D. O’Donovan wrote: “Since the matter of music and musical notation has been repeatedly raised, considered, discussed, illustrated and in some cases actually investigated, and Byzantine musical notation too, I’d be happy for some clarification on the point Rene was making at voynich.ninja. Has be produced some new research which adds a new insight to older work? What relevance is he arguing for this additional example? Is it just an illustration of musical notation or does he argue that it adds something to our knowledge of the Vms, or must modify the work done by earlier research? ”

If you want clarification on points Rene was making on the Voynich.ninja forum, I suggest you ask him on the voynich.ninja forum. It’s doubtful that he would offer that clarification here. I had the impression he was asking a question.

My point in this blog was not to say that the VMS text is musical notation. I’m not discounting the possibility (in fact, the idea intrigues me since I have a strong interest in music), and I’m not surprised that it’s been considered before because decipherment by its very nature means putting a wide variety of ideas on the table, but the point I was making is that the concepts inherent in relative musical notation (of using symbols that derive from preceding symbols) could be applied to textual or numeric systems as well, not only to music, and seem to have many analogies to the basic structure of VMS text.

Since the matter of music and musical notation has been repeatedly raised, considered, discussed, illustrated and in some cases actually investigated, and Byzantine musical notation too, I’d be happy for some clarification on the point Rene was making at voynich.ninja. Has be produced some new research which adds a new insight to older work? What relevance is he arguing for this additional example? Is it just an illustration of musical notation or does he argue that it adds something to our knowledge of the Vms, or must modify the work done by earlier research?

Just for interest sake here’s a link to the post where I included a fourteenth-century ms showing Byzantine musical notation (includes credit to the blogger who had earlier posted it)
https://voynichimagery.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/starting-from-scratch-7-c-seeking-the-voynich-hand-continued-2/

The accompanying paragraphs read:
“I chose the folio (above) as my contrasting example because it includes the Greek musical notation, as written in fourteenth-century style – and some of those ‘glyphs’ I admit are a little reminiscent of the Voynich gallows and of some Voynich glyph-strings – just as Musurus’ style of cursive/abbreviation can evoke one or two of the most ornate Voynich glyphs.

The image shown above just as it was uploaded to Pintrest a year ago by Maureen Cox-Brown – who notes that it came from … Pantokratos monastery.”

By the way, if you look at English in a purely phonetic way, vowel length does create minimal pairs. The erratic spelling of English just obfuscates this.

See for example grid – greed and grit – greet. The only way to distinguish between grid and greet is the length of the vowel.

Spanish speakers don’t feel vowel length, so they say “bitch” when they just mean “beach” 🙂

As an example, most languages repeat a letter to create a double letter, but in relative musical notations and the Pomo language, a symbol doubles anything that precedes it. Pomonians would grasp the idea without a second thought while others would have to learn it.

As for lengthening a vowel, there are many systems, and we have to be careful to distinguish between lengthening the sound (for example, in English some people think of “oo” as a lengthening of “o” when in fact it’s a different sound) and increasing its duration (same sound, but longer time period). In relative musical notation, a sound (the duration of the sound) can be lengthened by a symbol (or in staff systems, by redrawing the sound with a connecting symbol if it crosses a bar boundary). This doesn’t seem very relevant to English, because English doesn’t distinguish meaning by length—if it did, an American southern drawl would be a distinct dialect (rather than simply an accent)—but there are languages where a longer sound means something different.

One of the biggest differences between modifiers in relative notation systems and many languages, is that the identification of a specific tone is based on the neighboring symbols. You can put your finger anywhere in a book and start reading, but you can’t do that in a relative notation system. You have to go back to the beginning to figure out where you are on the scale. It’s a bit like rotating cipher systems… when you encounter a certain pattern, or after a certain distance or number of cycles, the system shifts and the same glyphs mean something different. If you can’t find the starting point, it’s difficult to unravel. Relative musical notation looks almost monotonic in a visual sense, but it’s a deceptive impression. It accesses the full range of the vocal scale. The VMS doesn’t strike me as a rotating cipher, because linguistics are different from a musical scale and require more detailed definition, but I nevertheless wonder if there are modifier and “reset” characters in the VMS.

For example, in an early form of Dutch spelling, “e” was used to lengthen any preceding vowel. This is still the case with “ie” in some Germanic languages.

Similarly, taking VM word-initial “o” as a modifier would partially solve the problems of the small alphabet and positional rigidity, but again this would be a normal linguistic use if digraphs. So what would be the difference?