Author Archives: J.K. Petersen

Not Náhuatl?

In previous blogs, I described possible influences on VMS Pisces and later added a postscript with some pictures of the alligator gar—a New World fish identified by certain researchers as the inspiration for Pisces. This blog looks at other animal identifications and the otolal “label” near the Pisces fish, which the researchers claim is in Náhuatl.

Janick and Tucker, in collaboration with Talbert and Flaherty, have published articles and a book about the Voynich Manuscript that make significant claims about the identity of the flora and fauna. It will take several blogs to comment on their theories and interpretations, so I decided to start with something simple.

Deciphering VMS otolal

On page 162 of Unraveling the Voynich Codex, the researchers state that the VMS “Pisces” fish, and the large fish with a nymph in its mouth (f70r), are New World fish called the alligator gar. They follow this up with the following decipherment:

“The word otolal above the gar can be decoded as ātlācâocâ, according to Tucker and Talbert (2013). Based on similarities to Nahuatl, we suggest that ātlācâocâ might mean “still fished” (ātlācâ = fished, fisherman/spear throwers + oc(a) = still).” —Janick & Tucker, 2018

I don’t know Náhuatl, so I cannot comment directly on this decipherment, but I can pass on what I saw when I looked up ātlācâ in a classical Náhuatl dictionary.

Looking Up ātlācâ

I did a search for atlaca in the Náhuatl dictionary of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. There were numerous hits, but none of them had anything to do with fished, fisherman, or spear throwers. Instead, there was a list of fairly consistent definitions and word combinations relating to bad, ugly, malformed, unwell, bestial, or undesirable, many of them from the 1571 dictionary of the Náhuatl language compiled by Alonso de Molina, a Franciscan priest.

When associated with other syllables or words, atlaca is similar to “mal-” in English, French, and Spanish, which is used to form concepts like malicious, malignant, malady, malformed, and malevolent. There was a reference to mariners, but the word was not specific to sailors, it used sailors as an example of a group of people who are commonly maligned or considered unsavory and the word “ruffians” or “undesirables” could just as easily have been used.

I found some definitions for oc and oca, but I don’t know Náhuatl grammar and can’t judge if it would be correct or usual to append oc or oca to ātlācâ in this way. Perhaps someone who knows Náhuatl will eventually offer an opinion on this.

Another Puzzling Identification

Turning back to the imagery, Janick and Tucker identify this little drawing as a jellyfish:

The image on the bottom of folio 78r… clearly shows the bell and tentacles of a jellyfish…. This tiny zoomorph is crudely rendered and impossible to identify to species level, but there are two possibilities: Chrysaora fuscescens… commonly known as the Pacific sea nettle or the West Coast sea nettle…, or the moon jelly… which is the most common jellyfish in the Gulf of Mexico. —Janick and Tucker (2018, p. 161)

This identification surprises me. Are the researchers ignoring context? I’m pretty sure this is a drain pipe drawn from the front and has nothing to do with sea jellies. There is a drain pipe drawn from the side on the obverse folio:

Large-Plant Identification

Janick and Tucker have suggested that the vine-like plant on folio 49r is Lithophragma affine a delicate plant in the Saxifrage family. They have further identified the snake-like creatures in the roots as a species of salamander (Dermophis mexicanis).

The ID of Lithophragma affine is problematic.

Lithophragma affine, or woodlandstar, doesn’t grow in the Gulf area. It’s almost entirely confined to California, with a minority of sightings in the northwest corner of Mexico. I don’t know if it had wider distribution 400 years ago, but it seems fairly particular about its habitat and doesn’t like overly hot climates.

Dermophis mexicanis, a legless salamander, lives further south. It is a tropical/subtropical salamander that inhabits lowland moist forests from Mexico to Nicaragua. It feeds on bugs, snails, and earthworms as it burrows through loose soil and leaf litter. It does not eat or dig deep into solid roots, as far as I know.

If it were determined that the VMS was a New World publication, it would still be difficult to find links between D. mexicanis and Lithophragma affine that would inspire an illustrator to combine these geographically separate species on the same page.

Prior Identifications of 49v

I wrote about f49v in 2013. I believe the viny plant may be Cuscuta, commonly known as “dodder”. Cuscuta is a parasitic vine. It does not need leaves for photosynthesis because it infiltrates the stalks and sometimes the roots of its host plant. Some species of dodder wind themselves around the stem, others climb over the host to form a monster umbrella.

When Cuscuta is seeking a new host, a long slender shoot wiggles through the soil very much like a snake. Technically, it doesn’t burrow through roots, but once attached to the host, it does sink fang-like filaments into the host’s tissues to suck out the nutrients. If a new shoot doesn’t find a suitable host within a few hours, it will die.

The VMS plant is leafless, with flowers along the length of the stalk, and it’s quite viny. Cuscuta is much the same. In contrast, the woodlandstar (right) is a white- or pink-flowered plant with long, thin, relatively straight stalks and basal leaves somewhat like Ranunculus. The flowers of woodlandstar do not grow along the stalk close to the base.

While an ID of Cuscuta is not a certainty, it does explain the various features of the VMS drawing more completely than a tropical salamander coupled with a California plant that doesn’t resemble the VMS drawing well except for a small swelling behind the flower petals.

One More for the Road

I don’t want to make this overly long, but I would like to mention one more Janick/Tucker/Talbert/Flaherty animal ID.

