Re: VMs: Various observations/questions

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

At 20:29 20/06/2004 -0400, "Surfing t" (from Grønjordskollegiet in 
Copenhagen?) wrote:
> I'm quite new to this fascinating mystery and would like to help out.

You can help us to help you help out by using page names rather than 
database IDs (*ugh*). Use my little JavaScript page to convert between the 
two:-
        http://www.voynichinfo.com/nickpelling/idpage.html

Also: if you want to speak the same language (when discussing Voynichese) 
as most of us here, please try to learn the basics of EVA (which is very 
easy to learn). It's not perfect, but I suspect that it's closer than its 
main critic might have you believe. :-)
        http://www.voynich.nu/extra/eva.html

> 1) What do people make out of the illustration on page with ID 1006108 (on 
> the Beinecke-library)? To me, it looks like some people taking off in a 
> gigantic helicopter. Forgive me for my ignorance, but had the idea of the 
> use of wings etc. for flying been published at the time the Voynich 
> document is thought to have been published. The wings seems to appear 
> again on picture 1006214.

1006108 is f18r - but I think you actually meant 1006208 (f75r) *sigh*. The 
"ruffled-edge" shape at the top appears to be a "wolkenband" ('chain of 
clouds'), a 15th Century decorative feature which occurs throughout the 
balneo[logical] section, as well as on the "galaxy" page f68v3. No need to 
invoke Quattrocento helicopters here for a sensible explanation. :-)

> 2) I'm positve I'm not the first to notice that some of the labels on the 
> illustrations repeats: For example, the string "202ap" (I have chosen the 
> closest symbols I know) is seen on the right of picture 1006212 and again 
> to the left of 1006209. Other strings repeats as well in the 
> illustrations. Has anyone speculated on this and found any patterns in the 
> repetitions (for example, do the repetitions solely occur on pictures with 
> many women? - are they the names of the women)?

As there are a handful of repetitions everywhere, so there are speculations 
everywhere. Overall, so far no repetition has proved helpful in getting 
under the skin of the writing system. Perhaps they are the names of the 
women - but in the zodiac pages, I think they're rather more likely to be 
abbreviations for names of degrees (in a 360-degree astrological system). 
But the jury is out.

> 3) Several people note that some words are repeated several times. I have 
> a theory that these words must be numbers in writing. For example, the 
> number "3" could be written as "one one one". Of course, such a unary 
> numbering scheme is not practical for larger numbers, but there could be 
> another word for fx 10 so that 14 could be written as "ten one one one 
> one" etc. This leads me to the following question: Do these cases of 
> multiple repetition occur more often in some parts of the documents than 
> the others? And what about the words that do repeat? What is their 
> frequency in the various sections? Has anyone researched this? The 
> sections is the book are clearly about distinct "subjects" so one could 
> reasonably expect differing frequencies of use of numbers - and the 
> reptitions might be indicators numbers.

The first thing to be broken on a famous 20th century book-length coding 
system was the numbering scheme: and people have tried much the same on the 
VMs. Words like EVA <dain / daiin / daiiin> could well be a kind of 
steganographic Roman numerals (Tiltman first discussed this, IIRC?) - but 
that too hasn't yet helped open up the secrets of the ms.

> 4) What do people make of the illustrations of the pictures with women? 
> Most of the pictures apparently show women showering but I wonder why they 
> put there hand up into the tube on most of the pictures. It almost seems 
> as if they are about to be "sucked" into the pipe system. On other 
> pictures, the women are sitting in containers connected to the elaborate 
> piping system. Additionally, on at least one illustrations some drops of 
> water from the pipe system appear to drip down onto the face of a woman 
> lying down. This woman is lying immediately below a container in which a 
> woman appears to be sucked down. One interpretation could be that the 
> "spirit" of that women is being sucked out and is transfered to the woman 
> lying down. Do you agree with this? What are the popular theories on these 
> pictures?

Most people don't really know where to start with trying to interpret this 
quire, most theories on this (like your "spirit-sucking" theory") are, by 
definition, unpopular. Don't take that as a criticism, though! :-)

> Frankly, most of the illustrations in the "biological" section doesn't 
> make much sense to me. I'm not an expert, but this doesn't look as 
> illustrations from the average religious document.

There are only two (hotly contested) VMs images that *might* be a cross, 
and AFAIK nobody has yet reviewed those pages in the new hi-res sidfiles. 
GC, any opinion?

> One thing that strikes me is a similarity between the text and the 
> pictures: Both seems to make sense at the immediate level: We can 
> recognize that the text is a text, it contains
> known concepts of text. However looked at as a whole it doesn't make much 
> sense. The same with the pictures: They contain elements we recognize, but 
> some of the objects we don't and we certainly don't understand the 
> combination of objects and the interactions of the objects. It's like the 
> illustrations have been made to look like they are meaningful but in fact 
> they are not. I think if the illustrator wanted them to actually 
> *illustrate* a concept (such as showering etc.) they would have looked 
> differently.  There are three possibilities: <SNIP>

> I'm leaning on b) being the most likely explanation. What do you think?

If you can only see three possibilities, you haven't yet opened your mind 
wide enough. :-)

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

PS: please introduce yourself to the list, it's only polite! :-) 

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