33:38 The pictographic representation for Our Lady has 12 dots around it, just like the 12 stars she is usually represented with in orthodox-catholic iconography. From the Book of Revelation iirc. Also note that the Cross of Christ is drawn with the triangle endings you usually see used in grimoires for sigils of angels.
Those 3 Z I think may well be pictographic depictions of snakes. Snakes may represent angels, or the angelic, not all snakes are fallen "be wise as snakes yet gentle as doves". The fact that they are always represented as a trinity is definitely relevant.
I have always assumed this must be one of the non-canonical gospels. Why else would the inventor of the language be so motivated to make the text indecipherable? From the 4th century on the church destroyed every copy of a non-canomical gospel that it could find. Those that survive intact tend to be found in only a single copy. Many of them are known only from quotations.
@@koengheuens If I recall, I think I read certain incidents illustrated in Rohonc that are not in any canonical gospel. That would refute the notion that Rohonc's gospel is a compendium of incidents from the canonical gospels, or a harmony of the gospels as was created first by Tatian around 160 and in wide use before the church condemned it.
One thing lending credence to this idea is that the translation given for the page with the three Marys seems to refer to something that simply doesn't happen in the canonical gospels - namely that the myrrh-bearing women came to the tomb prior to the resurrection and saw the body of Jesus.
@dumonu Good point. I seem to recall several other miniatures in Rohonc that illustrate something incompatible with the canonical gospels. It's possible an expert on the non-canonical gospels who studied all the miniatures might be able to identify the gospel being illustrated.
I think the Rohonc Codex is less popular because it doesn't look as good and the text looks much more like obvious gibberish, where the Voynich Manuscript really looks like somebody is fluently writing a proper script. So you think "I SHOULD be able to figure this out", while the Rohonc looks like "this is a big mess!" 😀
Exactly! So many people have published Voynich solutions because it is so approachable. The glyphs are much easier to read than for example highly abbreviated Latin of the time. On the other hand, the Rohonc offers more of an established framework with its images. If you can imagine which Bible story (possibly in an unattested version) is being referenced, you have a decent foothold to start from. I think you're right that it's simply less visually appealing. The suspected Christian content might also be less exciting than... whatever one imagines the Voynich to be. So the choice is between doing bible study or projecting onto the VM what your heart desires.
If I'd look for a natural language besides Hungarian personally I think I'd look towards the Caucasus. They'd be part of the greater Ottoman world and so they'd be familiar with Christianity and Islam and have a similar tendency towards spirals in pagan contexts. There's huge linguistic variety in the mountains, often with very large consonant inventories with few vowels, maybe motivating a syllabary. And the region wasn't and isn't adverse to inventing alphabets for different needs. Issue is they tend to be very agglutinative and I think that's been ruled out by statistical studies. Ultimately I think it's more likely to be a conlang or glossolalia with an unsystematic scribal abbreviation system. A copyist maybe wanting to play around with their artform. As for the text genre... Assuming there's real text there if the author was from Ottoman territory they might have been familiar with the Syriac diatesseron or similar works. Matthew, Mark, and Luke often tell the same stories even quoting or paraphrasing each other, so in some Christian traditions it's not uncommon to read a "combined" version of their books, which Syrians often do. So you'd get one book that attempts to reference the canonical books instead of standing on its own like the apocryphal gospels. Maybe the author tried their hand at that?
Somehow this made me think about the Paulicians, but they were iconoclasts. And more Armenian than Caucasus. You are right about the huge linguistic variety in the Caucasus mountains, and the huge amount of small tribes/nations with wildly different origins.
I'd suggest looking for the origins of the text to early Christianity, and to the African continent - perhaps Nubia or Ethiopia. There was a great deal of interest in Europe of the time in ancient scripts and also in finding 'Apostolic' biblical works. The history of how the Christian Bible was formalised is easily found - it occurred relatively late and the works which existed by that time, and variant versions of the Gospels, were numerous by then. So the disjunct in biblical chapters etc. is also indicative of the early period, before Christianity was widely established in Europe.