In the past, I have posted images and maps of VMS Scorpius, which is brownish-green and somewhat similar to a lizard or salamander (lizards and salamanders were often drawn with upright legs in the Middle Ages, as the salamander on the right). It’s a little difficult to see the end of it, but the VMS critter’s tail is very long and reaches all the way past its ankle and in between the two hind legs:

It might seem like a strange way to depict a scorpion, but it is reasonably consistent with some of the Scorpius dragon/lizard/salamander zodiacs of the time. Once again, here is a map of some of the non-scorpion Scorpius drawings:

I was very surprised when Tucker and Talbert identified VMS Scorpius as a cat, and that Janick and Flaherty supported this ID. In their words:

The dark brown or black cat-like animal with a noticeably long tail on folio 73r… appears to be a jaguarundi (Puma yaguaroundi…) in agreement with Tucker and Talbert (2013), who identified this as a black Gulf Coast jaguarundi (P. yagouaroundi cacomitli). —Janick & Tucker (2018)

First of all, the VMS “Scorpius” drawing is not dark brown or black, it’s tannish-green. The tail is noticeably long, and tapers significantly toward its end and curls in a very un-catlike way. Other hairy or woolly animals are drawn in the VMS with lines to indicate the textured coats, but Scorpius does not appear to be furry. Here is an illustration of a jaguarundi (note the shorter, blunter tail):

Why choose the jaguarundi as an ID for Scorpius when VMS Scorpius resembles other Scorpius drawings much more closely than a New World cat?

If the researchers don’t see this as a reptile, amphibian, or dragon, as in traditional drawings of Scorpius, then why not include a range of animals that more closely match the drawing, like the kinkajou or civet (note that VMS scorpio has a line of dots on its side, a characteristic more strongly associated with amphibians, reptiles, and civets than with the jaguarundi):

Summary

I’ve said this before, but I think it’s unproductive to associate a crude VMS drawing of an animal or plant with a specific species unless there are strong indicators that it is something unique and thus clearly identifiable (or for which there is an unambiguous exemplar). Most of the VMS drawings are vague and recognizable only through context—a table of possibilities makes more sense.

In their recent book, the authors dismissed the opinions of numerous researchers by referring to “non-published internet comments and chatter“, but other researchers, many of whom have excellent credentials, remain unpublished because research is ongoing and they prefer not to assume too much too soon.

Mistakes are inevitable, in a work of this antiquity and design, so no one is going to get it right every time, but there’s a difference between careful research that goes awry, and research built on faulty premises. If you rush to publication before an impulse is thoroughly investigated, you might mistake a drainpipe for a jellyfish.

J.K. Petersen

Somewhat Sheep-ish Sketches

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There are a number of critters in the VMS that have sheeplike qualities, especially if one considers the wide range of sheep drawings one finds in the Middle Ages. I’m extremely busy right now, so I have to rush this out on my lunch break and get back to work, and can’t comment on these drawings in depth, or provide links, but I’ll put them out there for those who are interested…

Here is a small selection of critters in the VMS that have been likened to sheep in one way or another:

There are many ways one can analyze medieval sheep drawings based on drawing style and individual features. There are also some peculiar ones, such as sheep that look like horses or wolves, and sheep with leopard or dog faces. I also noticed that the tails of sheep were generally quite long and, in contrast to the fluffy tails of European drawings, sheep from a Bhagavad Gita illustration have skinny tails with tufts on the ends:

One can also look at the way the coats are drawn, some with dots, others with rough or regular lines, some with tufts. Note how each of the coats in the VMS drawings is different. Either this is a very creative person or the illustrator may have been looking at examples from different sources.

Here are sheep textured with dots, spots, or curved and wavy lines:

Sometimes the texture is artistically shaped, blended, or drawn with different colors:

The most common way to draw the sheep bodies was with lines following the direction of the coat, especially tufts:

Sometimes the artist took this idea a step further and rendered the tufts as wave-like curlicues, scales, or calligraphic shapes. Some depicted practical considerations—the drawing on the right has four deliberately different coat textures:

In terms of drawing style, there were two very early drawings that caught my eye. They have the pinched nose and pointy rounded ears one sees on the VMS dragony critter and dead-looking pond critter. This doesn’t necessarily mean a connection, but I found them interesting nonetheless. Note that the one on the right, which illustrates the lamb of God, has a body that looks more like a horse than a sheep and the one on the left also has a rather long neck for a sheep (even one that is recently shorn):

The VMS drawings sometimes have more in common with drawings of the early and middle medieval periods than the late 15th century. This might indicate access to a library that included early manuscripts, or it might be a consequence of limited drawing skills. Note that the sheep on the left has paws, just as the VMS zodiac hooves are somewhat rounded and paw-like.

I have more sheep drawings but this is all I have time for at the moment. One thing I always notice when looking at VMS animals, that stands out from other medieval drawings, is that they are usually smiling. This, in combination with the fact that there are no obvious signs of weapons anywhere in the manuscript, other than the traditional Sagittarius bow and one pointy finger, makes me wonder if whoever created the drawings led a sheltered life.

J.K. Petersen

Matching the Marginalia

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It’s a challenge to find paleographic matches to the VMS. I’ve been hunting for almost eleven years, sampled more than 50,000 characters from scripts that were similar to the marginalia or to the main text, and developed tools to more objectively compare scripts based on slant, heaviness, spacing (between letters and lines), and the individual shapes of each letter.

