In today’s post, we exceptionally return to the “small plants” section, more precisely to the top right plant on f88v. Its root and trunk are drawn to resemble the bottom half of a monkey. In the image below, the adjacent plant has been digitally removed for clarity.
We see two long, bendy monkey legs, ending in monkey “foot-hands”. The butt and hips are marked as well, and it lacks a tail. In the top half, the image transforms into the botanically relevant form. I have absolutely no intention to identify the species of the monkey based on this information; the inset shows just one option, two barbary macaques, North African monkeys without a tail.
Ignoring the initial “o”, the label reads tokos. As a reminder: the images hidden in the plans are a hint to Greek speakers about the plant’s foreign, indigenous name. Ancient Greek for “monkey” is πίθηκος, píthikos. The plant name in the label, tokos, is very similar to the last part of the Greek for monkey: thikos.
The intricate, rebus-like nature of these linguistic hints becomes very clear in this example. We only need the last part of the word “πίθηκος“, so only the last part of the monkey is drawn.
The toko, according to this Indian government website, is a “Multipurpose palm tree”, which has been used “since time immemorial. It is extensively used in the state of Arunachal Pradesh.” It is found in India, Assam, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand (source).
The plant looks like this:
As we can see, the leaf of the toko palm (Livistona jenkinsiana) quite resembles that in the Voynich. The number of segments and roundness of the tips varies. Younger plants have leaves with fewer than ten segments, while the number in fully grown plants can be as large as 100. With nine segments, it is clear that the Voynich plant is a young one. The example below shows an older plant with many segments, though we can still clearly see the rounded tips:
The fact that this tree was a source of fibres might be the main reason why it was included in the Voynich plant collection. Knowledge of this tree and its possible uses would be invaluable for a travelling trader and/or his crew (see D.N. O’Donovan’s earlier conclusions about the “large plants” section). Indeed, the fibrous nature of the plant is hinted at in the image:
In summary, what the original audience would have learned from this image, apart from the botanical appearance of the leaf, is the following:
- This plant’s name is TOKOS, which sounds like the last part of pithikos (monkey).
- It is a source of fibrous materials.
Edit:
I add one more image of a young plant, which shows the clearest resemblance to the Voynich leaf.
Edit 2 (23/08/2016):
I agree with Lars Diets’ comment that the gibbon, a tailless tree-dwelling ape, is a better match for this image. An additional bonus is that its range overlaps with that of the tree.
The Voynich Temple 
Koen,
I’ll admit it – this is the first of your examples that has really has me nodding agreement about your explanation of the image. Definitely monkey limbs and back.
As an amateur I find the shift from “thikos” to “tokos” a bit much, but other specialists in comparative linguistics might have no problem at all.
The tokos palm is said to be endemic to north-western India according to this page.
http://arunachalpradesh.gov.in/toko.htm
I wonder, now about what sort of monkeys live there, and what their names are in the regional languages. 🙂
LikeLike
Diane
A shift from “th” to “t” is very common and even to be predicted in multilingual contexts. If a Greek says “thokos” or “tokos”, it will sound just the same to people who do not have the dental fricative in their native phoneme inventory.
You are definitely right about “o” to “i”, there’s no way that’s happening in one step. But of course what I propose is a mere cue to remember the foreign piece of vocabulary. Perhaps the phoneme sequence “TOKOS” was just not available in the Greek vocabulary, so they looked for something similar.
So I’m not looking for any kind of relation between the two words, apart from “sounds enough alike to jog the memory”.
LikeLike
Also – you know there is a plant from the Americas called Pithecellobium saman.
“Monkey pod tree” – just to make life hell. 😀
LikeLike
If this is indeed supposed to be a monkey/ape, it’s a long-legged species that’s apparently jumping from branch to branch, and it lacks a tail. So I would guess that it’s a gibbon. Which occurs in Southeast Asia, including the easternmost parts of India, which would fit with your identification. However, you wrote:
“Perhaps the phoneme sequence “TOKOS” was just not available in the Greek vocabulary, so they looked for something similar.”
But it is a word in Ancient Greek. See here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/τόκος
It would certainly have been possible to draw a plant that would evoke the concept of childbirth.
LikeLike
Hi Lars, thanks for your comment!
I did not ponder too much about which type of monkey it would be, since it is integrated into the plant design, so an exact identification is difficult. I admit, though, that the gibbon is a much better solution than the macaque, and might indeed be the kind of monkey the composer had in mind.
Your second proposal is a bit more complicated. So far, all hidden images in plants I have seen are extremely concrete: hand, monkey, crab, octopus, elephant. As you can see, there’s also a preference for either mythological figures or animals. Probably also everyday objects, but I have not yet analyzed any of those. This is only speaking about the small plants section.
The concept of childbirth is a bit more abstract. Additionally, it becomes more and more obvious that these images have been composed in a multicultural setting. I’m not sure if depicting childbirth was something they were all comfortable with.
LikeLike