Tag Archives: VMS f116v

I C U

In his most recent CipherMysteries blog, Nick Pelling zeroed in on a shape on the top line of f116v in the Voynich Manuscript. The letter in question (there are plenty of questions) has been interpreted in more ways than I realized. Pelling has suggested that it might be, “…a rare way of writing a Gothic ‘s’ shape”. I have to admit, “s” never occurred to me when I examined the letter. Not even once.

Here is a snippet that includes the mystery letter (focus on the first character). Underneath, I include a color-enhanced version to make it clear which shape(s) we are talking about and what I see when I look at it.

Pelling says he proposed in 2009 that it might be read as “simon sint (something)”. I found this  puzzling. No matter how I look at it, or split up the pen strokes, I don’t see a medieval “s” at the beginning (I’ll post examples of Gothic “s” further on):

To clarify my thoughts on this…

First, I do not see the first letter in the first word and the first letter in the second word as necessarily being the same. To me, the second one might have a faint descender and a horizontal line just to the right of the descender (under the smudgy part). It’s more squished than the first one (in the horizontal direction). It might be the same letter and it might not. The serifs at the beginnings of words often look similar on different letters.

I couldn’t see any descenders in the multispectral scans, but whether a descender shows depends partly on resolution and partly on which spectra are chosen. The first letter doesn’t appear to have a descender, however. The one on “put?fer” might. The letter on the right word looks vaguely like a “p” but I’m not sure, so most of my comments will be about the first word and the mystery letter on the left.

Sorting out the Letters in the First Word

I usually refer to the first word as “umen” or “umon”, but ONLY for communication, not because I’m committed to any particular interpretation. I have a list of possibilities and I don’t assume it’s a word—it could be a string of characters (e.g., vmçn), or an abbreviation.

The “e/o” letter is indistinct. It could be “o”, “c”, “ç”, or “e” (or something else). When I enlarge it, looks like there might be a couple of pen skips, so it’s possible it is an incomplete “o” (right). Letters 2 and 4 look like “m” and “n”, but I’m not sure about “m” because the humps are different from all the other “m” letters on the folio. Could it be “in”?

Scribal Habits

Before going into detail about the mystery letter, I’d like to point out that whoever wrote this (assuming a specific individual authored most of it) habitually used leading serifs, some of them quite long. It’s possible the writer learned both bookhand (the more formal handwriting) and cursive hand (for rapid writing). There are many hybrid hands with elements of both (see previous blog about the letter “g” which has a bookhand tail and low end-serif).

Here are examples of letters with leading serifs. The serif on the letter “i” is longer than average for scripts of this style:

Now here comes the surprise…

I couldn’t figure out why Pelling kept referring to the first letter as “^”. I assumed he was trying to be neutral about the letter’s identity by choosing a symbol instead of a letter, which is actually a good idea. It was several hours before it hit me that maybe he was interpreting only the serif as a letter. My reaction was, “Whoaaaaaaa!!”

It’s been a week of surprises palaeography-wise. I did not fully appreciate, until the last few days, how differently each researcher sees these characters.

Here are my feelings about it…

The serif at the beginning of the shape on the right is not a letter. If it were, the only typical letter it might be in Gothic script would be an undotted “i” with a very long serif.

An extra-long serif is not  unusual at the beginning of a word, but it still doesn’t look very much like “i”, in my opinion, it looks nothing like “s” either. Also, if the “^” shape were a letter, then what is the blob attached by a stroke on the bottom? The right stroke is not written like the other “i” shapes. NONE of the other “i” letters on the folio has a crooked stem or connects to the previous letter along the bottom. I think this is one letter, not two—one letter with a long serif.

So what letter is it?

You may have noticed that the longest serif of all is on our mystery letter, but is it unusually long? That depends on the identity of the letter. A long leading serif is unusual on the letter “i” but completely normal on “u” and “v” shapes.