I would suggest that the chapter numbers were observations made by the editors, who noted correspondences to the canonical gospels in Rohonc whenever they saw one. This is not a canonical gospel. The question is whether it is a late attempt to come up with a new gospel by incorporating excerpts from the canonical gospels and adding more details from legend or free imagination -- OR, could it be one of the gospels that were floating around in the 1st and second centuries, known today only by Patristic references or occasional quotes therefrom. If so, it may even be able to identify that early gospel from illustrations in Rohonc, telling a story known only from a certain early non-canonical gospel.
Work assuming Hungarian usually focuses on finding Hungarian's agglutinative case system, but usually comes up dry, indicating that whatever's encoded might be analytical (like Mandarin Chinese or something) or else is encoded too strongly to detect the cases in a straightforward manner. Most African languages have Hungarian-like features that would be detected in such a search, however. Most African languages have cases or similar things to cases that would be very obvious basically no matter the writing system. The main languages that don't are the ones related to Tamazight or Kabyle, but you'd expect something like tifinagh or arabic script to be used, and every feminine noun and adjective would be surrounded by ts (like in Tamazight, Tifinagh(t), Taqbaylit). The languages of Ethiopia primarily are SOV (so instead of "the hunter catches the antelope" they say "the hunter the antelope catches") which is a word order than wants to have cases in order to help break up S and O when they're next to each other. Most of the languages in the Sahel (the transition area between desert and tropics) work like Latin or Hungarian, and most of the languages south of the Sahel use a neat prefix system where everything pretty much is tagged by the noun it comments on (so like "the red headed woman eats a fish" might come out like "mthe mred mheaded mwoman m'eats ya yfish" if English worked like that)
41:51 "even Isaac Newton" we think of Newton as a physicist thus an exact scientist, but that is not true at all, he was mainly preoccupied with the occult and esoteric. Most likely hermeticism as was in vogue in his time.
Solved? These guys have nothing! Very disappointing! It's been 6 years they've been posing as 'genius decypherers', and they obviously can't translate or transliterate a single sentence!
Fascinating stuff! I hadn't heard about the Rohonc Codex before. I'm looking forward to the full publication of their work.
33:38 The pictographic representation for Our Lady has 12 dots around it, just like the 12 stars she is usually represented with in orthodox-catholic iconography. From the Book of Revelation iirc. Also note that the Cross of Christ is drawn with the triangle endings you usually see used in grimoires for sigils of angels.
Isn't this just a mirrored Ge'ez script? 😁
Those 3 Z I think may well be pictographic depictions of snakes. Snakes may represent angels, or the angelic, not all snakes are fallen "be wise as snakes yet gentle as doves". The fact that they are always represented as a trinity is definitely relevant.
I have always assumed this must be one of the non-canonical gospels. Why else would the inventor of the language be so motivated to make the text indecipherable? From the 4th century on the church destroyed every copy of a non-canomical gospel that it could find. Those that survive intact tend to be found in only a single copy. Many of them are known only from quotations.
@@GeraldM_inNC sounds plausible. I would really like that outcome.
@@koengheuens If I recall, I think I read certain incidents illustrated in Rohonc that are not in any canonical gospel. That would refute the notion that Rohonc's gospel is a compendium of incidents from the canonical gospels, or a harmony of the gospels as was created first by Tatian around 160 and in wide use before the church condemned it.
One thing lending credence to this idea is that the translation given for the page with the three Marys seems to refer to something that simply doesn't happen in the canonical gospels - namely that the myrrh-bearing women came to the tomb prior to the resurrection and saw the body of Jesus.
@dumonu Good point. I seem to recall several other miniatures in Rohonc that illustrate something incompatible with the canonical gospels. It's possible an expert on the non-canonical gospels who studied all the miniatures might be able to identify the gospel being illustrated.
I think the Rohonc Codex is less popular because it doesn't look as good and the text looks much more like obvious gibberish, where the Voynich Manuscript really looks like somebody is fluently writing a proper script. So you think "I SHOULD be able to figure this out", while the Rohonc looks like "this is a big mess!" 😀
Exactly! So many people have published Voynich solutions because it is so approachable. The glyphs are much easier to read than for example highly abbreviated Latin of the time.
