It was first published in Johannes Trithemius' Polygraphia (1518), in which it was attributed to Honorius of Thebes 'as Pietro de Abano testifies in his greater fourth book'. Its alphabet uses a number of unfamiliar symbols.Voynich MS - Text Analysis - the Writing SystemThe Theban alphabet is a writing system with unknown origins which first came into publication in the 16th century. It uses an extinct language. ABSTRACT Manuscript MS408 (Voynich) is unusual in a number of respects: 1. For example, the word AIN from the manuscript is the Hebrew word for 'eye', and it also appears in different distorted. Once the Voynich letters have been correctly transcribed, using the European Voynich Alphabet (EVA) as a guide, many of the Voynich words can be seen as Hebrew words that repeat with different distortions to confuse the reader.The text of the MS has been written mostly in a line-by-line manner, obviously from top to bottom and from left to right. Following are the main topics of this page:Almost the entire Voynich MS is written in a script that is not found in any other surviving (old) document. Statistical analysis of the text of the MS (further subdivided into five areas).This page addresses the first part, the analysis of the writing system.The text tends to have a straight left margin, and is only roughly right-justified, except for the last line of each paragraph which tends to be shorter.The text consists of groups of characters separated by spaces, and these groups seem to form words. Pages in the so-called biological section tend to have much more text, filling the entire page, sometimes with just three paragraphs, but occasionally also more. Herbal pages typically have two or three such paragraphs, which tend to occupy mostly the upper half of the page, clearly avoiding the herb drawing.One clear example isWhere one may observe a text break and a use of different inks before and after it, and also a partial line added above the last paragraph in the darker ink. Especially in the last two lines of this fragment, there is a strong suggestion that the initial characters were written first, and the remainder of the line was written later.In addition, there are several places in the MS where writing seems to have been added 'afterwards' or where the text was perhaps not written in a strictly top-down line-by-line manner. The following example is one paragraph onF88v. The remainder of the text was then added later.
These are also briefly addressed below.In medieval manuscripts numerous more or less standard abbreviations and ligatures were in use. They are briefly discussed below The remaining set has been compared with alchemical symbols or early renaissance ciphers. Of '4' both an early Arabic and a modern variety exist.( r l q d y) Some characters look like abbreviations found in Latin medieval manuscripts. ( a e i iin in o) Others look like numerals, such as 2, 4, 8 and 9. A summary of this is provided in section 4 of D'Imperio (1978)And this may serve as the basis for the following.A number of characters are very similar to Latin characters, and look like 'a', 'c', 'i' (undotted), 'm' 'n' and 'o'. Ever since it was brought to light by Voynich, people have compared the script with examples of writing. These are not typically found in medieval manuscripts, also not as abbreviation signs. They ascend above the majority of other characters. Some of these are also included below.A particular set of characters in the Voynich MS is usually called 'gallows' characters. D'ImperioShows a few cases in Fig.17. While browsing through this dictionary, one will immediately recognise the similarity between some of its entries and the writing in the Voynich MS. While these do not show exactly the same characters as the Voynich MS, there are some striking similarities, and the author of the MS may well have been inspired by these, or similar, examples.Of particular interest is the codex of Tranchedino (MS Vindobonensis 2398 in Vienna), which has been issued in a facsimile editionThis MS lists numerous, rather similar sets of ciphers to be used with different correspondents, and they are dated from 1450 to 1496. D'Imperio (Fig.39) shows examples from a cipher of Parma (1379), A Venetian cipher (1411) and the Code of Urbino (1440). There are only a few examples, and it is not certain whether this is coincidental or not, since these alchemical symbols were not known to me to have been in use in the early 15th century.Potentially of great interest is the comparison between the characters in the Voynich MS and the symbols found in early renaissance cipher systems. Not all characters in the MS can appear in a paragraph-initial position, and indeed these characters form only a very small subset.In addition to this, there are two initials highighted in red on the first page of the MS ( f1r),Which are not standard characters in the Voynich MS alphabet. More information about Fontana and his cipher may be found on a web page by Philip NealThe initial characters of many paragraphs are larger than usual, and are sometimes embellished with additional curls or dots. Also these are available in facsimile edition. Other typical features of the ciphers in Tranchedino are that they include nulls (characters that are introduced but have no meaning), and that double characters are usually represented by a single code character.Among the few known examples of manuscripts from the 15th century that have been written in code are two manuscripts by the humanist Giovanni Fontana (ca.
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