Re: VMs: Arabic and Voynich

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Larry,

At 18:36 06/04/03 -0400, Larry Roux wrote:
> Watching the war, every time I see something from the Al Jazeera network 
> the Arabic writing screams at me.  I found a doc in Arabic and flipped it 
> horizontally.  I am sorry, but isn't that looking very Voy-Like?  Gallows 
> at the beginning, the ribbon character ("l") etc?
>
> http://web.syr.edu/~laroux/revdoc.jpg

Yes, there are similarities in *letters* (though there are arguably 
similarities with a number of other Mediterranean scripts), though I 
wouldn't be comfortable if you were to suggest a similarity in *script* 
(which is much more like a mid-Quattrocento Italian humanist hand than 
anything else).

Whatever the VMS is, I'm sure we're staring it in the face (yet again). :-/

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

PS: IIRC, isn't there evidence that VMS lines were written left-to-right? 
If the original was in (right-to-left) Arabic, then the copy we're seeing 
could well have been made by a (left-to-right) Western scribe... though I'm 
not sure the statistics of the content of each line look right-to-left-y?

PPS: did John Stojko claim the VMS was boustrophedonic, or was that from 
elsewhere? I kind of half-remember this... :-o

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