Evaluating the VMS main text is particularly difficult because some of the glyphs may not be letters, they may be symbols, numbers, or abbreviations, so I will describe the marginalia first, and then explain my strategy for locating scripts similar to Voynichese in a separate blog.

As a sideline, I also looked for matches to the column text on folio 1r, but it is not my primary interest, so I have presented it more simply as a chart, which you can see here.

Selecting the Marginalia

For sampling individual letters in the marginalia, I used these sections:

The more consistent letter-forms on folio 116v (some shapes look like they might be in another hand, although it’s hard to tell, so I gave precedence to those that matched several times on the page rather than those that were questionable), and
The strip of text at the top of folio 17r (which I believe is the same handwriting as most of the text on folio 116v):

Note that I have doubts that the first letter of “valden” is a “v”. For one thing, no one wrote v like this in the Middle Ages (in more than 1,000 samples of text in a similar style, only one v comes close to the shape in “valsen”—this is an unusually low hit rate), but more importantly, if you look closely at the scans, you might notice traces of tails and letters under the last line (to see it you have to ignore the bleed-through from the other side).

Also, the part of the first letter that is visible is a close match to the top of other “p” shapes on this page, which makes me even more suspicious about this letter being “v”. Judge for yourself, here are some examples of common “v” shapes from the Middle Ages (keep in mind that “v” and “u” were used interchangeably in the Middle Ages):

The “v” in “vix” is not common either, usually “v” was written with a curve, but this form is not rare, it is simply uncommon, so I have provisionally used this for “v”, but gave it lower priority than other letters that are written several times (and more clearly).

First Impressions

When I first saw the marginalia, it looked to me like hybrid text, Gothic with hints of both cursive and book hands (I’ll post details later). There are also hints of Italic/humanist hand (e.g., note the small, rounded, spaced-out m).

But… scribes and scholars moved around, so it’s hard to generalize, and there were blended scripts similar to the VMS marginalia in several multicultural areas, including 1) Lombardy, 2) the area encircling the Veneto, 3) some parts of Bavaria/Tyrol, and parts of 4) Alsace/Schwabia.

There’s no sign that the marginalia was influenced by Anglicana, but not all English scribes wrote Anglicana, some adopted the styles of St. Gall. It doesn’t seem as elegant as many of the Parisian scripts, but not all were elegant, and scholars brought many different writing styles to Paris, so… I tried to put my initial impressions out of mind as I searched for similar texts, because I didn’t want to narrow my search based on preconceptions. Thus, I searched digitized manuscripts from as many regions as possible.

Matching the Marginalia

My only requirement for collecting a sample was overall similarity to the basic forms in the marginalia. These scripts tend to score 50 or higher. A really good score is 73 or higher.

Language didn’t matter and, for the most part, dates were ignored (I was hoping dates would fall naturally into place). In general, scripts scored as follows:

I sampled the following characters:

letters of the alphabet,
common abbreviations, and
words like leben/leber/lebe, maria, and vix, when I could find them, or similar words if I couldn’t.

A full sample was typically about 40 characters but not all source texts are long, some are marginalia or short dedications and thus were sampled for as many characters as were available. If the text was heavily abbreviated, I sampled most of the common abbreviations.

Scribes often used more than one shape for certain letters, depending on their position in the word, so I included terminal forms and forms with tails, but “character ratings” were only given to letters that specifically matched marginalia. The rest were evaluated separately.

Here are some general observations from approximately 1,000 reasonably close samples…

Gothic cursive, book, and hybrid hands were common throughout Europe from the late 14th century until the early 16th century, so common that paleographers often have difficulty identifying place of origin.
I was hoping for scores of 95 or better (out of a possible 120 for individual character shapes), but found it extremely difficult to find hands with totals higher than 75. I only have a few. There were a number of interesting finds in the 60 to 75-point range, however. Even if they didn’t match overall, there is some useful information that can be gleaned from individual characters that scored high.
I was hoping high scores might help me geolocate the marginalia-writer’s origins, but many of the manuscripts that scored high are of uncertain origin.
Certain letter-forms are very common, while others are specific to the scribe. For example, thousands of scribes wrote p, r, s, and o like the marginalia, while other letters are unusual or more commonly found in 14th-century scripts or in book hands. I will describe these characteristics in separate blogs.

The marginalia is not abbreviated in obvious or traditional ways, but one gets the feeling that some of the words might be missing letters because the words don’t quite make sense. There are, however, languages that have implied vowels, like some of the Bohemian languages, so perhaps this mindset was familiar to the writer and influenced the way words were written.

Scoring Individual Letters

Each letter is scored differently based on how widely the letter varied in medieval scripts. The letter “o”, for example, is not going to vary as significantly as an ornate letter like “g” or “h-with-a-tail”.

A perfect match scores 6. Out of tens of thousands of individual-letter clips, only one 6 has been given so far. Very close matches generally score 5 because even close matches don’t quite look like the same handwriting. The overall shape might be the same, but there are usually subtle differences in pressure, stroke order, or the way the parts connect.

How objective and consistent are these scores?

The first (and more important) answer is that I have a list of criteria for rating each letter—these could be taught to another person as long as that person has experience in reading old scripts.

The second answer is anecdotal…

One day I noticed two sets of samples lined up next to each other with identical scores. I thought I had discovered two different manuscripts written by the same scribe. As it turned out, I had inadvertently sampled the same manuscript (different folios) almost four years apart. The results were exactly the same.

Why does it matter?

The marginalia may have been added long after the VMS was created, so why would I devote so many years to studying it?