Before I post the v/u examples, I’d like to clarify the medieval letter “s” to explain why I don’t think the beginning of the word is “s” (not even a rare one)…

Examples of Medieval “s”

Based on direct observation and sampling thousands of medieval manuscripts, I have identified seven primary forms of “s” in scripts of the same basic style as 116v:

  • straight “s”
  • long “s” (essentially a straight “s” plus a descender)
  • final-“s” sigma (inherited from Greek)
  • final-“s” B shape (similar to modern ß but usually representing one “s”)
  • final-“s” snake shape (like our modern “s”—not common in most countries, although Spanish manuscripts often have this form of “s”)
  • figure-8 “s” (a true figure-8, not one that is deliberately skewed like a cursive “d” or accidentally similar to “8”—this was not common in cursive hands, but is sometimes found in book hands)
  • esszett (commonly expressed on computers as ß, this character had slightly different meanings in different languages but was frequent in central European manuscripts)

The straight-s (which modern eyes can easily mistake for “f”) was more popular in the early medieval period. The stem does not go below the baseline. The long-s has the same hook shape as straight-s plus a descender.

In the early medieval manuscripts, the straight-s was sometimes the only form of “s” used (which means it could be in any position in the word). In other manuscripts, a different “s” (final-s) was used at the ends of words. By the late medieval period, most scribes used a different “s” at the ends of words and some used multiple forms of “s”, as the example below-right:

The straight-s was gradually replaced by long-s. Straight-s is not very common in scripts that are similar to the 116v text, most of them use long-s.

Sometimes scribes added loops or flourishes, but the general form was the same. This chart illustrates that the VMS long-s is quite ordinary:

I’m not aware of any “s” shapes that resemble the first letter or even the first two penstrokes of “umen” but the above forms match well with the first letter of “six”, the last letter of “gas/gaf” and the last letters of “oladabas/oladabad”, “imiltos/multos/miltos” and portad/portas”, so the 116v script is reasonably conventional.

Summary

I don’t have a definitive ID for the mystery letter. It looks like the top of an open-p with a long leading serif, but I can’t see a descender (at least not on the first one) or any rubouts under the letter.

It comes closer to a flat-bottomed “v” than the remaining letters of the alphabet but I haven’t found a close match (the flat-bottomed variant is not as common as those with pointed bottoms). The vee on the right is a little too flat—it has lost the “v” shape.

Here is a chart of v/u letters common throughout the medieval period. There are a some flat-bottomed versions circa 1355, 1395, 1400, 1402, and 1410, so it’s possible this style was more prevalent after the mid-14th century, but I haven’t had time to confirm if this is true:

Coming back to the second letter… if this shape is “in” instead of “m”, it might be read as “vinen”, which has meanings in several languages (come, they come, the wine, the vines).

If the last word is “putrifer” then “vinen putrifer” (the grapes ferment/the wine ferments) would be hard to ignore as a possible interpretation. In certain germanic dialects, the “n” at the end of “vinen” is like adding the article “the”.

But what if it’s an “o”? Then it might be vinon or uinon which is harder to pin down than vinen. Vinon is a place in France, but a place name doesn’t seem like the best fit with the other words on the line.

Is anything gained by studying unknown letters?

Even if we can’t make out the letter, the serif on the mystery shape has a calligraphic “brush stroke” feel to it, as does the tail and dipped oval of the letter “g” on the last line. And yet, it’s not professional calligraphy. Maybe these clues hint at other skills…

Was it someone who could draw or who used a brush for some other craft? Medieval artists and illuminators were sometimes illiterate or semi-literate. Perhaps the writer contributed the nose on Aries, painted some of the plants, or inked the secondary breasts on the nymphs. The style of writing is 15th century and might even be earlier in the century if the “a” in 17r “mallier” is a double-story “a”.

I’ve never assumed the writer had any involvement in the creation of the VMS—notes on back pages were often added decades later—but the possibility is there… and that makes it more interesting.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2018 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved

Final Page, But Probably Not the Finale

9 January 2018

Like an ancient whale surfacing for air, discussions of the marginalia on folio 166v re-emerge from time-to-time. The subject this time was a possible French/Catalan interpretation, something Nick Pelling has apparently written about in the past and commented on in his Cipher Mysteries blogs.

