Comments for Thoughts about the Voynich Manuscript

Comment on And the Winner is… by Rene Zandbergen

Rene Zandbergen — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:00:19 +0000

The still incomplete information has made it into the English wikipedia page already. The source for the information is probably also not the most appropriate. Hopefully this will all be corrected in the near future, when more specific details are available.

Comment on Crossbow analysis by Elmar Vogt

Elmar Vogt — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:28:11 +0000

Hi Michelle, I agree with you partly. One shouldn't overemphasize the design of the crossbow drawn, especially considering that it's less than an inch or so across. OTOH, probably the artists didn't mean to draw one particular crossbow, but the "archetypical" crossbow per se of his time. So even this sketch will probably give us at least a hint of the date of them VM, much like a machine gun with a drum magazine would enable us to tentatively date a picture to the first half of the 20th century. OTOH, Jens' dating and the find of this costume seem to support each other and are in agreement with the Carbon dating.

Comment on Crossbow analysis by Michelle

Michelle — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:35:18 +0000

Hi again. Sorry to keep butting in, but after reading the link to the crossbow article above I felt that the ‘analysis’ is too ‘close up’. What I mean is, whoever wrote and drew the Vms was not an artist, that is obvious from the quality of the drawings, so to look so close up at the drawings, at the very fine details,to hope to date what is drawn seems a bit overdone- the guy ( or gal ) just wanted to depict a crossbow to convey the idea of ‘Sagittarius’ or whatever he had in mind, I really don’t think he was interested in creating a ‘photo’. It seems a bit like getting a plumber to do a rough drawing of his job to convey a concept to someone else and then say, well they’re not copper pipes because copper pipes would be shinier!!

Comment on My Personal Top Ten of Proposed Solutions by Elmar Vogt

Elmar Vogt — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:36:38 +0000

Yes, and I forgot that 6.) and 7.) (Stojko and Levitov) are now blown out of the water, too. (Unless you make them copies of an earlier blablah.)

Seems like the Top Ten shrinks to a manageable shortlist…

Comment on My Personal Top Ten of Proposed Solutions by nickpelling

nickpelling — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 14:14:12 +0000

Steve Ekwall’s still standing, though… :-)

Comment on Steel True, Blade Straight by proto57

proto57 — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:31:55 +0000

Elmar! You nut! No, just kidding… thank you for the nice post, and the nice comments. And yes, I am alive, not typing from “beyond”.

Well certainly it’s always been about the facts, and we finally have one… and it seems like a really solid one. The now determined, proper time frame will certainly need more attention, to help solve the problem… and it may get it now. But as I responded to René Zandbergen on my blog, I’m not sure I will have much to contribute to this time, as it has been pored over so thoroughly by so many, for many decades. But I will certainly follow it with interest…

I’m going to get back to my American Turtle Submarine research, and my experiments with, and reconstructions of, Cornelis Drebbel instruments and inventions. But of course we will stay in touch… it’s been the most enjoyable part of this whole thing… meeting really cool people, like you and René. Rich.

Comment on My Personal Top Ten of Proposed Solutions by Elmar Vogt

Elmar Vogt — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:56:35 +0000

All right, the recent carbon datings just knocked entries 2.) and 3.) clean off their feet, and seriously dented 4.) Which leaves this Top Ten almost exclusively with the more outlandish and whacky entries...

Comment on Results by Elmar Vogt

Elmar Vogt — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:41:59 +0000

Hi Michelle,

There possibly is some confusion here: The Stroke theory assumes that the VM letters represent the strokes of the plaintext letters, not the other way around.

Considering that, there is a huge number of possible plaintext “alphabets” to start from, which would all lead to different encipherings — from Italian or English cursive over various batarde writings to block letters, capitals and minors, and print.

The uncertainty about which plaintext alphabet was used is one thing which makes testing the Strokes so difficult, because each alternative would lead to different encodings.

I’m currently working the other way around, namely, there should be only some 52 “constituents” of all VM words (26 capital and 26 minor letters — give or take some numbers and possibly special characters).

But I haven’t yet found a meaningful way to test whether the whole of the VM corpus can be split up in such a nice manner into a limited number of syllables.

One advantage of the Stroke theory is that it would explain elegantly the different Currier “languages” — these would equate to different sets of plaintext alphabets, or even an “Italian” and an “English” hand, as you suggest.

Comment on And the Winner is… by Elmar Vogt

Elmar Vogt — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:47:54 +0000

I don’t know the details (I really wish there was a scholarly paper on the topic out there rather than the sensationalist yellow press blah…), but since at least from the vellum four samples were taken, it appears that they included both hands.

From what I gather, the results were consistent with the VM being produced in one “batch”.

Comment on Results by Michelle

Michelle — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:19:47 +0000

I just read your Strokes theory, which is something I tried to look at ( in my own naive and simpleton fashion – not being a Vms intellectual like voi altri ), but one thing important seems wrong to me: The direction the strokes start and finish shouldn’t be taken for granted, because if we are talking, for example, about an ITALIAN author, you should realise that they form their letters ( even today ) very differently to how, let’s say, someone from England would. I have noticed how my friends here in Italy form some of their letters completely back-to-front compared to me. By looking at the angle of the stroke ( you can almost imagine the quill tip) you can see more clearly how the letter was formed, and of course the blob of ink will indicated where the first and last stroke was made.( blob at the beginning, tapered stroke at the end).