Flicking through the VM pages looking for something else, I came to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and decided to have a closer look. I don't recall a dedicated discussion of this page on the forum, but this may be wrong. Either way this is the kind of page that was discussed extensively in mailing list days, so nothing I say will be new.

Observations:

1. As noted by Glen Claston, this page is a major clue that Q13 is out of order. Since You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is text-only and has a very fancy initial, it was likely first. But even if one would not put it first in the quire, it is hard to deny that this looks like the kind of page that traditionally introduces a new topic or chapter.

2. On this page it is exceptionally obvious that the top line carries more gallows, specifically EVA [p]. I don't often use Voynichese.com, hope this link shows what I mean: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . This reminds of legal documents, where we often see the ascenders on the top line enlarged. Below Burham Cathedral's Magna Carta.

   

Now if this parallel is valid in any way, that somehow gallows are used because this is the top line, then the implications are significant: it would mean that these gallows replace something else that takes up less space.

3. Paragraphs. The top half of the page appears to be one paragraph with signs in the left margin. Below there are three clearly separated paragraphs, with a blank space on the last line and a larger gallow as the first character. Only the last paragraph has a rather strange beginning.

   

What does this mean? Especially, why start with an uncharacteristically huge paragraph, which apparently requires marginal annotation?

When I wrote elsewhere:

Quote:In fact I have other things to do that I consider more interesting, and I want to finish first.

I found something. I used to get excited when this happened.

But now I'm a little older and wiser...

In order to follow it up and verify it, I'll have to drop everything else (including my increasing pile of almost-finished blogs that I want so much to catch up on). It will probably take a few weeks or months, who knows how long it will take, because I need a lot of screensnaps from different sources to illustrate it, ones that I didn't capture when I first saw them months or years ago because I DIDN'T know they might be important.


In the end, it will be only one more brick in the wall. It might be an important brick, at least as far as future Voynich researchers are concerned, but I'm getting a bit discouraged at how LONG it takes to gather all the data and write it up so that other people can appreciate why it is important.

Nothing to do with me, but I just came across this interesting computational analysis on the text. I'm still re-reading and digesting it. The authors wax a little ...lyrical at times.

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Quote:The statistical properties that we have uncovered in the Voynich Manuscript over the past four posts reveal something of its inner structure. It supports, but cannot prove, that the Manuscript is not a hoax, and that it the text is most likely drawn from some natural language.
The changepoint analyses in this post are a powerful tool for identifying evolution and mutation in data, and the demonstrated example of stylometric analysis to Martorel’s Tirant lo Blanc support their use in revealing points of fracture in texts, without reference to the source language.
With specific relevant to the Voynich Manuscript, both the word frequency changepoint and the topic model changepoint suggest that the manscript’s contents shift significantly at some point around Folios 30 to 40. Given the previous assignment of topics based on manual identification of images accompanying the text, this presents a new avenue of investigation for Voynich researchers.

Princeton MS Garrett 158. Check out the very detailed illustrations and the early modern rendition of a classical style of script and page layout in this c. 1471 manuscript.

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It was one of the manuscripts acquired by Wilfrid Voynich, so I thought it appropriate to have a link in this section:

"The early provenance of the manuscript is unknown. It was owned by Marc Antoine Muret, the French humanist (1526-1585), who died in Rome, where it was inherited by Marc Antoine Muret, his nephew (d. 1586), a student in Rome, who donated it to the Collegio Romano, a Jesuit school in Rome, founded 1551 and later renamed Gregorian University. The school was closed 1870-1874, and many books and manuscripts (including Garrett MS. 158) were lost or sold in 1873. It is unknown who owned or had possession of the manuscript immediately after it left the Collegio Romano. The Marcanova manuscript was part of the Voynich Collection, the personal collection of the New York antiquarian dealer Wilfred Voynich; in 1915 and 1920 the manuscript was exhibited with a group of Western illuminated manuscripts the General Library of the University of Michigan. It was described at the time as having been illustrated by Maso da Finiguerra (1426-1464), according to an article in University of Michigan, General Library Building (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1920), p. 35; copy on file in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Wilfrid Voynich sold the manuscript to Robert Garrett of Baltimore, Maryland, Class of 1897, in August 1924. Garrett deposited the manuscript in the Princeton University Library (deposit no. 7542) and donated it in 1942."

By perfect-reduplication, I mean the exact consecutive repetition of the same word: e.g. daiin.daiin

By quasi-reduplication, I mean two consecutive words that are very similar to each other: e.g. qokedy.qokey

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I mentioned the transcription of the French You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. While discussing a different subject with Koen, I noticed that this file contains examples of both reduplication and quasi-reduplication. These examples are quite different from what we see in the VMS: the repetition occurs across lines, the first occurrence is written in red and entirely lower-case, the second occurrence is written in black with a red capital initial (the title of a recipe, written in red, often also occurs as the first word of the recipe).
These are three examples of perfect reduplication (brouet.brouet gruyau.gruyau coulis.coulis) and three examples of quasi-reduplication (blan.blanc escreissez.ecreuissez mulet.mullet). 
The "perfect" examples of course are not-so-perfect because of the differences listed above; the first case also has different 'r's, so one could argue that it is b2ouet.brouet (or b2ouet.Brouet). For the sake of argument, please ignore these differences.
   

