p,f, with a blank space then counting the resulting combinations (don’t forget to separate the EVA q by
putting a space behind it to ‘count whole words only’)-

       quire  1     2     3     4    total
c             393   283   427   324   1427
cc             61    40    46    51    198
ccc           130    72    92   132    426
cccc           43    19    34    61    157  
ccccc          11     4    11    22     48
ci            251   202   239   132    824
cii            36    18    28    24    106
ciii           11    14    14     5     44
ciiii          46    35    40    32    153
cci           203   155   157   113    628
ccii           68    18    63    33    182
cciii          36    25    19    31    111
cciiii         87    73    84    84    328
ccci          345   264   314   257   1180
cccii          45    10    30    18    103
ccciii          6     9     9    14     38
ccciiii        33    11    23    17     84
cccci         118    53    77   134    382
ccccii         22     1     8    11     42
cccciii         4     1     0     1      6
cccciiii        8     3     7     6     24
ccccci         55    20    30    58    163
cccccii         6     3     1     7     17
ccccciii        5     0     0     0      5
ccccciiii      12     5     8     6     31

This is remarkably consistent throughout the 4 quires – (I have only used the first 4 quires so as not to mix up
Currier A & B which may be due to a switch of language)

Turning the above into percentages and putting in order we get –

VM  german
21.3  18.5
17.6  11.5
12.3   8
 9.3   7
 6.3   7
 5.7   5
 4.9   5
 2.9   5
 2.7   5
 2.4   5
 2.3   4
 2.2   4
 1.6   3.5
 1.5   2.5
 1.2   2.5
 0.7   1.5
 0.6   1.5
 0.5   1.5
 0.5   1
 0.3   1
 0.2   0.5
 0.1
 0.1   

Where German is the nearest match I’ve got but it’s not that convincing – anyone know of a better match? – and
how do modern German frequencies compare with German from 4 centuries ago?? – more counting - Oh the joys
of deciphering!


As I see it the main problem is accurately converting it back to the ci combinations -

Are all EVA Y ‘ci’ or are some just ‘c’
EVA ‘a’ and ‘o’ can be confused in some cases (the ‘o’ being formed by 2 downward penstrokes presumably to
avoid the nib digging into the paper on an upwards pen stroke and splattering ink everywhere – try it and see!!!)
EVA Sh & ch - converting these in Takeshi always gives ‘...cc...’ but some (those with a long ligature should be
‘..c c...’ i.e. parts of separate combinations
Even some EVA ‘d’ and ‘g’ could be ‘ci’ combinations

Lesser problems – those combinations beginning with ‘i’ (these could simply be from a common word list or
numbers)
Direction of writing – there are several instances where it looks as if the previous line was written after the
following one - i.e. a particularly clear instance is f.105r where the 4th group from the end of the second line
is raised to avoid clashing with the group beneath and in the penultimate line on the same page the 3rd group
onwards is raised to avoid the centred groups beneath.

Well that’s as far as I’ve got at the moment – as it’s taken me about 3 months just to discover what kind of cipher
it is – at this rate it’ll probably be another 3 before I arrive at any plaintext at all?!
And God help us if somebody was communicating with ‘angels’ when they wrote it!
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on November 04, 2009, 11:10:33 AM
Quote from: tonybaloney on November 04, 2009, 10:52:29 AM
Well that’s as far as I’ve got at the moment – as it’s taken me about 3 months just to discover what kind of cipher
it is – at this rate it’ll probably be another 3 before I arrive at any plaintext at all?!
And God help us if somebody was communicating with ‘angels’ when they wrote it!
I'm sure you've already made more progress than most people have made over several years. ;) I agree though, I certainly hope whoever was writing it wasn't high on angel dust.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 04, 2009, 11:56:11 AM
The ‘angels’ I was referring to can be found here -
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee
http://www.john-dee.org/   
being of good character, I’m not quite sure what Aaron is on ...
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 04, 2009, 11:56:43 AM
about
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on November 04, 2009, 12:33:12 PM
Ah, I can't say I've heard of him. I just know that a lot of cultures have "communicated" with higher powers through the use of drugs.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 15, 2009, 05:44:20 AM
The ‘gallows’ symbols -
knowing that all the gallows symbols are probably the same (as what is high frequency following any particular one is also
generally high frequency following the others – also in the circular diagram on f.57v that gives 4 ‘alphabets’ the EVA P & F
occupy the same position, hence, are interchangeable) and that 86% of all paragraphs begin with a gallows symbol – it
being extremely unlikely that any letter (or 4 letters) will start 86% of the paragraphs – they must be something else –
Whilst looking at an old manuscript it became apparent to me that the gallows were nothing more than a sort of rubrication
(just lacking the colour!)

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/rubrication2.jpg)

‘A’ is from MS Arundell 117 f.109 14th cent.  and is fairly typical of that period – the initial letter ‘O’ is enlarged and
rubricated – the fifth line is the start of a new paragraph and has the symbol marked ‘F’ before it – as does every paragraph!!
C D E F G are all variations of the same – all have the same highlighting function
Compare ‘A’ with ‘B’ – it is my contention that whoever wrote the VM they only intended it to look  like an old MS
‘I’ shows the gallows for comparison (they even look similar)
‘H’ just points out that the rubrication was sometimes written before the letter, sometimes through it in old MS’s

It was the above that led me to the ‘ci’ combinations with which I’ve still to make any progress but I’m positive it’s
a step in the right direction.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on November 15, 2009, 09:31:09 AM
Very nice! By the way, have you had any luck with using a word frequency chart instead of a letter frequency chart, according to your new theory of how the letters are written? Perhaps that would give a much better hint at what language it might have originally been.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on November 15, 2009, 03:09:57 PM
Not got that far yet - did find 4 Peruvian, 4 Indonesian & a couple of African languages that matched those frequencies!!!

Not sure I've got all the 'ci' combinations correct yet - when & if I do it should be easy to find the language by finding the most common repeating 'ci' strings which will be the common words and then try the different languages on them 

Alas the underlying plaintext may be glossalia or just nonsense as everything else is pointing to a fraud.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on April 12, 2010, 11:36:55 AM
Needless to say the ‘ci’ combinations led nowhere – since then I’ve been looking at quite a few herbals –
I found the following one quite interesting -

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/scan0029.jpg)

The above is from ‘Livre des Simples Medecines’ – a 15th c. French herbal.
As far as I can make out this bit says ‘Nasturcium est creson cest une herbe assez communue mais item
ya de deux manieres car il en ya qui croist en yaue et lautre es jardins et qu’t trouve es receuptes creson
simplemetre on dit entendre celluy de jardin il est chaut et sec au quart degre aucutres lappellent
gusinium autre anthoneas’

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/scan0027.jpg)

Above (from about 4 pages of it – 870 words) I have listed the letters that take different forms depending
on their position in the word – 1 is the first letter of a word; 2 is anywhere in the middle of a word; 3 as the
final letter.
EVA ‘y’ can be compared to the letter i above as it appears in the VM predominately as a first and final
letter; EVA ‘q’ compared to r or u as it only appears at the start of a word.
Note the r has 2 versions in the middle of a word – it seems to depend on the preceding letter.
On the right above is a comparison of the striking resemblance between some of the VM characters and
those in the LDSM and the letters are represented by them.
Now I’m not saying it’s in French or that this is what these VM characters stand for (they appear with a far,
far greater frequency in the VM than in LSDM) – you may draw your own conclusions – mine – the VM is
a copy of a Greek work translated into Latin by a dyslexic Frenchman who travelled throughout Asia and
ended up in an Italian castle with funny parapets  ???
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on April 12, 2010, 05:55:53 PM
Yeah, imagine how hard it would be to decipher if the words cycled between different languages!

Very promising lead with the French letters though... the similarities appear to be too close to be a coincidence.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on April 14, 2010, 05:20:36 AM
The following is a hand copy from a late 15th century herbal (MS 336 f.11) in the Wellcome Library –
You may need to see the original to appreciate the comparison – unless you want to fork out about £6 for
a copy you’ll have to make do with my sketch
(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/scan0002.jpg)
The text accompanying it – (I have put in brackets the letter/s I assumed from the abbreviation mark on
the preceding letter  - I may have got some wrong)

Nenufaro e predo i 3° grado e humido i 2° la radice, ela some(n)za restri(n)ge
lo fluxo de la sp(er)ma ch(e) vene nele vig(?)ilie, e cura le piaghe delii(n)testini
elo fluxo de le mestrue beudo co(n) vino, e cura la morfea ofete com
aqua, e la alopecia ofeto co(m)pesa liquida, e la radice beuda co(n) vino
cura lo fluxo antique, e le piage delii(n)testini, e cura lo apostema della
milza efato e(n)plathra de essa, cura lo eldore delstomato, e de la vesicha:-

The above image is to be compared with VM f.2v

On the stem of the VM plant on f.4r is the word ‘rot’ (German for ‘red’) yet it is not coloured in.

