VMS Notes - voynich

Sean B. Palmer
2005-02-14T17:43:44Z

Notes on the Voynich Manuscript. These should be moved to /voynich/ on inamidst, but for the time being they're here since it was a convenient place to scribe to whilst Terje and I discussed the matter somewhat on IRC.

VMS Notes

To be eventually moved to my Voynich Musings site.

On Michitonese...

The "ga| mich" section is weird for the g having a tail that extends through the a. And the o with circumflex-below could well just be upside down making it a hacek, but the rest of the text doesn't read well upside down. Interesting to note that "oladabas" becomes something like "augusujo" upside-down, but that's really just Rorschaching at that point.

The most interesting part to me at the moment is the superscript + in "maria". If this were being assembled as an anagram from various fragments, you'd expect the +s to have been placed quite regularly. The fact that one has been inserted after some of the text has been written seems telling; and though there's a big hole at the beginning of the text where there could be a word before the first "+", that seems inconsistent with the other line beginnings, so it's possible that + starts the whole section. In which case, is it not a delimiter?

f116v_tr.txt notes Rene's conjecture that f76v.P.19 ("orar.sheey") may be a possible source for the oror.sheey text. Note that they don't believe it to the exactly the same, which would mean that this is a unique occurance of the text through the entire document. That again could be rather telling. In any case, time to compare the ductus of the two sequences!

The woman at the left of the orar sheey text in f76v (line 19) could well be the basis for the woman on the michitonese page. And does the "r/ok" text to the left of the weird onion looking thing have any significance? The figure reminds me of the gherkin-loving Tidyup (the purple one).

Here's what I get tracing over the f116v figure 1 drawing (the "a" in the URI is for "abstract").

xover notes that the top figure on f76v looks to be decorated with an asian canopy. I showed him the rosettes page with the mixture of arabic and european architecture.

Style and Dating

Terje believes that the figure between the top-left and the top-middle rosette could be a human, possible a king/alchemist/merchant, and to me appears as though he's stooping over. It's also interesting to note that it uses the same colours as the architectural feature close-by, but that since the range of colours used appears to be limited this doesn't necessarily mean that it's an architectural feature.

On dating, wikipedia says 1450-1520. The vibrance of the writing and its resistance to fading must've contributed to people's beliefs that Voynich himself may have hoxed it, but as some old alchemical manuscripts reveal, it's not unusual for such a high-quality of preservation to occur.

The work above is Hayniger, Georg, (Autograph Alchemical Compendium of Recipes and Drawings), in Latin and German and Czech. Manuscript on Vellum and Paper. (Vienna, c. 1467), and the relevance to the VMS is that someone mentioned that a word on page 177 looks rather like michitonese in both vocabulary and handwriting.

On dating specifically, xover wondered whether the voynich manuscript had ever been dated. It doesn't seem to have been; the explanation given half-way down the EVMT page is that it'd be a costly process and would only give you an upper bound, but I think it'd be worth it nontheless. Yet it's not been done so far.

Incidentally, found a nice site on Alchemy via someone's musings on the VMS.

Sean B. Palmer