Omniglot is a convenient place to begin, if you are interested to follow that question. Here are two illustrations showing unidentifed script, and both — if they are different scripts — have been mentioned by Voynich writers. Specifically: the results accord with the views of Georg Baresch who had the longest certain familiarity with the manuscript and who said its contents had not originated in the culture of western Europe.
And finally, they accord with the opinion relayed by H. I have supposed, and may be proven mistaken in supposing, that whoever wrote the Voynich glyph had a hand accustomed to writing the numeral so.
Just one example, I know, but enough to make the point. Early 14thC. Subscribe to get access to the rest of this post and other subscriber-only content. Type your email…. Neither saw the manuscript as in that tradition. That Panofsky knew the latter is an indication of his range, for it exists in a single manuscript, and that in Madrid. Consider the range of exclusion implied. Richard Salomon , a specialist in Latin palaeography, recognised only one line of marginalia, which he read as medieval legal German — and whose date he then applied to the manuscript as a whole.
His circumstances after were so disrupted and so distressing that he was never able to return to his chief area of interest, lacking access to appropriate texts and references. The following image taken from Painter and Bowern The sample-range for comparison consisted of:. So, as you see, the two authors did not aim to research the origin and history of the Voynich glyphs as the lineage of a given set of alphabetic or numeric symbols would be traced.
Watching the zoom talk, a I began to think the authors had themselves come to suspect, or realise, that the comparative samples may have been chosen from too narrow a range to provide quite the answers needed for that question. However, I found their paper interesting and helpful. The paper is also posted as a youtube video HERE. Perhaps someone would like to raise the question on a forum?
