The Voynich Ninja

Patrick Lockerby claims on his blog that the first words in the Voynich Manuscript are these words (which he says are Latin):

Peractum es con itaque …


He reasserted this translation on the ninja forum on this thread:

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On August 2, 2017, I pointed out that his translation is not Latin, that it only looks vaguely like Latin mixed with French:

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Despite the fact that this is clearly demonstrable as not being Latin, Lockerby again asserted on Nick Pelling's blog on October 13th, 2017 that his translation is Latin.

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So he continues to believe and to promote the idea that he has created a Latin translation, even though there is no Latin (not even fractured Latin or note-format Latin) in his translation.


Some history... is this an original idea?

First of all, the idea that the VMS is abbreviated Latin is not unique to Lockerby or Gibbs, not even close. The idea is very very old because the text has many Latin characters mixed with Latin abbreviation symbols. In fact, that's why Vwords like "doary" get translated as "Taurus". It is because the "9" character at the end, in Latin, would be translated as "-us" or "-um". I've posted about these Latin abbreviations many times on my blogs prior to Lockerby's and Gibb's translations and I don't consider the idea to be a "discovery" because there's still no evidence that the text expands into intelligible Latin and Latin abbreviations are common knowledge to those who are familiar with medieval scribal conventions.

Yulia May ("searcher" on our forum) made a very creditable attempt to try to expand the text into Latin long before Lockerby and Gibbs, and May has done the best job I've seen so far (May has knowledge of Latin that both Gibbs and Lockerby do not) and even May discovered that it's difficult to prove if or what might actually be Latin and that the resulting text is unusually, exceedingly repetitious. May has not only done a better job than other claimants, but is also willing to look critically at the translation and say, "Something doesn't quite add up here."

Here is some of the discussion of the translation:

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We have other Latin scholars in the Voynich community who have not been able to turn the VMS into intelligible, substantiatable Latin, so I'm not sure why researchers with little or no knowledge of Latin think they can do something Latin scholars with a strong interest in the VMS AND good knowledge of scribal abbreviations have so far not done.


I have also repeated many times, both here and on my blog, that Latin characters and abbreviations were used in many languages, not just Latin. To assume that Latin abbreviations and ligatures automatically means the underlying language is Latin also shows a lack of knowledge of medieval scribal conventions.


The first language I (and many other Voynich researchers) tried to extract from the VMS text was Latin. Not only was it the lingua franca of the middle ages, but the glyphs are primarily Latin. It's not a new idea, it's an old one that so far hasn't panned out, but I'd still like to discuss the first few words in the Voynich Manuscript since Lockerby today repeated his assertion that the first words can be read as, "Peractum es con itaque …"

This is a copy of my August 2, 2017 response to the Lockery translation of "Peractum es con itaque …" I've copied it to this thread because it is directly relevant and so you don't have to keep referring back and forth:
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Lockerby has translated the first word as "peraetumes" and then says it is to be understood as "'peractum', a book for teachers and students".

Peraetumes or even Peractumes is not a Latin word.

He does not explain how he gets from "peraetumes" to "peractum" (other than saying that some of the ees are supposed to be cees), and peractum does not mean a book for teachers and students, as he claims. Depending on context and grammatical form it has a variety of meanings such as disturbed, harassed, completed, and would not be followed by "con ilaque" (ilaque is not a word in Latin, the only word that's close that is a correct Latin word is "itaque" but then all the ells in the transcript would have to be amended to tees for it to be consistent).


If you glance through his transcript, what you see is a lot of repetitious short syllables with Latin (and French) endings added to make them look like Latin. It's like taking a lot of nonsense syllables in English and adding "-ing" and -ly" and calling it English:

"umlio estoque este iloesesteum feretqueum esaesaus esaus ileumeses"
"etoque estoesaus ilestum iletum esorus etoesanus esto iletois"
"umeteeum oilaum oilum esanus oileteum iloilanus"
"feretestanus estoileteeum etoque liestoeseeesum"

Even if you change some of the ees to cees, there's not a single Latin word in these four lines, except for "esto" or maybe "este" (which is more French than Latin). One correct word every few lines (usually the short words) is not a translation.

To call this Latin stretches credulity pretty far.

DS Theorem one on 13.10.2017

Any translation attempt that includes the EVA letter [P] or the EVA letter [F] and
converts it directly in any other character or group of characters of another language, is wrong.

That being posed, the first word on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can not start with the EVA letter [P] being translated into a Latin P.