I haven’t seen Pelling’s earlier writings about this folio, but I’m fairly certain the marginalia at the top of f17r is the same hand as the final page. Also, the f17r marginalia includes a word that looks to me like mallier (an ending often found in French), so I’m perfectly willing to consider a French interpretation, especially since porta?/portas/portad on the last page is a construction common to Romance languages.

If we evaluate the top line as French/Provençal, there are a number of possibilities. But first, I should mentioned that I thought for a long time that the last letter in this line was “r”. Now I am not so sure. The more I look at it, the more it resembles some kind of i-like blip followed by a worm-hole. If that’s a wormhole, then it’s probably not an “r”. I wish it were, so this line might be interpreted as a piece of verse. Then one might get something like this:

por le ber [o]u mon votr[e] fer   or   por le ber [o]u mon votr[e] fe

Yes, I know, this isn’t good French or Provençal, it’s as much of a potpourri as any German interpretation, but it shows that the top line is not necessarily germanic in the same sense as “so nim[m] gaf/gas mich” on the last line.

The words in the middle are by no means clear. It could be “um en” or “urien” or “uri on” or “[o]u mon” any number of odd interpretations. The second letter looks like an r that was turned into an m and the third letter is nothing I recognize except perhaps ç (which would not normally be followed by “n”).

The last word isn’t much better. The first letter looks like v, or p with the stem partly erased. The next letter is bizarre, neither “u” nor “o” but a somewhat Voynichese-backwards-leaning “u”. The next letter is unclear, but perhaps a p or a badly formed “r”. The f has part of the top erased, the “e” is clear and then the last letter is ambiguous, somewhat like “r” and yet not.

What could it mean? In Provençal, “le ber” refers to a noble and eventually became a surname, and “fe” is faith. If it’s “fer” then it’s something that is done. If one then looks at the second line through the same lens, we might end up with something like this:

au chi/qui ton o la dabas + imil tos + te/re +  c?e + cere/céré + portas + m

In some Provençal dialects, “qui” (who) was written as “chi”. Unfortunately, even though there are some Romance-language words here and “au qui ton” isn’t completely weird, the sum total of the line doesn’t make any grammatical sense.

If it were Spanish, one might be able to wrestle something out of “oladabas” if one assumes the first “d” is an “s” with a pen skip. Then it could be interpreted as “o las [h]abas” (or the beans).

So, it still comes out as a gobbledy-gook of French, Spanish, Latin, Voynichese, and German, with no cohesive meaning.

The only place I can think of where they might have spoken like this would be the borderlands between Switzerland (French and German), Provençal (Spanish/French/Italian), and Italy, where blended versions of French, German, and Romance languages were spoken and were mixed with Latin in scholarly circles. Either that or the writer used a set of tables in a variety of languages, with words selected and combined according to some system that’s not easy to discern.

Two or More Hands on the Last Page?

It’s important to note that the ink on the top line is slightly browner than the three lines lower, and if you look at the way the letter ell is drawn on the top line, with an added straight bar across the top loop, rather than a connected, angled bar as on the second line, there’s no guarantee these were written by the same person. Note also the smaller, more angular “e” on the top line, compared to the larger, rounder ones on the other lines. It’s the same style of handwriting, one that was extremely common (Gothic), but was it the same person?

It’s really hard to tell, especially when the marginalia on f17r illustrates both styles of ell (angled tops and straight tops):

A straight, disconnected loop on the top line is rare enough in Gothic hands that I hoped it might provide clues to the cultural identity of the scribe. For years I’ve searched for straight Gothic-style loops, and only found four that were were similar enough that I thought them worthy of note. One is in a manuscript of unknown European origin, one is thought to be from Germany, the third is attributed to Nuremberg, the fourth is possibly Venetian.

There are two that are not quite as distinctly similar, one from Clairvaux, France, and one from Germany. Perhaps one day I’ll hit a bingo and find a perfect match. In the meantime, I’m not any wiser as to the meaning of the text, but it’s always interesting to look at it from another point of view.

