29-03-2017, 07:18 AM
I also believe that there is a good chance that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the planned end of the MS text.
Apart from the three points I mentioned, many other more speculative observations can be made.
The stars are a bit of a question already. While they are often considered paragraph markers, a closer look at the last - say - 30% of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows that there is no evidence of 'short paragraphs' . However, there are stars in the margin of this part of f108v.
The problem could even be worse than 'just' bifolio rearrangements.
There are examples of manuscripts that have been copied from other manuscripts of which the folios were not in the right order, or some copying error was made. Since the page boundaries do not have to coincide between the original and the copy, there could be jumps also in the middle of the text.
An example of this is the Marcanova MS that was also bought from the Jesuits by Voynich. The nice thing is that this can be used to show that the MS was copied from an older copy that is now preserved in Paris.
Now there is no particular reason to suspect that such a thing happened with the Voynich MS, but it is possible in principle, and this can only be detected if the text turns out to be readable at some point.
Apart from the three points I mentioned, many other more speculative observations can be made.
The stars are a bit of a question already. While they are often considered paragraph markers, a closer look at the last - say - 30% of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows that there is no evidence of 'short paragraphs' . However, there are stars in the margin of this part of f108v.
The problem could even be worse than 'just' bifolio rearrangements.
There are examples of manuscripts that have been copied from other manuscripts of which the folios were not in the right order, or some copying error was made. Since the page boundaries do not have to coincide between the original and the copy, there could be jumps also in the middle of the text.
An example of this is the Marcanova MS that was also bought from the Jesuits by Voynich. The nice thing is that this can be used to show that the MS was copied from an older copy that is now preserved in Paris.
Now there is no particular reason to suspect that such a thing happened with the Voynich MS, but it is possible in principle, and this can only be detected if the text turns out to be readable at some point.