VMs: Thanks for including me - first remarks

["Petr Kazil" <kazil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you for including me in the list.
I don't think I can make a big contribution, but at least I hope I won't be
a nuisance :-)
Some starting remarks:

1)

I visited the Royal Dutch library and looked through their catalogues.
 I found a copy of: Kraus, H. P. Catalogue 100. Thirty-five manuscripts:
including ... the Roger Bacon (Voynich) cipher ms. New York: H.P. Kraus,
1962.
I was locked up in a room with TV surveillance and was only allowed to use a
pencil.
 The original B/W photographs are very good and I now have an A3-sized copy
of the Marci letter and of the 3*3 foldout with the "asteroid with organ
pipes" in the middle. (I'm not fluent in the folio numbers yet.) It was not
so expensive, but the quality of the copies is not very good.
I was taken aback by these strange drawings (stranger than anything I
remember from the Beinecke website) and I was very much reminded of the
drawings of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli (I hope these links
work):
http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/woe_4.d.cfm
http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/woe_5.d.cfm

2)

I also borrowed: Brumbaugh, Robert S. The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript
and noted that there is a chapter about the sunflower.
Unfortunately http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-01-17-sunflower/
is *not* the plant that has been identified as a sunflower.
With Brumbaugh in hand the identification doesn't look so unlikely. Plants
have been simplified regularly in old herbals.
I have a copy of Brumbaugh and I'll try to post the correct page in the
coming days.

3)

A very good idea:
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-01-27-plant-names/PlantNames.ht
ml
I'll try (work permitting) to post a long list of plant names from old
herbals. It's in a dutch book on the history of botany.

4)

I bought a Czech book about "Mysterious Prague" in Prague and it's popular
but seems rather well researched.
It mentions the Voynich MS several times.
It even says that Arthur C. Clarke speculated that it might be an early
example of "automatic writing" :-)
I'll try (work permitting) to scan and post the relevant pages.

5)

Has anyone tried to find long repeating phrases in the VMS ?
All the analyses that I saw are on the character and word level.
I haven't seen any searches for repeating sentences and word sequences.
Have I missed anything ?
This exercise would fall within my programming abilities.

6)

The pages that are put in the "Who else is not out there? category on
Stolfi's webpage
 (http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/ ) can often be resurrected by
visiti"ng the web-archive:

Look out - these URL's are broken in two parts and have to be put together
to work again:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011207122656/http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/ev
mt/evmt.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20010804135847/http://champollion.nu/english/voyn
ich/index.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010126150200/http://www.gloryroad.net/~bigjim/V
oynich.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20010610194925/http://www.ils.unc.edu/~mornj/150/
vms.htm

Greetings,

Petr Kazil - Urban Adventure in Rotterdam
http://www.euronet.nl/users/kazil/