On f.72r1 there is a lady with an elongated arm holding a star – the reason for the elongated arm is that it
reaches round a hole in the vellum – this hole must have been there when it was drawn (the ladies on the
reverse of this page (f.72v1) are also positioned to avoid this hole.

I think the above is very strong evidence for the VM being written by a child –
he did not recognise the shoal of fish as a shoal of fish and drew it as a root,
he did not know German & hence did not colour it in but just copied it down,
no scholar would have used a piece of vellum with a hole in it but a child would.

Is it possible that the reason we cannot read the VM is not because it’s not in cipher or a lost language but
simply because a precocious child copied in his own fashion text and drawings which he could not read let
alone comprehend!

I have looked at quite a few herbals from around 1500 and not only from the quality of the drawings but
also the writing some of them were obviously written & drawn by children – perhaps it was a common
training exercise ( something like an ‘alphabet embroidery sampler’ for girls)

If this is so is it possible to reconstruct what he copied from?


Edith Sherwood suggests the VM is the work of a young Leonardo Da Vinci –

http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_decoded/index.php

 So I had a look at some of Leonardo’s writing for a comparison and was intrigued by the following bit in
the ‘Vitruvian Man’ –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/scan0001.jpg)

The top line in the above is Leonardo Da Vinci’s backward writing from the ‘Vitruvian man’ (third line
below the drawing)
third line is the top reversed with what it actually says above it,
fourth is a bit of the VM (in  f.108r) just for comparison

If you’re wondering why he wrote backwards – its simply because being left handed it avoids smudging
the ink as the hand moves across the page – (unlike Elgar who only did it once for fun!!)

Whether the VM is by Leonardo or not there are some striking similarities here - & a very good explanation
for the ‘qokeedy qokedy qokeedy’ type sequences and why EVA ‘qo’ doesn’t appear amongst the ‘labels’!
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on April 14, 2010, 07:03:41 AM
Even more feasibly, it could have been a book of hastily scribbled school notes on various topics... since the Voynich doesn't seem to be exclusively about plants. I know my notes can be damn near cryptic at times, what with all the shorthand I make up on the fly and fragmented sentences.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 09, 2010, 02:08:41 PM
Getting absolutely nowhere with this VM – what it reminds me most of is this one:-

S lmpi F. npi npil pil pink C. klmh F. oimg ogq, khq lqkh ikpg ogql, lqoi qoin oing lqkh. hmig C, omgk
F, npi npil qmk. C hgo, F, ploi omnl. qoip C qkin. F oing ihlm, ik, lmhn, C nhgq F, iomn hkom C. okiq F,
mqho, olhi. C, iko. ...........

The above is based on “A code of Signals for the Merchant Service” (it is one of 50+ messages sent,
by his family, to a Captain Collinson searching for Franklin lost in the Northwest Passage via “the Times”)

The capital letters here stand for different sections of the sailors manual – the lowercase g,h,i,k,l,m,n,o,p,q
are substitutes for 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 respectively

So  the message begins - Part V 6528 Part VI 428 4286 286 2847 Part III 7659 etc

Looking these up in the manual this part of a message actually reads:-

 â€œAll are well at Hook and elsewhere – Margaret got another boy on the evening of Christmas day, going on
well – Emily at Hook again – Bernard down for Christmas – Charlotte going to add population – Harriet stay
with Fanny – letter from Benjamin ......

(note - some of the numbers correspond to short commonly used phrases, the majority to single words)

I imagine the capital letters here could be equivalent to the gallows symbols – the lowercase letters to the
Voynich letters/numbers (I still don’t know which?!) – there are vaguely similar patterns

This sort of system explains why every paragraph begins with a ‘gallows’ symbol and can also explain how
lots of “words” only differ by one “letter” etc. – I think it well worth considering

But if that doesn’t take your fancy maybe you can find the key in this compendium of different systems from
‘Trait de la Parole’ by the blind French Doctor of Theology Claude Comiers

(http://i262.photobucket.com/albums/ii112/tony59b/comiers.jpg)
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on June 15, 2010, 01:01:06 AM
It always amazes me to see what you unearth. :) That compendium looks pretty cool.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 15, 2010, 03:09:44 PM
Aye, it’s pretty neat – make a lovely poster – there’s a good article on Comiers in Vol 27 issue 4 of Cryptologia
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on June 23, 2010, 04:18:00 PM
Is this how the ‘gallows’ symbol came about?

(http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/8ca58a3dcf.jpg)


It used to be normal practise for the letters with ‘crossbars’ (1) for the ‘crossbar’ to
be connected to the following letter as in (2) or to both the following and preceding
letter as in (3)
(4) two of the most common ways of writing the letter E which ends up looking like a
modern C when written as small as in the Voynich MS
(5) CT and ST used to be connected forming ligatures
(6) two common ways of writing the combination ESTE
(7) I have not seen an example of the ‘crossbar’ going through the preceding letter to
the one before it but think some idiosynchratic individual may well have done so
(8) the same sequence only written backwards

Now the question is, would it rankle in the mindset of a medieval writer
that this just doesn’t look right, that the S and T must form a ligature
 