It’s possible it was added later, but research into the letterforms has convinced me that the marginalia may have been written close to the time of the VMS, perhaps even at the same time. If so, then the marginalia writer was potentially a designer, advisor, or even illustrator.

Even if the marginalia was added later, anything that can be learned about the Voynich Manuscript brings us a little closer to understanding it, and if the source of the script style can be located (or connected with other documents in the same handwriting), it might help unravel the missing provenance.

J.K. Petersen

Multilingual Melting Pots

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There is a tiny linguistic gem northeast of the Veneto—an alpine village nestled near an important mountain pass. The inhabitants speak Tischlbong, a language related to Carinthian, a south-Bavarian dialect spoken by Slovenes who inhabit the mountains of the southern Tyrol and parts of the Slovenian Styria. As a distinct dialect, Carinthian dates back to about the end of the 13th century.

Timau by Mikmaq, Wikipedia

The little village of Timau is known since the early 13th century, and was once part of the Lombardic-Venetian empire. Timau (once known as Teschelwang), was rebuilt after severe flood damage and became part of Italy in 1866. The younger people now speak Italian, but also generally understand Friulian, a Romance language with roots in Ladin.

It is the older people who are fluent in Tischlbong, a medieval dialect shared with Slovenian residents of the Tyrol. A similar situation exists in Lombardy—the Lombardic language is mostly spoken by the elders, with the younger generation moving over to Italian.

Talking Tischlbong

At first the Tischlbong language seems odd, but if you switch your brain to German and note the patterns, after a while it makes sense. Substitute “b” for “w”, sometimes “p” for “b”, and drop some of the endings and doubled letters, and one gets words like

is da (ist die/is the); af (auf/of)
Otobar (Oktober/October)
ausar (her ausser/but for)
varlosen (verlassen/leave)

which has some commonalities with Voynichese in its simplicity and emphasis on vowel forms.

Tischlbong caught my attention not only because of its unique characteristics of dropping characters and compressing words, but because the larger Carinthian-speaking population has multicultural connections to Graz, the Veneto, and Slovenia. Historically, the principality of Carantani extended as far as Salzburg, on the German border. Forerunners to the language may also have been spoken in Swabia.

Klenje, Wikimedia Commons

Also noteworthy is that many of the inhabitants of Timau communicate with neighboring villages in Friulian, a language that includes words from Latin, Ladin, Venetian, Lombardic, and even ancient Celtic, while still retaining some elements of French grammar. Thus, Friulian adds a strong Romance component to the local culture along with a number of German words.

As examples, we see bon viaç (French bon voyage) for good journey, buine sere (Spanish/Italian) for good evening, and cràmar (from MH German Kramaere) for pedlar or haberdasher.

Records of these languages and villages begin to emerge in the middle medieval period, early enough to precede the Voynich Manuscript.

There are several places where combinations of languages happened naturally. One I’ve mentioned several times is the Burgundian corridor bordering Italy, Provençe, and Switzerland. I’ve also blogged about blended Latin and German, but wanted to include the eastern side of Lombardy, southern Tyrol, and the Veneto, as well, and to mention Tischlbong and Friulian (and their sister dialects) in the context of blended languages.

Summary

The text on folio 116v of the Voynich Manuscript is somewhat Germanic on the top line, Romance on the second line (at least in structure and the balance of vowel sounds), Latin on the third line, and Voynichese and Germanic on the fourth line. If a resident in one of the borderland villages of mixed Germanic/Romance origin were writing something for his or her convenience, it might come out in a similar way.

As for the main text, it is very concise and sparse and, in some ways, reminded me of Tischlbong. I’m not assuming the VMS is natural language, but I do think it came from the mind of someone who liked to focus on what was important and who did not include a lot of unnecessary “extras”, and many Tischlbong words, when compared to their German analogs, defy convention and include only what is necessary to understand them and no more.

J.K. Petersen

A Line in the Stars

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Recently Voynich Views posted a blog about the line (or lack of one) connecting the fish that represent the astrological symbol Pisces, paying specific attention to those that look like the VMS long-nosed fish. I have a dataset of more than 500 zodiac cycles, so I thought I would post them to help round out the picture.

Long-nosed fish are definitely in the minority. Only about 8% of the total samples in my files have long noses, and if you filter out those with a line between the fish, only 3% remain.

The majority of those with long noses originated in France, with a few from Austria and Germany. There were also single examples from Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. If you look back at the map of symbols similar to VMS Scorpio, you will see that several of those that resemble the VMS lizardy Scorpius are also from France.

The earliest examples, mainly from the 12th and 13th centuries are from France, England, Cologne, and Austria. Those enclosed in circles are from France, Austria, Germany, and the Hague.

Only two or three of the fish pairs have the same “wavy” shape as the VMS fish (a couple from Paris, possibly one from England, and one from Austria). Note that the 12th century zodiac from Seckau, Austria, may have had the drawings added in the 15th century, so I have sorted according to the later date [click to see larger]:

It’s interesting that so many of the VMS details are in the minority. Crossbow Sagittarius is relatively uncommon, as is lizardy Scorpius, and double-Cancer. The Gemini “courting couple” is also uncommon.

Pisces with a long nose is quite uncommon, especially those without a line between the fish. I sometimes wonder if the person who designed the VMS zodiac signs got the general idea from looking at zodiacs but inserted pictures copied from other sources. For example, in CLM 10072 and BNF Lat. 13025, we see a long-nosed fish in a pond, and a long-nosed fish with the scales emphasized in an embellished initial. The Book of Wonders and the Rochester Bestiary also have a variety of long-nosed fish. Plus, there are a couple of “zodiac man” images with long-nosed fish under the man’s feet that I didn’t include in the above compilation.

