The first word in line 9 on page 77v « darcheedal » contains several « letters » that are difficult to define. First the two « 8 », the first of which is straight and the second leaning to the right, then « ch » which can designate, in my opinion several letters or, rather, we must learn to distinguish the variants of writing, because they designate different letters. The final « al » can also read only « a », as some labels suggest.
If I keep the value of “d” for the initial “8”, the word should be “dark(g,x)ecta(l)”, I couldn’t find a matching word, but I found the word “targesta” for Tergeste, the Latin name for the city of Trieste.
Tergeste is quoted by Pliny the Elder and Strabo. The Targesta variant existed, at least, in French, as in Jacques Signot’s book (1555), for example.
What relationship can exist between Trieste and our text? If the text is related to Greek mythology, as Koen proposes or to geography, as Linda Snider* suggests, the word Tergeste can to be part of it. As Pliny said « … deceptos credo, quoniam Argo navis flumine in mare Hadriaticum descended non procul Tergeste… », this place can be cited in connection with the journey of the Argonauts.
*Linda has an article in word format for download at figshare
Personally, I don’t agree with this way of forcing readers to download, instead of posting to a blog.
Reading Voynich 
Hi Ruby, I did not realize that the format of my paper was a problem, i certainly never set out to force downloading of it. I put it there because of having seen Juergen’s papers and i liked the format. At that time it could be read in the preview section, which doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, unfortunately. I will take your opinion into consideration, I was actually going to update the paper a long time ago, as it is quite old and there is much more to add to it, but I have not yet done so. Perhaps I should start a blog instead. Thanks for the mention, regardless.
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Thanks Linda! I hope you didn’t find my remark too grumpy, a blog is easier to translate automatically by non-English speaking readers, and easily zoomable.
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