(9) if so, what more aesthetically pleasing way of joining them up

(10) !otserp yeH
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on June 23, 2010, 05:36:15 PM
Nice theory! It brings to mind the old habit of making a stylish s look like an f.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on August 03, 2010, 04:32:54 PM
It’s a topsy-turvey world
getting somewhere now –
below is the middle portion of f.116r – notice how where the gallows coincidentally line up vertically (circled) the upper 3 lines drift upwards – (other examples can be found on other pages)
(http://a.imageshack.us/img217/6886/linesup.th.jpg) (http://img217.imageshack.us/i/linesup.jpg/)
[img=http://a.imageshack.us/img217/6886/linesup.th.jpg]http:// (http://img217.imageshack.us/i/linesup.jpg/)
Below is an example from f.49v showing  how the tails of the ‘9’ EVA(y) are longer when above a gap between ‘words’ in the line below (examples of this and the EVA(q) tail doing the same can be found on many pages)
(http://a.imageshack.us/img440/5009/enlarge49v0001.th.jpg) (http://img440.imageshack.us/i/enlarge49v0001.jpg/)
[img=http://a.imageshack.us/img440/5009/enlarge49v0001.th.jpg]http:// (http://img440.imageshack.us/i/enlarge49v0001.jpg/)
What causes these anomalies – clearly they indicate that the line underneath must have been written before the one above it –
The obvious thing to do is turn the page upside down – now the aligned margin is on the right and the ragged one on the left indicating it was written from right to left – I thought at first that this must mean it was written backwards – not necessarily so -
(http://a.imageshack.us/img294/2161/herbacapillusmaior0001.th.jpg) (http://img294.imageshack.us/i/herbacapillusmaior0001.jpg/)
[img=http://a.imageshack.us/img294/2161/herbacapillusmaior0001.th.jpg]http:// (http://img294.imageshack.us/i/herbacapillusmaior0001.jpg/)
In the above image I first drew the ‘plant’ in my own fashion, then simply turned the page upside down – writing normally it is simple to leave a ragged margin on the left – to line up the right hand margin is done by simply adjusting the spaces between words or stretching or compressing as necessary – when this doesn’t quite work as in line 4 simply put in a null – I suggest the VM author did this to look like a rubrication mark – it also explains its predominate line position.
Note how the ‘header’ (Edgar Allan Poe), when the page is plant orientated appears in the bottom right as is usual in the VM. (It’s herba Capillus maiore)
Yes, it’s a self portrait – I was a hippie in the 60’s, now I’m a hippie in his 60’s – even painted my old Ford Popular psychedelic – the multi coloured spiral hubcaps used to make the pedestrians dizzy, but worst of all drivers behind kept running in the back of me whilst trying to figure out what the images on the boot were – I’m sure some of them looked exactly like the ‘chinese’ glyphs on f.1r
I digress
I think the above clearly shows the layout, direction of writing and construction of the page -
Now the only question is what does it say – what is his cipher?
I’ve always believed, because of the sheer volume of it & it’s age, that this would be a very simple cipher.
I think all he has done is re-orientate some of the letters (just as he did the page) – some letters he left untouched (there’s no way to change the letter ‘o’ – upside down, reversed, - it’s all the same to me) – some he simply distorted –
I suggest the following key:-
(http://a.imageshack.us/img80/3392/voykey0003.th.jpg) (http://img80.imageshack.us/i/voykey0003.jpg/)
[img=http://a.imageshack.us/img80/3392/voykey0003.th.jpg] (http://img80.imageshack.us/i/voykey0003.jpg/)
There are at least 3 different kinds of ‘6’ EVA(y) ‘9’ – those with a curved tail – those with a straight tail – those with the loop connected and those without – each may be a different letter – but all have been lumped together by those who transcribed it – the differences may help decide what represents what. Same applies to EVA(d) ‘8’.
Of course it may not say anything sensible – just as the plants are copies of plants from other herbals that have been distorted, recombined etc. the text, if copied may also have been distorted, recombined etc.???
With several (accidentally) lookalike symbols substituting for the same letter it reminds me a little of the of the following cipher where this was done deliberately  â€“
1821 82374 29 30 84541. 185270 924 184 182 82460. 84314 8842 31 8599420 31 8355 7239241 8218. 726 85400 021 - from ‘The Times’ Sep. 1853
Charles Babbage waged a war against street musicians who disturbed his peace, sending his man after them, taking out prosecutions etc.  â€“ I find it amusing to think that ‘Thou voice of my heart’ (it comes from a popular song of the time) could be being sung beneath his window whilst he was coming up with ‘Thou image of my heart...’ in the above cipher!
I digress again
Back to the Voynich –
EVA(f) & (p) are probably nulls/rubrication
Now as everything is reversed and upside down EVA(iin) is M and is not in cipher (this is the way it was written as the first letter of a word (see previous post on positons of letters from a French Herbal) – as this appears to be in Italian it will hardly ever appear as a final letter – in the middle of a word it must have been abbreviated here. (Incidentally the marginalia read as ‘michiton oladabas...’ beginning with four strokes this has been assumed to begin ‘mi...’ - the first stoke being curved is nothing more than a flourish and I think should be read as ‘ni...’ probably says ‘ni chiton’ (no clothes)? But if the palaeographers can’t even read what a bit of plaintext says, what chance have they got with a cipher – my God it’s just as well I’m here to help!?
EVA(o) upside down, reversed, it’s all the same to me – is now a prominent final just as in Italian
EVA(k & t) think these are both the same and represent L or LL (see similarity with Da Vinci’s L’s in a previous post) though why it is always double L when one would do is a bit of a mystery to me.
EVA(q) I believe this is probably equivalent to the ‘tyronian’ 7 and is just another old way of writing ‘et’ I think it was once written looking like a plus sign or a number 4, I’m sure I’ve seen plaintext examples where it is tacked on to the following word – though here it has ended up on the end of the word.
Those with a mathematical approach may like to recalculate the entropy or word distribution in view of the above 2  
i.e.   qokaiin okaiin otaiin qotaiin are all the same it’s just that 2 of them have ‘et’ tacked on the front – it doesn’t matter whether its reversed for this calculation.
EVA(y) this is the 9 which upside down becomes a 6 – the 6th letter of the alphabet is F (I’ve stated before I think the VM is the work of a child – just someone who thought he’d make his own ‘book’ - of course those who’ve spent years working on this will not take kindly to that suggestion – but this is what I see) – those familiar with old writing will appreciate the difficulty of distinguishing an F from an S written in the old style – the VM author either didn’t or couldn’t  - to complicate matters further, but not deliberately, the old style of writing an ‘I’ at the start of a word can look similar to a 9 so it also appears as a 6 etc.
EVA(d) ‘8’ again this has several varieties – presumably with the flat top it will be the substitute for ‘g’ – otherwise for ‘y’ and middle position’i’ as ‘i’ & ‘y’ used to be equivalent (I think) – I’m a bit confused with this as the ‘i’ was also written like a ‘j’ in first & final positions – not being a palaeographer I’m probably mixing styles from different centuries or countries!! – press on Tony
EVA(l) this stands for D it is either an upside down 4(old style) 4th letter of alphabet is D or it is simply a D that is written in reverse
EVA(e) this is E and is simply written in reverse
 EVA(h) is R written in the old style that looks like a modern number 2 (it will not appear at the start of a word in this fashion as it was written differently in that case - and EVA(ch) is RE another common Italian ending
EVA(Sh) I take in most cases to be RE with the little arc representing an abbreviation for a missing letter - probably M or N
EVA(s) must be ‘e’ with some abbreviation ascender making it ‘er’ ‘em’ ‘en’ ‘et’ – not sure
EVA(a) this is a ‘u’ unaltered or an inverted’a’ – think EVA(o) must also stand for ‘a’ in some cases
Applying the key to f.1v - I very tentatively came up with (line for line):-
tagore do fiore ? fiore dai ferelore too
fiorme tui orelo tori dorme tui il doi dore dallo torne
mai dore fiore dorle dore il dore ifreel dol dorme dollo
fiore d oi doli odoi doi doli serle doi doere ? ??ore do o et
irle ire dod ogore feredoi dallo dorme d orle dore illore
irneorme muolo fiol bere tui duor?e t?ui dorme solo
 fioll ore bereo ? ?ai oellore doi
dui fiorelol irlle s??rnelli imre irleorle irlle oi
fiore tagollo fiolld orei freo to tare seeli
tu turle tare bereldo do magore fenrel

the above does contain some Italian words (some common ones at that) – unfortunately the only language I know is English, so every word I have to look up in a modern dictionary – 500 odd years ago there were no dictionaries, no standardised spellings (In an English MS of that age I’ve noticed the writer spell the same word 3 different ways on the same page!!) – also it’s possibly gobbledygook like the plant drawings - so I turned to have a look at some of the labels to see if I could see a connection twix them and the accompanying image – didn’t have too much success there either which I put down to my lack of language skills, the fact that some cipher characters have multiple alternatives etc. etc. – still I think the system and key are basically sound – perhaps some palaeographer of medieval Italian can make something of it looking at it this way.

Incidentally the very first word (header) on the first page can be read as ‘Marci’ (now that name sets a few bells ringing)

For anyone looking for a precise set of steps to follow to decipher this – please consult the rule book for the game of ‘Mornington Crescent’
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on August 03, 2010, 05:21:50 PM
Haha, I like your self portrait! And I know I did that kind of check with the Dorabella cipher when I was playing around with it... it was tricky to figure out which direction it was written in.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 12, 2010, 02:37:16 PM
It's about time I made another post - looking back I ain't half written some rubbish on this 'cipher'-
anyways it's not upside down - I hope to show the basics of his method soon -
I couldn't see the wood for the trees as the saying goes.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 16, 2010, 03:40:06 AM
Not being happy with my last attempt I decided to go back to basics – looking at EVA k,t,sh,ch,c being roman numerals again & thinking the preceding Eva o & qo could possibly mean a zero & two zeros were added to the number before it was converted to roman numerals thus explaining the absence of X,V & I– or possibly  column markers - i.e. In Trithemius’s book found here –
http://diglib.hab.de/drucke/fb-128/start.htm?image=00378
on  images 00378 to 00421 the numbers on the right run from 1 to 1,056 and the column markers  1, 2 & 3 could be replaced with blank, o & qo – thinking vaguely along these lines and trying to find some pattern in all this madness ended with me looking at a hand written sheet replicated below - (in which I had listed EVA n, r & m as a single stroke, it not being clear to me whether they are different or not)  –
EVA y / o, qo / (k,t,p,f) sh, ch, c / o d s a ii (n,r,m) l y - which I’d marked down  basically thus – (as best I can display on the keyboard here - the ? is for EVA cKh, cTh, cPh & cFh)

Multiplier?                               prefix/suffix?
Column?   roman numerals     characters   separator ?
       1000 500 200 100 ?
9| O 40 | M C^C C-C C  ? | o 8 s a \\ o \ l | 9
9|      |                |   8   a \\   \   |        daiin  863
9|      |                | o              l |        ol     543
9|      |      C-C C     |    8             | 9      chedy  501
9|      |                |       a \\   \   |        aiin   466
9|      |  C^C     C     |   8              | 9      shedy  426
9|      |      C-C       | o              l |        chol   396
9|      |                | o            \   |        or     370
9|      |                |       a      \   |        ar     351
9|      |      C-C C     |                  | 9      chey   344
9|      |                |   8   a      \   |        dar    317   
9|   40 | M        CC    |                  | 9      qokeey 308
etc. etc.

 Now this is very regular and the 100 most frequent VM groups will fit in here with only a few exceptions, beyond that you have to start splitting some of them (this is reasonable if you assume the space was omitted to conceal some of the 1 & 2 letter groups etc.), but unreasonable if the roman numeral are connected with the letters in some codebook way ......
Anyways having typed the first 1,000 highest frequency groups into a spreadsheet – I sat back to take a break .....


Have you spotted it yet?


