I am a singer and a songwriter so I have a bit of knowledge of words.
Unfortunately, I can only sing English but I have attempted to sing other languages.
What stuck out immediately to me when reading the characters in the Voynich Manuscript was that many words end
with what looks like the characters 89.
In a most languages, words never have a suffix occuring that often.
Only one language type I have ever encountered has had suffixes that occur that often.
That is Spanish/Latin and maybe other languages of that type.
And especially when it comes to plants and many other objects.
That is they end in "o". Like tomato, potato, arpeggio, legato, fortissimo, amigo, etc...
Granted many English words end in "ing" but not enough to account for the many times that
89 appears at the end of words in this document.
89 must be "o".
What is strange is that I did not see 89 occur in the middle or beginning of words.
89 occurs so often that it makes it almost seem like the words are arbitrary and have no connection to one another or may be repetitive lists
of things.
But that is the way "o" is in Spanish.
Despacito
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7ki ... rt_radio=1
Only an "o" at the end of words can account for the amount of times "89" occurs at the end of these words in this text.
Many plant names in Latin may also end in o, (oregano, cilantro... ) I am not sure because, as I said, English is my main language.
It seems mostly like a botanist document detailing anatomy of plants and a bit of human type anatomy added with a lot of female worship.
An artist who likes to doodle, dissect and categorize plant types.
The females holding the stars are rather curious, I could not see any "pattern" in them at all. The variations in the drawings of each female seem superstitious and not deliberate. Their number varies, their headdress type, position of their arms and the relation of stars to each one seems unintentional. The females are the alchemic substance of the image in the center. I may be oversimplifying it but it does not seems enigmatic.
It seems that female worship is part of how the author expresses how that things work.
Goddess worship or simply a form of affection. The feminine energy force.
Given the flourish designs, it seems the book was written to categorize plants and the writer had a fascination simply with doodling.
The alphabet page seems like a fascination with odd characters and once again a creative doodling.
Is this some sort of code book? That is plausible.
The page with the alphabets in grid lines, the characters there almost seem like musical notes.
This particular page gave me the impression that there was some linguistic creativity going on here.
But the appearance of so many 89's at the end of words made me think that the words were simply practising script.
Until I realized the "o" that is so prevalent in Spanish and Latin languages.
That is the only thing that I figure can account for so many, what looks like 89s, is words ending in o.
89 at the end of words
Forum rules
All ideas are welcome, but please be civil with each other.
All ideas are welcome, but please be civil with each other.
Re: 89 at the end of words
Hi Rex, and welcome to the Voynich.net forum.
The repetition of various characters, sets of the them, parts of words, and whole words, is certainly one of the big "bugaboos" of the Voynich writing. Could this mean it is music? Or poetry, chants, singing? I guess no one knows... but there is really no good argument against these ideas, before knowing what the script means in the first place, if anything.
As for the "89", agreed it is not seen nearly as frequently in Latin. The "9" can be used as shorthand for "ius", "s", and so on, that is, as an abbreviation meant to mean the plural of the word it is appended to. I was recently made aware of another theory a friend made me aware of:
https://www.reddit.com/r/voynich/commen ... e_part_19/
The author of that theory suggests that the "9" can stand in for even more possible Latin word parts, or whatever they are called. I'm not convinced by this theory, though, as I feel it allows far too much subjectivity in any translation attempt, so no two people would come up with the same results.
And that seems to always be the balance:
1) Accept the observed repetition in the text, and we have repetitive output. That would imply poetry, music, lyrics, chants, etc.
2) On the contrary, do not accept the observed repetition, and come up with some rational that it is not repetition in the first place. That is, add rules and modifiers to the seeming repetition, so that the same characters can have many different meanings. This tends to force the decipherer into complex, very subjective methods, to find complex rules to make this changes.
I'm not saying one or the other is favored, because I do not have a clue. I'm only pointing out the dividing line between the two differing approaches. Perhaps there is something in between the two, also... a smaller level of both that finds middle ground.
In my personal opinion, this repetition implies that the characters themselves to not carry the meaning, but rather that the overall structure of some aspect of the characters carries that meaning... as in some type of steganography, such as Francis Bacon's Biliteral, or a number code, and so on. Schemes like this would allow for the observed repetition, but not give repetitive plaintext.
The repetition of various characters, sets of the them, parts of words, and whole words, is certainly one of the big "bugaboos" of the Voynich writing. Could this mean it is music? Or poetry, chants, singing? I guess no one knows... but there is really no good argument against these ideas, before knowing what the script means in the first place, if anything.
As for the "89", agreed it is not seen nearly as frequently in Latin. The "9" can be used as shorthand for "ius", "s", and so on, that is, as an abbreviation meant to mean the plural of the word it is appended to. I was recently made aware of another theory a friend made me aware of:
https://www.reddit.com/r/voynich/commen ... e_part_19/
The author of that theory suggests that the "9" can stand in for even more possible Latin word parts, or whatever they are called. I'm not convinced by this theory, though, as I feel it allows far too much subjectivity in any translation attempt, so no two people would come up with the same results.
And that seems to always be the balance:
1) Accept the observed repetition in the text, and we have repetitive output. That would imply poetry, music, lyrics, chants, etc.
2) On the contrary, do not accept the observed repetition, and come up with some rational that it is not repetition in the first place. That is, add rules and modifiers to the seeming repetition, so that the same characters can have many different meanings. This tends to force the decipherer into complex, very subjective methods, to find complex rules to make this changes.
I'm not saying one or the other is favored, because I do not have a clue. I'm only pointing out the dividing line between the two differing approaches. Perhaps there is something in between the two, also... a smaller level of both that finds middle ground.
In my personal opinion, this repetition implies that the characters themselves to not carry the meaning, but rather that the overall structure of some aspect of the characters carries that meaning... as in some type of steganography, such as Francis Bacon's Biliteral, or a number code, and so on. Schemes like this would allow for the observed repetition, but not give repetitive plaintext.
"Man is the measure of all things: What is, that it is; what is not, that it is not"- Protagoras