Hi all,
I hope this hasn't been discussed here already, at least I specifically searched for the appropriate keywords but could not find any related topic.

There have been theories about the VMS having some pagan content which, for obvious reasons, should be hidden both in text and in the images. That got me thinking: If I wanted to hide pagan (or any other scientific, philosophical, etc) ideas  that would surely get me in trouble in a strictly christian society, I would try to make it look very christian to the uninformed viewer.
Maybe the issue here is the other way around: A christian book which had to look like it has nothing to do with christianity. So what if the author originated from central/southern europe, but lived e.g. in the Ottoman Empire or any other place where there was a certain persecution of christians, and tried to make his work look like something that may have been more tolerated in that area?
That would fit well with the theories about hidden christian motives in the images of e.g. the plants/roots or nymphs.

Does that make sense to you?
Cheers, T.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a copy of the « Somme le roi » or « Livre des vices et des vertus ». It contains an image of the Jardin des Vertus, an allegorical representation. The seven fountains/springs/wells represent the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the trees represent virtues. The tall one in the middle is Christ. The virtuous ladies are using cups to water their virtues with the "gifts". 

When I first saw this, I thought it was similar to certain VM folios, namely You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and maybe to a lesser extent f84r . When I compared them in more detail, I thought, "nah, it's nothing". And now I think that still there may be some conceptual similarity.

   

The similarity is that you've got a number of female figures in a row, each flanking a stream of water. In the VM, these are labelled, suggesting that they may each stand for something specific. The direction of the water is different in the VM, where it seems to come from the sky (?) and whatever is going on in f84r.

Here is an older example from Ms 870, Bibliothèque Mazarine. The relation between the women with their cups, the water and the trees is clearer here. I like how the cups are basically circles or watery rings

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These also exist in the VM, though they are almost always connected to tubes and the nymphs kind of put their hand inside them.

   

Hi, everyone,

Here's the lecture I gave at The Grolier Club last week. Some of this may be new to some of you...at any rate, I hope you enjoy it!

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I was too tired to do any actual research this evening, so I decided to try and trace the pen lines of some of the small-plants vessels in Photoshop. Keep in mind that in some areas this is an interpretation. The lines are really ruined by the horrendous paint job, and in some areas your best bet is to kind of guess what's going on under the green and (especially) blue layers. I think decorative details in some sections are entirely obscured. Someone else doing a similar exercise might get some details differently.

What I noticed is:

- In these containers, not only the shapes but also the decorative patterns are variable. One vessel is even adorned with some kind of curly, question mark-like shapes I hadn't noticed as such before.
- The drawings are a bit more well-made than I gave them credit for.
- At least one of the containers is certainly placed on a pillar-like pedestal.

   

I'll probably do some more later.

I've recently run into some illustrations that reminded of an older investigation.  

Many of the earlier examples of medieval illustrations show various backgrounds with different patterns. There is one pattern of particular of interest to VMs investigations.

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There are several illustrations in BL Royal 16 G. VI that add to the example above. f352v, f360, and f440v
This ms. is a version of Chroniquesde France ou de Saint Denis produced in Paris between 1332-1350

Additionally there is an illustration in Yates Thompson 10 f.20 with a similar background and an interesting cloud band.

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This is an Apocalypse MS from Paris c. 1370-c. 1390. It also contains an Agnus Dei image, with certain similarities to the one from Liege (BNF Fr. 130996, but also with obvious differences.

The cumulative timeline shows the use of this pattern in Paris in the 1300s, and in the Netherlands in the early 1400s, and that would probably be the Duchy of Burgundy. And while the provenance overall is not highly specific, it is an independent factor and it does clearly include, rather than exclude, the sphere of Burgundy - post 1430 hypothesis.

"The text of the Voynich Manuscript is incompatible with natural human language." I have seen some variation on this conclusion in a lot of recent papers and commentary. This belief seems very much in vogue in the past ~10y, especially among scientists well experienced in wielding statistical tools to analyze information. I wouldn't say it's a consensus yet. But it does seem to be an increasingly popular view among VMS scholars who tolerate absolutely no deviation from the scientific method. Should this incompatibility come to be a consensus among those who truly understand the properties of Voynichese, a serious belief that Voynichese represents some way to write some natural human language will become an immediate indicator of someone who needs to do much more reading, and drop any cranky preconceptions, before adding anything of value to the conversation.

