More New Scientist letters...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

Cynthia Tenen (Stan Tenen's wife, and co-founder of the Meru Foundation) 
just told me about subsequent VMS-related letters (including one from 
Gabriel L) that appeared in the 8 December 2001 issue of New Scientist (all 
freely readable on the web):-

        http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opletters.jsp?id=ns232013

In the spirit of openness, I've cut and pasted them below: any comments on 
Tony Clarke's pineapple mayweed and period pains association (I presume 
he's referring to f78r)? The same plant-head would seem to reappear on a 
number of other pages (including the T-O map page, f86v3?).

        http://inky.library.yale.edu/voy/Z3724837.jpg

Or the custard apple? Or the Adamites?

Very interesting... :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

                                * * * * * * * *

Language of flowers
Having never heard of the Voynich manuscript (17 November, p 36), I was 
really intrigued and also amused by the various attempts by the world's 
best cryptanalysts to decipher it.
As often happens, clever people tend to seek sophisticated and complex 
solutions, but maybe it's better here to look for simpler methods. The 
article mentions that the crudely drawn flowers and plants are unlike 
anything found in nature and maybe that hints at a possible solution. Could 
the drawings themselves hold the transcription key to decipher the text on 
each page?
The plants shown in the article reveal leaves and roots that can easily be 
counted, and possibly the resulting numbers provide the key to translate 
the different pages of the document. Would it not be very ironic if all 
these years people have been searching for a key while it was right in 
front of them all the time?
Rudi Van Nieuwenhove
Genk, Belgium


The reproduction of one of the pages of the manuscript on p 36 seems to 
show the flower head of the pineapple mayweed, Matricaria matricarioides, 
being "filtered" into large containers or baths where women who seem to be 
in pain are splashing about. This plant has been known for many years to be 
a herbal remedy for period pains. So I suggest that this page is indeed 
giving herbal medicinal advice.
Tony Clarke
Elloughton, East Yorkshire


Correction: The Voynich manuscript is approximately 234,000 characters, not 
words as stated in the article. The total number of "words" (word-like 
strings of characters separated by a space) is about 40,000, and there is a 
vocabulary of about 8200 unique words.
Editor


I was intrigued by Catherine Zandonella's article on the Voynich 
manuscript. The opening page reproduction of the two halves of a custard 
apple (Annona reticulata) connected by vines passing through cylindrical 
graters was delightful, as were the multiple images of our renowned 
Sara-Marie doing her famous "bum-dance".
Since so many cryptologists have found the text impenetrable, it probably 
is meaningless and the manuscript part of a fraud, but the illustrations 
struck me forcibly as reminiscent of two things.
One is the imagery of late medieval/early modern alchemy, the jargon and 
symbolism of which had grown so arcane by that time that the practitioners 
could scarcely understand one another.
The other is the visual symbolism in some of the middle works of Hieronymus 
Bosch. Some scholars suspected that he belonged to one of the small Adamite 
sects who believed, among other things, in nudity and free love. I don't 
believe he did belong to them, but he may have used some of their imagery: 
his paintings do contain nude people, imaginary plants and giant bottles 
and flasks.
Perhaps these possible clues might be worth following up, though if the 
manuscript is genuine and does derive from either of those sources, it will 
probably, after decoding, prove to be largely gibberish.
Tony Glad
Brisbane, Australia


Interestingly, the word frequency distribution in the manuscript approaches 
Zipf's law, a statistical observation regarding the word frequency that is 
found in most languages. This property is unlikely to be preserved in texts 
encoded using polyalphabetical substitutions with many alphabets, since 
each plain text word has alternative spellings in the substituted coded 
form. Such alternative spellings depend on the number of alphabets used to 
encode the text and the word position in the manuscript with respect to the 
key.
Gabriel Landini
University of Birmingham