To be continued.......
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on October 16, 2010, 04:40:39 PM
I'm not quite seeing it yet but I'm glad you're trying a different tactic. :) Looking forward to the continuation.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 17, 2010, 03:55:01 AM
AAron - this bit -

o 8 s a \\ o \ l


to be contd...
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 18, 2010, 04:18:40 AM
The string of characters 
o 8 s a \\ o \ l
reversed
l \ o \\ a s 8 o
l i o n a r d o
& it’s the correct spelling (Da Vinci wrote his first name with an i not an e) – is he using his own name as a keyword?
he’s been proposed as a possible author of the VM, but then so have Dee, Bacon, Shakespeare et al.
I was going to post this and say the solution must come from this table somehow but got to thinking I was falling in to the same trap as everyone else who’s tried to solve this cipher – I’ve said all along this is going to be the simplest of ciphers because of the sheer volume of it – the utter impracticality of using tables like those in Trithemiu’s polygraphia in an MS of this length is ridiculous, absurd, I’m just not having it.
So is it just chance it says Lionardo – of course it may not, there are just a few other possible arrangements i.e. the o8sa\\ol\ - or -  soda\\ol  but not many – but I thought there must be a reason for this striking coincidence ....

just need to make/copy/scan /upload a few images now and all will be revealed ..........


Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 18, 2010, 04:01:32 PM
The part sentence in the following diag. is from MS270 an early 16thc. Italian herbal – I copied a couple of pages
from it about a year ago simply because the ‘4o’ looked exactly like EVA ‘qo’ – this is a bit from a paragraph that
accompanies the herb Illotris (my dictionary and I think it says it’s a prophylactic for Christians against bonfires!)
I use the word CREPATO from it now just as an example to show what I believe the VM is and why nobody has
been able to read it.

A/1. Is how Leonardo Da Vinci would write it & A/2. His mirror writing of it – note how every letter of it is reversed,
even the connected CR and TO
In B/2 the word is not mirrored but written backwards with the connected CR & TO remaining unaltered
C/ & D/ shows it in a more readable manner

(http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/8052/crepato0001.jpg)

What I am proposing is that D/ is the precursor to C/

And in the VM groups like EVA ‘qokedy’ it should be read as ‘oqkedy’ which read backwards is ‘ydekqo’ which says
something like ‘idellto’ (note - this is a very young child spelling a word as it sounds in a Tuscany dialect so this will
be something for the Professors to work out)
The second most common group in the VM is ‘ol’ reversed ‘lo’ – my dictionary says ‘the’ – well knock me over with
a feather!!
I’m saving ‘daiin’ till my next post – it’s a killer
Third most common ‘chedy’ – the ‘ch’ is connected so reversed it should be ‘ydech’ this will be a word sounding
like ‘idere’ probably modern spelling ‘ideare’?
At number 46 we have ‘lchedy’  - almost the same as the previous group – this must surely be (l’idere) two words
combined (l+idere) so he writes the words in order, the first not being reversible then the second which is.
The same applies to any other VM word beginning with the letter L
Not being able to read, speak or even know the Italian pronunciation of letters let alone words it’s time to hand over
to the experts – but in the top 50 most common VM words obviously reversing EVA ‘al’ = la / EVA ‘s’ = e(essere) /
EVA ‘dy’ = id / EVA ‘y’ = i / ; all common Italian words as one would expect
EVA ‘or’ & ‘ar’ I don’t understand – think the character transcribed as EVA ‘r’ is an initial way of writing T so they
become ‘to’ & ‘ta’ – possibly an old form of ‘tu’??
EVA ‘dal’ I think is ‘da+l’ but it doesn’t quite fit the method proposed, (d+la) would but d’la is French isn’t? (brain cells
are dying at an alarming rate) 

Before I forget, Da Vinci’s notebooks have a right aligned margin, yet the VM is left aligned – the reason must be that at
this early stage he was writing across the page left to right but reverse writing the individual words

To be continued ........
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on October 18, 2010, 04:06:42 PM
Ah, so it *is* backwards... in a way. :) I like the young Leonardo da Vinci theory.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 19, 2010, 04:59:08 AM
Some time ago after looking at other 16th c. herbals I came to the conclusion the VM was by a child (a few reasons are given in a much earlier post)
In the recent grid shown where I was erroneously thinking about Roman numerals and letters and seeing something like Lionardo pop up as a possible keyword –
if it isn’t a keyword how does it get in there? – the order of those letters only comes about because the preponderance of ‘daiin’, ‘aiin’ and ‘ol’ in the text –
but I got to thinking what ‘daiin’ could possibly be -

what is the most important thing to a child – what does he know better than anything else?

That night I dreamt I was in a foreign land a long time ago and overheard the following bits of conversation –

  â€œLinad get dressed” . . . . . “clear those vellums off the table Linady” . . . . . “Linady are you dressed yet” . . . .  â€œnow I said” . . . . “and put those paints away” . . . .
“and those old books back on the shelf” . . . .  â€œwhere have you gone now? . . .  Linardy . . . Lionady . . . .Lionardy... Lionardo. . . . ”
“here I am nanny – how do you spell cow?”

Below is a piece of Da Vinci’s notebooks – it says reading right to left –

sicome delli 8 cubi a checo*pogano ilchilindro a b
io ne foilcubo di c d ancora desso cubo c d
io ne faro il chilindro a b Add*uque  

(http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/1984/danil0001.jpg)

Whats the most important word to perhaps a 9 year old? - My guess is his name – it’s going to appear loads

Now what I need is someone who knows the pronunciation of the Tuscany dialect around 1460!!

 (i.e. my first name is Anthony but I was called Tone or Tony and if I could remember far enough back my first spellings of it may have been Toni)

So is linad a shortened version of Lionardo  - the ‘a’ can have the same sound as ‘ar’ the ‘d’ can be pronounced different ways

To be contd.....
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 19, 2010, 10:03:25 AM
I'm a silly old fool - I really believed that last post about EVA 'daiin' being his nickname when posting -

but it kept nagging me that EVA 'n' & EVA 'l' where both going to have to be L - so I looked again -

EVA 'n' is actually U and 'daiin' really stands for (di+anu) which reverses as before mentioned

and is simply (di una)

the older Leonardo in his notebooks writes the word 'di' as one single special character!!!!!!!

so EVA 'aiin' is simply 'una'

I'll put that in the actual writing to make it clearer later

bloody fool


Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 25, 2010, 09:05:00 AM

Believing sinistrality and atypical brain organisation to be the cause of the VM’s script and thus being the
precursor to Leonardo Da Vinci’s mirror writing –

The following shows an attempt at deciphering a few VM words –

(http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/1690/shedy0001.jpg)

i.e.SEDERE – beneath this word I have written it as it would have been written at the time – (note the vowel
that follows the ‘s’ is directly under it & the ‘re’ are connected) – under that is its ‘reversal’ and below that
how it might look if written hastily and carelessly.

In the lower half next to the word CHE - 1. Shows an old way of abbreviating it; 2. Is EVA ‘g’ and 3. EVA ‘sh’;
2. looks very similar to 1. But EVA ‘g’ does not occur that often – whereas EVA ‘sh’ has a very high frequency
and also a slight resemblance to the way ‘che’ was written
Beneath that I give a few examples of showing it to be common words run together.
Whether ‘che e di si’ makes any sense I have no idea?! So may have that one wrong.

All we need do now is to bang the heads of a palaeographer, a Da Vinci scholar & an Italian primary school
teacher together and see what comes out.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on October 25, 2010, 01:16:40 PM
Well, at least one of those is easy to find... somehow I think Italian schoolteachers are different in today's world compared to Da Vinci's time, though.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on October 25, 2010, 01:44:20 PM
Ah - but the children are the same & the schoolteacher knows what is likely to be the first things a
child writes about and what kind of grammar they use.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on October 25, 2010, 01:45:36 PM
Very true.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on January 22, 2011, 04:46:27 PM
YABADABADOO....

Just thought I’d break the silence - (he he.. I’ve often felt like shouting that out in the B.L.’s manuscript room)
The Yaba.. is also for the VM cipher – I think I’ve had a breakthrough – should have something worth posting soon  -

so stay tuned for the next exciting episode....
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on January 25, 2011, 09:23:08 AM
As they used to say on Blue Peter ‘Here’s one I made earlier’ -

(http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/252/challenge0001.jpg)

The above could almost be a missing page from the VM – if anyone cares to have a go at deciphering it –
it is the start of a very well known Italian story – the plaintext is Italian and it reads left to right and
top to bottom in the normal fashion.

