VMS numbering systems hypotheses

From: Dana Scott
•Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2002 08:11:44 -0700

How would the 898989 sequence in the middle/right of line six in f14v and the
89890898 sequence in the seventh line be interpreted? I see a possible match to
the triplicates seen in the botanical drawing. And what are all those dots in
the first gallow? May match to the drawing as well?

http://voynich.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/voynich/image/E382AFE383AAE38383E38397E3839CE383BCE3838902-thumbnail2.jpg?1450143162691

Voynich observations

1995/12/7, posted by Jim Reeds

I just spent a couple of hours with my friend Sergio Toresella, an expert on manuscript herbals visiting this country from Italy. He has been making a tour of American libraries and while at the Beinecke spent a little time with the VMS. He knows about my interest, and about our group. Here is a sketch of some of his comments about the VMS:

The VMS is, with certainty, authentic; not a fake. It was manufactured in the period 1450-1460. It was in France for a while: the month names on the zodiac diagrams are in French in a French handwriting. The book itself comes from Italy; the mysterious writing is done in a round humanistic style found only in Italy in the second half of the 1400's. There are similarities between the organization of the VMS (including the balneological section!) and that of other Italian herbals of the 1400s. (He has a lot more to say on this account.) The author of the VMS was a madman, obsessed by sex.

Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 22より

1995/1/9, posted by Robert Firth

1. A Preliminary Observation

Look at the MS. It was written fluently and at speed. This is proven, in my view, by the elegance of the hands, and by the length of text between successive refills of the pen, which can be inferred from the density of the ink. It is written in a script that I have argued elsewhere was devised explicitly to promote a fast, cursive hand.

If the text contains meaning, then, that meaning could be encoded very quickly, or at least copied very quickly. And I believe the copyist was not transcribing opaque cypher text, but understood the meaning, and the evidence for this is the vanishingly small number of seeming transcription errors we have found in the corpus. Contrast, for instance, Brumbaugh's numerous transcription errors, which, by the way, are to me clear proof that his alleged deciperment is bogus.

2. Possible Cyphers

So, if the VMS is a cypher text, the cypher must be very simple. It must be readable virtually at sight. Of the set of "dense" cyphers - those where most of the encoded text is signal - I think that rules out anything more complex than a "gold bug" substitution cypher. Not to mention, of course, that nothing more complex was even known in the fourteenth century.

Indeed, even that is too difficult for most "secret" communications, especially those of occult or secret societies, who are a desperately verbose bunch and therefore tend to adopt simple cyphers. One obvious example is the Caesar cypher, based not on a random substitution but on a simple cyclic shift of the alphabet. Another are the Masonic cyphers, most of which are based on a rectangular grid, populated by letters, and with each cypher symbol a glyph designating a part of the grid. You can learn such a cypher in half an hour, and become fluent in it in an afternoon.

3. Is it Gibberish?

No, it isn't. We have applied to this demon-haunted document the best and most powerful quantitative tests of twentieth-century linguistics, and they all tell us the same thing: there is meaning in the MS; *it is language*.

13世紀 vs 16世紀

1991/12/21, posted by Mike Roe

I believe that there is already fairly strong evidence from the style of the illustrations and calligraphy that the MS is not much older than the 15th-century.
For example, in [Brumbaugh76], the following evidence is given:
- The cipher table includes J, V, and W [presumably he means the one on f1r].
- There is a two-handed clock on f85
- The costume of the medallion on the Sagittarus map
- The Arabic numerals in the margin of f49r.

In [ONeill4], some of the botanical illustrations are identified as plants from the New World, suggesting that it was written after Columbus.
(Although it is possible that some imaginary plants draw in the 13th century might happen to look like real plants which were discovered later).

The style of the nudes in for example f79v is also evidence against a 13th century origin.

放射性年代測定を行わなくても、すでにヴォイニッチ手稿に描かれた様式（服装、人物、植物）から、15世紀より新しいものの可能性が高いのでは。
ひまわりの同定はかなり怪しいですが。

2001/6/26, posted by Dennis Stallings

I've always favored the second half of the 15th century. This period is bracketed by

1) the "humanist hand", a writing style that stood between medieval Gothic and modern Italic. The "humanist hand" was only used for several decades in the 1400's. Jim Reeds has affirmed that the VMs script was heavily influenced by the humanist hand.

2) The nymphs' hairdos. Julie Porter, who has served as several; Renaissance fairs' costumesmistress, says that nothing characterizes a period so much as the women's hairdos. The nymphs' hairdos indicate 1480-1520.

