Re: VMs: French Website

[CanBooks <canbooks@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Rene for the leads about Arabic.
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/mirror/firth/
 http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/

I will try to respond to them, but my time is getting limited as I will be
away lecturing over the next couple of months. As I look at the VMS,
everything in my subconscious tells me that this is related to old Arabic,
but written using a simple cipher. The use of simple ciphers in the Middle
East goes back to 200 BC when the Nabataeans started writing their language
in two scripts, one known in the Middle East, and another using a script
they picked up in Yemen. This is mentioned by early Greek and Roman
historians, and today is known as Safatic. They also used another script
which is known today as Thamudic. (I've decried this on the website:
nabataea.net\write2.html.) Dr. John Healey at Manchester University now
considers the writers of these scripts to be all the same people, and after
considerable field-study I must also agree with him. During the Muslim era,
the Nabataeans were looked down upon, and I suspect that much of their
writings, (which have all disappeared) were disguised in ciphers using other
characters. I suspect the VMS is one of these, as are several other books I
have come across that use other "strange" characters. If there was a
frequency table for EVA, then it could be compares with frequency tables of
other languages to see if they matched.

I also wonder if the VMS is dated before 771 AD when Dwbnt introduced the
concept of the zero to mathematics. Before that, numbers were written using
letters, such as CCXXIII. This would account for "words" in the VMS that use
multiple letters.

Just some thoughts.

Dan Gibson


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