What kind of cipher is it?
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on January 26, 2011, 10:44:46 AM
Forgot to say I'll give the solution next week -
if anyone does manage to solve it - just post the 2 words I accidentaly
omitted from the end of the second paragraph! 
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on February 03, 2011, 11:06:17 AM
What kind of cipher is it? – basically ‘simple substitution’ – the 2 missing words ‘fermo mai’

(http://img825.imageshack.us/img825/9607/pinocchiokey0001.jpg)
It is the opening lines of the Pinocchio fairy tale & should say  -

*Naso di legno, cuore di stagno, burattino quando diventerai un bimbo come noi?
*Pan di mollica, scansafatica, dove vai? Sono un burattino e non mi (fermo mai).
*Con le mie scarpe di zuppa e pan bagnato il vestitino di carta colorato
*faro i dispetti a chi sara cattivo e saro buono con chi mi dice: *Bravo!

Why would anyone make a cipher like that?

There are usually 3 sorts of ‘simple substitution’- i.e.
 1 substitute letters for letters (eqalgtbqkudb)–
2 numbers for letters (2 18 5 1 11 20 8 18 15 21 7 8 )
3 fancy symbols for letters (+^~%!£$^#?{$) –
any of which can have a few frills added i.e. writing backwards, writing in ‘backslang’, including
nulls, misleading spaces, etc. etc.

What I think makes the VM cipher different is it’s a number cipher that has the numbers written
instead of just writing the actual numerals (they are also written backwards)

i.e. as in no. 2 above (owt neetthgie evif eno nevele ytnewt thgie neetthgie neetfif enoytnewt neves thgie)
or in Italian (eud ottoicid euqnic anu icidnu itnev otto ottoicid icidniuq anuitnev ettes otto)

note the oft recurring ‘icid’ – this I think is EVA ‘chedy’ where the y is some kind of separator & EVA ‘
cheedy’ is ‘iceid’
Is this what gives the VM its repetitive nature & rigid structure order?
Throw in a few frills & abbreviations, etc., write it so small that some of the letters look the same, give
it to someone 500 years later and we’re all stumped.

The following chart shows better what I’m getting at –

(http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/9527/numeralswritten.jpg)

The above chart is by no means definitive (half of it is probably wrong and I still have gaps in it) –
consider it a work in progress.......
He probably used a keyword as well – try one in the Pinocchio key & you get a totally different output.
The Pinocchio example was ‘simple substitution’ (a basic trial run for the idea of written numbers) –
I could have made it much more like the VM if I had used alternative substitutes for some of the letters
(consider  una,due, otto, in the above chart) – which would make it a homophonic cipher – I think the
VM author did this but unintentionally!
Before you say what about the ‘labels’, they’re probably just made up words.
You’ve probably spotted the absence of EVA ‘al’ ‘ar’ ‘ol’ ‘or’ ‘dal’  etc. – they may belong in the chart
above somewhere (possible) – they may be nulls (unlikely) – or they may just be simple words not
enciphered ‘la’ ‘lo’ ‘d-la’ (possible)

The Florio dictionary (which is probably about 140 years post the VM) can be found here –

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/florio1598/

Anyways – just thought it worth posting.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on February 20, 2011, 09:45:34 AM
Wow! Some of those items in that table are pretty dang close! It's a good thing you found that Florio dictionary.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on March 14, 2011, 04:18:35 PM
Those who've had the stamina and patience to stay with us for the last couple of years will have noticed
I've been going round in circles trying to solve the Voynich MS - the only thing I was certain of was that
it wouldn't be anywhere near as complicated as thought to be -

"the
penny
has
finally
.
.
.
.
dropped" -

next time I'll show how it was done
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on March 14, 2011, 06:17:25 PM
Something clicked?? I can't wait. :D
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on March 17, 2011, 07:50:51 AM
More of a thunderclap than a click!

Whilst waiting you might like to amuse yourself with this video by Prof. Gordon Rugg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpzLhmH0UYs
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on March 17, 2011, 10:12:42 AM
Ah, he has the pessimistic approach I see. I'm sure yours is much better. ;) Are you getting your hands on the full manuscript?
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: tonybaloney on April 07, 2011, 07:37:18 AM
The ‘Voychinese writing’ is actually an artist’s impression of writing –
Just as the VM  artist builds up some of his images from a series of pen strokes one after another, Voychinese
was created in a similar manner –
Perhaps it needs renaming -

(http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/5388/questo0001.jpg)

 All the letters above are self explanatory – two common abbreviations – some hands looped the top of the X
so it’s only missing it’s shorter right hand leg.
The first dotted arrow shows where all the EVA cho, cheo, chedy etc. combinations come from, the second
where EVA daiin, oin, ar etc
The star is just me filling up a blank area!
Below is the first layer of his drawing of writing – a randomly drawn background to build upon –

(http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/7606/background0001.jpg)


What follows is a rough guide only to how he did it (that’s code for ‘my brains to addled to work out the finer details’)

(http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/5699/questosys1.jpg)


 1 - Draw random groups of EVA’e’ across the page

before proceeding lets have an explanation of the so called “Neal keys” these are the EVA ‘p’ & ‘f’ characters
which appear predominately on the top line of pages and paragraphs where the preceding line teriminates
early - these were called ‘keys’ as it was thought they may have some special function in a code or cipher
system – the simple explanation is there is more space above the top line of a paragraph and more space above
the right half of a line where the preceding line terminates early – there just isn’t enough space between the
lines to use this variation (especially in quire 20 pages)but it sometimes appears in the middle of paragraphs
on the herbal pages where the line spacing is greater.
EVA p,f,t & k are all the same and represent a capital L

2 – Draw in the capital L (EVA k) to the left of any island of c’s (EVA e)

3 – Connect the first 2 c’s of all islands with crossbar & over about half of the EVA ch combinations thus formed,
 put a little arc

4 – at random change some of the final c’s to an ‘o’ – note this is the ‘o’ from codex and not the ‘o’ that appears
before lots of the k’s

5 – at random change some of the final c’s to a d – (codex d)

6 – at random change some of the final c’s to an x EVA y or add an x at the final position

7 – (Eva l) is actually an old abbreviation for ‘per’ – not belonging to either of the 2 main words (codex/Lionardo)
it is a floater and can be placed anywhere, but he seems to have a preference for attaching it after an ‘o’ or an ‘a’
which clearly shows I have got the order of insertion wrong already - 

Consider the above as a demonstration of the method – not the exact way/order of insertion – it’s probable that
after the initial background of c’s the first thing he adds are the iiiin types linking most of them to the c’s to form
the aiiin sets – it is also possible that with q being the last letter added to the left of a set and x (EVA y) being the
last added to the right, that he used some alphabetical order for insertion
 
I find it to much of a minefield with some of the same letters being changed from a c and some added & I may not
even have the title exactly right (for a while I considered it to say ‘codice’ not codex, still not 100% certain)

Is it DaVinci? Of course it is - Regarding the carbon dating – this fits rather well when you consider a young Lionardo
would have been given unused quires from an old ledger for his doodlings – this was probably 4 times the size of the
VM and he cut it down to make lots more pages to make his very own first MS

Conclusion – it is neither cipher, code, lost language or hoax (that implies deception) – it is just a young Lionardo
fascinated by the books in his father’s library making an excellent attempt at emulating them.   
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on April 07, 2011, 09:19:23 AM
Makes sense to me! :) Not the most satisfying conclusion, of course, but when you consider that he was an artist first and foremost...

In a sense, all those sketches in the manuscript were his actual early artwork with the writing being there to "fill the blank space", much like you drew a star to fill the blank space in your example.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on February 10, 2012, 12:41:22 AM
I started having another look at this, but more in-depth.

Originally, I pretty much did a cursory glance at pages and noted down observations, but never got very in-depth. I also reviewed the Currier Papers and whatever I could find online. I am currently working towards a solid transcription of the 1st part, the Botanical section. As Currier indicates, some of the rules change between sections and between handwriting styles, so I figured it would be best to start with only a specific section with one style, in one hand.

I am working with materials available at:
http://www.voynich.nu

As well as the PDF book from Yale.

My basic method so far has been to review the available transcriptions, make a list of "words" in Voynich EVA, and use this list of "known" words to revise any words where there is cause for dispute. First part completed, I am now revising the transcription.

I don't think this is Western. The words available (from a list of 2878 "known" words) seem to follow a very specific phoneme-specific rules. As if, the words are made up of very specific parts, and while the parts may change, the blocks which form them are very rigid.

Currently, it feels to me like it may be some sort of localized non-Semetic Afroasiatic language which exhibits some Semetic tendencies. This could explain some of Currier's findings of the beginning and ends being unique and the repetition of words (which would necessarily indicate such words as nouns, which may help some when it comes time).