Another way that the VMS fish differ from many fish drawings is the way the scales cover the whole body. Many illustrators don’t put scales on the bellies:

The wavy form of the VMS bodies is also unusual. I found a “wavy” fish in an Arabic manuscript, but other than the undulating posture, it doesn’t strongly resemble the VMS fish. It has spots, three fins top and bottom, a pale belly, and a drawing style that is much more eastern:

There are also some long-nosed fish in the marketplace and in the water in Tacuinum Sanitatus:

This fish is scaly top to bottom, but the fins and nose are quite different from the VMS fish:

In the planetary influences section, Cod. Sang. 760 has a human Sagittarius and some scaly long-nosed fish, but the fish are roughly sketched and probably later than the VMS:

Morgan B.19 has a very cute drawing that looks like it was done by a child that includes a long-nosed fish with double dorsel fins:

In the Andalius De Sphaera (c. 1327), we see long-nosed dolphins. They’re not fish, they’re mammals but many old texts refer to them as fish and even today many people call them “fish”:

Family emblems, such as this one (which also features cloud-band imagery), sometimes include long-nosed fish:

The best match I’ve seen for the VMS fish outside of zodiac imagery was the one pointed out by MarcoP in the Sachsenspiegel. It has a long nose, a face quite similar to the VMS fish, and is scaly top to bottom. I’ve turned it sideways so it is easier to see:

Summary

Even though the VMS long-nosed fish are unique in a number of ways, there are several possible sources for the imagery, including zodiacs, bestiaries, and manuscripts unrelated to astrology.

The Parisian zodiac dating from c. 1350 (Morgan M.75) is the closest I’ve found so far as a Pisces symbol, in terms of style and features. Morgan M.75 also includes a four-legged Scorpius and crayfish Cancer, so perhaps there is some common source that connects them, but I’d like to gather more information and continue analyzing what I have before venturing any conclusions.

J.K. Petersen

[Postscript July 27, 2018] I found this picture after I posted the blog:

The drawing style is different from the VMS, but the features are notable. It has long-nosed double-dorsal fish that are scaly from top to bottom. Plus, something that is even harder to find in fish with these characteristics… the lower one has an undulating posture. The image detail is from a 14th-century hell-mouth fresco in the Timios Prodromos monastery in Serres, Greece.

Serres also has grottoes with fabulous stalactites. I’m always on the lookout for grottoes since some of the VMS bathing images have grotto-like structures.

J.K. Petersen

Postscript 30 August 2018: It has been suggested that the VMS Pisces symbol represents the New World alligator gar. Here is a picture of the gar. Note there is one fin top, two sets of fins bottom-front, and another fin back-bottom. Drawn from the side, it might look like one top and three bottom.

If the researchers who identified the VMS fish as alligator gar are going to ignore the mismatch in the number of fins, then any fish with a long nose could be said to be similar to the VMS fish, including the northern pike, which is indigenous to both Old and New Worlds:

The same researchers claim the fish with the nymph in its mouth on folio 79v is also an alligator gar. I can’t take that seriously. Look at the mouth, it’s very broad and blunt, more like a wide-mouthed bass:

In contrast, the mouth of the alligator gar is long, narrow, and toothy (especially this species):

Natural or Traditional?

Four years ago, I looked at hundreds of pictures of New World and Old World fish and there are several with long noses and two fins top and two bottom, but I have the feeling the VMS illustrator consulted other drawings rather than studying real fish because VMS Pisces resembles medieval illustrations more than it does naturalistic drawings of the time.

Here is a small subset of Pisces symbols with varying numbers of fins and long noses. They are all Old World illustrations:

I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the VMS fish look more like the New World alligator gar, or like fish in pre-conquest medieval illustrations. I’m partial to the fish in the Sachsenspiegel with its similar face and tail, and to the fish in the Greek fresco, which have the right number of fins, top-to-bottom scales, and narrow curvy bodies.

Small Clues in the Marginalia

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I’ve mentioned that the person who wrote the VMS marginalia may have learned to write in the late 14th century or early 15th century. If so, he or she could have lived at the same time as those who illustrated and wrote the VMS, and might even have been involved in the creation of the manuscript in some way.

I’ve already posted some of the statistical properties of the marginalia “g” on the voynich.ninja forum. Here is a reprise of the comparison chart:

Samples of the letters “g” and “a” suggest the marginalia writer was familiar with older handwriting (e.g., 14th century), or with more formal book hands, and it appears that the writer may have learned to write in the late 14th or early 15th century. This suspicion is not based on just one set of statistics, however.

The Sample Set

To sample the marginalia, I used the text on 116v and 17r because I’m fairly confident it is the same handwriting. I did not use “ven mus mel” because there are too few words to be certain if it’s the same. Many scribes had similar handwriting. In fact, they were encouraged to copy each other so several scribes could work on the same manuscript without awkward transitions.

Below is the sample set I use for full comparisons. Note that the “z” is actually an abbreviation symbol, but most scribes wrote it like the letter “z” and sometimes also the number “3”, so I provisionally stored it in the “z” slot.

