Voynich zodiac month names - in Occitan?
It has long been suspected that the month names in the Voynich Manuscript ("the VMs")'s "zodiac" section were added by a later owner.
But what language was that person writing in? Like so many aspects of the VMs, this should (in theory) be simple -
but (in practice) is far from it.
Here, I have cut'n'pasted the months from the Beinecke Library's recently released sidfiles, with the exception of July, which
appears to have been temporarily overlooked - for that, I took an earlier (lower resolution) monochrome scan and enhanced
its resolution using Shortcut Software's "S-Spline 2" software. I then overdrew the outlines of each letters in a simple
drawing package (actually, Debabelizer Pro) to give the right-hand column.
What I found interesting about this exercise is that it became clear how (and when) the gap in the writer's nib opened up
(compare the second "Aburil" to the first, or the second "May" to the first, or "Nove[m]bre" to "Octe[m]bre").
Understanding this helped me become a little more confident about how the individual strokes were formed.
For me, the first month-name looks like "m.a.r.c-cedilla" - the Occitan word for March. At the same time, "Augst"
would seem to be the mark of a native German speaker - while septe[m]bre/octe[m]bre/nove[m]bre/dece[m]bre would perhaps seem
to point to someone more in an Italian milieu. These would seem to be broadly consistent with a Toulon dialect of Occitan,
as discussed by Jorge Stolfi in 1997.
Yet what are we to conclude about "Aburil", where both renderings have a curious accent above the "u"? Some have asserted
that this points to an Arabic influence - perhaps some historians of Occitan might help us resolve this mystery?
Cheers, ....Nick Pelling....
Month name |
Month image |
Outline image |
March - Marc |
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April - Aburil |
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April - Aburil |
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May - May |
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May - May |
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June |
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July |
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August |
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September |
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October |
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November |
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December |
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