I have no background in coding or information science. My knowledge of statistics is rudimentary, and my knowledge of linguistics is only as a lifelong amateur enthusiast. In reading the latest by Alin Jonas, JKP, Marco Ponzi, Torsten Timm, Brian Cham, Donald Fisk, and a few others, I tried my best to wrap my head around the metrics of natural language specimens, and how these authors' specimens differ markedly from those of the VMS. I've been impressed with these efforts, and think all of these authors make a good case that Voynichese as a vessel capable of holding natural human linguistic communication is, as yet, an unsupported premise. This conclusion doesn't go unchallenged, but I've noticed that increasingly, supporters of this incompatibility are comfortable meeting most challenges with some variation of, "You don't really understand what you're arguing against." or "You don't know what you don't know." I know that I don't know. I could believe that the compatibility vs. incompatibility of Voynichese with natural human language is a false equivalence, and that proponents of compatibility are only numerous and vocal because of how few people have truly taken the time to understand how the book's glyphs are arranged. On the other hand, I'm open to the possibility that proponents of incompatibility are something like an ideological echo chamber, who reach the same conclusion only because they start from the same set of assumptions, and don't keep company with researchers who don't share those same assumptions. To someone who isn't really qualified to argue either side, it feels like a bit of a Rashomon effect.

Reddit.com has a forum called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The idea is admitting your ignorance, and humbly inviting an expert to provide friendly, simplified, and layperson-accessible explanations to technical questions. It seems that if Voynichese is highly unlikely to represent natural human language, there should be a way of explaining this to fledgling researchers and enthusiasts, in a way that any person of average intelligence could grasp. Incompatibalists, I know you're very tired of trying to explain your conclusion to would-be Voynicheros who just don't want to hear it. So just a link is fine. If incompatibility is indeed robustly supported, what post or other short piece of writing should be promoted as required reading for newbies who *do* want to hear it, and *don't* want to waste their time building a theory that's already been duly ruled out?

One important consideration of this issue, is what it would take to falsify the statement "Voynichese is incompatible with natural human language". To the benefit of anyone mounting a sincere and well-informed challenge to the incompatibility idea, it's a negative statement. All that's really needed to falsify a negative statement is one good contrary example. For example, if I say "There are no black swans," all one has to do is find me one black swan to prove me wrong. Similarly, all someone would have to do to falsify "Voynichese is incompatible with natural human language" is find one example of human writing (which can be reliably and replicably converted to human speech and vice versa), which measures similarly to Voynichese on all of the relevant metrics. This is easier said than done of course. It's not helped by an unfortunate paradox: Those most qualified to perform and interpret meaningful statistical analysis on written language are also likely to have acquired these skills through an education that put blinders on their ideas of typical written language, that they may not even be aware of. Human language of the written kind is used in a lot of ways that have no literary merit and seldom make it into the historical record, after all.

In summary, I think the arguments for Voynichese's incompatibility with natural human language are not as widely and well understood as they deserve to be, and I don't think that's entirely due to willful ignorance. How can this viewpoint be better worded and promulgated, so that anyone out there with the chops to dispute it (or confirm it!) understands what they're replying to?

I would like to bring your attention to the Austrian artist August Walla (1936-2001), who suffered from schizophrenia and spent most of his time in psychiatric institutions (or at least under medical supervision). There, he was encouraged to express himself artistically, and became a member of the “Gugging artists” who received praise and appreciation from modern painters and art collectors. His works now are on display in several museums. His life, and also his clinical record, are well documented.

Walla’s style involved the inclusion of text into his paintings. Some are pure text, but most of them combine text and figurative illustration. In those cases, the text is somewhat integrated into the picture and used to fill any voids between the figures, obviously following aesthetic principles as much as its inherent “meaning”.

Some of his texts are (kind of) understandable and some are not, some appear to be meaningless. To him, they were undoubtedly meaningful. In some sense, he used his art to communicate; in some sense, to follow an urge to express himself and his religious and cosmological beliefs (which are actually quite complex). Very likely, he attributed some magical component to his work.
 
He “chose” painting as his form of artistic expression because he knew this from his early education, and because was encouraged by his environment. In Gugging, the necessary materials were also supplied. 

In his extensive oeuvre, a small number of topics prevail – family, religion, politics. Single works as well as series of his works are extremely repetitive. He even will repeat single words or letters for a couple of times. 

