VViews, I can't post to your interesting thread because it's in the library section, but the last image you posted reminded me of something I'd seen.

Here is a physical embodiment of the curvy shapes in the drawing you posted, from an astrolabe designed in the 15th century by Fusoris. This example (I don't know if it's a reproduction or an original) is in the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum:

  

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What if the VMS is a work based on, or discusses part of, the works of Aristotle?

Where are the five elements he discussed found in the Voynich manuscript?

Are they in the containers in the middle of the rosette page?

1. Earth, which is cold and dry; this corresponds to the modern idea of a solid.
2. Water, which is cold and wet; this corresponds to the modern idea of a liquid.
3. Air, which is hot and wet; this corresponds to the modern idea of a gas.
4. Fire, which is hot and dry; this corresponds to the modern ideas of plasma and heat.
5. Aether, which is the divine substance that makes up the heavenly spheres and heavenly bodies (stars and planets).

In medieval times it was very well accepted that there are more celestial elements, spheres or layers. For example wikipedia mentions: "The Earth within seven celestial spheres, from Bede, De natura rerum, late 11th century".   

Here for example are 7 paws, on Walter-f7r, Diagram of the terrestrial climate zones with the Riphaean mountains.
"The circle [of the world] girded by the five celestial zones" (Quintus=Five)



the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mountains – a mythical range of peaks thought to mark the boundary between Asia and Europe, and the Arctic and North temperate zones -- represented as seven abstract, colored silhouettes resembling triangular game-pieces.

It is always a matter of what you count: the 8 spheres: Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. 
Or just the seven: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Also often it's the question what is an element and what is not.
Sometimes spheres and elements are mixed in literature, and there is no unity in that.

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In the middle of the Rosette page you see the names of elements very clearly listed:

a. daral
b. opar
c. opchees
d. Shdy
e. odal
f. opy
g. oteedy

Yes, there are 7 names and 6 containers here!


It seems that the author of the VMS added one element more than he drew?  Probably not.
Look closely. What is dominantly between the containers?
Is it the same substance that is very present in the balneo section, which is water?
Or is it a presentation of the heaven, the cosmos?

I think it is the latter, the cosmos, because it has 12 three-leaved endings. It almost looks like a blanket spread out between the six containers.
You can not capture the cosmos in a container, that is the most logical explanation, and that is the reason the "blanket with stars on it" was drawn.

If we now have 6 elements in the containers, and one is the cosmos.
What is the description of the six basic appropriate elements?

The seven western elements are:  Air, water, metal, aether, fire, wood, earth

Would it be possible to define:
daral, opar, opchees, Shdy, odal, opy, oteedy

We now can assume that the middle word represents Shdy=cosmos.

If those represent those seven words, what are the other words and how does this relate to the text?

This being written, makes me also interested in the Nature manuscripts of Aristotle and the interpretation of those during medieval times, in relation to the VMS.

Anton,
One of the interesting things about the Voynich diagrams relating to winds and stars is that they do not show any clear correlation to the usual "zodiac-planets-cardinal winds" mindset of the Latin European texts.  The so-called "zodiac" doesn't represent the zodiac creatures; there is no sign of the planets' inclusion apart from sun and moon - which seems to mean that astrology may not be a subject of the month-roundels as is usually presumed - and the winds on f.67v-1 are not the cardinal winds.

For these and various other reasons, including the disposition of those curved lines on the famous diagram of f.68v-1 I was obliged to conclude that the sort of "text-book" astronomy-astrology characteristic of the Latin west does not inform the content of Beinecke MS 408 - and that the diagrams in the latter better agree with other traditions and customs-  chiefly those of the navigators.
It is an interesting question as to when, and where, that information first entered the Latins' horizons and  I'm not sure that the question has ever been investigated in any depth.

The set of the pipe-like objects in the left portion of f69v is remarkable. At first, I considered is as a candidate for another complete set of "Voynich objects", similar to what the "Voynich stars" of f68r1 and f68r2 comprise.

However, this was quickly disproved by the fact that the Voynich pipe labels are not unique within this set. Namely, all of them are unique except okeod which presents itself three times instead of just one (which would be fine for the set to be a complete set).

There is no "system" on the surface according to which okeod would appear. The long and short pipes are interleaved in the chart, but okeod does not relate to either of those exclusively. Instead, it twice in a row relates to short pipes, and once - to a long pipe. There is also no regularity in the placement of the labels okeod.