J.K. Petersen

Copyright © 2018 Jan, J.K. Petersen

The Last Page But Not the Last Word

Folio 116v Revisited

In 2013, I posted a couple of times about Folio 116v, which is sometimes referred to as the last page of the Voynich Manuscript. I also suggested, as I worked through my journey of personal discovery, that it might be a healing charm. I knew nothing about healing charms before trying to puzzle out the VMS, but I was following a hunch that it might be associated with magic when I saw the strange word oladabas. I later discovered, in 2013 and again in 2015, that abracula was a charm word (a very old and and venerated one) used to cure fevers, and posted some examples of 15th century charms, which follow a format surprisingly similar to the VMS text.

Considering how little is written (and drawn) on Folio 116v compared to most other pages, it’s surprising it has generated so many questions. One of the persistent challenges is the interpretation of the characters, some of which are faded and some of which are unconventional. I can read Gothic Cursive better now than I could in 2013, but that doesn’t help when a word is a blobby mess like the one in the middle of the first row of the main body of text (marked with an arrow):

Vm116CeveBig

Deconstructing the Blob

I didn’t pay any attention to what others proposed as the reading for this word because I was so focused on other aspects of the page that I never followed it up, but the subject was raised on the Voynich forum today and I thought it was time to post my impression of what the letters might represent.

In 2013, I thought the word-group in question might be a messy rendition of toe because “o” and “e” are sometimes combined in old manuscripts as œ. After looking at it for a while longer, I realized the explanation might be something completely different.

Vm116Ceve2Let’s say, for example, that this was originally written as a bench character (EVA-ch). The bench char isn’t only a Voynichese char. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s also a common Latin ligature that can represent a wide variety of combinations of “t” “c” “e” and “r” characters, since they are similar to one another in Gothic cursive. In fact, in some manuscripts, it’s hard to distinguish “c” from “e” or “t” from “c” without context.

So, if it’s a bench character, maybe it’s a bench char with a cap or maybe the “cap” is part of the corrected shape or something not used anywhere else. I’m not sure. The cap is smaller and lower than usual, so it might be part of the corrected shape, but we don’t know if the script on the last page is written by the Voynich scribe or someone else who is somewhat able to mimic VMS text but doesn’t do it exactly the same. In the example above, I’ve lightened the shapes that appear to have been added after the initial shape was drawn. I left in the “cap” or “elbow”, but it’s probably best to picture it in your head both with and without the cap-shape since its connection with the other shapes is unclear.

All right. So let’s say for the moment that the scribe drew a bench character. What happened then? Why did he turn it into an unreadable mess? Perhaps the scribe was trying to correct an error. Maybe it’s Voynichese and he didn’t want to give things away. Maybe it’s a common Latin ligature and he decided it looked too much like Voynichese and could be misinterpreted later. Maybe it’s simply a mistake.

Vm116Ceve3Here’s what I think the scribe may have tried to do to correct it… I’ve added colors to the letters so they’re easier to see because I think the answer may lie right in front of us.

In this illustration, the “c” or “t” is purple, the added “e” or “c” is green, and the added “v” or “r” is bluish. Note how the bench char is still in the background, making it hard to clearly see the letters in front even when they’re highlighted with color? So… if it’s a mistake, adding the letters didn’t fix the problem.

What was he trying to write? Was it tev/ter/tar or tcv or ccv or cev or cer—all of which might have been written with the first two letters as a ligature in Latin? I think maybe it’s “cer” or “cev” (ligature ce plus v) and he never finished correcting it because it wasn’t working, so instead of taking the time to scrape away a mistake—he wrote it again correctly as the next word, spaced out better and not blobby, to create “ceve” or “cere”.

Vm116Ceve4

Plausible?

I don’t know. It’s just an idea, I can think of other interpretations, as well, but I think it’s worth mentioning in case it sparks some fresh thoughts about how to read it.

J.K. Petersen

© Copyright 2016 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved