VMs: Some new, and old (VMS f76r) news From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 1/05/10 2:17 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested, here's some new news, and just maybe it might allow building a bridge to an older hypothetical VMS mystery: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #326 (Vol. IV, 4 JAN 2010) : J.VS: Mathematical Sparse Coding analysis of illustrative artworks http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U ************************** VMs: Phoneticizing Voynich text with synthetic speech From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 1/20/10 3:58 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested, Jan Hurych has been doing some fascinating experiments converting Voynich text to listenable speech: Journal of Voynich Studies communication # 328 (Vol. IV, 19 JAN 2010): J.VS: The phonetisation of the Voynich Manuscript text: Voynich text to synthetic speech http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U ************************************************ RE: VMs: Re: Phoneticizing Voynich text with synthetic speech From: Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 1/20/10 4:50 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Robert Teague wrote Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:20:41 -0500 : " I just listened to it. Very strange-- sounds like a HAL 9000 computer breaking down. " But that's good though - we don't want HAL up to his nasty tricks do we? :-) I've heard several of Jan's experimental the-Voynich-manuscript-speaks experiments. One of them really flipped me out because it sounded like I was in a foreign airport hearing a public announcement over the PA system, but from quite a distance away. It struck me as sounding like a Slavic language, so naturally I conjectured to Jan that maybe it was Czech, fitting in nicely with VMS Prague manuscript. There are quite a lot of complications in the whole experimental process (I've gotten started myself), not the least of which is settling on a suitable speech synthesizer well matched to the input transcription coding. Berj ********************************* RE: VMs: Re: Phoneticizing Voynich text with synthetic speech From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 1/20/10 2:52 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Don Latham wrote Wed 1/20/10 8:31 AM : " Really fun! and can be very interesting for pattern recognition. " Hi Don. Yes this has been considered a number of times, for example here in his 27 NOV 2008 list post ( Re: VMs: "Nagging Sense" in "The Six Unsolved Ciphers" ) Jan made these comments: " Hi Julian and Dennis, as I said, I am no theoretical linguist (in spite of the fact I can speak three languages) so pls take whatever I say with some healthy scepticism. ....... Even so, the plaintext can have many different forms - from religious chants through some garbled phonetic record ( lets say phonetical record of Navajo communications in WW2 by Japanese :-) all the way to simpole text or even further down to rather strange music note.record (seriously, I know Berj was trying to express the VM as a musical record - I do not know if he tried soem kind of speech phonetics - it would be very interesting exercise, considering we may HEAR what is the VM saying). " And indeed the feeling of chants often comes across when listening to experiments of this kind. The music work Jan is referring to is of course the well-known work of J.VS comms. # 166 - 172 (Vol. II, February, 2008) : http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolII2008.htm and which was back then also announced here on the list. With the text converted to speech, as of course conversion to sound or continuous waves in general, we can in addition to employing our own sense of audio-frequency analysis use mathematical analysis, and there are some good computer programs available, like Audacity and Wavepad. Berj ***************************** RE: VMs: Re: Phoneticizing Voynich text with synthetic speech From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 1/21/10 4:57 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Jan Hurych wrote Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:19:09 -0800 : " Still, we are encouraged to carry on. " Jan, I'm finding that even very slight changes in the speed, and also the pitch (of the speaking voice) to which the speech synthesizer is set can make a big difference in the "naturalness" of the delivered Voynich "speech". This has held true with three very different speech synthesizers. In one experiment, several lines worth of a straightforward EVA transcript without any further coding conversions, sounded just awful at the default speed (HAL going down :-), but improved dramatically with a slight slowdown. However, a code conversion of course affects the situation, and the best speed and pitch have to be hunted for all over again. Berj ******************** RE: VMs: Re: Phoneticizing Voynich text with synthetic speech From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 1/21/10 6:06 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny paraphrased Barbara Barett wrt Heads of Confusion cipher and VMS labels Thu 1/21/10 4:45 PM : " bravo uniform tango mike alfa yankee bravo echo november oscar tango tango oscar delta alfa yankee mike xray juliet uniform hotel quebec " Well with respect to VMS labels, there are already the experimental "decipherments" of the star-name ALCIONE in the VMS astro-folio f68r3 (PM-curve panel) [1], and "SOL DEUS CHRISTUS" in the VMS folio f79v where the illustrated VMS celestial-nymph is "blessing" with a cross in her hand the text on that page [2]. To briefly summarize the rather simple decipherment procedure used there: 1.) assume that VMS glyphs which look like latin letters are latin letters. So for example GC-a/EVA-a = "a" 2.) assume that VMS glyphs which look like latin abbreviations are latin abbreviations, and use Capelli (or the abbreviated Capelli tables in D'Imperio) to fit latin expansions for those glyphs. 3.) If any unresolved glyphs remain, say gallows letters, assign latin letter(s) to them according to the context and the already partial decipherment. Needless to say, it is in these particular two cases trivial to put "ALCIONE" and "SOL DEUS CHRISTUS" in to a speech synthesizer - we don't need it to know what the converted transcription will sound like. However, if ALCIONE and SOL DEUS CHRISTUS are further "Heads of Confusion" something or other, then on the assumption that they are correct to this stage, possibly a speech synthesis attack can make further progress. Berj [1] J.VS comm. #171 (Vol. II, 23 FEB 2008) : J.VS: ALCIONE / ALCYONE on astro f68r3 and Voynich-text to speech conversion challenges http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolII2008.htm [2] J.VS comm. #175 (Vol. II, 16 MAR 2008) : J.VS: Voynich f79v and SOL DEUS CHRISTUS http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolII2008.htm *************************************************** VMs: Overview of first results of phonetisation of Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 1/28/10 12:40 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested, Jan Hurych has just communicated to J.VS an overview of the first results of the experiments producing synthetic "speech" from Voynich manuscript text: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #331 (Vol. IV, 27 JAN 2010) : J.VS: PHONETISATION OF THE VM - FIRST RESULTS http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm The experiments are ongoing of course, and there will be more to come. It's quite interesting. Berj / KI3U ****************************** RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 1/31/10 4:58 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Robert Teague wrote Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:59:38 -0500 : " I agree with the poster who said the particular folio shown (f67r1) is a depiction of an annular eclipse. .......... That being the case, the date was 12 Nov. 1547 when the eclipse occurred over England. " Hi Robert. Do you think then that, considering the recently reported radio-carbon dating indication that 4 samples of the VMS parchment are from the period 1404-1438, older parchment was used in the 16th c., or perhaps even more interesting that f67r1 was composed in the early 15th c. as a prediction of an eclipse in the following century? Berj *********************** RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 1/31/10 11:59 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Robert wrote Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:28:05 -0500 : " The PM Curve is a sine wave of the moon's apparent movement over the next 24 hours, and it will hide the star Alcyone, which has some significance in Paracelsian cosmology. " Quite a while back, someone here, I think it may have been GC, commented firmly on the medical inclinations projected in the VMS being either Paracelsian or non-Pracelesian, I can't recall at the moment which he said but I think it may have been the former, Paracelsian. Anyway, Paracelsus (1493-1541), was the guy who led European medical science out of alchemy, and he was born after 1404-1438. So if medical indications in the VMS are convincingly Paracelsian, then therewith is another of those post-Columbus indicators in the VMS, which the radio-carbin indicator is at odds with. Berj ******************** RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/01/10 6:18 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Robert wrote Mon 2/01/10 1:14 AM : " Where is it set in stone that "date of parchment creation" = "date of VMs creation"? " Well it isn't of course. And I could add further for myself: where is it set in stone that radiocarbon-date = actual historical date? But that's hardly a popular view. But that's not the issue I'm here exploring. Suppose the Pelletron data is eventually borne out and the VMS was indeed created 1404-1438 on fresh-at-the-time parchment. And suppose further however that your data too is eventually borne out and the astro section depicts events a century or more later. What would that mean? It's one thing to predict astronomical events within one's reasonably expected lifetime, but quite another to predict them far into the future. Nowadays when that's done, say predicting that Mars will "closest approach" again in 2287, it's quite public. But so far, the VMS seems to have been a rather private affair. Berj ***************** RE: VMs: Incunabula Binding From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/01/10 8:12 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Dana Scott wrote Mon, 1 Feb 2010 12:28:45 -0700 : " What intrigues me about these two incunabula is that the covers and the binding appear to have been done in the same manner as that seen in the Voynich manuscript. Even the vellum used for the binding seems to compare favorably with the VMs vellum. Also, take a close look at the text of the manuscripts and see if you might discover additional nuggets of gold. HM 65: “Almagestum Ptolomaei cum tabulis. Manuscritt.” http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf?Description=&CallNumber=HM+65 " Hi Dana. That is indeed a striking cover and binding in HM 65 resemblance to the VMS! This could well be a goldmine to explore. Berj / KI3U ********************* RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/01/10 8:48 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Richard Sale wrote Mon, 1 Feb 2010 10:19:27 -0800 : " Obvious appears to be a relative term. Some alteration, such as rotation, is even more to be expected, on the presumption that exact replication is a dead giveaway. " Well there sure are flips of various kinds in the VMS where it seems it was intentional, for example some of the human hands are turned wrong, and as I recall some cannot even be corrected by mirror viewing, when nevertheless across the manuscript the VMS illustrator exhibits that he/she knows full well how to draw human anatomy properly. Berj *************************************** RE: VMs: Incunabula Binding From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/01/10 9:04 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rene Zandbergen wrote Mon, 1 Feb 2010 21:28:54 +0100 : " The most interesting part of MS HM 1035 is, that it has a similar pencil inscription as the Voynich MS. " I don't see that yet. However I think it is worth comparing the remnant of something inked to the right of the penciled "J1022" on the Voynich inside front cover - these remains look a little like the lower portion of a capital "I", with the inking of the title on the spine of the HM 65 binding. Berj ************************** VMs: J1022 and much more on VMS inside front-cover From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/01/10 9:53 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Incidentally, while we're on the subject of the "J1022" penciled on the inside front-cover of the Voynich manuscript thanks to Dana Scott and Rene Zandbergen [1], there is a bunch more tiny faint writing on the inside front-cover in addition to the inked remnant "I" which I mentioned in [1]. For example along the top around the J1022 you can see a bunch of tiny numbers, including another "22" somewhat to the right of the J1022. To the left of the J there might be some Greek script. It all cries out for examination under a microscope! Berj / KI3U [1] voynich.net vms-list thread " VMs: Incunabula Binding ", launched by Dana Scott 1 FEB 2010. ***************************** RE: VMs: J1022 and much more on VMS inside front-cover From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 2/02/10 12:52 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Mon 2/01/10 11:16 PM : " I can't see those things... the J1022 is on paper, which seems to be glued to the vellum. " Hi Rich. Well first, to give an idea of the size-scale of the other writings I'm seeing, look at the jpeg you cropped: go to the top of the inner "2" of the "J1022". Floating just above it, and immediately to the left of the left edge of the hold-down plastic, is what in your jpeg looks like a tiny "2". It's not really a "2", but something else, as seen in the high-resolution SID. But it gives an idea of the scale of the markings I am referring to. Now try this: 1.) Load the SID image of the inside front-cover into the SID viewer. 2.) Select tif export and crop a good portion of the upper part of the inside cover. 3.) Load this best-obtainable resolution image crop into IrfanView, and select original size. 4.) If necessary, adjust the image as follows: Red = -47 Green = -18 Blue = -76 Contrast = 49 Gamma = 0.14 the others default. Now go to the upper part of the "J" and down again to the end of its hook - let that be the horizontal level. Proceed left along this horizontal a width just less than the width between the left of the upper part of the J and the right of the upper part of the 0, in other words approximately the width of J10. What I see there is a mark which looks to me strikingly like a well rendered GC-y / EVA-r. It's quite faint, and its faded color would seem to argue it is just a worn part of the old leather. However, what makes it more plausible that it is indeed a text-symbol, is that as we proceed on its horizontal back again toward the J, we see more letters, and some of them are fairly compelling as having been written, and altogether it looks, to me anyway, like the horizontal holds a short line of writing, with mixed Voynich, Greek, and Latin letters. For instance, one could read this line as ending in (here written all in latin letters) : olas. If you go back to your jpeg now, you can see it too shows these indications. " Interestingly I do notice a thick and thin line in brownish ink, on the vellum, to the right of the J1022's paper. " Yes, that's the inked remnant I denoted earlier as appearing like the lower portion of a capital "I". I don't think there's much doubt about it being written ink, and it ought to be compared with the title inking on the spine of the Huntington HM 65 cover-binding. Berj ***************************** RE: VMs: Incunabula Binding continued From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 2/02/10 3:31 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Dana Scott wrote Tue 2/02/10 5:49 AM : " ......... http://app.cul.columbia.edu:8080/exist/scriptorium/individual/PP-RB-305.xml?? querytype=basic&term1=voynich&field1=any&stringtype1=all&howmany=30 " I wonder how they came up with " Bought from Arno M. Voynich of London 1915 " Arno M. Voynich is a new one in the still growing list of Voynich monikers. Berj / KI3U ******************* RE: VMs: Incunabula Binding continued From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 2/02/10 7:31 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue 2/02/10 5:36 PM : " Is it a name, or a place with missed punctuation? Could Voynich have visited Florence or the Arno region, a monetary or college and acquired more manuscripts? Could it have been sent on to him or found by him at another Jesuit base in Italy, tha manuscript originating from the Arno region? " Good question, I hadn't thought of that, and just assumed it was yet another of the names somehow come to be attached to our Wilfrid Voynich. Dana wrote Tue 2/02/10 6:02 PM : " I wonder how WMV got on this list? http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~sherry/Nat%20T-Z.htm " Another good question. Well Wilfrid got around a lot we know. We already know about the ambiguity of where he got the VMS - in an Austrian castle versus Mondragone, so it's perhaps not surprising he'd be ambiguous about just about anything in a particular situation, as it would suit him. He might have simply let his contacts assume details about his identity without correcting them. we have him as Dr. Voynich and Count Voynich among his recorded identities, and recently off-J we noted that Wilfrid was a benefactor of U. Chicago - gave them some annual money for three years starting around 1915, for Polish history studies. He was also apparently a member of the Savile Club in London. Berj ************************ RE: VMs: Incunabula Binding continued From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 2/02/10 8:59 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue 2/02/10 8:18 PM : " Italy, monks, Latin - works for me if his stockpile of acquisitions came from one "undisclosed" place in the area, and I would guess that the "lost" parts are still within the same "general society". In fact I would be shocked if it hadn't at some stage passed through such hands, or at least the important parts of the manuscript. " Well I once floated the idea that the meaning of "Roger Bacon wrote the VMS" was really: the VMS is a product of a secret Roger Bacon Society, and Wilfrid knew that and was loyal to the concept. Wilfrid himself is almost as interesting as his manuscript. Lots of questions at every turn with him, Ethel, and Miss Nill. There is for instance this weird feeling that Ethel and Miss Nill's provenance-changing revelation that the VMS was obtained at the Villa Mondragone, is a borrowing of a plot element from Ethel's Gadfly novel. And that leading to the thought: was it actually Ethel, and not Wilfrid, who discovered the Voynich Manuscript, and in the 1890's at that? And so on and so forth. Fun to weave conjectures on what really happened, and who wound up with the folios which were cut out of the manuscript. Berj ******************** RE: VMs: Incunabula Binding continued From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 2/02/10 10:56 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Dana wrote Tue 2/02/10 10:08 PM : " One thing that impressed me about the cuts was how white and clean the edge of the cut vellum looks. " The f75r image shows this very well. " I have wondered (pure speculation) whether or not one of the students at Mondragone might have gotten into the footlocker containing the VMs. " I suppose it is possible that the parchment which was removed, was cut out not for any especially dramatic reasons, but because it was blank, and either was needed for something or other, or because it was felt that the visual continuity of the VMS would be improved. Berj ********************* VMs: The Voynich text speaks From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 2/04/10 1:32 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested, there is available a new audio-file of Voynich speech: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #332 J.VS: The Voynich text speaks: latest experiment converting VMS-text to synthetic speech http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Owing to time-differences across the Atlantic, it may not be until "tomorrow" that the audio-recording becomes available for download from the J.VS Library. Berj / KI3U ********************** RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 2/05/10 2:16 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net GC wrote Thu 2/04/10 5:35 AM : " Yes, the opinion I expressed was that a Paracelsan view was being presented, and this definitely goes to timeframe. That's just one of those things that simply doesn't agree with the dating for some reason. .... And my biggest personal hurdle is f57v, that falls within a single decade, 1530-1540, and could not have been written any earlier, at least according to all the work I've actually done on this page. ... " Hello Glen. I guess Rudolf II was big on Paracelsus's ideas. Well that f57v seems a particularly easy folio in which to notice something new with every visit to it. For the total amount of ink on it, it can appear very rich in messages. This f57v often gives me the impression it was algorithmically worked out right on its parchment, rather than having been copied from a finished rough draft. If you can convincingly demonstrate it 1530-1540, and that it could not have been written earlier, it would of course pretty much straddle Paracelsus's big book of 1536. During one of my recent funny-hour I was counting "tree rings" in f23r, and reached the conclusion that f23r could not have been rendered before 1915 minus 22 = 1893, reinforcing my suspicion that Ethel Voynich created the VMS in 1897/98 during her mysterious trip to Austria; just kidding :-). Berj ************************* RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 2/06/10 2:55 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net GC wrote Fri 2/05/10 6:44 AM : " Hey Berj, I truly missed you!!!! " Well thanks for the flowers GC. On the flipside I never felt you were really all that far away. " I have built a secret hideout where I spend a great deal of time, and I've code named it "the bathroom" so no one will question what goes on when I'm out of reach, heh heh. " Ah yes the bathroom - the first thing any architecture student should learn to design. The lighting, environmental and artificial, is all-important of course. There is that great VMS "bathroom" in f84r - nice. " As you might remember, I spent three years studying one of the most arcane subjects anyone could study - shorthand symbols and systems. I actually know enough on this topic to write a stand-alone book. " I would like to read it. " I will tell you almost everything you want to know about what I know, except for the exact meaning of that 17 character string on f57v. ..... but I've said multiple times that all 17 characters are to be found in a particular shorthand system, and that at least 9 (probably 11) of these are found in only one system that derived from only one place, that being the religious colleges of Cambridge. " r, well Cambridge is no surprise to me regarding the VMS. So, good. " But the fact remains that these 1530's examples have no added embellishments or improvements that we would expect from the generational shift between 1430-1530, so I read this to mean that I'm within a generation of their point of creation as a system, and that they could not have managed an unchanged existence for 100 years, and then exhibit such an explosion of innovation in the following 5 decades. " Hmm, interesting. I haven't got anywhere near the study of f57v you do, but somewhere I had made a note to myself that the symbols in f57v show evolution. So again, good. Now, elsewhere in this thread you commented on statistics shifts across the VMS, and you said: " Even the basics of Currier statistics tells us that there is a major connection between the A herbals and the pharmaceuticals now located in the rear of the book. His statistical analysis wasn't as refined as mine, but both datasets tell us that the original work consisted of an herbal and a pharmaceutical. B pages, written in a totally different statistic, where interleaved in a bifoliated manner within the herbal, and a single B section was added later to the pharmaceutical section. " This observation seems to align nicely with an idea I plug now and then, what I call the "Slavic Doll nested-shells" organization of the VMS: http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/4-1-2007-06-27/ This organization could of course fit any plausible time-scenario, including that it was innovated late at the time of last binding. Berj ****************************** RE: VMs: Mass emailing: Habits of Old Vellum Use? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 2/06/10 9:22 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Sat 2/06/10 8:26 PM : " I sent the below general question, in a mass emailing, to about 20-25 addresses... all of major libraries containing vellum documents. As I glean more addresses, I'll send it out to more. ..... " Excellent Rich! Well done! This ought to result in some very interesting data. Thanks for doing this. Berj ************************ RE: VMs: Re: The VMS appears on APOD (again) From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 2/07/10 6:15 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net GC wrote Sat 2/06/10 9:44 PM : " I followed your link and looked at your notes, and with only a few minor exceptions I am very surprised that you have used your own methods to come up with almost the exact alignment I have argued in detail to Nick in private, using statistical information, pigment and palette information, vellum type and script analysis as the basis. " Well actually, speaking of surprises, to me the biggest surprise following the Slavic Doll nested-shells work of NOV 2006 ( http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/4-1-2007-06-27/ ) came just under a year later in OCT 2007. Let me explain: In a DEC 2006 list reply to Robert Teague about the nested-shells, I commented: " At the very center of the book (in this core-plus-shells model) the balneological core is pierced by a single all-text code-page: f76r " So, imagine my surprise in OCT 2007 when I concluded that the upper-half of the f76r text is, in addition to whatever else, holding an embedded steganographic hand-script text-art portrait, specifically a portrait of a man holding up with both hands before his eyes a rectangular plate, evidently an optical filter-plate: http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/18-1-2008-04-15/ http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/14-1-2007-10-22/ The optical filter-plate dove-tailed with my already long-rooted belief that optical physics was a major concern of the VMS author, said belief having begun with taking that thing in f67v2 as an RGB color-calibration provided by the VMS author, and that for example filters are needed to view (in the actual Voynich Manuscript) what Jan Hurych and Robert would call the hidden VMS embedded within the overt VMS we normally see. You don't believe in microscopes in the VMS I know, but I think there is a good chance that Rich SantaColoma is correct about at least one of the pharma "jars" being a depiction of an optical instrument, namely some sort of microscope. And as I've already said somewhere, perhaps some of the pharma section preparations are not for the purpose of producing medicines, but rather dyes of various kinds to be used in making optical filters. None of this argues against the VMS author having had high-priority medical interests. But again to my personal big surprise: f76r, a code page, is the organizational center of the Voynich Manuscript, and lo and behold, it holds a stunning thematic steganographic portrait of the man who is in all probability the author of the VMS. And if it turns out there were multiple authors, say teacher-student across generations as you've explained, then the man of f76r is the chief designer of the VMS among them, I believe. And so at this stage it is easy for me to conjecture that if the f76r text is, simultaneous with its graphic aspects, also really a carrier of cipher, then that cipher is likely to decode into some biographical details of the man of f76r, who I presume to be the VMS's chief author. " It is for instance, hard for me to imagine that someone starts out with a complicated script and devolves it to something much simpler over time. " Well one possibility is analysis: taking the advanced exemplar and reverse-engineering it so as to deduce its evolutionary track. " One thing lost to our modern electric world is the smell of freshly washed clothes as they come off a clothes line hung outside. .... my cat .... " Well, common in the thoroughly polymathic off-J discussions are themes dealing with the now-mostly-lost great joys of yesteryear, like steam locomotives. Think of it: people still ride horses, and ride in modern cars and rail stock, but have never experienced a train-ride with a steam locomotive: they are in a sense fragmented in their transportation experiences. Perhaps Wilfrid and Ethel hatched some of their plots while riding the Orient Express :-). Did you note by the way that very recently Tornado saved the day when the modern railroad stock succumbed to the severe weather? " In the later stages there are entire shifts in palette, different materials used entirely, which would possibly indicate both a time and a location shift in the authorship of these pages. " Or a shift in optical filters and steganography experimentation. " I know there are many who don't care to use my transcription, probably due to the fact that is a bit difficult to use, ....... " I don't think so - I find it quite easy to use. I think that's because I switch to visual processing of it within my mind when using it, whereas with EVA I have the tendency to process it verbally. Somebody of course a long time ago classified people as mainly verbal thinkers, mainly visual thinkers, mainly feelings thinkers, and so on, but even so, in polymathic work like the VMS it seems to me to be mandatory to develop the full-spectrum capabilities. " ..... The script is based on an old shorthand script, and all of these odd little changes are standard shorthand variations on standard shorthand characters. ..... " Well, in a somewhat different fashion, that great early VMS worker Romaine Newbold would agree. Curiously, you had earlier mentioned: " ... but one of the "stuffed" bifolios includes 80r and 80v. " And f80v just happens to be where "my cat", that interesting lady CATWOMAN resides, with all her micro-implications: http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/12-1-2007-10-12/ " I want to make it clear that I do not think the VMS is written in shorthand. The script is derived from shorthand symbols, but these are used to manipulate a relatively simple cipher with only a handful of alphabets. The shorthand marks - the variations of glyphs within the script, are "instructional" in that they allow for the manipulation of the cipher in creating patterns the cipher could not otherwise mathematically create. The VMS is a combination of both shorthand and cipher - a shorthand cipher, if I may coin a term? ..... " A very interesting idea for sure. Berj ************************************** VMs: Voynich text group frequencies From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 2/13/10 3:19 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Jan Hurych's latest article discussing the VMS text and attacks on it is now available in the J.VS Library: IS THE VM ENCODED? ( and how to solve it in that case) http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/23-4-2010-02-12/ Here's an excerpt: " If indeed the VM is using codewords, it also suggests the possible method of solution: instead of letter frequency, we will use the word frequency in our cracking method. By frequency of course I do not mean the frequency of the words with the same length, that would be pointless exercise. Instead, we will count the words that are exactly the same, that is they do have the same order of the same letters. The "top" words (with highest frequency) then could be replaced by the "top" words of the language in question. " Berj / KI3U ********************* VMs: History of the Libreria Franceschini From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/15/10 4:18 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #335, (Vol. IV, 15 FEB 2010): J.VS: The history of the Libreria Franceschini http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U ******************** VMs: Voynich ten years before and after the Libreria Franceschini acquisition From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 2/22/10 6:14 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested I have some data: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #336 (Vol. IV, 21 FEB 2010) : J.VS: Some Wilfrid Voynich matters across ten years before and after the Libreria Franceshini acquisition http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U **************************** VMs: U. Chicago Office of the President, Adm. records, Voynich: Box 85 From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 2/24/10 9:46 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net I'm not sure if the following is old news, or something recently put online, but here it is anyway: http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/uncap_rs3.php?eadid=ICU.SPCL.OFCPRESHJB&format=raw-xml&collection=project/SCRC University of Chicago Library Guide to the University of Chicago Office of the President, Harper, Judson and Burton Administrations Records 1869-1925 Abstract: This collection contains records of the University of Chicago Office of the President, covering the administrations of the first three presidents of the University: William Rainey Harper (1891-1906), Harry Pratt Judson (1906-1923), and Ernest DeWitt Burton (1923-1925). Included are administrative records such as correspondence, memoranda, and reports. Box: 85 Folder: 5 Voynich, Wilfrid M., 1916-1917 Berj / KI3U ******************************** RE: VMs: Astro Section Date Summary From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 2/25/10 12:27 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Richard Sale wrote Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:54:31 -0800 : " While investigating the use of markers on a sundial as indicators for the hours, I discovered the obvious need to adjust the position of the markers relative to the given latitude. Something of a quandary. Perhaps it might be possible to determine latitude if there were sufficient accurate data to establish numerical positions on the sundial. Probably there is too much variation in measurement, given the size of the patterned boxes (e.g. f 71 r), although it still may be possible to find a best fit for the data in total and see if it is accurate within ten degrees or not. It might be Prague. " Well maybe this will be of use (you might like the ending :-) : Journal of Voynich Studies communication #277 ( Vol. II, 30 OCT 2008 ) : J.VS: Estimating the Geo-latitude of the Voynich f85r2 philosopher http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolII2008.htm Berj / KI3U *********************************** VMs: Voynich and connections with Psychical Research From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 2/26/10 5:35 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested I have some data: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #337 (Vol. IV, 25 FEB 2010) : J.VS: Voynich and connections with Psychical Research http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U ********************************** RE: VMs: authentication certificate of VMS? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 2/27/10 7:37 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Greg Stachowski wrote Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:18:49 +0100 : " Today, perhaps. I think things were somewhat different in Voynich's time; moreover, Voynich himself was considered an authority (see numerous letters and articles of the period). " Greg, if I remember correctly there actually was an appraisal done on the VMS, after Wilfrid Voynich's death as part of an estate appraisal. But where oh where is that datum in the mountains of VMS data? Berj **************** RE: VMs: Re: Re: f86v circular diagram From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 2/28/10 12:36 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net David Suter wrote Sat, 27 Feb 2010 16:11:12 -0500 : " As to the scribble- I thought it might read "Humphrey"...maybe. " Hello David. For what it's worth the scribbles in and around the "T-O" in f86v3 seem to me to show an approximate repitition. The basic scribble inside the T-O seems approximately repeated by the scribble to its left outside the T-O. This may have been noted sometime back by Jonathan Dilas of the German Voynich list, as the best processed image I have of this was made by him. Another thing I notice is that the nib which did the scribbles seems to have chattered - compare with the "T". Worth comparing is this f86v3 scribbles "T-O" with those of f68v3 (spiral galaxy) and f86r6 ( "678 anno" north-east rosette ). In the scribbles T-O the two lines both seem drawn freehand. In the spiral galaxy it looks like at least the horizontal was drawn with a ruler, and the vertical though a little bent, may also have been drawn using an edge. In the rosette both paint and ink seem to have been roughly applied to make a "T" inside a crude "O". Finally, a lot of 6's and 8's seem to be associated with these T-O's. Berj ********************* RE: VMs: Oldest Known Papyrus Roll: It's Blank. From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 3/01/10 4:18 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Very good reference page Rich. Tnx. Berj From: helio6 To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: VMs: Oldest Known Papyrus Roll: It's Blank. Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010 13:14:28 +0000 From: http://www.normanpublishing.com/G2I/timeline/index.php?category=Paper+%2F+Papyrus+%2F+Parchment+%2F+Vellum "The ancient Egyptians had used rolls made of papyrus from the early days of the Old Kingdom. The oldest known papyrus roll was found in the tomb of Hemaka in Saqqara, and dates to the 1st dynasty, around 2900 BC. The hieroglyph for 'papyrus roll' existed already in inscriptions from this period. The 1st dynasty roll was blank; the oldest examples with writing dated from the 4th and 5th dynasties" (Roemer, "The Papyrus Roll in Egypt, Greece, and Rome," Eliot & Rose (eds) A Companion to the History of the Book [2007] 84). "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." Francis Bacon ********************* VMs: Alexandra David-Neel From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 4/14/10 10:56 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Jonas Nyman wrote Wed 4/14/10 10:31 PM in vms-list thread "Re: VMs: Tibetan plants 2" : " I have been interested in Tibetan culture for many years. One thing that has occupied my mind for some time is what is called the Shangri-la-syndrome. To put it very short: Westerners perceive Tibet and Tibetan culture in an overly romantic way. This is because of early explorer's often exaggerated recounts of their time in Tibet. A good example is Alexandra David-Néel. (or Tuesday Lobsang Rampa!) This is a complicated subject which I would love to discuss, but it is rather far from the main subject of this mailing list. That is why I shortened it to my, perhaps clumsy, statement about me doing interviews... " Hm, interesting. Apparently Jonas Nyman has spent quality-time immersed in Tibetan culture comparable to the quality-time spent therein by Alexandra David-Neel. Personally I don't think such a complicated subject is so rather far from the studies of concern to this Voynich list, and I would read what Jonas Nyman has to offer as his opinions thereon, at least his initial opinions. Berj / KI3U ********************** RE: VMs: Where Are They From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 4/20/10 3:25 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net On page 76 they seem to be in the Washington, D.C. area March 4, 1915; on page 153 they seem to be in London, September 6, 1921. Berj / KI3U From: dscott520@XXX To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: VMs: Where Are They Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:28:10 -0600 I find the following quote regarding Wilfrid Voynich to be a bit confusing. Are he and William Warner Bishop in the United States or in London, or both? http://books.google.com/books?id=wOIQaVfRpEIC&pg=PA76&dq=wilfrid+voynich&lr=&cd=35#v=onepage&q=wilfrid voynich&f=false Regards, Dana Scott ******************** RE: VMs: Where Are They From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 4/20/10 3:56 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Lets try it like this: * 21 NOV 1914 Voynich sails for NY from Liverpool aboard the Lusitania, arriving in NY in about a week (source: Rafal T. Prinke - shiplists). * 4 MAR 1915 William Warner Bishop meets Wilfrid (de) Voynich for the first time, in the Washington, D.C. area. * 7 OCT - 3 NOV 1915 Voynich exhibits the Roger Bacon Cipher MS for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago (source: Xavier Ceccaldi). * 6 SEP 1921 Voynich and Bishop see each other in London. * 29 OCT 1921 Voynich sails from Liverpool to the U.S. aboard the Scythia (source: Rafal T. Prinke - shiplists). So it all seems to fit. Berj *********************** RE: VMs: Where Are They From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 4/20/10 1:38 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net I had read from a few pages before pg. 76, and a few pages before pg. 153 in Sparks's book, and Bishop makes clear that his Kensington is in the Washington, D.C. area. From the context it seemed so also was the mentioned Buckingham Hotel, although perhaps that was a mistake. We can expand the timeline to include another important date: * 21 NOV 1914 Voynich sails for NY from Liverpool aboard the Lusitania, arriving in NY in about a week (source: Rafal T. Prinke - shiplists). * 4 MAR 1915 William Warner Bishop meets Wilfrid (de) Voynich for the first time, in the Washington, D.C. area. * 7 OCT - 3 NOV 1915 Voynich exhibits the Roger Bacon Cipher MS for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago (source: Xavier Ceccaldi). * 20 APR 1921 Voynich and Newbold formally introduce the Roger Bacon Cipher MS (VMS) with their lectures at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (source: D'Imperio). * 6 SEP 1921 Voynich and Bishop see each other in London. * 29 OCT 1921 Voynich sails from Liverpool to the U.S. aboard the Scythia (source: Rafal T. Prinke - shiplists). We actually have scattered here and there among our sources more dates of Wilfrid's whereabouts and doings. As always, someone has to take the time to organize all this info. Berj To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: Re: VMs: Where Are They Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:03:51 -0400 From: monet273@XXX The Cosmos Club was near Connecticut Ave , which I believe even then extended straight up to the Kensington area. There may have been a trolley, as they were used in DC right up to the 1950/60's, after which they vanished, unfortunately. David Suter The Cosmos Club is definitely in Washington, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_Club and there is the town of Kensington in Maryland, just north of D.C. -----Original Message----- From: Greg Stachowski To: vms-list Sent: Tue, Apr 20, 2010 6:17 am Subject: RE: VMs: Where Are They On Mon, 19 Apr 2010, Dana Scott wrote: > p.76: When William Bishop and Wilfrid meet, there is an exhibit of > manuscripts at the Buckingham Hotel (London?), following the "expiration of > Congress" (in Washington?). They have dinner at the Cosmos Club > (Washington?) and then return to the hotel, after which William takes "the > midnight trolley to Kensington (London?). Unless there was a Buckingham > Hotel in Washington and a Kensington township or suburb nearby Washington > D.C., I still find this quote confusing. The Cosmos Club is definitely in Washington, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_Club and there is the town of Kensington in Maryland, just north of D.C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington,_Maryland It's not impossible there was a "Buckingham Hotel" in D.C. at the time, it's a popular name (c.f. the rather more famous Buckingham in NYC). Amusingly, there is a Washington Hotel near Buckinham Palace in London. G. -- -------------------------------------o--------------=- greg@XXX **************************************** RE: VMs: Where Are They From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 4/20/10 5:29 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:18:39 +0000: " There is a Buckingham Hotel out in Ocean City, Maryland... but probably too far to be staying at for someone in Washington. Just for jollies I emailed them, to ask if they were in business in 1914: http://www.ocrooms.com/buckingham_hotel.htm " Hi Rich. Turns out there is at least one listing for a "Buckingham Hotel" in Washington, D.C. back around that time : via google books, in the George Washington University Bulletin, Volume 4, we find on page 33: " Broughton, William S., Law 1901, Buckingham Hotel, Washington, D.C. " Berj ************************ RE: VMs: Voynich Manuscript, by Frederic P. Miller From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 5/08/10 5:38 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Sat, 8 May 2010 17:12:46 +0000 : " Is anyone familiar with this book, published September '09?: .......... " Hi Rich. As I recall a year or two ago off-J we discussed what seemed to be computer-generated books becoming more common, and we saw a Voynich example or two, but I don't recall if this particular one was among them. There is one customer review which pretty much tells the tale. Berj *************** RE: VMs: List challenge From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 5/16/10 2:23 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Barbara Barrett wrote Sun, 16 May 2010 11:07:00 +0100 : " funny bunnyed; Transcription from VM glyphs into your own glyphs in whatever language or code that may be , then translate into English. Barbara baffles; That would require identification of the plaintext language, and knowlege of how the VMS's codeing works; under which conditions transcription systems are redundant. " It seems to me that depends on the objective of bunny's proposed experiment. You imply the restricted objective of recovering the encoded plaintext, if indeed there is one. But, suppose a spectrum of people do this and produce their subjective "translations" of some block of VMS text, say the opening paragraph of f1r. Looking over those translations and comparing them could well be interesting from the perspective of cross-cultural studies. The scope of study opportunities which the Voynich manuscript provides is bigger than just assuming there is a systematic enciphered plaintext and cracking it. Actually, if you want to insist on your implied criteria, it would be useful if you provided some evidence to show why the VMS author did not generate his / her text just precisely for the purpose of stimulating experiments in cross-cultural subjectivism. Berj / KI3U ******************** RE: VMs: Transfer of Domain From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 5/19/10 4:38 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Wed 5/19/10 4:18 PM : " The voynich.net domain transfer has taken effect, and it is under my name. Of course this will not change anything... like the others before me, Dana Scott and Rene Zandbergen, I am really here to maintain and protect the domain. " Hi Rich, glad to see the list remains in good hands. " As I said, nothing will really change as far as posting or receiving messages through the mailing list. It was suggested during this process, by another party, that there be some sort of filtering of messages according to content... some sort of "value" judgment applied according to some sort of agree upon set of "standards". I disagree of course. " Good. " I will reestablish the missing "subscription" page, so that it is easier for new people to learn how to join the mailing list. " Good. " ..... to create a searchable database for all the posts since the last time this was done. " It sure was handy in earlier years. Berj / KI3U ******************** RE: VMs: Guiding Star From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 5/28/10 1:33 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Dana Scott wrote Fri 5/28/10 7:04 AM : " There is what appears to be a major "star" toward the middle of folio f82r. I wonder what this symbol might have signified during the Middle Ages? Notice the similarity to the border "star" in the following: http://www.wikiwak.com/image/Angelic+movers.jpg http://www.wikiwak.com/wak/Dynamics_of_the_celestial_spheres Perhaps, this might help narrow the provenance of the VMs... " Excellent discovery Dana! The similarity of the border "star" decorations in the 14th c. illustration to the star on VMS f82r is one of the closest matches of anything in the VMS to something outside it, that anyone has ever come up with. Congratulations! Berj ********************** RE: VMs: Guiding Star From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 5/28/10 7:15 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Bunny wrote Fri 5/28/10 6:51 PM : " But, the inclusion of old style symbols on old vellum does not make an article genuine to that age ... " No argument with that. And, along the same lines, back in 2006 I mentioned striking similarities between some VMS plant illustrations and those in: Oxford Bodleian Library Ps. Apuleius, Herbal England, St. Augustine's abbey, Canterbury; 11th century, c. 1070-1100 http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwm...hmole/1431.htm and a guy like, say, Elias Ashmole, with his vast collections, could have, in the 17th c., possessed copies of this and Dana's just found manuscripts, and further, a friend of Ashmole, having access to Ashmole's collections, which might have even included unused old parchments, could have drawn upon the collections to fabricate the VMS. Not impossible at all so far as I can see at this stage. Berj **************** VMs: Emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 6/23/10 10:03 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net In working with the Voynich "text" over the years I have now and then wondered what would make a good candidate for exhibiting its mysterious strangeness, in the sense that some aspect of it plainly showing it is strange, could easily be put before an interested newcomer, and a newcomer not necessarily trained in advanced mathematics, but nevertheless able to appreciate straightforward arithmetic in relation to sequences. To my mind the above is an interesting problem in its own right - lets put it this way: can we exhibit a few easily appreciated numbers and ratios which in a matter of minutes effectively let the newcomer grasp the oddity of the VMS text? Of course many exhibits of the VMS text's analytic properties show its strangeness to the experienced observer, and in one category it is itself strange that analytics can show remarkable similarities to, say Latin text sequences, while other analytics show just the opposite. An approach to the above "challenge" then would obviously be colored by whoever specialist was commenting about it - mathematician, linguist, cryptographer, artist etc. Back in the late 1990's after I had read the work on the higher-order entropies of the VMS text by Dennis Stallings / KE5OT [1], I got some ideas along the present vein which lately have been entering my latest VMS-text experiments [2]. I've been using a simple check on the sequences I've been experimenting with, in particular the Vocabulary represented by these sequences, which may or may not be a good candidate to meet the above challenge, but I think it's worthwhile presenting here, and anyway things are so quiet on the list lately that it should do no harm, and perhaps I've made errors which will hereby surface. I call this check: frequencies of the prime permutation trigraphs, being the trigraphs of the three most-frequent characters in the block of text under investigation. It's simple - lets see how it works with three independent sources of "text" groups: the Voynich text, a 17th century English-language botanical work, and a block of more or less random numbers. 1.) Voynich Text. We start with Glen Claston's Concordance of Separate Voynich Groups [3] : voygroup.txt This file is famously accurate, and has only a few minor errors here and there, remarkable for such a huge and demanding transcription and general-computing job (Thanks GC!!), for instance the entry, as I have it: 8aeoy 9k2c79,43v.7.1 looks to me like it needs some fixing as regards the end of line 6 and the start of line 7 there on f43v. But to continue. Lets extract the Voynich text Vocabulary from voygroup.txt - assuming I did this correctly, I obtain a VMS Vocabulary of 9433 distinct groups: VMS Alphabet = 119 glyphs/symbols No. of Groups = 9433 Total no. of symbols = 50381 Average Group-size = 5.340931 Total-Symbols-to-Alphabet Ratio = 423.37 The longest group-size = 16 The shortest group-size = 1 In this VMS Vocabulary the three most common glyphs, and their frequencies are: GC-o : 6793 GC-9 : 5062 GC-a : 4045 Together these three Voynich symbols represent: { 6793 + 5062 + 4045 } / 50381 = 15900 / 50381 = 0.315595 almost 32% of the Vocabulary in the VMS text corpus. Perhaps not surprisingly they are rather easily and quickly and similarly stroked during writing. So, with such a weighty 32% visibility in the VMS, you'd think these three guys would often appear as neighbors. Lets check the VMS Vocabulary to see in how many of the VMS groups we can find the six permutation trigraphs of GC-o, GC-9, and GC-a : o9a : none oa9 : none 9ao : none 9oa : 9oay, g9oae9 ao9 : none a9o : none Just two groups in the VMS vocabulary show up here. Is this unusual? 2.) From Project Gutenberg we obtain the transcription of the 1699 first edition of John Evelyn's "Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets", Project Gutenberg file [4] : 15517.txt Extracting from this file the body-text of Evelyn's work, and extracting from that the Vocabulary, I obtain: Alphabet = 63 characters No. of Words = 6333 Total no. of characters = 42856 Average Group-size = 6.767093 Total-Characters-to-Alphabet Ratio = 680.254 The longest group-size = 22 The shortest group-size = 1 In Evelyn's Vocabulary the three most common alphabet characters, and their frequencies are: e : 4666 i : 3327 s : 3145 { 4666 + 3327 + 3145 } / 42856 = { 11138 } / 42856 = 0.25989 and the counts of their permutation trigraphs are: eis : 4 esi : 19 ise : 26 ies : 68 sei : none sie : 9 Quite a difference compared with the VMS Vocabulary in 1.). 3.) A more or less randomly generated "Vocabulary" of numbers, composed of the numerals 0-9 : Alphabet = 10 numerals ("characters") No. of Groups = 784 Total no. of characters = 3268 Average Group-size = 4.168367 Total-Characters-to-Alphabet Ratio = 326.8 The longest group-size = 17 The shortest group-size = 1 The frequencies altogether are: 0 : 354 1 : 344 2 : 385 3 : 323 4 : 337 5 : 329 6 : 291 7 : 298 8 : 298 9 : 309 and for the top three they are: 2 : 385 0 : 354 1 : 344 { 385 + 354 + 344 } / 3268 = { 1083 } / 3268 = 0.331395 and the counts of their permutation trigraphs are: 201 : 4 210 : 1 012 : 4 021 : 1 120 : 2 102 : 1 Again quite a difference from 1.), especially considering that here we have altogether generated only a 784 groups Vocabulary, compared with the 9433 Vocabulary available in the VMS. It would seem that the permutation trigraphs comparisons are promising for easily displaying what is emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text Vocabulary - they require only simple arithmetic to appreciate [5,6]. As to what they suggest from the very limited three comparisons above, one could say that the VMS VOCABULARY strongly hints at having been generated in a rather non-random manner, a manner which avoids the prime trigraphs. Berj / KI3U [1] http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/mbpaper.htm [2] I've been experimenting with test sequences generated by chaotic functions to investigate the properties of the Voynich text - quite interesting, and hopefully I'll have some of this stuff in shape fairly soon to communicate to J.VS. [3] http://voynichcentral.com/transcriptions/Voynich-101/index.html [4] http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15517 [5] Jorge Stolfi has some VMS trigraphs work online: http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/Notes/061/work/count-trigraph-freqs http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/Notes/061/work/enum-trigraphs http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-06-07-word-grammar/ [6] See also Marke Fincher's word-permutations work: http://www.sphere.me.uk/vms/WPPA.doc ******************************************** RE: VMs: Emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 6/29/10 2:09 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Mon 6/28/10 2:17 PM : " Sorry Berj I have read this a couple of times, and I'm not entirely clear. The text can be counted and broken down in infinite ways, resulting in infinite counts, with no indication of which is the correct one. Even if it is matched to a sample text... it can broken down in many ways to match various aspects of any sample text... character count of that text, syllables, phonetic groups, random "chunks". So I'm unclear how one would know your conclusion, about it avoiding these "prime trigraphs". Yell at me if you need to, and set me straight on this... if there is something I don't get. The thing to me, before any count of Voynichese, or any comparison to an existing plain text for similarities, we would have to have a reasonable sense of the structure, as the possible system used, so that we can apply the correct count in the correct way... otherwise the chance of hitting on "the one" proper count/comparison would be virtually impossible. But maybe that is your point, and an attempt to find such a structure in the existing text, and I misunderstood the purpose of including the comparison to a plain text passage. " Hi Rich Well let me see if I can make clearer what I was trying to do regarding an examination of the Voynich text. This may be a bit long-winded. First of all, again, I see it as an interesting Voynich studies challenge to find: " what would make a good candidate for exhibiting its mysterious strangeness, in the sense that some aspect of it plainly showing it is strange, could easily be put before an interested newcomer, and a newcomer not necessarily trained in advanced mathematics, but nevertheless able to appreciate straightforward arithmetic in relation to sequences. " That is to say, we are wondering if there is some fundamental property of sequences which is relatively easily appreciated by interested parties who are not especially trained in advanced math, but yet a fundamental property which fairly demonstrates the strangeness of Voynichese as compared with other sequences. Now, I realize that rather than leave it up to the reader to figure out from context, I should have at the beginning explicitly stated how I am using the word "sequences". That concept is used somewhat differently here and there, even in Voynichland. So lets start with that. I was using the idea of "sequence" at the group/word level: a group or word is a sequence of characters or glyphs or letters or symbols. Clearly a sentence, such as this one, can be seen as a super-sequence (of complete words) of sub-sequences (the letters in the words). Now possibly, the entire discussion could be rewritten to avoid "sequence" altogether, and instead say that: a group or word is a set of characters or glyphs or letters or symbols. But lets proceed. Now the Voynich "text" is a set of groups. So in tune with the interesting challenge, lets first of all pick some common aspect of sets of groups. How about this: they all have a "Vocabulary", being the list of the set's distinct groups. To illustrate, suppose we have this set of groups (it happens to be a sentence): {1} The situation in the Gulf of Mexico is rather worrying and it is becoming more so daily as the conditions in and around the Gulf deteriorate further and no solid evidence that the expansion of the catastrophe can be checked is forthcoming We see there are altogether 42 groups/words in this set. Lets look at its Vocabulary: {2} 01: The 02: situation 03: in 04: the 05: Gulf 06: of 07: Mexico 08: is 09: rather 10: worrying 11: and 12: it 13: becoming 14: more 15: so 16: daily 17: as 18: conditions 19: around 20: deteriorate 21: further 22: no 23: solid 24: evidence 25: that 26: expansion 27: catastrophe 28: can 29: be 30: checked 31: forthcoming We see that its Vocabulary is just 31 distinct words. Some of them are not uniquely represented in the 42-words set, they appear more than once in the complete "text" : {3} word : frequency in the text in : 2 is : 3 the : 5 Gulf : 2 and : 3 of : 2 As an aside, we could note for {1} its: {4} Vocabulary Ratio = 31/42 = 0.7381 We proceed on the assumption that its Vocabulary is a fairly fundamental aspect of a set/text of words/groups. For one thing, the Vocabulary contains the complete characters-set of the text. In the above case it is: {5} GMTabcdefghiklmnoprstuvwxy which constitutes a total alphabet of 26 characters for the text of {1}, the number 26 here being just a coincidence. These alphabet characters variously appear as neighbors, and we begin the study of neighboring with the socalled "n-graph", so that examples of "di-graph" would be: ii, ed, de, Gx, Gc, and so on. The alphabet of {5} allows: {6} 26 x 26 = 676 possible digraphs and even more possible tri-graphs, etc., and needless to say entire words are their own n-graphs, because Vocabularies can be seen as just that: a list of certain n-graphs. And so then, one way to study {1} is to see what it's 676 spectral-lines di-graph spectrum looks like: which of those 676 spectral lines are raised above zero in the case of {1}, and to what amplitudes [1]. We might make a rule that in counting, we count the occurrence of a digraph in a word just once, so that say for example, "hahahaah", gets only 1 count for the digraph "ha". Or, if our analytics deem it appropriate, we invoke a different counting rule. But insofar as a Vocabulary is more fundamental than its particular use as in {1}, it seems then that it would be more fundamental to study the digraph spectrum of the Vocabulary {2}. And in general, study the n-graph spectrums of a Vocabulary, so as to obtain clues to the fundamentals underlying a Vocabulary. For example, suppose we have two Vocabularies and they are both built upon the exact same alphabet. Lets go even further and say that both Vocabularies have the exact same number of words, and word-lengths statistics. But if the di-graph spectra of the two have no overlaps at all, then there is something fundamentally different between these two Vocabularies, at least in the way their words appear on paper, although we concede that they might still be mapping identical notions with their visually different words. So then at this point in trying to meet the defining challenge of this discussion, it seems that the n-graph spectra of the Vocabularies of texts are a natural place to find an answer to the challenge. Can we keep the quest simple, and zero in on just one n-graph spectrum, say the digraph spectrum, when comparing Vocabularies? A thorough answer to that question involves some considerable mathematics - we would need to set up models for Vocabularies beginning with modeled alphabets, and define functions which characterize the evolving n-graph spectra according to rules governing the expansions of the alphabets and Vocabularies, and then from those characteristic functions find their greatest sensitivities, and then we'd finally have the good answer, if there is one. The irony here is that if we proceed thusly, the whole thing might become so interesting that we might forget all about Voynich and not return for a long time. So instead, we take a short-cut: experimentation. Which gives us just some limited hints of what is a promising answer to our challenge, and we concede from the outset that when you wrote: " The text can be counted and broken down in infinite ways, resulting in infinite counts, with no indication of which is the correct one. " you are right. However, remember that we are in a quest to meet a challenge, and to do it we need candidate answers; I've been asserting from the beginning that the challenge is worthwhile for anyone really seriously interested in the peculiar Voynich text, so I'll justify the efforts here no further. Now then, going into experimentation, some things are obvious right at the start, like: {7a} the bigger an Alphabet, the more possibilities it has for n-graphs for any given group-size, and as a consequence, the easier it is to construct (or have societies evolve) Vocabularies which AVOID certain n-graphs. {7b} the bigger a Vocabulary in relation to the size of its alphabet, the more stringent must be the rules of its word-constructions if that Vocabulary is relatively restricted as to its n-graph spectra, that is if the Vocabulary is clearly avoiding certain n-graphs. (One measure of the size of a Vocabulary is the total number of characters in all its words.) Now, if we went no further than appreciating {7a} then we couldn't much be faulted for giving up on the possibility that experimentally investigating n-graphs AVOIDANCE might work for meeting our challenge. But an extreme imaginary example for {7b} motivates us to keep the avoidance-gauge possibility alive: if you constructed a Vocabulary of 750 Trillion groups upon an Alphabet of just 10 characters, you'd have to be working at it quite a lot to avoid some n-graphs completely. What the contrast between {7a} and {7b} comes down to is: out there in the world how do "Vocabularies" generated by language and writing evolution, generated by designed construction, generated by random processes, and generated by natural streams of signals including biological like bird-song, compare as to n-graph spectra? So we do some exeriments with various Vocabularies, and plot their n-graph spectra. To make a long story short I had been finding it handy to gauge Vocabularies by a special sub-spectrum of n-graphs: for lack of something better I called them the "prime permutation trigraphs". There are six of them, and so their frequencies in a Vocabulary make for just 6 numbers, which I found gave me a pretty good feel for the construction of a Vocabulary, during day-to-day work of this type. Lets again see the definition for these trigraphs: {8} prime permutation trigraphs : the six possible trigraphs constructed from the three most-frequent characters in a Vocabulary The distinction which the pp-trigraphs have, whether or not they rise to meet our challenge, is that they are clearly special among all the possible tri-graphs of a Vocabulary: they are the trigraphs formed from, and only from, the top three frequent characters. We might think of their spectral lines in the grand tri-graph spectrum as the royal lines. Yes I know, history shows that being royal is no guarantee of efficacy :) Needless to say, a Vocabulary has to include groups of length 3 characters or more, for {8} to be of any use. The main idea behind {8} is to cut down some the effect of {7a} : {7c} Using as a reference a randomly generated Vocabulary upon a fixed-size Alphabet, a Vocabulary which has no rules restricting which characters may randomly follow which characters, then as the size of this Vocabulary grows with the generating process, the probability that the prime permutation trigraphs will NOT appear in the Vocabulary, diminishes toward zero. That's not terribly dramatic, but in other words, if there is nothing to stop it, then in a freely generated Vocabulary we would expect to see trigraph-level neighboring of the three most frequent characters of the Vocabulary. Lets go back to {2} and see what the prime permutation trigraphs are doing. In the Vocabulary of {2} the three prime characters, i.e. the three most frequent, are: e,o,i, all vowels, and together they make up just over 30% of all characters in {2}. Lets form from them the six possible permutation trigraphs, and check their frequencies in {2} : {9} pp-trigraph : frequency in {2} eoi : 0 eio : 0 oie : 0 oei : 0 ieo : 0 ioe : 0 Total avoidance, so to speak. But really this is not all surprising - the Vocabulary of {2} is quite small in relation to its alphabet. The total number of characters in {2} is 167, and so: {10} Total-Characters-to-Alphabet Ratio of {2} = 6.423 Indeed, with such a relatively small Vocabulary if we did see considerable counts in {9}, we might actually entertain the possibility of pp-trigraph FAVORING, in contrast to avoiding. Needless to say, if we bring in a bigger real-world English Vocabulary upon the Alphabet of {5}, we are likely to soon see e,o,i replaced as the prime characters set, perhaps by e,t,a, and in more advanced text work the dynamics of pp-trigraph cast-of-characters evolution is of some interest. But back to the rather simple idea of the pp-trigraphs as a candidate answer to our challenge. In the launch-post of this thread I gave the example of the 1699 first edition of John Evelyn's "Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets". There the Vocabulary's prime characters were e,i,s, accounting for nearly 26% of the Vocabulary's total 42856 characters. And we saw: {11} Total-Characters-to-Alphabet Ratio = 680.254 pp-trigraph : frequency eis : 4 esi : 19 ise : 26 ies : 68 sei : 0 sie : 9 so they occur a total of 4+19+26+68+9 = 126 times. At this stage it is handy to define a new simple math-gadget which collects the pp-trigraphs spectrum numbers into a single useful number. To be cautious, we must realize that coming up with a single number representing the effect of the pp-trigraphs is potentially quite complicated because we would first want to have the benefit of the earlier-mentioned studies of n-graph spectrum characteristics functions and their sensitivities to changing conditions. But we proceed on the realization that a simple gauge is just that, and if it registers an eye-popper, it is just a possible indication to be looked into more carefully during work of this kind where countless computations and their results are flowing by before you. So then define: {12} In a Vocabulary: PPTFR = Prime Permutations Trigraph Frequencies Ratio == ( 3 x the total of the pp-trigraph counts ) / ( total number of characters ) The reasoning here is as follows, by example; let : N = total number of characters in the Vocabulary G = total number of groups/words in the Vocabulary L = length of every group (number of its characters) T = number of trigraphs making up a group; in the group "hahhahhah" it would be 3 C = total of pp-trigraphs counts Now consider the two examples: {13} N : G : L : T : C :::: PPTFR 300 : 100 : 3 : 1 : 100 ::: 1.0 1800 : 100 : 18 : 6 : 600 ::: 1.0 It looks more complicated than it is. As you can see, the definition of PPTFR, the single useful number we are after, attempts to make PPTF's values range only over 0 - 1.0 . The two examples are contrived as maximum possible pp-trigraph Vocabulary cases. As goes my own experimentation, I'm still evaluating the definition {12} and perhaps a better one, and just as simple, will come along to replace it. But in any case, in my experiments I generally see PPTF values in non-VMS Vocabularies noticably higher than in the VMS text's Vocabulary, ten times higher is not unusual. Using the definition {12} lets see what Evelyn's book's Vocabulary comes to: {14} PPTFR = ( 3 x 126 ) / 42856 = 0.00882 In the launch-post of this thread I gave some numbers on the VMS Vocabulary extracted from GC's voygroup.txt file. Experienced VMS guys like yourself know there is no one definitive extraction, and noticed that I skipped over some items. For one thing, the VMS alphabet's size I gave as 119 is much too high for really practical investigative work - we all know that the overwhelming bulk of the VMS text Vocabulary is written with just 16-18 most frequent glyphs. Therefore the essential Total-glyphs-to-Alphabet Ratio is much higher than ~ 423, and we ought that much more to see some pp-trigraphs, but we hardly do. Finally, you noticed that I picked as the prime glyphs GC-o, GC-9, GC-a, instead of GC-o, GC-9, GC-c. Since you didn't call me on this, you must have seen my reason for doing that: even though GC-c is a bit more frequent than GC-a, unlike GC-a though it immediately gets us into the controversial can of worms of just what is a Voynich glyph, and should there be GC-C as well as GC-c and so on and so forth - skip over all that so as to keep continuity of the point I was trying to develop. Besides, if we do calculate the frequencies of the pp-trigraphs using GC-o, GC-9, GC-c, they still come out much lower (PPTFR ~ 0.0013) than in other Vocabularies I'm seeing so far. Well as you know, the numbers in this type of work being what they are, where even distributed computing could conceivably be considered as interesting, you go by what the moving-average of your experience is indicating. And presently the pp-trigraphs look promising for an answer to the challenge of finding some simple, easily understood demonstration of the weirdness of the Voynich text. Of course I'll jump at something better if it shows up from somewhere. And regarding Voynichese, you said above: "we would have to have a reasonable sense of the structure .....". Well, I'm suggesting that one reasonable sense of the structure of Voynichese's Vocabulary appears to be the relative paucity of the prime permutation trigraphs, and that it is worth looking into further. Berj [1] the amplitudes would be the "frequencies", i.e. the number of occurrences of a particular digraph. It is perhaps unfortunate that text-analysis uses the term "frequency" in the way it does, rather than just plain "count". ******************************************* RE: VMs: More prop/art books: From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 7/03/10 5:43 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Sat 7/03/10 4:35 PM: " And this really striking example, which includes mysterious characters, phony science, etc.: http://www.mythoplasm.co.uk/1312.html " Yeah that one is pretty interesting. " As I had pointed out in my blog post, the earliest example I had found was from Faustus, 1594... in which a prop book is specified... and I suspect it would not have looked all that different than some of the above examples. " I had a couple of thoughts during reading of your blog Rich. One thought, not really so relevant to the Voynich problem, is that somewhere in some museums are little ancient carvings of actors striking their poses during performance of Greek plays back in ancient Greek times - maybe one of these carvings shows one of the actors holding what would be a prop book, thus moving back in time the prop book tradition by a couple of thousand years or so. A more immediately potentially-useful thought is that perhaps within the "hoax" book category, or even aside it as its own category, would be a "decoy book". The idea goes like this: lets say the VMS author in all seriousness wrote the VMS as the collection of his/her most treasured research secrets; but the existence of the book, and glimpses of it, were known of by at least several people in the VMS author's circle. The VMS author fears his precious book will be stolen, or after his death fall into the wrong hands. To counteract this, he creates in parallel a decoy copy, a decoy which so resembles the true book that all who had seen glimpses of the true book would mistake the decoy for it. The decoy is left relatively unguarded, so that if it is stolen, everyone will think the true book has been stolen, and the focus will shift away from the true book's hiding place. This is basically an amplification of an imagining I've revisited now and then: that the VMS we have today is one of at least two similar copies. Berj ************************** RE: VMs: Emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 7/03/10 8:28 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich wrote Sat 7/03/10 4:46 PM : " If you do show this to a qualified new pair of eyes (a "V-V"?), perhaps you could simplify your concept a bit... package it somehow. " r, Greg was thinking similarly and the other day suggested I begin with a Lexicon of terminology, and I think it's a good idea that I post such a thing separately to J.VS before the actual investigations comms., so that the latter don't get even longer than they will be. I started on a draft Lexicon, which starts out like this: Definitions for n-graph Spectroscopy 1.) A Vocabulary = the set of distinct groups/words distilled from a set of groups, or "text". It represents an Alphabet of "symbols" from which its groups are constructed. 2.) Vocabulary Ratio = (the Vocabulary of a source of groups) / (total of source groups) 3.) An analytically expanding or evolving Vocabulary (i.e. the Vocabulary List is growing) may be expanded in several ways, e.g. : by expansion of the source of groups, by included group-sizes, by total number of symbols in the groups of the List, by selected sub-Alphabets, and in other arbitrarily chosen ways. 4.) At any given stage of expansion of a Vocabulary, its characteristics may be evaluated, so that along with those of previous and succeeding stages the characteristics versus expansion can be investigated. In particular, the n-graph spectra are of interest. 5.) An n-graph spectrum of the Vocabulary is the organized set of n-graph amplitude versus n-graph, where the amplitude = count of occurrences of the n-graph (i.e. its "frequency") in the Vocabulary, counted according to some rule such as: that a given n-graph is counted only once per group even if it appears to occur in the group more than once. If an n-graph of the Vocabulary's possible n-graph spectrum has at least one occurrence in the Vocabulary, then it is an "active" n-graph. The full n-graph spectrum, akin to "bandwidth", is determined by the Alphabet, or sub-Alphabet which is governing the particular analysis. If the Alphabet consists of m symbols, then the complete n=2 di-graph spectrum would have a bandwidth of m^2 spectral-lines, each of which may or may not be of zero-amplitude depending on the Vocabulary case. 5a.) n-graph spectrum bandwidth == the maximum number of n-graphs possible upon the Vocabulary's Alphabet 5b.) n-graph spectrum density == ( no. of active n-graphs ) / ( n-graph spectrum bandwidth ) 6.) An n-prime symbol of the Vocabulary is one of its n most frequently occurring symbols. Hence the di-prime symbols are the first-most and second-most frequent symbols. The tri-prime symbols are the 1st-most, 2nd-most, and 3rd-most frequent symbols appearing in the Vocabulary. And so on. In a dynamic-Vocabulary analysis, say the Vocabulary is expanding with sub-Alphabets, the prime symbols identities may change, before stabilizing, if (in general) they stabilize at all. 7.) A prime permutation n-graph is an n-graph constructed from, and only from n-prime symbols. The complete set of possible prime permutation n-graphs may be regarded as a special sub-spectrum of the overall n-graphs spectrum. There are 4 possible prime permutation di-graphs, and 6 possible prime permutation tri-graphs with Alphabets of at least 2, and 3 distinct symbols. 8.) Definition of the "prime permutation n-graphs frequencies ratio", PPnFR, is still subject to some thinking, but currently the attempt is to force the ratio to always fall only into the range 0 - 1.0 and is as follows for the first two cases: 8a.) an n-graph is counted exactly once regardless of how many times equal-to-or-greater-than-once that it appears to occur in a group. 8b.) PP2FR == ( 2 x total of all pp-digraphs counts ) / ( total of all symbols in the Vocabulary under consideration ) 8c.) PP3FR == ( 3 x total of all pp-trigraphs counts ) / ( total of all symbols in the Vocabulary under consideration ) Well we'll see - so far the above are pretty straightforward I should think, although they could be improved, and certainly some like 8.) ought to be illustrated-explained with simple examples. The rationale with 8a.) is that it can get tricky counting n-graphs in groups which are made up of a lot of repeating symbols. Some years ago, I forget if I released it, I wrote a program which addressed this, and one of its Help blurbs was to warn the user that a "mathematical" count of a group's n-graphs composition could seem at odds with what the eye is seeing in the group. " Your posting of this work did prompt me to re-read D'Imperio. As you, yourself, strongly suggested years ago, anyone trying something new ought to consult her book...... because I am really astounded at just how complete that book is... Basically, we have advanced about an inch in the miles that book represents..... I think this is still the best book on the subject... needing maybe a page or two added to the end as an update, with a few corrections which arose when the author and others had really bad photostats to work with... " Right! I've maintained that I regard D'Imperio's book as one of the greatest literary achievements of the 20th century, based on how superbly she achieved organizing and presenting so tremendously difficult a subject. " One of the preconceptions... or developed conception maybe... I have now, is simply that this is in no way a cipher, and that the pre/mid/suffix structure, with shorthand additional structures, implies that this is either a code or an artificial language. I've known of the Friedmans, and Tiltman's, conclusions in this direction from the beginning, of course... along with all the others. So I wondered... do you feel that your results (and I understand this was not the purpose, to analyze this yourself, but to present an aspect of the enigma to new eyes...) point in any direction? Toward or away from cipher? Toward or away from code or artificial/natural language? " Well. How to answer that. This latest thing as you know began a couple of months ago on May 3rd when I was just interested in producing blocks of "randomly" generated reference groups, according to: a.) the pseudo-random blocks must be specifyable as to gross characteristics, for example average group-size. So for example, you might specify the generator to make you a block of 20,000 groups, upon such and such alphabet and n-graphs mapped in such and so manner as to their distributions, and the block having only group-sizes 2,3,5,6,7,9, and you want the average group-size to be say 4.89. b.) the pseudo-random generator must be to some extent steerable, so that as a generated reference block shows some promise in analytically matching up with a block of text under investigation, it may be steered toward even better matching. Then the changes in the integer sequences which actually produce the block's groups, may be studied to try obtain clues to the structure of the text under investigation. Corollary to this requirement is that the pseudo-random generator produces the exact same output for the same input specifications. And this program, the core of which is four interacting chaotic functions, and which settled on the name "JVSCGS" for J.VS Chaotic Groups Generator, was basically working by the end of May, receiving a tremendous improvement in computation speed when Greg optimized the efficiency of a couple of its core routines, so that in one test a big block which had previously taken 16 minutes to generate, was generated in a matter of seconds. Then I started using the program, and inevitably some drop-in Utilities suggested themselves, more and more utilities concerned with Vocabularies, and at this point Version V0.93 is approaching 7000 lines of source-code (counting the all-important comments), with the original objective of releasing V1.0 hopefully approaching more rapidly, as lately there are no noteworthy bugs cropping up. I believe that JVSCGS will put some real power into the hands of VMS newcomers interested in text analysis, not at all because they aren't bright enough to write their own programs, but precisely because when you first come upon the Voynich scene it can take quite a while to figure out just what programs you want to write for analyzing the text - JVSCGS can save you some of that time by making it easy to experiment with the text and getting further ideas about it. Something like this is needed I think in Voynichland, whether or not JVSCGS is up to the billing. For VMS work I use GC's transcription alphabet with the program, but so far as I can tell EVA should be no problem. And presently I'm experimenting with the prime permutation digraph and trigraph spectra of evolving Vocabularies, evolving by expanding sub-Alphabets. And that finally brings me to answering your question above. As far as I can tell everyting remains consistent with other attacks on the text which in the past I've done on it, things like music and Eulerian text-circuits: at its bottom, it looks to me like much of the Vocabulary of the VMS text was pre-generated by some algorithm, an algorithm which generates groups of numbers, which are then transcribed via alphabet mapping into the Vocabulary words we see on the parchment. Now, certainly when you first come upon the VMS text, and without even doing so much as a frequencies count, you could just by looking at the script intensely and long enough, reach the just stated simple observation. But when that simple observation is amplified with different analytic attacks, you get some hopefully-true hints about the generator algorithm. And as discussed in the past, say by Jeff Haley and me, with some blocks of VMS text, prime numbers (2,3,5,7,....) just seem to gush out of them. Along that same vein one of the most interesting comments I've ever read on this list was when GC said that during the transcribing of the VMS he could "feel" the algorithm shifts as he was typing along. I've had that same experience with it, not from transcribe-typing it, but just running the text serially through some dynamic graphics programs and watching. And it's not the same as with ordinary plaintexts - I get the strong impression that there is some kind of serious math-machine at work in there, at least in many of the paragraphs/blocks. Critically, I still think that the VMS author made his script alphabet serve several different schemes for getting words/groups down upon the parchment, including steganographic. I think there are indeed some Voynich words here and there which are directly translatable into plaintext in some language or other. But I do think a large portion of the Vocabulary was manufactured by a math-machine, which often, if not usually, controlled the composition of a generated group down to the resolution of individual elementary glyphs: would you really need such resolution for an artificial language? Now, if indeed this and that block of Voynich text had its Vocabulary generated by a math-machine, then of course there could be a bunch of different ways to use the machine to encode plain-text messages, if desired. Anyway, for the serious newcomer who is seriously interested in the VMS text, I think it is worthwhile to spend some focus on its VOCABULARY, in the general sense where each block of text has its own block-level Vocabulary, and any set of blocks have variously overlapping Vocabularies: the Vocabulary is therefore made a variable rather than a constant, in the analysis. Berj **************************************** RE: VMs: Emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 7/03/10 11:17 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Keith wrote Sat 7/03/10 8:54 PM : " Berj, I took your analysis to imply that a complex cypher is extremely unlikely, and the common characters are likely vowels. " Hi Keith. No, I didn't mean that at all. First of all I'm mainly focused on the VMS text as a sequence, which may or may not be the output result of a source-sequence which has undergone a transformation; the source-sequence might be plaint-text, or it might be just random numbers; the transformation might be reversible, or it might not be. What I'm trying to find out is: Was the VMS Vocabulary generated systematically with some algorithm, as opposed to generated by just some initial rules followed by the application of those rules at whim and convenience? Say the way a poet might set for himself a few rules: avoid foul language, have at least one question in each stanza, every few stanzas become overtly introspective. And then just basically talk out a poem onto the page as the words flow from the mind's internal conversation. So my focus in the present considerations is distinct from trying to ascertain whether or not a cipher, complex or simple, is at work. Basically I'm looking for a kind of "presence-of-algorithm signature" in the VMS text, which, if it is there, may or may not give clues to the details of the algorithm. And if an algorithm is at work, then it could well permit at least some possibilities for cipher use, if desired. Berj **************** RE: VMs: Emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 7/04/10 2:32 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net An edition of D'Imperio's book is available online for downloading from NSA (31.2 MB pdf) : http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_history/publications/misc.shtml Date: Sun, 4 Jul 2010 14:15:31 +0100 From: kbody@XXXXX Subject: Re: VMs: Emblematic of the strangeness of the Voynich text To: vms-list@voynich.net Kopy You might find voynich_manuscript.pdf, 32030 KB Keith In a message dated 07/04/10 13:45:58 GMT Daylight Time, thaly@XXXXX writes: Hi everybody! How could I get a copy of the D'Imperio-book? Buy it or lend it? Honest ingun, i send it back, after reading it. I am working on the VMS since 8 months - maybe I am missing out on something, if I do not read it before... Best regads, Kopy Thaly ******************************** VMs: The Castle of Soave From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 7/14/10 8:47 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested I've collected some links to photographs of the Castle of Soave: Journal of Voynich Studies communication # 345 (Vol. IV, 14 JUL 2010): J.VS: The Castle of Soave http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U ***************** RE: VMs: The Castle of Soave From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 7/14/10 9:35 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net David Suter wrote Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:03:39 -0400 : " Some of these ideas re: technical authentication of artists (although, as a professional artist I refuse to admit they are possible!) are also presumably applicable to quantifiably identifying cartographic entities being represented by the shapes of both illustrations and the graphic nuances of the VMs text. " David take a look at some of the aerial / satellite views of the Soave Castle and its surrounding area (available among the links I provided), in particular the Castello Scaligero - one can certainly get an impression of strong cartographic similarities with the VMS's north-east rosettes panel with its castles - say the stars in the VMS panel surrounding the pentagonal writing are not representing stars, but instead a vineyard. Berj ****************************** RE: VMs: Re: The Castle of Soave From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 7/15/10 12:44 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Barbara is befuddled by Berj's broadcast: " can't find either links or photos at the url below or anything about soave; is the url correct? " The Soave communication is reached by scrolling to the bottom of the page. Here are just the links to the pictures: http://www.veronissima.com/sito_inglese/html/tour-soave.html http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-10-25/food/17184913_1_soave-classico-wine-category-docg-status http://www.hickerphoto.com/castle-soave-verona-12772-pictures.htm http://www.wellsphere.com/parenting-article/scaligeri-castle-in-soave-italy/438600 http://www.wasabibros.com/murielPhotos/pages/photos5.html http://www.wasabibros.com/murielPhotos/pages/photos1.html http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=819104&page=25 http://www.winetourseurope.com/photos/venice http://www.lifeinitaly.com/tourism/veneto/soave http://wiki.worldflicks.org/soave.html#coords=%2845.4205029,11.2466955%29&z=15 http://www.panoramio.com/photo/2636863 http://www.patriciaguy.com/pGuyWineFood.php http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanni-valle/3313535791/ http://www.offtoeurope.com/25-beautiful-photos-of-europe/ ************************************************************ VMs: n-graph spectroscopy initial results From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 7/21/10 10:50 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested I have some data: Journal of Voynich Studies communication # 346 (Vol. IV, 21 JUL 2010): J.VS: Initial experimental results: n-graph spectroscopy of texts and Vocabularies http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm An excerpt: 346-1-E: COMPLETE SOURCE-TEXT VS ITS VOCABULARY In this section of the table the entries for chaotically generated Vocabulary and text serve as a convenient reference. We see that as the chaotic Vocabularies morph into text, the average of their prime permutations digraph and trigraph frequencies ratios, the AvPP2+3FR numbers, remain unchanged. With the four normal language examples the AvPP2+3FR increases as the Vocabulary morphs into text. But the opposite happens with VMS text, both for small and large blocks of groups - the AvPP2+3FR drop as the VMS Vocabularies morph into VMS text. So then, within the confines of the data in the table, the Voynich Manuscript writing behaves like a kind of "anti-text". It remains to be discovered, with the accumulation of much more data, how unusual this remains, and in particular if the AvPP2+3FR measure is able to serve as a useful simple gauge for demonstrating the strangeness of the Voynich text: on the folios it gives the impression of some sort of writing, albeit in unfamiliar script, yet it in some sense it is an anti-text, this anti-text characteristic being even more pronounced in the last part of the book compared with the early part. Berj / KI3U ************************ RE: VMs: "anti-text"? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 7/22/10 12:35 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net CW Lee wrote Wed 7/21/10 11:12 PM : " This is a new term to me, and I don't understand the concept. What would an "anti-text" look like if composed of Western alphabet letters, and a variety of word lengths? How could one distinguish such an example from a randomly generated set of "words", each of which itself was randomly generated? " As I coined this term "anti-text" it was new to me also. It simply came to mind as I pondered the data in the table [1], and it is necessary I think to read [1] to see my track, and I then wrote my impression of the data with unrestrained poetic license: " So then, within the confines of the data in the table, the Voynich Manuscript writing behaves like a kind of "anti-text". " Seems perfectly clear to me what I'm saying. I was aware of course immediately that this term "anti-text" has the potential to stimulate some new thoughts about the nature of the VMS text, and you are proving it; and from my perspective it is not so important if my original use of the term holds up, but an even better use of it in connection with the Voynich text arises - I would say that either way it's an interesting way to think about the vexing VMS text. Berj / KI3U [1] Journal of Voynich Studies communication # 346 (Vol. IV, 21 JUL 2010): J.VS: Initial experimental results: n-graph spectroscopy of texts and Vocabularies http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm ************************************************ RE: VMs: "anti-text"? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 7/22/10 3:53 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Arqy0plex wrote Thu 7/22/10 3:28 AM : " So that would mean the VMS is an ..."anti-thesis"? ;-) " Well of course we can have fun with it. However my initial thought processes which led to the "anti-text" notion came out of regarding the prime symbols as little magnetic monopoles and thinking what factors would make for which magnetically sticking n-graphs to arise from them. At some point that led to thinking of the Alphabet symbols in general as particles and anti-particles, n-graphs as atoms and anti-matter atoms, and so on and so forth, even black holes entering my contemplations of the VMS text. Maybe that sounds bizarre to some here, but for me it's always been perfectly natural and routine to metaphorize broadly across subjects which interest me, and see which relations in one subject prove fruitful to entertain in a totally different subject. Berj / KI3U ***************** VMs: Version V1.0 of the JVSCGS Chaotic Groups Generator and Utilities computer program From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 7/26/10 5:23 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested, version V1.0 of the JVSCGS computer program for text and numbers sequences research is now available: J. Voynich Studies communication #347 (Vol. IV, 26 JUL 2010): J.VS: The JVSCGS Chaotic Groups Generator and Utilities computer program http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U **************** RE: VMs: Version V1.0 of the JVSCGS Chaotic Groups Generator and Utilities computer program To vms-list@voynich.net From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 7/29/10 10:00 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Thu 7/29/10 12:36 PM : " Thank you Berj (et al at J.VS.), that is an enormous amount of work. I will do my best to understand it! I'll look it over, now that I am back home and catching up. " Hi Rich - glad you're back safe and sound. Well it remains to be seen if the data in Table 346-1 is pointing to something new which holds up in the long run, and especially something which is easy to understand by the interested Joe intelligent-man-in-the-street, who is ok with some arithmetic but not necessarily polished in advanced math. And as we again noted earlier this month, when D'Imperio's book came up, there really hasn't been much new since she published her wonderful book. So for instance with one glance at Tiltman's 17 commonest Voynich symbols, only 17, and his Voynich words parsing table of roots and suffixes, Joe, being interested, could immediately get the impression that Voynichese at the character and word levels has "low entropy", although he likely wouldn't think of the essential observation in those terms. Since Tiltman's easy-to-understand observations we've had plenty of interesting mathematical detail developed with information functions and entropy of Voynichese versus something-else-ese, one of the post- D'Imperio classics in that vein being Stalling's h1-h2 work: http://ixoloxi.com/voynich/mbpaper.htm but the VMS text still remains a mystery, and Joe had already heard that before he even glanced at Tiltman's observations. Here's what Dennis says at one point in his h1-h2 paper: " While the differences in statistics between syllabic and phonemic notation are interesting, they are not necessarily relevant to the Voynich Manuscript. They are chiefly interesting in raising questions about the use of the entropy concept. " and a little further on he says: " The various h2 measures are only crude, partial measures of all the factors that interest us. However, the entropy measure will continue to be useful. " Well, Joe is relieved to read that, but what does Joe know of h-this, h-that, and conditional 2nd-order entropy and so on? He's very interested in the VMS text mystery, and he can tell this much - that the longhairs with their entropies haven't figured out the mystery yet either, and he's hoping it's all at least partly understandable with his limited mathematical skills, but he's also concerned because he's noticed another complication, namely that there is some sort of tension over the concept of entropy between the physics and information-theory camps, a tension which seems nevertheless resolvable with socalled "uncertainty". So Joe settles for his intuitive assessment, and that being that as the uncertainty about the Voynich text increases and it overwhelms us with mysterious "information", the number of entertainable Voynich-text hypotheses increases exponentially. This, Joe can easily understand. I often think of myself as a Joe Voynich - very interested in the whole mystery and always wishing I knew more about this and that field, and especially wishing for simple, clear explanations of the essential ideas. And so that's the motivation with the n-graph spectroscopy work: all its definitions are easy to understand, while retaining the precision required by mathematical analysis. For example, we've long known that digraphs are a critical element in the construction of the VMS Vocabulary, and Joe might even have conjectured as much with a closer look at Tiltman's roots and suffixes table (years later expanded upon by Mike Roe and Jorge Stolfi), but digraph spectroscopy very easily illuminates this with precision. And, if the n-graph spectroscopy eventually finds some way to demonstrate in easily understandable fashion just what is so strange about the Voynich "text", then that will be a big bonus, because as I've said I think it is a worthwhile challenge to do that. The JVSCGS computer program makes much of the work in this area pretty quick and easy. For example, suppose we revisit another one of the old VMS longhair papers analyzing the text, Stolfi's soft-letters prefix, hard-letters midfix, and soft-letters suffix, decomposition of the VMS Vocabulary: http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/97-11-12-pms/ Stolfi observes: " An unexpected feature of this decomposition is that there is a surprisingly small number of prefixes and suffixes with significative frequency. " This observation is easily seen in JVSCGS experiments chaotically generating Voynich Vocabulary: it is much, much easier to generate valid Voynich words (i.e. words actually found in the VMS) when you set up the generator to favor Stolfi's socalled "hard" VMS letters/glyphs, especially as digraphs, over the soft ones. Experimenting with JVSCGS's generator is like playing with loaded dice, dice which you can load variously depending on your requirements - load the dice, toss them, and see what happens. Well Rich, I've rambled on long enough. Btw, I have some new Learavian Longwave data which I'll send you to compare with the winter data. And it did occur to me that the longwave log might be interesting to do an n- graph analysis on - it is just line after line of technical data with lots of abbreviations, and abbreviations have always been of interest in VMS text analysis. And with Currier's VMS-line-is-a- functional-entity observation, who knows: maybe a lot of the VMS text is a log of something, perhaps even a botanical log. On another note, Jeff Haley popped in off-J the other day and briefed us on a truly interesting idea he's been on, and I'm quite interested to see him come out with the text results of it so I can do an n-graph study on it. Berj ********************************************** VMs: A closer look into the "anti-text" peculiarity of the Voynich text To vms-list@voynich.net From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 8/08/10 3:55 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested I have some data: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #349 (Vol. IV, 7 AUG 2010) : A closer look into the "anti-text" peculiarity of the Voynich text http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm It's quite long and detailed, so here are some excerpts: " The material is divided into these sections: I. HOW THE VOYNICH ANTI-TEXT EFFECT ARISES II. OUTLINE - INVESTIGATING THE ANTI-TEXT EFFECT III. OBSERVATIONS ON TABLE 349-2 IV. THE NATURE OF THE ANTI-TEXT MAKER GROUPS V. TENTATIVE RULE FOR TRANSFORMING A NORMAL VOYNICH VOCABULARY GROUP INTO AN ANTI-TEXT MAKER GROUP VI. TENTATIVE RULE FOR TRANSFORMING AN ANTI-TEXT MAKER VOYNICH VOCABULARY GROUP INTO A NORMAL GROUP VII. WHAT DOES THE ANTI-TEXT PECULIARITY REFLECT ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF THE vOYNICH TEXT ? " " The data, as seen in the bottom eight rows, confirms our above initial suspicion (due to our familiarity with the AvPP2+3FR numbers) about the origin of the anti-text characteristic: The VMS Vocabulary morphs into text bound by a rule which suppresses the proliferation of Vocabulary words which would contribute to an increase in AvPP2+3FR. As seen in the table, the mechanism works across a great range of text gross-characteristics - in particular it is interesting that only in the case of the large 157 block are the Tps, Vps, and Zps completely identical. We might object to denoting the condition here with the term "suppresses" - we have not proved that the observed condition, at this point based on limited data, could not be simply accidental. But we do have enough data in Tables 346-1 and 349-2, to justify using this term in its neutral or mathematical sense. So that then is the underlying mechanism relating the Voynich text with its Vocabulary, for the cases studied, which together account for a considerable portion, about two-thirds, of the total Voynich text. Let us better comprehend the meaning of this data in Table 349-2 by way of analogy, where we imagine that we are teaching a class on essay composition: We hand our class's students a Vocabulary list which has some proportion of the words marked with an asterisk. We tell the students that they are to write an essay, of whatever length they like, short or long, with the following rules applying: a.) the essay must use only words from the provided Vocabulary list b.) every word in the Vocabulary must appear in the essay at least once c.) the words marked with an asterisk must appear exactly once in the entire essay Unbeknownst to our students we determined the asterisk-marked portion of the Vocabulary, not from literary considerations, but from mathematical considerations: we determined the Vocabulary's tri-prime symbols set, that is its top three most-frequent alphabet symbols, formed from them the four possible prime permutation digraphs and the six possible prime permutation trigraphs, and then marked with an asterisk those words in the Vocabulary which contain these ten n-graphs, thus guaranteeing that as the Vocabulary is morphed into various essays by our students, their essays will evaluate to AvPP2+3FR numbers which are less than the AvPP2+3FR of the Vocabulary. [6] Our analogy is slightly simplified - depending on how a VMS text-block is identified from the entire VMS text corpus, rule c.) may be slightly relaxed. Alternatively a more complicated rule may be substituted, for example that for every use in the essay of an asterisk-marked word beyond the first use, three or more un- marked words of similar word-length must be added into the essay; and this rule may be further refined by distinguishing the marked words as to their prime digraph and prime trigraph contents, and assigning specific x2 and x3 multipliers for unmarked words required to co-add, so as to ensure suppressing a rise in AvPP2+3FR. These rules are a reflection of the scheme which created the VMS text. Surprisingly, they ring somewhat reminiscent of exercises which essay composition professors sometimes assign their students (I say this based on my own schooldays experiences), except that in the VMS the rules are not, at least on the surface, literarily-determined rules, but rather mathematically-determined rules. " " To continue our probing of this anti-text mechanism let us seeing if we can find some additional noticable patterns among the Voynich groups which function as AvPP2+3FR suppressors and anti-text makers, comparing them with the other Voynich groups. We will collect the {z} sets of the VMS examples in Table 349-2 and have a look at them. But even before we do the collecting, we are struck by the particular {z} set of 25R (Voynich folio f25r) : Table 349-4 : n-1 {z} remainders set 8am 8am 1an s 8am 8am Kan It is dominated by none other than the most famous / infamous Voynich text-group and sub-group of all, the notorious GC-8am (EVA daiin) which Voynich text researchers have been puzzling over for decades. Across the VMS more than 3% of the words are either 8am or include it. In Voynich f25r this 8am or daiin word is the chief AvPP2+3FR suppressor, the chief anti-text maker. " " So, the dividing of the total VMS f25r text into its normal and anti-text sub-texts, proceeded such that the total glyphs count, 180, divided into the two primes 29 and 151. Once more, we remind that all this is highly dependent upon the transcription SYSTEM, in this case the system created by GC. And the merits of various Voynich transcription systems have been extensively debated over the years, and occasionally still continue to be debated. From my point of view, the anti-text peculiarity of the Voynich text is one more in a growing series of indicators that the VMS creator was, aside all else, quite a mathematician, someone who really liked numbers and their relationships. And that the VMS author created some sort of math-machine for generating his Vocabulary and text, and that even if its purpose was to encipher plaintext, that at least as much his algorithm was so constructed to display his love of numbers and their relations, including their relations to text. And that's different from just devising a clever system for hiding plaintext - it's different because the algorithm projects a philosophy, and therefore it projects a philosopher behind it, not just a sharp technician. " Berj / KI3U **************************** RE: VMs: A closer look into the "anti-text" peculiarity of the Voynich text From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 8/14/10 11:29 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Robert Bub wrote Sat 8/14/10 10:03 PM : " I've often wondered if the VMS was most likely composed of numbers. " Well that's an old recurring hypothesis, by no means original with me, that the VMS text is numbers written in Voynich glyphs. Over the years there have been efforts to identify Roman numerals with some of the Voynich groups. In her book D'Imperio gives Table Fig. 16 comparing Voynich symbols with early Arabic numerals, and her table can be expanded some with more similarities. One advantage of the Hindu-Arabic numbers hypothesis is that it helps another hypothesis: that the VMS text was dictated to a scribe who actually wrote what we see in MS 408 today - here's what I offered in reply to Keith (kbody) about this back in 2006 [1] : " As to phonetics, where we are pondering that the "text" was dictated to the scribe, I think there is a fairly simple way that could have been accomplished, if indeed that was the scheme. We note that many of the most common text "letters" in the Voynich manuscript strongly resemble Hindu-Arabic numerals as they were written around the time we think the Voynich manuscript was scripted. So, a dictation could go something like this: 40409 2 09 94044712 40440669 4000689 ....... etc. where the dictation of the numbers was spoken in their language, whatever language, any language in which the Hindu-Arabic numerals were speakable, that both dictator and scribe knew: forty-thousand-four-hundred-nine two zero-nine ....etc. " In this scenario the difficulty of conveying the text to the scribe, say the VMS author's wife who has the manual dexterity to efficiently record the script into the little book, is easily overcome. In contrast, even if the VMS author had a pronouncable transcription similar to EVA, it would not be nearly as mistake-proof as just reading off numbers - this also neatly addresses the long-held common view that the VMS is remarkably free of corrections. But my own favorite view about the text is that it is a vehicle for a whole variety of schemes - I think that once the VMS author settled on his alphabet, he made it serve a variety of purposes in various places in the manuscript, cipher in some blocks, mathematical demonstrations in other blocks, ordinary direct- mapping simple substitution with various complications like anagramming in others, and steganographic experimentations including making the script serve graphics imaging, notably embedding his self-portrait in the form of hand-script text-art (akin to today's ASCII art) in the upper half of folio f76r [2]. However, I think before he began using it, I think the VMS author pre-generated much of his text Vocabulary by algorithm, with some sort of math-machine as I call it. That is, he created a Vocabulary stock, the properties of which he was intimately familiar with, so that he could then draw upon portions of his Vocabulary in accordance with the particular scheme he was experimenting with in this and that section of the VMS. And as I already said in the launch of this thread, even if the VMS author's purpose was to encipher plaintext, that at least as much his Vocabulary and text generating algorithm was so constructed to display his love of numbers and their relations, including their relations to text: I believe our VMS author had a philosophical view of the relationship between writing and mathematics. Berj / KI3U [1] voynich.net vms-list post by Berj / KI3u June 13, 2006, 12:10 AM : Re: VMs: incognito symbols in the Voynich manuscript http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/1-1-2007-05-05/2JVSlibKI3U.htm [2] Various pictures, of the hypothetical self-portrait of the optical physicist and presumed VMS author, embedded as steganographic handscript text-art in Voynich folio f76r, are deposited in the J.VS Library: Blink1bVMSf76r.bmp Blink2bVMSf76r.bmp are suitable for blinking, and are available in J.VS Lib. deposit # 18-1-2008-04-15 : http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/18-1-2008-04-15/ Several other pictures, including more blinks, are in J.VS Lib. deposit # 14-1-2007-10-22 : http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/14-1-2007-10-22/ Extensive discussion, with earlier references, of this f76r curiosity (as well as others) is found in J.VS communication # 156 (and Re:'s # 157, # 163): J.VS: The Voynich hypothetical f76r text-art portrait: how was it done?; (Vol. II, 4 FEB 2008): http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolII2008.htm Further discussions are found in J.VS Volume II communications # 158, 161, 164, 181, 182, 183, 185, 191, and Volume III communication # 317: http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIII2009.htm ******************************************************** RE: VMs: Arabic From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 9/07/10 5:10 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue, 7 Sep 2010 16:00:49 +0100 : " If anyone wants copy just say " Yes I would appreciate a copy of anything you have turned up - tnx. Berj / KI3U ***************** RE: VMs: fr1birdglyph From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 9/12/10 5:25 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Sun, 12 Sep 2010 12:14:44 +0100 : " Attached is a link of an astrolabe dated 1208 with bird like glyph similar to that seen on f1r of the VM and on the Codex Mendoza. Glyph on top image 4-5 O'clock and on the tear drop shaped arm that hangs off the circle. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Astrolabium.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Codex_Mendoza_folio_1v.jpg " The 1208 Arab Astrolabium illustration is from an 1852 book (in French) by Sarrus wherein he describes it in detail: http://imgbase-scd-ulp.u-strasbg.fr/displayimage.php?pos=-323003 It's 42 pages, with several illustrations near the end of the book. Some of them have variations of the bird symbol, or Aries symbol, or whatever it is, possibly a representation of a number. The last page, page 42, is a table, and should clarify what it is. Berj ************* RE: VMs: 14th century astronomical instrument? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 9/14/10 5:40 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Francois Jurain wrote Tue, 14 Sep 2010 17:38:18 +0200 : " I wonder if this would work at all? What precision would we get? " Apparently the ancient ancients could achieve some impressive precision. Here's a good popular article on Karahundj : http://www.astrologycom.com/armstone1.html The sighting stones with their boreholes are of particular interest. Herouni in his 2004 book describes experiments his team performed. Using just the boreholes in the stones they could obtain a resolution of 14 seconds astronomical time. Inserting bamboo or clay sighting pipes in the stones, and then affixing yarn crosshairs, they achieved precisions down to two seconds. The pipes dimensions were about 1 meter long, and with an internal diameter 1 cm. The eye of the observer was about 1 m from the observing end of the tube. Berj ************************ RE: VMs: 14th century astronomical instrument? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 9/14/10 11:09 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue, 14 Sep 2010 23:00:52 +0100 : " So this is what I want to know, if the image is true (and that remains unproven as far as I know - I have mailed the website regarding its origin) does that mean that is would be reasonable to assign what may look like telescopes in the VM possible as sighting tubes (within the context of possible astronomy in the VM and the carbon dating)? Retaining in this way the astronomical context and similar explanation of the tubes while also observing the dating. " Well of course some of us have long wondered if some of the tubes in the VMS suggest astronomical instruments, lensed or not lensed. As we know, tubes are most prevalent in the nine-rosettes illustration. There are so many of them clustered there that it is difficult to not entertain non-astronomical ideas about them, say organ pipes of some sort. The central rosette looks a bit like a fortress surrounded with gun tubes or cannon. Could make a good pic for Voynich Steampunk :) Or maybe they are just circular towers in a fortress-like scene. I suggested some whiles back that in some of the south tubes are depicted what appear to be animals - the high-res SID is needed to see them. So, if indeed those tubes are telescopes, does this suggest that the zoodiac is being viewed? Certainly the starry sky is prominently featured at the very heart of the central rosette. And if the object at the entire panel's lower-left is indeed a "clock" as Brumbaugh suggested, then that could also tie in with an astronomy theme via calendars. I remind that the clockhands, in the hi-res SID appear as symbolized keys, a pair of keys, drawn so that one key is inserted into the other. But the first thing suggested with that is not astronomy, but ciphers I would think. Berj / KI3U ************** RE: VMs: 14th century astronomical instrument? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 9/16/10 6:10 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:12:18 +0100 : " If the "clock hands" were not in a circle would it still look like a clock why are the hands not centrally located, why 8 divisions and what time does it read? It is a symbol that has been widely used in alchemy, e.g., aqua regis and loadstone (magnetic=compass), various occult alphabets (e.g. by Agrippa) and was used in the C14th as a sigil for Capricorn (and Aries- late usage) among other things and is similar to the sigils for fixed stars. It is also similar to those on f67v1 (though drawn with faces) which is within the astronomical folios and shows a glyph similar to the sigil for Aldebaran (Heremetis) also used later for Capella due to copyist error, and a medival sigal for the Moon/Sun (maybe comet also?). " Yes it could be a sigil, why not? I forget if D'Imperio used the word "sigil explicitly, but she certainly thoroughly covers that area in her book. Personal signatures can also apparently incorporate sigils, for example the signature of the Armenian King Leo I / Leo II (d. 1219) suggests that to my eyes. Now upon all that, then perhaps the clock-hands are the nine-rosettes / VMS's author's sigil-signature, suggesting perhaps an "L" letter. Otherwise the closest graphic to the nine-rosettes clock-hands I've found is the device on the 1469 Crisogonus de Nassis manuscript (Bridwell MS 5), which is not drawn within a circle. As for f67v1, I'm not sure what you mean, unless you mean f67v2 which at lower right has that L-shaped design incorporating four heads. I think the nine-rosettes illustration is certainly multi-thematic, ranging from mathematical ideas to geographic and celestial notions, "scientific" as well as philosophical / religious. It is the product of a highly polymathic philosopher with a vision of unity across the cosmic fabric. Going back to earlier in this thread and the problem of the tubes / pipes in the VMS, perhaps they are meant to emphasize just tubes. Just that: the concept of "tube". The tube is after all a fundamental elementary object in our universe, reflected in some form or other just about everywhere we look. To a polymath the tube is a universal symbol, and in a modern physics context the tube can even serve as a symbol for conservation laws. Many biological organisms are basically tubes: whereas serpents are fairly straightforward living tubes, we anthropoids are more complexly appointed tubes, but nevertheless we are still tubes. Even our dear planet Earth can be viewed as a tube if we take into account magma-connected volcanoes (we recall there has been discussion about the possibility that a volcano is depicted in the nine-rosettes panels). Violent as they are, volcanoes are nevertheless vital to the life of Earth itself, recycling its rock mass. It's actually hard to think of something which does not partake of the concept of tube - even a seemingly dead orphan asteroid travelling through outer space, channels, that is it tubes or tube-izes, some measure of thermodynamic forces, however feeble. So it seems to me that tubes in the