The whole number of pipes is 28. That number has some possible associations. First of all, it is the so-called "perfect number". Next, it might point to the menstrual cycle, to the jewish solar cycle known as "machzor gadol" and to some other things which Wikipedia suggests but which do not look very relevant.

So the question is, what would be a set that:

- consists of 28 objects;
- consists of objects of two alternating sorts;
- contains mostly different objects, but one object is contained three times;
- that latter object may belong to either sort.

Is there any relation to machzor gadol identifiable?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a very good example of how you should analyse images within its context.

According to voynichese.com, the word or occurs 366 times and the word aiin occurs 470 times. Simply by chance we should expect multiple instances where the two words occur adjacently. However, the phrase or aiin is much more common than aiin or. This suggests that its occurrence is important in some way.

It could be a set phrase with a single meaning (such as parce que in French). It could also be a sign that one order is grammatical and the other is not.

(Interestingly for my hypothesis that words are transformed at the beginning of lines, a few instances of sor aiin occur.)

Although even two word phrases are not terrifically common, I wonder if any other two words show obvious signs of bias toward one specific order. It could be that we could use them to divide words into groups according to the positions they take in such phrases.

I'm doing some research on Quire 20, and while the results may take a while, I thought I would share an interesting observation.

On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there are six occurrences of otaiin. Five of those are on the first line of a recipe, and all six either the third or second to last word in the line. Five of the lines end with m.

I don't know what this pattern is, but it is worth reporting to see if anybody has any insight.

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In order to test if the VMS is in Welsh, I'm approaching it from a different angle.  I'm still using the cipher chart and any column with a number the letters can be interchangeable as long as they come from the same column.  To explain a glyph could represent a letter, "a" or letter, "s" as long as it comes from the same column (like from 1).  In this test I'm not adding up letters and I'm also omitting glyph's that don't form a welsh word.  I'm not using anagrams.  I'm simply going from left to right in a VMS word and pulling out a properly spelled Welsh word.  I decided to try this, because when I added up a few paragraphs with the numbers I assigned to the glyph's I felt I was dead on in the summation although Coon and JKP, felt I was not 100%.  That is why I ran a VMS paragraph test to show that we can all miss count the VMS words.  I will release those results when its ready.

The glyph's I did not use have red strikes through them.  I pulled letters from left to right from VMS words and the letter equivalents can only be from the same column if the VMS glyph is different.  The paragraph is what I call prose or a lament.


I will keep trying this method for paragraphs only as I believe the labels use numerology.  As for the other paragraphs and phrases I'm not sure do to Coon and JKP.
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Hi everyone,
it seems that most of the focus on the "astronomy" section has been about the part contained in Q9.
I'd like to discuss the diagrams we find in Quire 10, just before the beginning of the "zodiac".

The folios in question are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , f69v, f70r1 & f70r2. Compared to the previous set, they contain a lot less stars and a lot more other features such as tubes and weird foamy/bubbly-like designs ( see f70r1).
The figure at the center of 70r2 looks really majestic, much more than the "sun" in the previous folios. Maybe that's just my impression, but this figure seems important.

There's a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on Ellie Velinska's site where she compared You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to a wind diagram on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Oxford St. John's College MS 17.

I saw a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on the old list thanks to a link on Stephen Bax's site, in which Adam McLean & ReneZ discussed 69v and referred to it as the "28 mansions of the moon" folio.

There is a post by Robert Teague in the List archives (sorry I can't link to those) where he says he believes the foamy designs on f70r1 are trees, and that this folio represents 'The world".

There is also another post in the list archives about this whole foldout by a poster named SD, but to be honest, I couldn't make any sense of what the poster meant, other than his claim that "The VM will destroy Mankind unless people repent and return to God's (Gardening) Plan"...

I am sure there must have been more discussion of this Quire before. It includes the beginning of the "Zodiac" section so I'd expect it to be somewhat related to astrology, but who knows?
I'm really curious to know what other posters' interpretations of these folios may be, or if you have any links to blogposts or discussions about them that I haven't listed above.

I was quite stunned after running the Latin through a translation program from what I pulled out of 1r.  My attack was based on the bird glyph in Dee's Monas, although there is a string of nulls the Latin sentence made some sense.  If Dee wrote this I believe he did not have his notes with him as to the fact of nulls.