I might imagine a story of the work being produced out of Mali, and working its way north on the trade route and not finding the destination and so being sold at market. It would be at least as plausible, I think, as it being the scribbling of a young DaVinci. That said, even if a translation is someday worked out, I would hazard to say there is nothing of interest here for William Shatner that he couldn't find in any other manuscripts of the period.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on April 30, 2013, 12:21:11 PM
There's a constant issue with whether we're looking at an original form, or a copy of some earlier text.

Baresch did send a copy of pages to Kircher. In the relatively unlikely, but not impossible, event that he used
scrap parchment to save money on the effort - he hired at least two copyists - so we might be looking at a true copy,
but one made by people 'drawing the writing'.

That wouldn't provide much a clue to the nature of the written text as orignally formulated. If we could see that it might not
look at all like a drawing of writing, need it?

Sorry, this is probably such a basic observation that it has been made, and dealt with long ago.

D.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on April 30, 2013, 12:28:14 PM
Good point,  if these are hand-made copies we're looking at then there might be a lot of variations on the originals.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 02, 2013, 07:36:43 PM
Currently working through the lexicon.

"daiin" is by far the most common word, and, I'm guessing it is analogous to "is" or "to be". If so, "aiiin" and "ain" suffixes may represent tense (was, will be, or vise versa). It appears 194 times in the text and has a fairly even distribution. That's around 7.79% of words, or 9.24% of words if you include what appear to be variants, "daiiin" and "dain".

The suffixes "ol" and "or" have a strong correlation. Perhaps a gender or sum?

The character "y" is weird. It's extremely common as an ending, and occasionally used as a beginning. But as a character in the middle of a word, is extremely infrequent, happening just 6 times out of 2489 words (0.24% of words). By comparison, it starts 10.48% of words and is at the end of a staggering 46.48% of words! It may represent some sort of stop, where starting a word with it may represent the start of a new thought or "paragraph". As a check, "y" never starts a page or is the first letter after a visible break, though it occasionally precedes a footnote. You'll also notice that the "y" character has a very strong resemblance to an enclosing mark. If you follow the inkflow of the y, you would write it by making a circle motion and then moving it aside.

The thing that especially stopped me about the "y" was the appearance of the words "daiiny" and "kydainy" where I'd assume the suffixes (based on frequency) would be "aiin" and "ain", respectively, added on to "d" to make "daiin" and "kyd" to make "kydainy". Again, "daiin" is the most common word and "daiiny" happens just once, which seems to suggest a grammatical modification of the word "daiin" rather than a new word.

Just some cursory thoughts as I work on this.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 02, 2013, 11:34:25 PM
In regards to copy versus original work, I have a few thoughts:

(a) if such works were copied directly by scribes, one would expect that this item would not be isolated; that there would be more books with a similar character set existing somewhere. None have been found, but, obviously not all are necessarily available. This is probably of some interest (I didn't pick Mali out of a vacuum):
http://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org/
(b) One would expect, as a type of hand-wrought work, that the drawings would be made first, and the words made to fit around them. We have multiple instances of which the phrasing of the text seems exacting, while keeping alignment and general size. For example, Q1-F2R (p5) or Q2-F9V (p20). I believe this consistency would be difficult with a transcription.
(c) The main argument for copying is there seems to be no known evidence of the writer trying to correct errors. Following through the 3 transcriptions from http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html and finding the disputed words and comparing them against the manuscript reveals that there seems to be some hesitation, and possible errors within the text, but that these were left as-is. That is, the author left any errors alone.

I think those points would suggest original work.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 03, 2013, 02:55:03 PM
Just plugging it in, I like the daiin as "IS", but not the "y" as a break.

Consider:
chol chol dar
qokchol dar
tchol dar
ykchol dar
chol daiin dar

Also consider the former problematic line:
chol chol chol cthaiin dain

If dain is "will be", we might equivalate the sentence to:
chol chol WILL BE chol cthaiin
thus neutralizing the triple word problem.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on May 06, 2013, 04:08:30 AM
I've no idea how the message about the Dead Sea scrolls attached itself to my name - a joke by the great attractor, I expect.

One scenario which occurred to me and almost simultaneously to an Italian chap (whose name escapes me for the second) is that the manuscript represents the results of efforts which are recorded being made by Poggio Bracciolini to accumulate information about eastern plants. He interviewed various pilgrims but ran into problems. His translators could manage the grammar but had no equivalent in their own language or in Latin for the plant's names. Then, a bit later than the parchment's date (but not much) de' Conti arrived back from years working in the east and had certainly learned the names and virtues of eastern plants during his decades there - at least that was all he talked about according to to the Spaniard he met.

Many eastern languages are tonal or would seem so to a European - like the three positions for 'k' in Arabic.

So it is conceivable that an oral account might be taken down, with spaces left for inserting a sign indicating whether the sound was high, median, low etc.  And the informant would fill those out in the fair copy.

From experience, I can assure you that it is possible for someone with a good ear to simply learn an alphabet and then be able to transcribe information dictated to them. They may not end up with perfect orthography, writing n for the formal ng or (to use an example from Japanese), writing 'mas' for the formal 'masu'.

In the imaginary scenario with de' Conti (and any number of other candidates) the script might be a simplified version of an eastern script, affected by their own native habit.  A person used to writing Hebrew might square off letters; a person used to writing a European script would omit the line from which Indian scripts hang.

That would explain the interlocking 'hands', the general appearance of a writing not natural but 'drawn', and the fact that we have no other example of similar script extant (at present).

But this is just a scenario, as contra- to the current emphasis on Rugg's theory.

Diane

Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on May 06, 2013, 10:13:28 AM
Yeah, it's a joke from Neon Genesis Evangelion, heh. The default tag for all newbies.

Phonetic transcription sounds like a good theory too, partly since it's not exactly a prevalent written language or anything. The question is, which language does it most approach if you sound out the words?
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on May 07, 2013, 01:57:00 AM
Aaron,
Interesting you should say that. I've come directly from Julian Bunn's site and it struck me that in all the effort to break the cipher, people seem to be thinking of the written text as a kind of monolithic entity - like that sculpture outside one of the sneaky-centres, forget which.
I mean, they seem to forget that if the text is real, is must permit enunciation. And that means vowels.  It's perfectly possible that vowels might be omitted, and if a person were used to a contemporary language omitting vowels (rather than this being a transcription from a very much earlier original) then you really don't have to worry about doing full stats, do you? The first stage would be to see whether vowel-frequencies in any particular language-group (such as Czech or Polish vs Italian) give you a comparable frequency and relative distribution?

Tell me if I'm talking nonsense; I'm not an expert in languages, I'm conceptualising this more as music, imagining vowels as grace-notes of different lengths.

But wouldn't that help reduce the possible number of languages, and help isolate which glyphs represented vowels - if vowels were separately represented.

So then the next stage... and so on.

because labels so rarely use the '4' glyph, I'd tend to omit them from the sample; I'd also tend to omit the glyphs appearing between what Nick Pelling describes as the split gallows, because I suspect it is either an invocation, or a key to the cipher or some other anomalous element.

(this, by the way, because even in the Christian tradition, the customary association between plant-harvesting and star is preserved - balsam when Sirius rises sort of ting; which means that the split glyph might contain the name of plant, star, angel-of-the-month (as per the Cairo geniza and Jerusalem 'astrology').

Sorry - tmi - but yes,I'd omit those glyphs. Also, I think spaces can probably be omitted, and each paragraph treated as a 'line-length'.  For reasons that would again be tmi, I think that the end-of-line glyphs are token representation of an item not required in this version.

i feel a little like a tourist in a holy place here - I'll try not to make too much noise in future.

(I see there is no 'modest downcast eyes' emoticon. :)
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Aaron on May 07, 2013, 02:30:05 AM
I'm just glad people are still coming here; make all the noise you want. :)

Some languages, like Mandarin, are certainly musical...
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on May 07, 2013, 02:54:16 AM
so are some dialects of languages not recognised as musical - irish, welsh, australian english.  The last, heard from a distance, sounds very like Cantonese.  I've experimented, here in Australia, using a comparative monotone - invariably people simply don't recognise what you've said. They're not listening for the words, as such, at all. Compensation for flattened vowels perhaps.

All by the way.

I was going to wait a week before I said this but I simply can't.

Tony - if you see this, pleased be assured that like anyone else I am awe-struck by your unearthly ability with ciphers.

When it comes to art-analysis, though, there's no easy way to say it: you suck at it.  There is no way in Gd's green earth that those drawings were made by leonardo da Vinci or created by any Italian Christian. None.  No more chance than that the text was written by a person who'd never picked up a quill pen before. 

Leonardo  might have preferred men, but he could no more have drawn the split, two-toed feet and deformed faces on the female figures in the bathy-section than he could have instantly imagined and produced the art of aboriginal Australian tribes. 

