Voynich sign ‘M’

Stephen Bax ♦ May 18, 2014 ♦ 4 Comments

The new website www.voynichese.com is a wonderful tool for seeing patterns of signs and words in Voynich text 오르막길 다운로드.  Who made it? It seems anonymous, but someone should get credit for a useful piece of work….

One thing it allows us to do is to see patterns  which would otherwise be invisible windows 7 disk images. For example:

The sign transcribed as ‘M’

Take the example of the letter transcribed in EVA as ‘M’ English book.  If you look at this sign in the www.voynichese.com tool you get this view of its distribution across the whole manuscript:

http://www.voynichese.com/#/exa:-m/893

This reveals some clear and interesting patterns 포비든 그라운드 다운로드. The first is that this sign does seem to be used as a ‘terminator’, as I suggested in my Feb 2014 paper 펀드토큰 다운로드. Look at its use in the final ‘recipe’ pages of the manuscript, such as here Download cursive in English. As Cosmo said on these pages, and as I have discussed in another post, the visual evidence does indeed suggest that this sign ‘M’ is used as a terminal variant of  ‘R’ Gta4 free download.

Scribal variation?

However, another interesting pattern also emerges with this sign. If we take just the plant pages, on some of them this sign is used a LOT Miss Little Sunshine. For example on f3r and f3v it is all over the page Pre-Genesis download. Yet on other plant pages it is not used at all.

Furthermore, it seems that when it is used a lot on one page, then it is also used extensively on some adjacent pages too Jenkins plugin. For example, from f20r – f21v we have four pages with none of them at all (although those pages have relatively little text).  Then from f22r – f24v, we see lots and lots of them.

This suggests an element of possible scribal variation, typical of mediaeval manuscripts. If we assume that scribes worked on sequences of pages, then we would expect this kind of pattern.

What I am suggesting is that this sign is used in general as an ‘end-marker’ of some sort, as can be seen from the last pages of the manuscript with the ‘recipe pages’. But it also appears that some scribes, e.g. the scribe of f3r and f3v, chose to use it even more frequently to break up the text , just as some modern writers use more commas than others.

How many scribes?

In much Voynich discussion it is suggested that there are two scribes and two ‘languages, A and B. In my view these are not two languages at all, but simply dialect and scribal differences. However, we note that Currier himself suggested many scribal hands:

“So now we have a total of something like five or six to seven or eight different identifiable hands in the manuscript. This gives us a total of two ‘‘languages’’ and six to eight scribes (copyists, encipherers, call them what you will)” (http://www.voynich.nu/extra/curr_main.html, my emphasis)

In my view, we badly need more research into the scribal aspects of the manuscript, and into variation of the kind I have highlighted. The Voynichese website will undoubtedly be of help in elucidating these areas and pointing to  possible further avenues for research. Has anyone noticed other interesting patterns?