It’s not clear whether the last letter of “gaf” on the last line is “f” or “s” but since most scribes wrote them the same (except for the crossbar), it probably doesn’t make a big difference. When assigning values to similarity, I gave higher priority to letters that are repeated and clearly written. I consider the “u” and “v” shapes to be lower priority since “u” is not clear and the “v” appears to be in a different style.

Note that “n” has both a descending “tail” and a non-tail form. This is very common. Many scribes wrote n, m, and h both with and without a tail:

Now here’s an interesting puzzle…

Is the first “a” on f17r a double-chamber “a”, the style that was popular in the 14th century, but less so in the 15th century?

It’s hard to tell, but it looks like it might be, if the top is slightly fuzzed. It was very common for the two-chamber “a” to be taller than other characters nearby:

It’s impractical to post exhaustive statistics or lists of manuscripts that have different styles of the letter “a” in a blog, but to give the flavor of it, here are examples from the 14th century with only the double-chambered “a” (from scripts with some similarity to the marginalia):

In paleography, there are many hybrid scripts (scripts that blend different styles). Paleographers frequently argue about names and classifications (some have devoted whole books to this), but diversity isn’t a bad thing—it can help identify an individual’s writing.

The Significance of the Double-Story “a”

As the single-story “a” became more popular in the 15th century, some scribes mixed both singles and doubles, sometimes even in the same sentence. Here you can see both kinds of “a” in marginalia that was added c. 14th century to an early medieval calendar:

Sometimes the mixing was random, other times, the double-story “a” was used as an uppercase “a” or at the beginnings of words.

The double-story “a” was retained for a longer time in more formal book hands, but casual hands gradually abandoned it for the single-story “a”. By the late 14th century and early 15th century, many manuscripts included only the single-story “a”:

Some Statistical Properties of the Marginalia “a”

As mentioned previously, I set up a mathematical system to compare letters more objectively. A perfect match on higher-priority letters would be 120 (with slant, weight, connectivity, spacing, etc., assessed separately). After 10 years, 5 months, and 5 days of searching for a close match, I still find it quite difficult to locate scripts higher than 75, so a bit of luck will probably be necessary to do better.

It surprised me that a medieval “a” could be so varied. Out of a sample of more than 1,000 manuscripts specifically chosen for their similarity to the VMS marginalia, only 20% scored 4 or higher (out of 6) for letter-forms.

Note that the stem is fairly vertical, and the loop doesn’t quite close on the bottom. There is a small point at the top of the stem and the serif turns up at a fairly sharp angle.

Finding all these characteristics together is a challenge, but here are some of the better matches. Note that the overall score (listed under the letter) isn’t always high. In other words, even if the “a” was fairly close to the VMS script, sometimes other letters were not:

If the letter on 17r is a double-story “a”, then it has some physical and statistical commonalities with the single-story “a”. The stem is fairly upright and the bottom loop is not quite closed. Note that the bottom loop is larger than the top one (some scribes did it the other way around).

Here are some examples from handwriting that is fairly similar to the VMS (note that only one “a” is significantly similar to the VMS “a” in shape, proportions, and slant, and it lacks the sharp serif):

When the double-story “a” is substituted, the statistics for overall similarity come out very much like the previous search, as did the date range of most of the samples. In other words, scribes with handwriting similar to the VMS writer used either or both forms of “a” around the same time period as they wrote letter-forms similar to the VMS.

Summary

The greater popularity of the double-story “a” in the 14th century might suggest a date earlier rather than later in the 15th century, although there are a few areas where the double-story “a” was still common until the end of the 15th century. Some parts of eastern Europe, and many of the smaller more remote towns, lagged behind large urban areas in terms of the evolution of script. It does seem very likely, however, based on the paleographic evidence, that the marginalia was added after 1330 and before 1490. It’s not as precise as radio-carbon dating, but it does help when research from various disciplines tends to confirm rather than deny the existing data.

I have much more information on this topic, but will cover it in separate blogs, and I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether the letter on folio 17r is a double-story “a”.

J.K. Petersen

Stars on Strings

The Chameleon Quality of Scribal Conventions

1 Reply

Medieval alphabets, numbers, and abbreviations are often the same shape. For example, the glyph identified in the VMS as EVA-l (ell) was used as both a number and as a scribal abbreviation. In the previous blog, I described the “is” glyph, which is used to create syllables such as ris, tis, or cis. This time I’ll illustrate the flexibility of the EVA-l shape.

Something I noticed, when reading early medieval texts, is that many basic abbreviation symbols were based on Indic-Arabic numbers, long before these shapes came into general use. I’m assuming this was to help distinguish abbreviations from regular letters.

Thus, the number 1 (the old style with a slight wiggle), and the lightning-bolt style of 5 were used for er/ir/re/ri and other sound-alikes that usually include “r”. Number 2 represented ur/tur, number 3 (often written like a zee) was at the ends of words to stand for rem or us/um. Number 4 (as shown above) was a general-purpose abbreviation, 7 became et, and the number 9 was commonly used at the beginnings of words for con/cum, and at the ends for us/um. These conventions continued from the early medieval period until the 16th century. The only significant change was that the number 4 gradually fell out of use by the 15th century.

The 4 had lapsed as an abbreviation by the time the Voynich Manuscript was created, but it had become common to use it as a numeral.

