Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 8 [1992 January 8] ---------------------------------------- Clews to the Voynich Script That's as in Feely's "clews": words that we might guess from the pictures they accompany or label. For instance, there are 30 individual Voynich words on the Pisces folio (f70r), and they might be stars, days, saints, angelic governors, or John Dee's ex-girlfriends born in March. But they surely mean something. [Note: again it is unproven that they are "words" in the conventional sense. But I think we are on fairly strong ground in asserting that the labels are in some sense discrete units of meaning.] D'Imperio Fig 4 lists eleven other zodiac folios, and over sixty (!) herbal folios. That's a lot of possible simple names. One attraction to this approach (apart from it being cheap, easy and requiring little structured thought), is that it might provide a "clew" into the script independent of the underlying language. Proper names are common across languages: the month names, for instance, are similar in all of Western Europe. Plant names are harder, but usually the romance and the germanic forms will cover a lot of territory. And, my best candidate, if we can recognise the pictures, is star names: most of them are derived from Arabic, and are common to virtually all of Europe. Recall, please, that the Egyptian script was deciphered by just this means: the proper names on the Rosetta stone and other inscriptions of the Hellenistic period. This might be a way to break one insoluble problem - an unknown script and an unknown language - into two soluble ones. If, for instance, we can deduce the alphabet from the star names, and corroborate it from the plant names, we could then romanise the text with a fair degree of confidence. Well, I wrote out those 30 piscean names, and stared at them for a long time, but to no avail. And I'm pretty hopeless at plants, so my few guesses (garlic on 100v? - ivy on 100r?) are unreliable at best. What we really need is (a) reproductions of the whole MS, and (b) a tame European botanist to go through the original colour folios. No thoughts on (b); as for (a) - yes, I'd pay my share of a $250 copying cost. Robert