The point I want to make is that here quasi-reduplication appears to be accidental: the two words are not really different, the differences are due to arbitrary spelling variation.

Semi-reduplication is a rarely discussed Voynich phenomenon. Timm and Schinner have provided a model for it. I may be wrong, but I understand they create reduplication by mean of this process:

1. words are randomly selected from a certain pool (a previous page)
2. when writing down a word, it can be slightly modified

Point 1 is responsible for both reduplication and quasi reduplication: word selection does not check that the new word is different from the immediately previous word.
Point 2 is largely responsible for quasi reduplication: a word identical to the previous one is selected and it is slightly altered before/when writing it on the page.
In this model, reduplication and quasi-reduplication appear to be closely related.


The other explanation of quasi-reduplication I am aware of is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. encryption system by Rene. I undertand that here a nomenclator is created by adding new words as they are found in the text. Each word is replaced by a ciphered version that is very similar to the cipher version for the previous word - "the quick brown fox" becomes something like "2134 2135 2136 2137", but of course if a word is already present in the nomenclator, the cipher word in the nomenclator is used: this quasi-reduplication pattern only happens under certain conditions.
In this case, each minimal difference between two words is highly significant. It is no more true that similar words typically have similar meanings (as in plain text). Perfect-reduplication is an entirely unrelated phenomenon that is not explained by the cipher system but must have its source in the original plain text.

Obviously, the spelling variation that we see in plain text manuscripts (such as S 108) is more similar to what Timm and Schinner discuss.

I was wondering if there is any statistical method that could tell us if, in the VMS, quasi-reduplication is related with perfect reduplication or not. I.e. are there verifiable patterns that should be present if the two are related and absent if they are not?

With Lisa Fagin Davis' most welcome analysis of different handwriting in the MS, this question came to my mind again. Clearly, the herbal (large-plant) pages were somehow divided among two persons as far as the application of the text goes. But do language A and B (or scribe 1 and 2) pages also display differences in their imagery?

We know that there are different painting styles in the MS. This has been noted about the water, and JKP also wrote about how differences exist in the greens of the plants. 
Sam G once noticed that the color red (or at least the brown that passes for red in the VM) is used almost exclusively on A-pages (over 30 instances) with only one clear use on a B-page.

With this in mind, at the end of 2018 I set out to digitally sample all colors used in the large-plant images. You can't trust your eyes for this, since our perception of color is always dependent on context.

I always sampled an area (as large as the image would allow) to avoid deviant pixels. I then noted the HSB values and gradually developed HSB ranges that correspond to particular colors. This was to a degree arbitrary since pigments are not always mixed the same so you get more of a continuum. Still I tried my best to distinguish meaningful differences. I used an online color namer to provide names. I did this in order to avoid bias.

The blue in this section is a mess, often with streaks of different colors going through it. When there was blue, I just sampled the blue and left the other colors alone.
The most difficult to categorize where the different kinds of tan/beige colors. I'm pretty happy with how the greens went.

I ended up with the following color palette:

   


You can see all my data here:
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The first page distinguishes all those shades; the second page is a reduced version with fewer shades.

I knew from the start that it was a risky undertaking and probably lots of work for nothing. Since I haven't worked on this for a while now and I'm not sure if anything good will come from it, I decided to just share it as-is.

[color=#1d2129][size=small][font=Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]OK, folks, here's my recent lecture from the annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America in New York City. This is only one part of my research, though - the full extent of my work will be published in the coming months in the journal Manuscript Studies: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I was looking at the folio 68r.2 after reading a thread in this forum about it. I noticed that they had marked two constellations on this page (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 
I think that the constellation at the bottom of the page near the star they have marked Sirus, could be the constellation Cancer. I looked at the modern starmap for Cancer, which has 4 stars in it. Therefore if this is Cancer then the stars would be Iota Carncri, Asellus Borealis, Asellus Australis, Acubens and Altarf. At first look this star drawing looks to be made of 3 stars. But further up there is another star which might show Iota Cancri. 
Another constellation that was marked was the open ended triangle at the top of the page that looks a little like the ship from the game Astroid. I think that this shows the Summer Triangle constelation. If so then the stars for this is Vega (top left), Deneb (bottom left) and Altair (bottom right).
Please do share your views on this
Caitlin

Scallop patterns are very common in medieval art (and any art really). They can indicate scales, feathers, fur, mountains, armor and probably much more. On a few VM folios, a slightly enhanced version is used, where many of the "scales" are dotted. 
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. both combine plain scales, dotted scales and something tent-like topped by a pole, water emerging from each. The pattern is also used on the two-birds page and to some extent on the rosettes foldout.

Browsing around, I came across an image from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., of  a castle with dotted roof tiles.

   

All of this is rather confusing. I'd have thought the Q13B dotted scallops must be mountains since water flows from them, but their orientation and color is quite similar to that of roof tiles as well. It almost feels like Q13B, the rosettes foldout and its reverse are patched together from a catalogue of roof and tent images...

Edit: the Wenceslas bible also contains some tents with extremely VM-like cloud band patterns, though I feel like this must have been pointed out before: