Online webcomic “What Don’t You Understand” by Hong Jac Ga (“A pretty strange story about a hitman, a hermit writer, and a boy who loses his memory”, translated by Rachel Ahn) has recently put up a nice Voynich-inspired episode (#24 here).
It’s not often you have a story with a talking cat and dog trying to train a somewhat unwilling young dark magician: for the purposes of the narrative, the Voynich Manuscript is a kind of repository of impressions, able only to be ‘read’ (or rather ‘sensed’) by someone able to tune in to the original magician’s wavelength.
And I can affirm that there are plenty of people in the real world who truly believe that they can read the Voynich Manuscript in precisely this way, i.e. purely by affinity and/or sense. So perhaps the modern world is just as magical / irrational as it ever was, lurking beneath what is no more than a thin veneer of 21st century logico-positivist supposed hyper-rationality.
Then again, maybe dogs and cats will indeed converse enigmatically long before anyone has cracked the Voynich Manuscript in this kind of way. 😉
What constantly amazes me is that people who have no Latin, Greek, Armenian, Russian etc. will happily browse the pictures in manuscripts they cannot read; recognise and point out similarities between them, and never for a moment doubt that they really can make sense of pictures alone.
yet the same people will cough politely if it is suggested that reading the voynich imagery is no more difficult. And just as it is possible to recognise the difference in style between Russian, Greek and Latin pictures (whether or not you read the language), so it’s possible to recognise stylistic traits in Voynich imagery.
say so, though and you’ll get the polite equivalent of ‘haw-haw, sez you” which is ‘it’s all subjective if you can’t read the writing’ – like receiving ‘impressions’.
paradox, thy name is voynich wisdom
Har har! Here’s a caption for ya (really, if Nick can resort to comic book “balloon”s, I guess we can have our “fun”-nies too):
“tee-hee”
This old hen (“biddie”) can also cackle!
Sheep “b-a-a-ah”
Goats “bleat” or “na-a-a-a-a-ah”
ad infinitum ad nauseum?
beady-eyed wonder
Beady-eyed or not, I don’t identify with “Wonder Woman”. I hope I can get at least a “giggle” from you?