He invented “languages”, using dictionaries. Also the words he invents are used very repetitively, or he combines them to create „new“ words. Walla even created  a rune-like set of characters that he used occasionally. But mostly he wrote “plain text”, using capitals and an idiosyncratic punctuation. 

Some of his work reads like this (and I will deliberately start with one that is not really representative, but really touching: #1, then introduce some “weird” ones: #2-5 and finally some “meaningless” examples: #6-8).

Quote:[Text1]

Ewigkeitvorherzeit von Ewigkeitzeit.?

WELTALLENDEFINSTERNIS UND DIE EWIGKEITENDEZEITRIESENUHR MIT ZEIT VOR DER EWIGKEIT UND MEINEM VERJÜNGERUNGSWUNSCH 11 JAHRE JUNG ZU WERDEN.?

Quote:[Text2]

Walla August.!

BIN DER HEILIGE GOTT SAÄRIL.! GOTT SAÄRILL.! GOTT ALLAH.
SONNE HINTERM BISAMBERG IN DEN BEZIRK KORNEUBURG AN DER DONAU?
SARARILL UND ALLAH.! KPÖ I 1 II 2 I 1 III 3

Quote:[Text3]

STERN, ADOLFE. STERN, MEMMAK.? STERN, GUURU.? STERN, MERKUR. STERN, PANKI. STERN MARS.! WENUS. ERDEN.! SATURN. URANUS.! BLUTO.! SONNE. MOND.! STERNE.

Quote:[Text4]

HHH
ICH BRAVER HALBTEUFEL DANKE, DEM GOTTESSOHN JESUS CHRISTUS WENN ICH HEIMKOMME NACH KORERNEUBURG
Ich lobe solchen braven Menschen die heimbringen dem braven Burschen August Walla.!
HALBTEUFLEIN AUGUSTIN ALOIS WALLA GEORG.! TEUFEL MIT BLONDEN HAAREN, IST EIN SÜSSER STROLCH, ALS STRITZIBUBE.!
Sepp.! Sepp.!
GESPENST.! SÜSSER BRAVER STRITZIBUBE IST DA GLÜCKBRINGENTER SO DUNKELBLONDER KIRCHENEHRLOSER FREUNDLICHER TEUFEL ALS SO HALBTEUFEL HIER.!

Quote:[Text5]

+ WALLA AUGUST + SO BILDL FÜR BRAVN BRAVN BRAVN HERR KURT HOFBAUER + BILDL EIN BRAVER BUNTER PAPAGEI + DU LIEBER GOTT ALLES BÖSE KOMMT WIEDER, UND ALLES BÖSE VERGEHT WIEDER + PAPAGEI MARIA + 1997.! +17

Quote:[Text6]

Jeaobek Jeaobek Adolfe, gpatb autbnaa akgn tb akgntb Adolfe, Gor. Saaahnh jmn Hego Aoxbhego Bocefskoheuheago.?

Quote:[Text7]

KISI KOMISER SAIRE KISI OGUSTO LAP LASTIRMAK KISI KOMISER. SAIRE PUT GOTT, KOF SLAMNÜNYA SAIRE KOF EZELF.! Lied.! KITLEMEK ISLÄM. PUT SAAAHNHX PUT PUT PUT SAAAHNHX.! FAKAT FAKAT MEK ESYA=KOMISER. MEK ESYA, KOMISER.

Quote:[Text8]

MELICIDIUM ETTOQUE PÜPUS + ISCRIX + GRÄMEN ET LIQUOR TRUTTANUS MELICIDIUMTRUTTANUS ISCRIX AUGUST + GRYPS + GRYPS COMPOS GRYPSCOMPOS.! CAELESSARARILLH, SARARILLH.!

The following talk by Laura Cleaver is not about the Voynich MS, but about Wilfrid Voynich as a book dealer.

   

Hey ninjas ,
I wrote a paper on the VMS, I compared it with 80+ other languages and I tried to make its characters readable in an alphabet we could understand.
Long story short, it failed.
But I'm pretty sure my paper could still interest some of you, as I did use a large amount of data and even if the translation failed, the languages / corpus I found to be the closest of VMS are of a great interest I think. It could be used to support or guide your theories.

The paper is here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I hope to have feedbacks.
Also, if you find it of any interest and think it would be great to have it published on Arxiv, I need to find an endorser on CS.CL.

Have a nice day!

(26-02-2020, 06:23 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To me, this gives the appearance of a copy of a source text that also included special symbols, e.g. zodiac or planet signs.