Wrong mind-set, wrong culture, wrong approach to line.. you name it.  No way. None.

And that's without getting into the technical folios, which (as it happens) includes the bathy- section.

Would Leonardo really know the convention by which the central harbour in Alexandria and Sicily were denoted by a flat-topped 'stud' motif?  .... in the 3rdC BC?  Or in theTabula peutingeriana?

Nup.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 10, 2013, 09:34:12 PM
I guess you haven't gotten the memo, dodonovan, but there were actually only two people alive in the middle ages: DaVinci, and Bacon.

So, if the Voynich wasn't DaVinci, then, by order of elimination, we know who to look at.

Sadly, although that's a joke, Bacon was proposed as early as 1666. :/
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on May 12, 2013, 08:08:33 AM
Phil,
I trust you'll be sitting down when you see this ~ there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea that the manuscript came from England, or even that Bacon had owned  the copy [exemplar] from which ms Beinecke 408 was made in the early 15thC.

What made it seem impossible was a  mental glitch in Voynich researchers  - basically just a reflexive anachronism - which led to an automatic presumption that the parchment's date was the earliest possible date for composition of the content.

 Silly, really, the minute you formulate the idea, but most simply didn't.  As soon as you do, it's obvious how very few authorial manuscripts are found from that time, compared to copies of earlier works.. but there you go.
An 'author' had been assumed and a full virtual profile imagined for that hypothetical (probably imaginary) being and everyone began running around trying to find him in the medieval equivalent of Who's who.

For a precedent copy, though, there's nothing wrong with that 12thC date.  This was pretty clear to me some time ago, and I may have said so as much as four or even more years ago.  Basic content - going by the imagery - 3rdC BC-3rdC AD; revision during the twelfth century before the fifteenth century and the Vms itself.

More recently I've found a very close match -  in both  form and in style - for parts of the botanical section, in a manuscript of the same (12th-13th) century.

 Other details in the Vms accord with this work, and again with the circumstances for its composition. It happens to be a first-generation translation into Arabic from Syriac of Dioscorides, but I can only discuss styles in drawing and painting  ~ no presumptions about the Vms'  textual content or even whether the text was as it is now before 1438.

Details of the Vms script do, however, agree with that earlier manuscript's heritage, one which takes us back from upper Mesopotamia (where that Dioscorides translation was made) to the shores of the Indian Ocean and, equally, the eastern shores of the Black sea... where yet more motifs occur which are in the Vms.

So the filmy web of evidence about the Vms' antecedents may now bear somewhat greater weight and perhaps we can be rid of the fantasy 'auteur' ~ for the pictures at least. 

At the same time,  I'm not arguing that Bacon had the exemplar; as a wild guess I'd think.. maybe a Jewish traveller through, or resident in Sicily or England or something of that kind - from the east anyway. 

Bacon's ownership of an exemplar, though, still seems considerably better supported by tangible evidence than any about  Rudolf's supposed ownership. 

Sorry to run on, but it is less foggy now than five years ago.

Just wish I'd been in charge of McCrone's brief.  God - what I wouldn't give for pollen-samples, substitution of Indian or Chinese gums for mopa-mopa,  a few  slides of the parchment and a technical description of the gatherings, complete with distances between finished and uncompleted stations.  *sigh*
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 12, 2013, 01:40:44 PM
The silliness is the fact that if something isn't known, it is unkown because Bacon. It's like a snap reflex. Ya, could have been, but the odds are pretty stacked against it. There was like 400 million people on the earth at that time.  Besides which, ignoring the fact that it appears to bave four authors (who I bet are listed on page one), how much information is this who's who going to provide? Another manuscipt serving as a rosetta stone of sorts would onviously be immensely helpful, but the effort seems predominantly based on finding one, or poopooing the whole thing.

I think any real effort should probably be object based and categorizing/indexing just as Linear B was. The pictures here provide more context and so it doesn't seem insurmontable, just freakishly tedious.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on May 13, 2013, 01:15:20 AM
Phil
Freakishly tedious is a just description.

The research-road  feels like some sheep-track obliterated not only by time but the near-concrete accretions of speculations hardened into boundaries, defended by all means possible by those who respect and espouse venerable relics.

One find that even so simple a simple statement as that the manuscript may have no fifteenth-century 'author' or 'authors' at all is likely (as I was shocked to find) to result in personal offence being taken, and scarcely so much as a raised eyebrow as token of interest in what possibilities open up.

It is perfectly possible we do have comparative texts, but that at some stage they've all been bound into this one volume.

If  I were working on the written part of the text, which I'm not qualified to do, I think I'd suppose the 'B' hand served a purpose similar to  scholia, and that what is written in  hand/language 'A'  ~ especially in the botanical section ~ was largely thesauric. 

After working for some years on the  imagery (never thought I'd need more than six months), my view is that it shows the whole as we have it now a compilation which looks like an itinerant profession's bible. 

Really, I have often been reminded of the old   Pear's Cyclopedia - maps, description of routes, a handbook of plants which (from the selection I considered through last year) are ones that will both maintain and provision a ship and also provide medicines-and-dyes (presumably as trade items, or for the ship's doctor), and many also valued for perfumery in the broadest sense - i.e. including scented woods. 

The matter has been compiled of ancient works that - to judge from stylistic affects - had been maintained east of Europe.  These more superficial affects relate well to regional art along the maritime spice route, a parallel line being defined, in my opinion, by the range of plants in the botanical section. 

The 'bathy' section, though,  seems to me more concerned - pace Adam McLean - with higher levels of processing vegetable products, and I've recently revived the issue of pre-European alchemical processes.

This last item does seem to have created some enthusiasm;  having published my reasons and commentary on some of the relevant folios'  imagery,  I was treated just the other day to the sight of another person suddenly announcing the whole text alchemical.  I doubt it is.

However, everyone including Rene Z. seems busily revisiting the alchemical herbals, to which Neal first drew attention so many years ago, but about which after several years' investigation, Rene had not ago said that they were 'not very like' the Vms. 

But a rising tide lifts all ships, so I'm rather pleased by this latest sign of movement.

What this indicates for cryptographers, I can't say, but a polyglot dictionary of simpler alchemical processes and terms might be useful  - Hebrew, Arabic, Hindu, Persian, any regional Jewish dialects and possibly Arabic  included along with the usual European ones.

All a bit too early for the full-blown European style o falchemy, I think. McLean is perfectly right that the Vms imagery is not from that tradition or time.

But it may be helpful to have at hand technical terms from Mappae Clavicula and Theophilus (?Roger2). 

As I see it, this type of imagery begins only from about f.77 (imo),  associated both with semi-architectural features and 'nymphs'.  One folio seems to me to depict the chemistry of casting, very possibly glass-casting. If I happen to be correct, one might expect to see a term for natron there.

But this whole section may once have been a book entirely separate from the botanical and 'pharma' sections, and they separate again from the astronomical section.  When the anthology took its current form remains uncertain.

Cheers
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: AuroraBorealis on May 13, 2013, 05:41:14 AM
Hi,

Although I am really a newbie, I can't resist putting my spoon into this soup. But I also happen to think that the manuscript might actually need a fresh look, because, as dodovan pointed out, scientists from various fields seem to have become stuck with interpreting the text from certain points of view, like it being from the 16th century.

Now, to my observations. Please note that I only became aware of the subject of this particular manuscript yesterday, so kindly just push me gently towards the right direction, if you notice any faulty conclusions. As to my background (I believe it would be beneficial to know the viewpoints of the interpreter when they are looking at something as complex as this), I have studies in computer science, such as data mining, I am interested in the history of science in general, have also received some basic education in cognitive science, and I am an amateur painter.

To me it seems there are four possible main lines of inquiry:
1) It is an encoded manuscript
2) It is a manuscript written in natural language, such as a dialect of Chinese, but without using any phonetic alphabet used to write it in our time
3) It is a script written by a naive writer (child, glossolalia, or any other case where the writer does not know what they are writing)
4) It is a hoax

Then what are, to my eye, the weaknesses of each line of inquiry?

Encoded manuscript theory:

If the VM is indeed encoded, one of the points brought by the inquiries of tonybaloney previously on this forum (prior to Leonardo Theory), is that we do not know the number of marks the encoded piece actually covers: According to my knowledge, it was commonplace for monks copying text in the middle ages to start using shorthands. For example, the contemporary mark "@" presumably started as such a mark, used by monks to shorten scripts. Similar examples can be found in contemporary cyrillic alphabet, as the mark for latin 'l', 'm', and 'i' are all just a different number of "spikes", and if you write all these letters together, it easily seems like a mark resembling a continuous wave. Going in from this direction, I think it would be beneficial to try and analyze the whole volume again, bearing in mind, that the number of different marks highly depends upon whether there are actually "shorthand syllables" within or not. Remember, we may also have some markings for sounds that have since been forgotten entirely.