This clip from a legal charter illustrates the flexible nature of 4. It represents whatever letters are missing, similar to a short macron or curved macron in late medieval texts. It usually stood for one- or two-letter omissions (a bar was more commonly used if several letters were missing). Here it variously stands for m, n, and er:

Scribal abbreviation 4 symbol representing a number of different letters

Examples of the flexible nature of the “4” abbreviation standing in for several different letters or more than one letter. [Image credit: Stiftsarchiv Reichersberg German legal document from 1231]

You might wonder why a single glyph would be substituted for another single glyph rather than writing the missing letter. Part of the reason is space. There is plenty of space between lines that goes unused, so substituting a superscripted letter shortens the overall length of the document (and the amount of parchment needed). Vanity may also play a part—those who could write and read abbreviated text probably moved up in the social hierarchy.

Paper began to replace parchment in the 14th century, and was less expensive, so some of the superscripted abbreviations, like 9, were lowered to the main text (some scribes wrote it both ways). The 4 continued to be superscripted until it became more strongly associated with numbers rather than with abbreviations:

I think it’s important to understand how scribes made the distinction between letters, abbreviations, and embellishments if one is to analyze anything written in the medieval period.

I still encounter considerable skepticism about the VMS glyph-shapes being inspired by Latin. They are not as unusual as many people have suggested.

You can search all over the world for that elusive “alphabet” without finding it. In fact, I did exactly that. Even though I recognized these shapes as Latin, I wanted to be sure I had not overlooked anything and spent two years learning dozens of foreign alphabets (Armenian, Syriac, Gujarati, Georgian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, etc., in addition to the ones I already knew… Korean, Japanese, Russian and a tiny bit of Chinese), well enough to read simple words… and then came back to where I started—almost all the VMS glyphs are normal Latin scribal repertoire, and the few that are questionable are similar to Greek conventions or could reasonably be constructed from Latin scribal building blocks put together in a slightly unconventional and yet acceptable way.

Understanding scribal conventions might help sort out which variations in VMS shapes are meaningful and which are not. For example, in Latin, you can draw the tail on EVA-m in any direction without changing the meaning, but if you change the left-hand side, it becomes another syllable. In Latin, the 9 shape can be drawn any way you want, as long as it is vaguely 9-shaped, but if you move it from the end of the word to the beginning, you change the meaning. VMS glyphs might follow similar concepts even if different meanings have been assigned.

Summary

If some of the VMS glyphs are abbreviations, it creates one-to many relationships of varying lengths. If this were a substitution code, this, in itself, would not be unduly difficult for cryptanalysts to unravel, but in medieval times there was another twist—scribal abbreviations commonly represented not only several letters, but often different letters in each word. In this way, scribal abbreviations diverge from typical one-to-many/many-to-one diplomatic ciphers, in that the interpretation of a specific shape can change from one word to the next.

In Latin, and possibly also in the VMS, two words can look the same, but mean something different.

J.K. Petersen

Le’go my Lego

2 Replies

I’ve frequently posted that Latin scribal conventions are flexible. They are like Lego^® blocks that can be taken apart and recombined in many ways. This is essential to understanding Voynich text. Looking for similar shapes is not enough, one has to consider the combinatorial and positional dynamics of medieval text in relation to the VMS.

Basic Building Blocks

I’ve already discussed these shapes in previous blogs, but I’m going to post again with additional examples. This is one of the most common Latin scribal conventions, frequently used to represent the syllables “ris”, “tis”, and “cis”.

The glyphs below are from two scribes with different handwriting styles so you can see how the abbreviations vary from hand to hand, but can still be understood by the reader:

Some parts of the ris/tis/cis abbreviation are meaningful and some can be changed to suit the person’s handwriting or aesthetic sensibilities. This is one of the reasons why it’s important for the dynamics of scribal abbreviations to be understood—meaningful and non-meaningful variations in glyph-shapes need to be differentiated to create accurate VMS transcripts.

For ris/tis/cis, the left side of the glyph defines the meaning (although ris and tis can sometimes be hard to tell apart in 15th-century documents and tis and cis can be hard to tell apart in 13th-century documents). In the example below, it’s quite clear that the left side is “r” for ris, but the shape of the right side can be varied, as long as there is a small loop with some kind of tail. In this 15th-century addition to an early medieval calendar, the tail is long and swings left:

A further example (c. 16th century), shows that the ris/tis/cis abbreviations were still used during the Renaissance and early modern period, and could vary in shape, as long as the meaning was clear from the context. Note here that “tis” looks like a small EVA-k at the end of the word hereditatis. It has a straight stem (no foot as in earlier script styles) and a short tail, and yet is perfectly understandable:

Here’s an example in a different 15th-century hand in which ris has a foot and so, to distinguish it from tis, the scribe has given tis a bigger foot and a subtly more rounded back. Also notice how cis is rounded to the point that it looks like EVA-d with a tail. This cis-variation is also found in the VMS and might be a hand-variant of the cis-shaped glyph or might be a separate glyph:

This example, from yet another 15th-century scribe, shows tis and cis in context. Even if you don’t know medieval Latin, you can probably figure out that the word on the right is “dulcis”. Note how the tis and cis are at the ends of the words. This is how they are usually positioned in languages that use Latin conventions and in the VMS, but they can be placed elsewhere if desired:

Similar Shapes in the VMS

Now I’d like to point out a snippet from the VMS that suggests the Latin “is” convention was probably known to the scribe or designer, because it is not always written like EVA-k and EVA-m in the VMS. A right-facing loop with a stem is sometimes attached to other letters.