From his transcript, here is Lockerby's translation of the first few vords:

peraetumes con ilaque

It doesn't mean anything in Latin. Neither peraetumes nor ilaque are Latin words. The closest thing you can get out of this is "itaque" in Latin but then all the "ell" characters would have to be changed to "t" and the rest of it still wouldn't make any sense in Latin or any other language.



If we want to play with the idea that this is Latin, I want to propose an alternate reading that not only is real Latin, but which follows Latin scribal conventions more accurately than the translations offered by Lockerby or Gibbs.


1. If we take the Latin scribal convention for "pro" or "per" (a P with a looped or straight macron), then the first glyph could be interpreted as "pro", but this wouldn't make sense in relation to the following glyphs, so perhaps the VMS is looser than convention and a glyph with or without a curled tail could be either pro or per (already one has to make compromises to read this as Latin).

Thus, the first glyph becomes "Per"

2. We read the "a" as "a".

3. The bench ligature, in Latin, has many interpretations (this is normal, the meaning is known from context). It can mean "tr" "er" "et" "cr" and just about any combination of c, t, r, or e that makes a proper word. I have many paleographic samples to substantiate this. So let's read it as "ct".

4. The "9" character, which is written both superscripted and inline with the rest of the text in medieval documents, usually stands for con- or com- at the beginning of the word, and "-us" or "-um" at the end of the word (it can have other meanings, especially when used in other languages, but these are the most common).

5. The c with a tail can be many things in Latin. It can be an embellished c, an embellished e, a c with a tail, an e with a tail (with the tail representing a script-version of a macron... a line over the letters to indicate an abbreviation). Thus this glyph can have many meanings, such as cum, -eus, eius, etc. Unfortunately, in this context, none of these readings make any sense. the only one that fits well is to interpret it as an "ess". It's a compromise, if one wants correct Latin, it was not likely to represent "ess" in medieval Latin.

6. The "9" character appears again at the beginning of a word, but to expand it as the conventional "con-" or "com-" would not make sense in Latin. But... if the spaces between words in the VMS are contrived, it can also be interpreted as an ending "9" resulting in "-us" or "-um".

7. Assuming EVA-k is a ligature, one can interpret it as "in".



So what do we get with these conventional Latin expansions, with a bit of massage and wiggling to turn it into intelligible Latin? It comes out like this:

[attachment=1754]

Per actum suum in...

Which at least is readable Latin... but look how many small compromises were necessary to shoehorn this fragment into something close to proper Latin, and consider what happens when one tries to generalize this to the rest of the text.


Is there Latin in the VMS? Maybe, perhaps a few loan words, many proper names were shared among the ancient languages. Is the text in toto Latin? Most of those who have claimed that it is have not produced anything that is grammatically correct and the majority of translations so far aren't even real Latin words.

(13-10-2017, 08:10 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.DS Lemma one on 13.10.2017

Any translation attempt that includes the EVA letter [P] or the EVA letter [F] and
converts it directly in any other character or group of characters of another language, is wrong.

That being posed, the first word on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can not start with the EVA letter [P] being translated into a Latin P.

This is right, but with one important addition, which I am sure you implied.

Such a solution is definitely wrong, in case the letters Eva(p) and Eva(f) are the only ones that encode certain plain
text letters. It would not necessarily be wrong if (for example) the plaintext "n" would be encoded by Eva(l) or Eva(p).

For many years now I have been using this criterium as one of the first ones to look for, in all proposed solutions.
Most recently also the one proposed by Matthew Luther.

In general, the people proposing their solutions, when confronted by this evidence, find it very hard to accept, even
though the argument is very simple and very strong.

It is one example where, not being familiar with the statistics of the Voynich script, puts one at a big disadvantage in
finding a solution.

Speaking of first two words I would put my money on "satyrosam comoediam"

Quote:And again the ugly question: why are the cryptographers not able to decrypt a 15th c. cypher.

Well, they are not able to decrypt quite a number of ciphers which, to all probability, would not be very sophisticated. Zodiac ciphers, for example. Likewise, one could ask a question: "why 17th c. scholars (such as Marci or Baresch) were not able to read a readable 15th script".

Quite a number of old ciphers were deciphered only recently, such as e.g. the Copiale cipher, the tables of Soyga or some Trithemian stuff.

@Anton: ...I am curious, what text do the tables of Soyga contain ? ;-)

Quote:RENE.......Such a solution is definitely wrong, in case the letters Eva(p) and Eva(f) are the only ones that encode certain plain

text letters. It would not necessarily be wrong if (for example) the plaintext "n" would be encoded by Eva(l) or Eva(p).

I disagree and without explanation I introduce (I copied this also to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)


DS Theorem two. 14.10.2017:     The Eva letter [P] and Eva letter [F] are a signalling letter.