Re: VMs: Brumbaugh / 1972 / Milan / numbers...?

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Nick Pelling wrote:
> However, their page 129 might have one thing worth pursuing: that
> "Brumbaugh's first and most important breakthrough was in the spring of
> 1972, when he noticed that some of the Voynichese symbols were similar to
> others [...] on the back of another old manuscript" in Milan, where they
> represented numbers in an astrological diagram. Does anyone know what the
> reference for that other MS is?

Worth pursuing, but a fair number of Voynichese characters look like
something *somewhere*, often numerals or abbreviatory notae.  Plausible,
but not very helpful explanations would be that there are only so many
simple shapes one can easily make with a quill, or, again, that certain
canonical shapes appeal to human minds.

In regard to the notae, if the "Voynich author" was familiar with such
notae, as he would have been if he were a European of the periods commonly
suggested, then perhaps he was tempted to play a game with them.  For
example, the EVA y (like 9) is in some contexts used to abbreviate final
-us, so assuming there is something in the i or e plus flourish analysis
of the system, then perhaps y (e + l-flourish?) represents "us" or "s$"
(final s), in which case maybe e = s and l-flourish = u, or e = s and
l-flourish = "no following vowel"?  I haven't pursued this, because it
seems an unlikely idea and because I think it produces too many esses.

> On the subject of Brumbaugh, I'd also still like to know what a 15th
> Century Florentine archer's hat looks like - but perhaps we'll never
> know... :-o

It probably looks like it's been through hell.

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list