On the left, an “is” shape has been attached to EVA-a or, alternately, it might be a straight-leg EVA-d attached to the right side of a bench. Either way, EVA-d has a variant form with a straight leg that is similar to Latin short-leg cis. I don’t have a clip handy, but “is” also appears next to other glyphs such as EVA-y.

In the example below-right, both ris and cis shapes are visible, but what you might overlook if you are not familiar with Latin scribal variations, is that the character in the middle of the second line is drawn a little differently. This might be a differently-written ris (different from others in the VMS), OR if one were reading this as a Latin scribal glyph, it could also be interpreted as EVA-i with the looped shape added:

Summary

After I wrote a series of blogs on Latin scribal conventions there was a mini-flood of Voynich “solutions” that made the headlines, all claiming that the VMS was abbreviated Latin. They looked suspicious to me because the researchers clearly didn’t understand how to use these conventions correctly and thus could not have come up with the idea independently.

Here are some of the major problems with these “solutions”:

Latin scribal abbreviations don’t automatically mean Latin language. Latin conventions were used in all major European languages. Even some of the west Asian languages apply some of the same concepts. The VMS might turn out to be Latin, but not in the simplistic way these researchers translated the VMS text. And it might not be Latin—the same scribal conventions are used in Spanish, French, English, German, Czech, Italian, and other languages. Sometimes the same shape means the same thing in different languages, and sometimes it is adjusted to fit the spelling or grammar of the host language (for example, a squiggle-apostrophe might mean -er in English and -re in French).
Most of the proposed “solutions” are nonsense words, not Latin. They might include one correct Latin word out of every 20 or 30 words (more by accident than by design) and they might look a bit like Latin, but it’s not Latin vocabulary, it is certainly not Latin word-order or word-frequency, and it definitely isn’t Latin grammar (not even note-form grammar).
Those offering the solutions expanded the abbreviations incorrectly—that was the give-away that they hadn’t really done their homework and probably got the idea from somewhere else. Saying that it’s Latin is easy, anyone can do it—demonstrating that it’s Latin when you don’t know scribal conventions makes it really obvious to those who can read medieval script that the person offering the solution is not even superficially familiar with the basics. One of the solutions, published in a prominent newspaper, expanded one of the most simple and common Latin abbreviations the wrong way (he forgot to take into consideration the position of the abbreviation in the word). Another solution didn’t recognize the fact that Latin scribal glyphs have many different meanings, not just one, and that the meaning is inferred from context. The solver expanded them all the same way which, once again, generates nonsense rather than natural language.

The VMS might be natural language and it might not. If it is natural language, it’s possible scribal shapes are different from alphabetical shapes. The majority of computational attacks do not take this into consideration, or the fact that if there are scribal shapes, they might need to be expanded.

So, I will continue to post examples, as I have time. Perhaps a better familiarity with medieval conventions will help researchers understand which glyphs might be combination glyphs, which parts might need to be expanded (if the glyphs do, in fact, represent abbreviations and ligatures), and how VMS transcripts could best be adjusted to provide a more accurate rendering of the text.

J.K. Petersen

C-3P oh?

Summary

There are several reasons for posting this example…

It illustrates medieval evolution in representing information,
it provides a 15th-century example of codified plant data that is outside the mainstream (not everything was slavishly copied in the Middle Ages),
it demonstrates that VMS labels shouldn’t be assumed to be nouns (I’ve noticed this is a very widespread assumption among Voynich researchers)—they may be abbreviated or encoded character traits (easy to say, but this example demonstrates how it might be done),
it expressly demonstrates that VMS text should not be assumed to be wholly linguistic. The text may be abbreviated in a number of ways… the VMS could include scribal abbreviations that are linguistic or symbolic, or an entirely different system of coding,
if there is codified data that includes numbers, then the majority of Voynich “solutions” are inadequate even if they turn out to be partially right—very few researchers include numbers in their proposed solutions, even though numbers are commonly found in medieval manuscripts, and
it provides an example of a system that might account for glyph-priority within tokens.

The idea that the VMS might be ultra-abbreviated is not new—the possibility has been mentioned by others. Highly verbose codes have also been suggested—neither contention has yet been demonstrated or proved.

I’ve been investigating the possibility of codified text for almost as long as I’ve known about the VMS because I’m familiar with data encoding in scientific papers and noticed many of the VMS tokens were quite short and formulaic, but finding a medieval example to confirm that this kind of thinking existed in the 15th century can be difficult if you are explicitly searching for it. Sometimes it’s better to wait until a suitable example comes along, as happened with Clm 667.

J.K. Petersen

Voynich Portal

Ruminations about the mysterious 15th century "cipher manuscript"

Author Archives: J.K. Petersen

Not Náhuatl?

Deciphering VMS otolal

Looking Up ātlācâ

Another Puzzling Identification

Large-Plant Identification

Prior Identifications of 49v

One More for the Road

Summary

Somewhat Sheep-ish Sketches

Matching the Marginalia

Selecting the Marginalia

First Impressions

Matching the Marginalia

Scoring Individual Letters

How objective and consistent are these scores?

Why does it matter?

Multilingual Melting Pots

Talking Tischlbong

Summary

A Line in the Stars

Summary

Natural or Traditional?

Small Clues in the Marginalia

The Sample Set

The Significance of the Double-Story “a”

Some Statistical Properties of the Marginalia “a”

Summary

Stars on Strings

The Chameleon Quality of Scribal Conventions

Summary

Le’go my Lego

Basic Building Blocks

Similar Shapes in the VMS

Summary

C-3P oh?

Summary