VMS, and a VMS section (the biological) wherein tubes seem to be emphasized in connection with life, make a lot of sense from the perspective of a polymathic philosopher seeking to explore cosmic universals - a serious philosopher of any era would have appreciated the universal significance of tubes. Berj ****************************************** RE: VMs: Bird Glyph From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 9/19/10 10:49 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Sun, 19 Sep 2010 17:43:50 +0100 : " Given that it has only (so far) been found in post-Columbian Iberian language documents, indicating a Spanish origin, this does not rule out that this symbol could have originated from an earlier Arabic source in Spain. Given the similarity of glyphs found in medieval Arabic magic themed manuscripts and the Arabic tie to Spain, maybe the bird glyph could originate from an earlier Arabic source? " Actually to this point with all the exemplars we've looked at, given their available image qualities, the ones in the illustration of the 1208 Arab Astrolabium by Sarrus appear to my eyes the closest match to the VMS f1r "bird" glyph. The others of course suggest it, but to me many of them appear closer to an upside down VMS "walking picnic table" glyph, AGC-92. Berj / KI3U ********************* RE: VMs: Termination of the Medici hypothesis From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 9/20/10 4:58 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Richard Sale wrote Mon, 20 Sep 2010 09:04:58 -0700 : " I am cancelling the Medici option; the heraldry on f 71r is Fieschi. ......... Eliminating any consideration of the Medici connection means that there is no reasonable alternative to the Genoese interpretation of the blue-striped logos of f71r. ......... " In two or three simple sentences which Joe Voynich can understand and appreciate, can you state the current version of this hypothesis? Berj / KI3U ********************* RE: VMs: Cracking the Voynich-MINI From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 9/21/10 12:16 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Richard Sale wrote Mon 9/20/10 11:22 PM : " The VMs- MINI is that composite of the lines that the author has designated by clear use of the patterned boxes. The real question is how do the “start here” markers function? .......... The overall point is that the author’s intentional creation of a secretive text-related system has a great potential significance. ......... Ideas or comments are welcome. " Well, backing up for a moment to the hypothesis as you clarified it earlier in the other thread, the essential points of which I take it are that in VMS f71r the alternating blue and white "tub" adorning stripes, regardless of their orientation vs standard heraldry and dots-in-white-stripes, suggest a historical connection to the two 13th c. Genoese Fieschi popes, and that at least the outer person-in-striped-tub seems to be definitely bridging the two patterned box-crosses (as I refer to them) each on one of the circular bands, it then seems to me that the easiest place to start is to get some more information on the Fieschi popes, find out what they were up to and if anything in their history is interesting in the context of anything VMS. For instance, did they put their hand to any documents which bore the box-cross, and if so is there to be seen there any relationship to text in the rest of the document? Another possibility: are five, ten, or fifteen persons in a group especially significant in the history of these popes? Curiously, the inner box-cross has an "o" and a dot drawn to the left of it in its band. Also, for what it's worth, in the old days there were discussions about some of the VMS "nymphs" being identifyable individuals and appearing in more than one VMS illustration, and I agree for at least one definite VMS lady. In that general vein the outer 3 o'clock lady seems to me to resemble an aged version of the young lady at top-right in f80r who apparently is being chased by a young man. And also in f80r one of the VMS ladies along the top is wearing a red-white striped gown or something, so maybe there's a connection between f71r and f80r. In any case you're quite right to keep hammering the f71r 10 o'clock details - that the person there in that tub is unequivocally bridging the two box-crosses, the only two, is more than enough incentive to try get something of possible significance out of that tub and it's occupant, and the position of the tub and of course the associated text; it is something of a real rarity in the VMS that there is a single "o" floating by itself so conspicuously. Berj ****************************** RE: VMs: Galen and Hippocrates From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 9/24/10 4:39 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Dana wrote Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:44:24 -0600 : " Here is another similar example. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DBP_1991_1490-R.JPG " Interesting Dana - that German stamp seems to be dated 1991 and is celebrating 750 years of the Apothecary occupation / trade : 1991 - 750 = 1241 A.D. Berj / KI3U ********************* RE: VMs: Sideways "Gallows" as Stanza or Line Markers From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U (ki3u@hotmail.com) Sent: Sun 10/10/10 2:41 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich wrote Sun, 10 Oct 2010 13:57:33 +0000 : " In the 1390 Regius Poem, markers are used to join each two lines of the poem. They do look somewhat like VMs gallows on their side. ...... " Interesting Rich. From what I gather the 1390 Regius is Masonic, and there are some plausible Masonic-cipher symbols in the VMS, e.g. f57v, 12 o'clock, 2nd band in from the perimeter. Berj ******************* RE: VMs: Sideways "Gallows" as Stanza or Line Markers From: Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 10/14/10 6:55 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:32:27 +0100 : " I take it the symbol you mean is the L.^ (best the keyboard can do!). " Hi bunny, yes that's the one, and in GC's Voynich Keyboard Assignments for his voyn_101.txt transcription he denotes it as VMS glyph AGC-204. Back in early 2006 when I was making a nuisance of myself here going on an on about Knights-Templar-Masonic connections and the letter "M" being of some considerable importance in the mind of the VMS author, I suggested: " ..... this GC-204 symbol suddenly struck me for what it is: a dead-ringer for a Masonic cipher coded group. Even if the VMS author had not intended that, it is nevertheless a dead-ringer for it. Depending on the interpretation of the hollow dot, as opposed to solid dot, it could simply decode to "LV", which in turn could decode to 55, or 5 emphasized by repitition. 50 and 5 are common ancient number symbols, of course. Symbols similar to GC-204 occur in the same band, and also in the inner band of f57v." And you just now came up with the same LV and 55, so good. I guess back then I went on into some other possibly Masonic items, for example considering the guy at the top of the central circle in the f85r2 illustration projecting a hand-signal, possibly a Masonic hand-signal. I haven't read through it recently but what I posted on this back then is in the J.VS Library in deposit # 1-1-2007-05-05, somewhere in there. " .... but like most things Masonic exactly what is true/rumoured is difficult to separate, and I have found dates ranging from 16th to 18th century for the first known use of the Masonic cipher, nothing on 14th/15th century use. " Yeah, seems to be so. " If it was not used as early as the carbon dating then a Masonic theory in relation to the symbols mentioned joins the queue of other later possible hypothesise. " What?, the VMS's symbolisms out of whack with the C14 "dating" ! Doesn't bother me at all ;-?) " I know this was all just a brief mention by Rich with no further implication meant, but for arguments sake what does the VM have that could be Masonic? A lot more than at first glance actually. .......... " Ah, you are coming up with some good stuff. " Most interesting is the relation of the Pleiades and Taurus (also Orion's belt - 3 stars) to the location of what has been described as the blazing Sun or alternatively Sirius (again don't know how old this aspect of Freemasonry is, possibly going back to Egypt). They are depicted as the numbers 3 5 7 1, and 7 and 1 are prominent in the "Pleaides" folio of the VM. " Can you explain this more clearly please. I wonder if Dr. Strong with his 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1-4-7-4 sequence was hip to that, and at all interested in any Masonic connections. GC would know, but he's evidently been too bored with the list to come on here and give us a rant on it. " However like any thought of it being a religious manuscript the frolicking nymphs are out of place, they are reminiscent of astrological calendars (based on classical art), mythology, bath houses, depictions of stars as women, etc., but they are unlike religious imagery of nakedness which tends to be an expression of suffering in hell, the innocence of Eve, etc., likewise I can see no obvious place for such imagery in a Masonic manuscript. " Well back during my Christine de Pizan explorations I made a big deal of the idea of "sisterhood" being projected by the VMS "nymphs". Many of the scenes in the VMS involving women are quite serious it seems to me, not frolicking. Not sure, but I think women's counterparts to Freemasonry are relatively recent though, but I'm not up on all that history at the moment. In any case I think Masonic symbolism and Freemasonry are at least interesting considerations in the VMS. There's certainly a lot of masonry depicted in the nine-rosettes foldout, and those nine-rosettes panels, by themselves suggesting "construction", and with their multiple and universal themes, are the very climax of the VMS. Berj / KI3U *********************************** RE: VMs: Sideways "Gallows" as Stanza or Line Markers From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 10/15/10 8:34 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Fri 10/15/10 5:06 PM : " It would be interesting to see if any trace of Orion in the VM. " Orion in the VMS is a bit of a challenge. One, only approximate, candidate that I can think of is the 3:15 o'clock wedge in the f68v1 astro-panel: if you rotate the panel clockwise about 90 degrees you can see it easier - but the "belt" is distorted, dented downward as it were, and not the right angle within Orion's frame. Would be interesting to know what Robert thinks of the associated pieces of text there. Somewhat more easily obtained are the possibilities of Ursa Major and Leo Minor (though apparently first named only in about 1687), or Perseus - see J.VS comms. #226 and 227 (Vol. II). But aside the asterisms, it could be interesting, for those not discouraged by any C14 indications, to contemplate if Masonic cipher principles are elsewhere indicated in the VMS, and if the "LV" and 55 etc. from f57v make some interesting connection somewhere in the manuscript. For what it's worth to the present discussion, to the extent that Freemasonry can be associated with things hidden and any indications of Masonics in the VMS, a while back I proposed that in the f57v illustration there is, if you look very carefully at the high-resolution SID image, a fifth hidden man (J.VS comm. #270, Vol. III). Berj ***************** RE: VMs: Sideways "Gallows" as Stanza or Line Markers From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 10/16/10 2:37 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Joel Stevens wrote Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:36:37 -0400 : " I don't see the 5th man, I think that's just hair. ........ The first link shows a quincunx as it appears in astrological and alchemical manuscripts, the second link shows how it relates to the geometry of 5 points. ......... " Well in any case the number five is worth extra consideration in VMS f57v, after all at the bottom-right of f57v is drawn what sure looks like a big 5. It doesn't get much discussion at all relative to the main works of f57v, but it's there and there's nothing like it on any of the other folios. Berj *************** RE: VMs: essential reading From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 10/22/10 3:38 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Barbara Barrett wrote Fri 10/22/10 3:07 PM : " Indeed. And this tome give one the skills to assess the VMS as a medieval forgerie, and why. there are many here who think the VMS was made to look much older than the 15thC and within this book you'll find ways of assessing that claim. " I think it useful to make a distinction between forgery and period simulation. For example, suppose in the present era I am greatly interested in antique cameras, and I put together a book on the subject which goes no further than up to 1920. For a variety of esthetic reasons I produce my book with materials and techniques of not later than 1920. I have no forgery motive in mind, no intent to deceive, and perhaps even the book is meant only as my personal document, an artifact to inspire me in my avocation. Several centuries go by and someone finds my book, and with advanced materials analysis determines it was made in the early 21st century. Now, if it is then assumed that my book is a "forgery", the assumption is dead wrong, and is made upon no evidence at all of intent to deceive or hoax. In the case of the VMS, even if it turns out true that someone tried to use the book to hoax Rudolf II, a highly risky enterprise, it still by itself is no evidence that the actual VMS author created his book as a forgery. Berj / KI3U **************** RE: VMs: Archer From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 10/29/10 9:43 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net A interesting item; here's the other side of it: http://www.celt.dias.ie/publications/cat/b/b2-10-1a.jpg and the main page to it all: http://www.celt.dias.ie/publications/cat/b/b2-10-1.html Appears to be in the Bodleian. Berj From: dscott520@XXXXXXXX To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: VMs: Archer Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:41:20 -0600 Another example of archer as Homo sapiens sapiens sagittarius sans Equus ferus caballus: http://www.celt.dias.ie/publications/cat/b/b2-10-1b.jpg Regards, Dana Scott ***************** RE: VMs: AMN From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 11/07/10 2:54 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Yes that's consistent with H.P. Kraus's statement in the VMS chapter of his 1978 book "A Rare Book Saga" : " Ann Nill was the longtime companion of Mrs. Voynich and inherited the Cipher Manuscript on the latter's death in 1960. I bought it from her on July 12, 1961, for $24,500. " Berj / KI3U From: dscott520@xxxxxxx To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: VMs: AMN Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2010 01:03:56 -0700 Based on the following Library of Congress pdf concerning ELV documents/music donated to the LOC by Anne M. Nill, we can assert the AMN was sitll alive in 1961. http://international.loc.gov/service/music/eadxmlmusic/eadpdfmusic/mu010020_x.pdf Regards, Dana Scott ******************** RE: VMs: WMV Photo From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 11/10/10 4:04 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net The WMV photo is recorded as having been donated by Dr Robert Steele in 1939 - Steele and Voynich appear to have had some dealings, as we see in the May 12, 1900, No.1767, "The Publishers' Circular", pg. 518 (found with google books search). Perhaps Steele took the photo. The pictures of Wilfrid I have seen mostly avoid showing the right side of his face. He seems to have had a massive neck too. Berj / KI3U Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:11:09 -0500 Subject: Re: VMs: WMV Photo From: joel.s.stevens@xxxxx To: vms-list@voynich.net by an "Unknown" photographer. Now we have two mysteries.... :( On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:34 PM, Dana Scott wrote: A new photo of WMV... http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/largerimage.php?LinkID=mp103974&rNo=0&role=sit Regards, Dana Scott ********************** RE: VMs: WMV Photo From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 11/10/10 7:41 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net D'Imperio has a bunch of references to Steele and his comments on the VMS. Berj From: dscott520@xxxxx To: vms-list@voynich.net Subject: RE: VMs: WMV Photo Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2010 09:23:41 -0700 Steele studied Roger Bacon. Robert Reynolds Steele (1860-1944) http://www.jstor.org/pss/225459 Steele referenced in Jim Reed's "Voynich Manuscript Bibliography" http://www.voynich.net/reeds/bib.html Regards, Dana Scott **************** RE: VMs: Tycho Brahe's Remains Exhumed From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 11/16/10 6:29 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue 11/16/10 3:42 PM : " Medication or murder most foul? " Well, if Tycho was murdered, what is the list of suspects and their pressing motives ? Incidentally, is it reasonably ruled out that mercury did not arrive in the body post-mortem, say by some attempted embalming technique? Berj / KI3U ********************* RE: VMs: Tycho Brahe's Remains Exhumed From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 11/16/10 10:57 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue 11/16/10 9:16 PM : " Kepler is a well considered suspect - but so is Tycho medicating himself. ........ " r, that's of course all old hat. Aren't there any other fingers pointing in this proto-thriller? Berj ************* RE: VMs: Re: VMs: Tycho Brahe's Remains Exhumed From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 11/17/10 4:23 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Wed 11/17/10 7:32 AM : " Exactly, it is all old hat but Kepler was the only one who gained directly from his death. Tycho probably had a good number of enemies, those other scientists jealous of his work and a good few of the inhabitants of Ven to name a few. But who was present at the banquet and who had access to his home? Only family, friends, doctors and trusted staff I guess...maybe the dwarf did it? However, only Kepler gained greatly. But that is another story outside the scope of the VM carbon dating results. " Alright then, it appears to remain that the two main suspicions regarding Tycho's alleged untimely death by mercury poisoning are Kepler for some reason or other, and Tycho himself either accidentally or suicide. Is there anything more specific, even sensational, regarding Kepler's possible motive besides his urgent desire to gain full control of all of Tycho's astro data? Say, for example, could there be hints that Tycho had a secret notebook, known to Kepler, in which Tycho outlined a politically incorrect heliocentric model and perhaps had even deduced what would become known as Kepler's laws of planetary motion? Anything like that, somewhat reminiscent of the Hooke - Newton story, in the air? The notion that Kepler might have murdered Tycho is a pretty big claim, requiring some reasonable derivations it seems to me. As I recall, one of the current articles on Tycho's latest exhumation quotes a scientist saying that Tycho will probably have to be exhumed again by future scientists. So, what's the driving force here? Killer Kepler would certainly qualify if it had some reasonable froundation, but it would all be less than admirable if it's just the latest crop of guys trying to make a name for themselves at the expense of Tycho's peace. Berj ******************** RE: VMs: Re: VMs: Tycho Brahe's Remains Exhumed From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Thu 11/18/10 2:46 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Tony Mann wrote Thu 11/18/10 7:50 AM : " As I recall there was a book a couple of years ago which accused Kepler of the murder. The author's previous career was as speech-writer for Ronald Reagan. " That's interesting Tony, I didn't know that. I thought, and still do, that Reagan delivered some pretty good speeches. Your comment motivates a thought: I wonder if, over the years, the VMS has ever been discussed inside the White House. Berj ***************** RE: VMs: just out of interest From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 11/21/10 5:34 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Barbara Barrett wrote Sun 11/21/10 4:24 PM : " How many of ye see the word in the central mandala of 72r3 (cancer/july) as having looped decenders? " Are you implying that the word there reads "non9", nonus, i.e. ninth, or "nov9", novus, i.e. fresh etc. ? Berj / KI3U ********************* VMs: Medieval French Birdglyph, paragraphs, organ guns From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 11/23/10 6:21 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Perhaps someone can read this 1442 French manuscript and figure out if the glyph which starts the main body-text is an ordinary but fancy alphabet letter, or something like the bird-glyph of VMS f1r: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&nma=true&rt=nc&item=200535323645&si=ZZoOfT%252Fp9TgKGjgfQxMuPTdX5h4%253D&viewitem= For those who are interested, more on that, and paragraphs, and tube-clusters, in: Journal of Voynich Studies communication #355 (Vol. IV, 23 NOV 2010) : J.VS: A 1442 French MS Bird-glyph possibility, paragraphs, and Organ Guns http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Berj / KI3U ******************** RE: VMs: B/W scan property query? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 11/26/10 3:35 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Fri 11/26/10 1:40 PM : " I wonder if anyone could explain the technical reason why some of the plant folio B/W scans show the written areas particularly highlighted (lighter and/or darker) as if in little boxes. I noticed this when examining f17r and also noticed it is not a consistent property across the scans e.g. f2v. if it was a property of the scanning process or manually done to sharpen the written areas or such like, I would expect it to have been universally applied. " Of interest in this vein are also the stark differences between the b/w photograph of f1r supplied by Wilfrid Voynich for his 1921 College of Physicians of Philadelphia lecture and f1r as it appears in the latest Beinecke SID high-resolution color scans - discussed in a vms-list thread back in January, 2007, from which: " Another thing: The last Voynich text-word on f1r is GC-81am On the 1921 Voynich Plate 2 there is almost nothing of that word to be seen. Yet in today's Beinecke images it is the strongest word of the entire bottom paragraph. " For more info see the 2007 vms-list thread " Re: VMs: Tepenecz: three scenarios...? ", which can be found here: Library of the Journal of Voynich Studies J.VS Library deposit # 1-1-2007-05-05, file 4vmsKI3Ulab.htm http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/new/ Berj / KI3U ******************** RE: VMs: Test From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 11/29/10 3:30 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Kopy wrote Mon 11/29/10 9:01 AM : " Sorry, This is just a test: I seem to be unable to contribut... " Test came through ok here. Berj / KI3U ************* RE: VMs: Kopy's VMs Structure Observations From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 11/29/10 6:11 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Kopy Thaly wrote Mon 11/29/10 5:02 PM : " Voynich Word Structure ............ Your comments, please! " Well for what they are worth, my initial comments are: in the Investigations.docx you write: " ch is a very special component! ch stands only 4 times alone (only in nonherbal part), but has a high frequency as a component of a compound word. " and this naturally brings up the always-present problem of transcription of the VMS text - if, as does GC in his voyn_101.txt transcription, we take into account the socalled "soft" spaces (versus normal hard spaces between Voynich groups), then EVA-ch (GC-1) occurs alone at least a couple of dozen times across the VMS text corpus in addition to the 4 unambiguous cases. Whether or not this materially affects anything in your production I don't know. Berj / KI3U *********************** RE: VMs: I admit defeat :-( From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 12/05/10 3:34 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Barbara briefed Sun, 5 Dec 2010 14:50:51 +0000 : " Is it, as the title suggests, a lexicon of unusual marks and letters from meieval times or is it as the synopsis suggests something to do with novels and mythology? " The title is, about as you said, A Lexicon of antique forms in German Texts of the Middle Ages (Bound edition). There follow some standard praises and then the short description, which on quick reading also seems close to what you figured out - the lexicon apparently is especially useful for studying the influences of antique forms on middle ages German romance novels. Maybe Elias in Germany or John in California will provide better on this. Berj / KI3U ******************* RE: VMs: Is the f85r1 man Martin Luther? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sun 12/05/10 6:09 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Sun 12/05/10 3:34 PM : " Here is a bit of speculation on the man at the top of f85r1: http://proto57.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/is-that-you-martin-luther/ Of course Luther was born 50 years after the Voynich vellum was made, and became famous decades later. But I do still think for many reasons, that the use of 50 to 100 year old vellum for the Voynich is not such a wild idea. If so, Luther being represented in it would not be impossible. Luther was known for two rings with red, ruby centers: His famous signet ring with his rose/cross symbol, and his wedding ring, with a crucifix and ruby. " Hi Rich. Glad you wrote that piece. I've long been wondering if some curious faint marks on VMS f83v are the Rosicrucian symbol. On the SID image of the folio I get an impression they might be a purposeful watermark on the parchment. Have a look and see what you think: go to the first line of the second paragraph, and then move left horizontally, past the plastic hold-down to the left edge of the folio. There is a slightly brownish smudge there at the edge of the parchment - it's size is about that of two GC-1's, one stacked atop the other. Zooming in on it, it gets interesting. There is, to me, at least some suggestion of the Roscicrucian rose symbol, though worn by the ravages of time. Maybe not, but it's interesting to ponder. I'll send you a tif crop of it, and a processed version of the crop, off-J. Berj ******************** RE: VMs: Breaking News From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 12/06/10 4:12 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Cait Reynolds wrote Sun, 5 Dec 2010 22:54:52 -0500 : " I consider myself a Bostonian, despite the fact I have been in Philadelphia for 6 months. ........ " Reminiscent of Ben Franklin :) Well hello Cait. You can give us some unique insight: as a dedicated list-lurker of several years, what is your assessment of the lists's general communications effectiveness from the perspective of non-participators? What I mean is, is the lurker frequently wishing that the list regulars are less cryptic with their lingo, or is the level of the lingo here reasonable considering the complexity of the subject and the seriousness with which it is approached? Or, how welcoming friendly toward newcomers is the list? Of course you can decline to answer this, but I've always been quite interested in the reactions of newcomers and peripheral observers to Voynichville happenings. Berj ************************** RE: VMs: Breaking News From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 12/06/10 6:09 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Cait Reynolds wrote Mon 12/06/10 5:17 AM : " OMG! The "Berj"! has written me!!! " Well, actually as I saw it, " The "Berj"! " replied to a new list personality. " ... feel like I'm in the presence of celebrities! " Yeah, sometimes here so do I :-( :) " But, if I am to focus my opinion on what is actually the crux of the matter, which is the text, then, sometimes, I feel we approach it with a very contemporary, 21st century feeling and technical approach. " Others have pointed this out also. Now, the text may be the crux of the VMS matter, but other aspects of the mystery which seem to me quite significantt could use more discussion. For instance in the balneology section there are many illustrations of women which suggest themes other than one of the standard VMS guesses - that a sizable portion of it concerns female medical issues. We see groups of women suggesting communal themes, even sisterhood, but for some reason this doesn't get much discussion. I would find it interesting to sit back and observe women list members express their views on that. Berj *************** RE: VMs: Is the f85r1 man Martin Luther? From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 12/06/10 4:48 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Mon 12/06/10 9:19 AM : " When enhanced and viewed at an angle on screen (and better viewed turned 180°) the blob does look reminiscent of a flower. 4/5 petals with a centre which would make it a dicot. The closest in form to this in the VM (when turned 180° as suggested) is the "Violet" on f9v, the top left flower in particular, which has writing on it. It doesn't particularly look like a Rosicrucian rose to me though. As always though to bear in mind - maybe just another cloud bunny? " Yes, and to also bear in mind that the cloud bunny problem is profuse across the VMS and may have been intentional on the part of the VMS creator, and so it is necessary of more than passing attention. Because, if an abundance of cloud bunnies are intentional, then it is an indication of a rather high level of illustrative subtlety in the VMS, which in turn requires more serious attention to higher possibilities, for example that the VMS author experimented with dyes to achieve visual effects requiring special optical equipment, filter goggles at least, to see. Just for example, lets briefly revisit another maybe-cloud-bunny, the construction of the bottom end of the long vertically running stain on the sunflower folio, f93r : is the end of that stain merely accidental, or was it worked to result in a slightly grotesque head and face? It can easily give the impression of a head and face without any processing of the high-res SID image. How often do accidental stains running down a page end up like that? If it was worked intentionally, then it was quite a feat of skill, especially at that small size. [1] Rich wrote Mon 12/06/10 3:30 PM : " What did occur to me during this "Luther musing" was the chicken/egg thing... " Yes I appreciated that when I read your piece, and the idea deserves more consideration. Berj [1] pictures of the f93r end-of-stain face are available in the J.VS Library, Library deposit # 12-1-2007-10-12 : http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/library/ ************************ RE: VMs: I admit defeat :-( From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Mon 12/06/10 8:50 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rourke Decker wrote Mon, 6 Dec 2010 13:37:05 -0600 : " By the way, Barbara, I would ditch Babelfish. I find its performance to be quite subpar. I prefer Google Translate (http://translate.google.com), which I believe to be far and away the best automated translator. Though it is not without its flaws, it often returns results that are not only accurate, but also surprisingly idiomatic. " Just for experimental fun I plugged into the google translater GC's voyn_101.txt transcription of f16r, stripped of transcription punctuations - the google translater said it detected it to be Afrikaans, and its translation was essentially the input text. Doing the same with the C-version of the EVA from the 1.6 interlinear file, it detects it as Albanian. Berj *************** RE: VMs: I admit defeat :-( From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 12/07/10 6:47 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Clay Holden wrote Tue 12/07/10 4:03 AM : " For fun, I ran Bob Dylan¹s ³Hard Rain² through Nifty Amikai a few years ago, first into Japanese, then back to English. ....... " Interesting, comparing with Dylan's original lyrics: http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/a-hard-rains-a-gonna-fall-0 The thought arises of perhaps an asymptotic approach to stable translation-outputs, as the procedure above is repeated over and over. And then in that there would be curve-characteristics of the approach to stabilization. And those characteristics could be compared, Voynich versus other source texts. I wonder if anyone has done this and if so, what the results are. I'm purely guessing now: VMS text would stabilize relatively fast, Currier-B even faster than A. Berj ******************** VMs: French Library finds coded Leonardo MS From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 12/07/10 3:50 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11936080 ********************** RE: VMs: French Library finds coded Leonardo MS From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 12/08/10 3:09 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Wed 12/08/10 10:08 AM : " I guess we have all been there done that got the tee-shirt by now - rotated the writing and seen that even here some Voynich like glyphs occur. Given the era of Leonardo this is not surprising. Other scripts contemporary to the carbon dating also show various matches to the VM text or additional writings, though non in totality. " Well this is another reason why the trace of the Voynich group in Kircher's 1664 letter to Adamus Schall [1] is so intriguing: view it as is, or mirror it, and it still shows itself as a nice snippet of Voynich text. Berj [1] http://www.as.ap.krakow.pl/jvs/library/8-1-2007-09-14/ *************** RE: VMs: The VMs Unsolved From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 12/10/10 3:42 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich SantaColoma wrote Fri 12/10/10 1:52 PM : " Dana: Just for the reasons you say, that is very interesting. I left a post on his video, asking where those came from... if he made them, or where he found them. " I think some of the pictures he uses came from Our Flat World : http://www.ourflatworld.com/ If I recall correctly this fellow somewhere writes that he is employed painting the exteriors of NASA rockets. Near the end of his part 2 video he seems to suggest that the VMS was created by a non-human - I assume he means alien. Berj / KI3U ********************** RE: VMs: A tale of the red Roman galero From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 12/21/10 8:16 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Richard Sale wrote Tue 12/21/10 7:10 PM : " ..... It is an ecclesiastical hat worn by certain members of the Roman Catholic clergy. ....... And what has this to do with the VMs? Kindly consult my favorite VMs page, the zodiac’s white Aries, f71r, where there are several figures of persons whose heads are encircled by reddish-brown bands. Could they be hats?! OMG! }You’re sure they’re not old copper lampshades or red vinyl 45s being worn by The Little People??{ And most prominent among them is the figure that is also associated with the blue-striped logo, And it is this logo which I have contended is the VMs author’s rendition of the heraldic insignia of the Fieschi family. For me, this draws a pretty tight circle. " An ecclesiastical hat worn by a person with breasts? Berj / KI3U ******************** RE: VMs: fr1birdglyph/flower From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Tue 12/21/10 9:56 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Tue 12/21/10 8:35 PM : " Secondly, does anyone see a flower of fleur-de-lis on f1r? " If you mean the faint, seemingly organized markings between the right end of the bird-glyph paragraph and the edge of the parchment, at about the level of the paragraph's second line, it's another one of those suggestions of a purposeful watermark like the flower/maybe-Roscicrucian-symbol on VMS f83v. I suppose it could be seen as a fleur-de-lis emanating out of the center of the flower, upward and slightly tilting clockwise. Berj / KI3U *********************** RE: VMs: fr1birdglyph/flower From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Wed 12/22/10 12:20 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net Rich wrote: " On close inspection it looks like the left side of the symbol is the original, and the fainter, right, side is transfer when the edge of the page was folded on it. Maybe wet transfer, or dry from rubbing (which I do not know if it is possible). " Perhaps caused by Wilfrid, during his tortuous Tepenecz'ing of f1r? Berj ****************** VMs: Comparison of VMS f68r2 stars-diagram with similar diagram in 1698 ASTROSCOPIUM by Wilhelm Schickard Jr. From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Fri 12/24/10 1:28 AM To: vms-list@voynich.net For all who are interested: Journal of Voynich Studies Communication #358 (Vol. IV, 23 DEC 2010) : Comparison of VMS f68r2 stars-diagram with similar diagram in 1698 ASTROSCOPIUM by Wilhelm Schickard Jr. http://www.as.up.krakow.pl/jvs/JVSvolIV2010.htm Merry Christmas. Berj / KI3U *********************** RE: VMs: Comparison of VMS f68r2 stars-diagram with similar diagram in 1698 ASTROSCOPIUM by Wilhelm Schickard Jr. From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 12/25/10 8:11 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net bunny wrote Sat 12/25/10 6:33 PM : " Interesting. " Well it seems we've finally got an external handle of some sort on those f68r panels. I dug up another old cut with sun, moon, and stars, all together - it's reproduced a few times in Michiel Maes's 1686 Almanach (google books), but as you can see, it is nothing like the VMS f68r1 and f68r2 and the ASTROSCOPIUM illustrations, which clearly share common design conceptions. Now, what are the respective diagrams supposed to project? I agree with Greg that they are likely not a single accurate skyview [1]. But individual asterisms and constellations, most likely as seen from the northern hemisphere, could well have been arbitrarily plugged into the circles, not necessarily with standard accuracy. In that respect I am presently pondering (reference the comparison picture) the following, at least for the VMS panels: 5 orange-linked stars = Cepheus the King 5 yellow-linked stars = Cassiopeia the Queen, where the 1572 Nova was observed 7 blue-linked stars = Pleiades, the 7 seven sisters, daughters of Atlas who holds up the heavens From this we might ponder the integrated symbolism of a sisterhood framed by Moon and Sun, King and Queen. Then perhaps the other patterns might be interpreted as Eridanus the Celestial River Ocean surrounding the ancient world, Gemini the Twins with their Castor and Pollux which Chinese astronomy associated with yin and yan. Or maybe Draco is in there. Anyway, this repertoire would amount to a fairly powerful symbolic punch. But it's still early in all this. " And the C14 dating... " Yes, a few tiny slivers from some of the VMS folios subjected to carbon-isotopes ratios analysis, and that analysis then via reference to tree rings interpreted to mean that those slivers got started as parchment 606-572 years BP (Before Petroleum). Well, it's just another indication among many indications from the Voynich Manuscript, like its indication of white-space paragraphing, which historically began in the 17th century. We love a good mystery. That's why we're here, at least me :) Berj [1] I do believe, that once it has finally sunk in that the VMS author experimented with sophisticated optical techniques on the parchment, and that special color filters are required to view the subtle and hidden layers of the Voynich manuscript, and someone with access to the VMS goes ahead and does the experiments, that f68r2 will appear three-dimensional spherical - and that the VMS author constructed the diagram with opticially sensitive colors to appear so. ************************* RE: VMs: Comparison of VMS f68r2 stars-diagram with similar diagram in 1698 ASTROSCOPIUM by Wilhelm Schickard Jr. From: owner-vms-list@voynich.net on behalf of Berj N. Ensanian KI3U Sent: Sat 12/25/10 11:51 PM To: vms-list@voynich.net Philip Neal wrote Sat 12/25/10 11:37 PM : " Intriguing. The frontispiece of a book is not necessarily original art and the idea of Atlas holding up a globe is much older than 1698, so perhaps there are earlier examples of the same general idea. " Well I've been looking, even back to earlier than Roger B. But so far nothing terribly compelling. Some of Khunrath's (d. 1605) complicated engravings invite a closer inspection, but they don't make it either. Berj ******************