On the other hand, the Rohonc offers more of an established framework with its images. If you can imagine which Bible story (possibly in an unattested version) is being referenced, you have a decent foothold to start from.
I think you're right that it's simply less visually appealing. The suspected Christian content might also be less exciting than... whatever one imagines the Voynich to be. So the choice is between doing bible study or projecting onto the VM what your heart desires.
If I'd look for a natural language besides Hungarian personally I think I'd look towards the Caucasus. They'd be part of the greater Ottoman world and so they'd be familiar with Christianity and Islam and have a similar tendency towards spirals in pagan contexts. There's huge linguistic variety in the mountains, often with very large consonant inventories with few vowels, maybe motivating a syllabary. And the region wasn't and isn't adverse to inventing alphabets for different needs. Issue is they tend to be very agglutinative and I think that's been ruled out by statistical studies.
Ultimately I think it's more likely to be a conlang or glossolalia with an unsystematic scribal abbreviation system. A copyist maybe wanting to play around with their artform.
As for the text genre... Assuming there's real text there if the author was from Ottoman territory they might have been familiar with the Syriac diatesseron or similar works. Matthew, Mark, and Luke often tell the same stories even quoting or paraphrasing each other, so in some Christian traditions it's not uncommon to read a "combined" version of their books, which Syrians often do. So you'd get one book that attempts to reference the canonical books instead of standing on its own like the apocryphal gospels. Maybe the author tried their hand at that?
Somehow this made me think about the Paulicians, but they were iconoclasts. And more Armenian than Caucasus. You are right about the huge linguistic variety in the Caucasus mountains, and the huge amount of small tribes/nations with wildly different origins.
I'd suggest looking for the origins of the text to early Christianity, and to the African continent - perhaps Nubia or Ethiopia. There was a great deal of interest in Europe of the time in ancient scripts and also in finding 'Apostolic' biblical works. The history of how the Christian Bible was formalised is easily found - it occurred relatively late and the works which existed by that time, and variant versions of the Gospels, were numerous by then. So the disjunct in biblical chapters etc. is also indicative of the early period, before Christianity was widely established in Europe.
I would suggest that the chapter numbers were observations made by the editors, who noted correspondences to the canonical gospels in Rohonc whenever they saw one. This is not a canonical gospel. The question is whether it is a late attempt to come up with a new gospel by incorporating excerpts from the canonical gospels and adding more details from legend or free imagination -- OR, could it be one of the gospels that were floating around in the 1st and second centuries, known today only by Patristic references or occasional quotes therefrom. If so, it may even be able to identify that early gospel from illustrations in Rohonc, telling a story known only from a certain early non-canonical gospel.
Work assuming Hungarian usually focuses on finding Hungarian's agglutinative case system, but usually comes up dry, indicating that whatever's encoded might be analytical (like Mandarin Chinese or something) or else is encoded too strongly to detect the cases in a straightforward manner. Most African languages have Hungarian-like features that would be detected in such a search, however.
Most African languages have cases or similar things to cases that would be very obvious basically no matter the writing system. The main languages that don't are the ones related to Tamazight or Kabyle, but you'd expect something like tifinagh or arabic script to be used, and every feminine noun and adjective would be surrounded by ts (like in Tamazight, Tifinagh(t), Taqbaylit). The languages of Ethiopia primarily are SOV (so instead of "the hunter catches the antelope" they say "the hunter the antelope catches") which is a word order than wants to have cases in order to help break up S and O when they're next to each other. Most of the languages in the Sahel (the transition area between desert and tropics) work like Latin or Hungarian, and most of the languages south of the Sahel use a neat prefix system where everything pretty much is tagged by the noun it comments on (so like "the red headed woman eats a fish" might come out like "mthe mred mheaded mwoman m'eats ya yfish" if English worked like that)
And the idea these are just unknown languages?
41:51 "even Isaac Newton" we think of Newton as a physicist thus an exact scientist, but that is not true at all, he was mainly preoccupied with the occult and esoteric. Most likely hermeticism as was in vogue in his time.
Solved? These guys have nothing! Very disappointing! It's been 6 years they've been posing as 'genius decypherers', and they obviously can't translate or transliterate a single sentence!
34:47