Also the repetition of certain words seems interesting. It is plausible that they are numbers, in written form. To me these repetitive words also seem in some way to increase the odds that this is indeed encrypted, as it would explain, why there aren't any numbers in the manuscript otherwise at all. (Of course it might just be that the book doesn't have any, as it is more descriptive in nature instead of precise with numbers.)

An other point is, what would have been important enough to be encoded? I think this is a key point, as it may guide the cryptologists towards the right vocabulary. Alchemy has been mentioned often - however would that really have been an issue around the 1300s where the carbon dating puts the book? According to general introductions to the history of science, alchemy was pretty much done by everyone, and being prosecuted over it might not have been as frequent as you would suppose in the middle ages. But in order to ponder the motivations, you should first know where it was written, or preferably by whom.  If the pictures are indeed related to the text, which I think we can not even say for sure, some of the astronomy section, with it's circles within circles, look like models of the solar system. And this is interesting: It turns out that the structure of the solar system was indeed a heated debate approximately at that time. It could for example be a way to protect some even older manuscript by some greek philosopher, whose view of the system was against the Church's teachings of the time (But this all starts to sound too much like Umberto Eco :D).

Obscure language theory

To me, this is a really interesting one. As dodonovan mentioned, I would really want a pollen sample of the book as well, to know whether to place it in Europe, Asia, or Africa. However, I think it is really important to remember, this might not be the only copy of the work. Indeed, this might be the only surviving copy, but not necessarily the only one. On the other hand, I also suspect that the different parts in the book may just have been bound together even later, as someone noticed these seem to be from the same hand.

If it's an obscure language, I'd like to mention a couple of things: First of all, the writer, who invented this way of writing down another language, might not have been a fluent speaker of the language. They also can have a much different mental image of what language is: For example, as it seems certain letters only turn out in the beginning or in the end of a word, it could be, that these are morpheme suffixes or prefixes of the language, but the writer has come from the Latin family of language and has marked these down with different letters, as they have thought it curious, because they are themselves used to prepositions. I think it would make a lot of sense for a person like that to try to force the foreign language into a format they have previously seen. Also they might not be able to hear tonalities, or certain sounds at all, if their ear is too accustomed to certain noises. This for example happens in young kids when they grow up: When they are little they can learn to speak any language without profound accent, but later that ability disappears. We have to remember that the way to represent language was not yet as sophisticated as what we have. But in this case, I believe, there should be (or has at some point been) a volume describing the way to transcript the other language in these marks, which may have been in Latin.

Also if the manuscript is an attempt to write a foreign language, I believe we should have some mentions of it in other books. Writing about what has already been written was a major tradition of scholars in that time. Scarcely any new science was produces at those times, but most of it was critique to what has already been previously said, by Aristotle, for example.

In this case we also have to wonder, whether the pictures are related to the work or not. I remember reading, that monks used to draw pictures in books, when they made copies, because they were simply bored by the work. This could explain, why we have a lot of naked women in the biology section: If you can't even read what the book says, maybe when you're assigned to copy it, you just doodle something into the pages every once in a while. But if the pictures are related to the text, I also think the women hold some key to the journey of the script: At least the biology section is not likely to be Arabic, as the depiction of humans was already banned in the Islamic tradition.

Why then are the plants clearly chimeric? If the book was written about a journey in china, could it be, that the pictures weren't drawn on location, but perhaps described to a scribe afterwards, and then the scholar copied his field notes under those pictures? There can be so many ways to interpret the pictures... To me the plants look like motives on Iberian buildings from the time of the Ottoman empire. On the other hand, the women then again seem to be all depicted in semi frontal position, and despite their nudity, the headdresses, which seem to be from Europe in the middle ages, might give point to what they are. However they are incredibly poorly painted to be taken as middle age art in the usual sense.

Naive Writer theory

This is in a way very compelling, as the book really seems like the work of a child. However, I think, this is incredibly hard to prove. Also, why would it have been written on vellum? Vellum was very expensive, and therefore the texts should hold some meaning, at least to their writer. In general kids or apprentices weren't let near such expensive materials before they were able to show their skills. They probably practiced by drawing on sand, or something similar. I also remember reading that in monasteries, the copying of books was often done in multiple steps: The harder parts done by someone very skilled, and easier parts, like coloring, by the apprentices. Also the theory that this was only written on older vellum seems implausible: Why is there no clear evidence of writing that does not belong to the book? (Or maybe the pictures were drawn on those parts to hide the inferior quality of re-used material?) To this end, more precise dating of individual pages should be done, and perhaps radiography, if it can be done on vellum, to ensure there are no pre-written texts under the pictures.

Hoax

For the VM to be a hoax is also hard to prove: We are missing a motive, and why would someone have destroyed other volumes, probably very expensive as well, to gain 13th century vellum? Also modern carbon dating was not around when the confirmed history of the manuscript begins, so why bother taking something as old as that, and not just something newer? Also same evidence, as in the previous section should be found in that case. Of course, if can be, that the book was already intended as a prank in the 13th century. There is no way to confirm that, and maybe that is why it seems so intriguing.

So hope some of these ramblings give you new ideas on how to approach the subject. Can't wait to see, what new people find about this!
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: dodonovan on May 13, 2013, 11:53:41 AM
Point taken.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 13, 2013, 02:52:34 PM
Was just glancing through the pictures in the rest of the book.  Glad I did, I've spent so much time on the front section that I forgot there was a possible lexicon of plant parts at the back.

But anyways, I just wanted to throw this in... this is pretty much exactly the scale of Libra that I see in the book. I was trying to figure out what the original artist was trying to represent with the circle on one side )p132 in the PDF), and went hunting.

(http://tarvos.imareal.oeaw.ac.at/server/images/7007603.JPG)

Personally, I think it's a dead language rather than a foreign language. Something Eastern European or Germanic is definitely possible, like Galindian, of which no known written samples exist (and died in the 1400s). Lots of dead languages and extinguished cultures. An object-based approach revolves around saying, "screw the language, what does it mean?".
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 14, 2013, 09:29:01 AM
Pretty sure there's none of that nonsense here; but, it's obviously a much quieter place. I respect your decision in either case, but if I can be so forward as to ask a little more about the scale?

I did a great deal of hunting yesterday evening and found that the best yields were produced by searching "medieval apothecary's scale", or "equal-arm balance scale apothecary", that type of thing. None of the roman era scales I looked at had that needle bit in the middle of the scale, where almost all of the period apothecary scales had it, starting from the mid 1400s.

Can you point me to the pre-roman scale you mention?
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 18, 2013, 12:50:22 PM
Thank you for the reply. :)

I think a complete dismissal of all preconceptions is probably the healthiest approach, but when obvious technology is present, then that may be a clue as to origin.

The question of whether this is part of a Zodiac is an interesting question also, but I think it is. The real question here that I would ask is why the year starts in Pisces.

I see the Julian Calendar started on March 1st between 988 and 1492. Engand had March 25th for a while.

Here are some other calendars that start in March:
Babylonian
Aztec
India
Sikh Nanakshahi
Iranian
Zoroastrian
Balinese
Telugu
Kashmiri
Gudi Padwa
Ugadi
Sindhi
Thelemic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year

Of course, some of those fall outside what is currently considered the days of Pisces.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 19, 2013, 02:22:30 PM
Now that I think on it, that's actually probably one of the strongest methods to attack the VM. If those are stars, then the labeling of them should be somewhat consistent throughout the Zodiac charts. If we can get some decent correlations happening in the nomenclature, we can start looking through historical star maps. Say, for example, "otchdal" was found in April, May, September and October, we would list include this as a piece of a puzzle. Given enough such pieces, you might be able to weed out a solve or two that would satisfy all the conditions (one of which being that a particular named star or constellation only occurs in those months).

There was an application that made historical star maps, I recall. But it was years ago when I looked at it and don't recall the name. Basically, you could plug in a date and a geographical area, and it would provide a star chart. If anyone remembers the name, or knows of a similar application, please reply!

Star charts vary both in time and by geography, so this could help pinpoint both a period and a region for the writing of the VM. It would also obviously provide a "starter list" of words, and solidly dismiss the "hoax" theory.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 20, 2013, 09:11:22 AM
I posted a possible computational approach in a new thread.
Title: Re: Lets look at the Voynich
Post by: Phil_The_Rodent on May 20, 2013, 09:21:40 PM
Ooh, found a very clear mistake. I'm transcribing the first abril (goat) page and on the inner ring right behind the goat, the "oteo alale araly" has clearly been changed to "oteo alals araly".