I have been puzzling about the loops that connect through the "rays" the centre side rosettes to the central rosette. I have been wondering what they may represent. There is no connecting loop between the centre top rosette and the central rosette and in my analysis that's fine. It is unclear whether there is a connecting loop between the right centre rosette and the central rosette as that part of the page is very worn, but if anyone can see anything there that I can't that's great. The two remaining connecting loops are drawn differently, so that seems to imply there is some meaning to the drawings. I think it worth noting that there are two dots each either side on the connecting loop between the bottom centre rosette and the central rosette, this seems a specific design feature.

Any idea of what these represent is great. These identifications I think do not require a drawing in a manuscript to illustrate them, as is the habit, though that is certainly very welcome if there is a similarity. A real world object that resembles the drawings would be of equal value I think. (I note that to my chagrin that drawings from manuscripts of objects are often posted by Voynich researchers, but images of real medieval objects are rarely presented.)

The only things that have occurred to me as of now are rings or lens, though my ideas have not crystallised yet. (Though lens here do not appear to be illustrated such that they refract light and therefore they would be superfluous.)

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Grove's Titles

From voynich.nu
>>
The term 'titles' was introduced by John Grove.
This term is related to the layout of the last lines of some paragraphs.
Normally, these last lines are left-justified and do not reach the right margin.

Three alternative formats are used occasionally:
    The last line is short and centred
    The last line is short and right-justified
    The last line is left-justified, but has additional words that are right-justified

The last example is strictly speaking what John Grove called titles, but all three cases are of interest.
    17 pages that include centred end lines,
    11 pages with right-justified end lines,
    05 pages that use 'titles'.

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Groves list:
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Some brief chat on the old mailing list about 'catchwords':
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Some stuff here, which leads to the suggestion they are unfinished parts of sentences:
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A good example is on folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where all 3 paragraphs have 'Titles'.

To quote VViews from the above thread:
"My questions remain: what can these "titles" be? What is their role? Why is their layout like that?"

Answers to VViews questions and any additional information would be most welcome.

Just stumbled upon this Computerphile clip. I don't exactly follow the process, but it's a method of mapping word similarities (in the "semantic" sense), based purely on their occurrence within comparable contexts in a given corpus, not on some understanding of their actual "meaning". The results are surprisingly accurate. At the risk of sounding like a total noob here, could an approach like this be at all useful for the VM text? If so, it's probably already been done. In which case I'd love to learn more about it.

I've been spending some time reading through the blogs of -JKP- and Emma May Smith for the past few days, trying to get a deeper sense for how Voynichese is constructed, and what patterns it contains. These two researchers do an excellent job teaching this, and their blogs should be required reading for any aspiring Voynich theorist, right up there with classics like Currier and D'Imperio. As much as I like to let my imagination wander, I agree with both of these bloggers that a solid foundation of what is there must form the foundation of any good speculation on what might be there. I am also now firmly convinced that the writing system is synthetic, and the construction of vords and lines of text are deliberate.

In my wanderings on Wikipedia, I came across the theory of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and am about to order myself a copy of Wierzbicka and Goddard's seminal work on this theory. Basically it proposes that all natural languages, and quite possibly all human systems of symbolic communication, can be expressed as combinations of approximately 65 basic concepts that are fundamental to the human experience, and cannot be simplified any further. This was a little further down a wiki-hole that started for me with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a short list of lexical items that would have been known to all prehistoric humans, and show a high resistance to sound changes or replacement by borrowing, over time. The point being, if the VMS contains a natural language, a constructed language, or any sort of symbolic encoding of human communication, there is a short list of concepts that must appear in the VMS, and must have a Voynichese way of being written. Defining this list would be the first challenge. Later, I'm envisioning finding a way to use, for example, -JKP-'s differential distribution of Janus pairs and Emma's rules about syllable construction, along with clues from the imagery, to try to identify which units of writing likely correlate with which units of meaning.

But I don't want to be that newbie who reinvents the wheel, and ignores good research that's already been done in this direction. Can anyone point me in the direction of any VMS researcher who has already worked on something similar?

I was able to pay a short visit to the 2019 book fair in Frankfurt, meeting primarily with the people from Siloé in the area of art books:

   

There were many firms presenting their facsimiles. If you are interested in expensive bindings, these are available:

   

I noted this tiny facsimile, of which I wonder if it is one of the two copies of the Pseudo-Apuleius herbal in Florence.

   

There was also this large calendar:

   

With a conspicuous lobster:

   

New paper about the VMS: "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."

The paper by Luis Acedo is available You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

The author concludes:

Quote:The most interesting results are, however, those obtained with the observation probability matrix, which clearly separate two kinds of characters to be associated with vowel and consonant phonemes ... On the other hand, this correspondence is not as strong as in the case of the English text of Section 3.1 because there are symbols with noticeable probability that appear in both figures (in particular, the EVA symbols 'e', 'i', 's' and 'y').

Hello Folks,

This is my first post!

The Voynich MS is still not translated after so many years.  Maybe human can't resolve this enigma. Seeing the performances of the robot Sophia (creepy)  and other AI designs which comes all together in the cloud and learn from each other, I think it's possible in the near future with AI. What do you think about this option?

In the cosmic comparison of VMs f68v3 with BNF Fr. 565 fol 23, the illustration of Harley 334 fol 29 has also been included.

Does the comparison of the siren /mermaid in the lower part of VMs You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. form a second link with the illustration from Harley 334 fol 57?

There has been discussion of the VMs mermaid before, but I don't see where the Harley 334 image was included.

If not, is there a better match to the VMs illustration?

At the very top left of fRos there is a word

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Is it voynichese or marginalia ?

It looks like 'PaRib Fox' (english text style) but the glyphs dont seem very voynichey.

also very specualtively above the 'F' there are 3 very faint symbols.
   

I'm wondering if Voynichese was meant to be pronounced or pronounceable.

If it was, it would fit an unknown-language or glossolalia hypothesis, but not so much a ciphertext hypothesis. The answer seems neutral on a hoax hypothesis.

In favor, the glyphs really do look like an alphabet (some glyphs even present in Latin MSS), the "vords" seem to have an onset-nucleus-coda structure (which is pronounceable), and the EVA representation is pronounceable.

Against, no phonetic values are known, the script has layout effects (e.g., first character of lines, first lines of paragraphs, etc.), and many vords seem differ by only a stroke or two and may have been generated by purely graphic means (see Timm & Schinner).