インクの化学分析

1991/12/12, posted by Nate Osgood

Analysis of inks: It seems that given an adequate sample of the voynich ink, it might be possible to place it in a particular time period (or even place). I heard somewhere that some of the ink looks suspiciously similar to modern varieties. Such affinities would seem to be rather easy to check, given the appropriate removal and chemical analysis techniques, coupled with some knowledge of how ink
technology changed over time. It seems reasonable to assume that while Voynich (or any other forger) may have conceivably been able to get their hands on ancient vellum, it seems unlikely they would have been able to obtain ancient, usable ink. (It might also be profitable
to see whether PEN technology changed much between the different periods -- would 13th century pens have been really crappy compared to e.g. 16th century pens, and left characteristic signatures?)

年代を測定して、結局何世紀に作られたことがわかれば、
その当時の暗号技術や、ねつ造を行った人物を絞り込めるということですね。
ヴォイニッチは緑色が印象的だったなぁ。
そのほかにも赤とかいろいろな色の絵の具が使われていますね。

C14年代測定

C14年代測定を使って、ヴォイニッチの羊皮紙の年代を測定することで、
1) a modern forgery (e.g. by Voynich)
2) a text　written at the time of Dee
3) a text written at the time of Bacon.

を区別しようという試み。

quoted the post from Mike Roe in 1991/12/11

Regards your question about the "Voynich Manuscript". There isn't an especially good technique for dating the vellum to the degree of accuracy which you would require. Radiocarbon dating using an accelerator mass spectrometer would be able to give you a date although you would have to
destroy approximately 30 mg of vellum in the process. This would date the death of the animal from which the skin was obtained to be made into vellum. It would not give the time when the ink was applied onto the vellum.
Obviously the ink could not have been applied before the animal grew it's skin but the ink could (theoretically) have been applied ANYTIME afterwards.
Unfortunately radiocarbon dating, being a statistical technique, has a standard error term which at one sigma is about +/-60 radiocarbon years.
Because there is not a linear relationship between radiocarbon and calendar years it is necessary to calibrate the radiocarbon age to obtain a calendrical one. The period AD c.1600-1950 is a very bad one in radiocarbon terms since production of 14C in the upper atmosphere kept pace with radioactive decay
so that there is a "plateau". This means that it is not possible to distinguish dates in the last few hundred years, only to say that an object must date to sometime within that period. [After 1950 the atomic bomb pulse makes accurate dating possible]. It would be easy to check whether the vellum dated to the 13th century AD or to the period c.1600-1950 but it would not be possible to check whether it belonged to 1600-1700 or to 1912. If it is a
forgery it is (just) possible that the forger wrote on "old" vellum in which case the radiocarbon date would tell you nothing about when it was written.

不幸にも放射性炭素年代測定は統計的な技術であって、ごく普通に1σ、±60放射性炭素年の誤差が生じる。なぜなら放射性炭素年代と実際の年代は一対一の対応ではなく、実際の年代を知るためには放射性炭素年代を修正する必要がある。
1600年から1950年の間は放射性炭素の期間としてはとても悪い。なぜなら高層大気中で作られる14Cとその崩壊の速度が一定である「安定期」であったからです。つまりはその対象物がその期間のものであるということを示すだけで、最近の数百年の年代を区別することはできません。（1950年以降は原爆のパルスによって正確な年代決定が可能。） その羊皮紙が13世紀のものか、1600-1950年の間のものなのか見分けることはたぶん簡単であろう。しかしそれが1600-1700年の間のものか、1912年(注：Voynich Manuscriptが発見された年）のものかを見分けることは不可能であろう。もしそれが偽造されたものなら、偽造犯は古い羊皮紙に書くことができたはずであり、その場合は放射性炭素年代測定法ではいつ書かれたものかを調べることはできない。

ということもありますが、1600年以前のものと、近代のものなら有効なので、分析かけたいねぇ。
ちなみに、数年前にバイニキー図書館で実際のヴォイニッチを触らせてもらいましたが、手袋つけてたので、そこに繊維片でもくっつてないかしら？とも思ったのだけど。
個人でC14分析依頼したらいくらかかるのだろう。

（群馬大早川先生による若干の訂正）
1660年以降は放射性炭素法で年代を測るのはとてもとてもむずかしい，との表現がもっとも適切かと思います．つまり，1600-1660の間は見込みがあります．ひとことで言えば，炭素法の仮定のひとつ「地球大気に含まれる14Cの濃度は地質時代を通して常に一定」が（厳密には）成り立っていないことによります．


1991/12/20, posted by Peter Davidson
If it was the 16th century then Dee and Kelley become the prime suspects for the "two hands", but if it was the 13th century then we can rule out McKenna's hypothesis that it was a forgery produced to palm off to the Emperor Rudolph for a princely sum.

13世紀の物か、16世紀の物かを区別するだけでも大きな進展です。