Re: VMs: Arabic and Voynich

["Larry Roux" <lroux@xxxxxxx>]

Having copied Voynich script by hand I am sure it was written left to right.  

I just found it interesting that if you write the Arabic script I happened to find left to right instead of right to left you get gallows at the start and "9"ish characters at the end.  Not that the two scripts are overly similar....but it is interesting none-the-less



******************************
Larry Roux
Syracuse University
lroux@xxxxxxx
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>>> incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 04/06/03 19:30 PM >>>
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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