The Voynich Ninja

We probably need a separate thread to discuss You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that RenegadeHealer posted on the Calgary thread, since the interpretations of this researcher might be different from those of others who claim that it is Turkish (just as there are many different versions of "the VMS is Latin" theories).


It's a very nicely organized site, with a clear explanation of how the letters are transliterated.

Many of the substitutions are similar to the Latin characters, so it's not hard for westerners to understand their transliteration system. For example EVA-e = c, i = i, m = k, iin = m, o = o, ö, l = x, r = r, k = l, il, d = s (just as it is written in French).

These substitutions are extremely similar to the majority of Latin transliterations, so I assume they are treating it as Romanized Turkish (here is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on Romanizing Ottoman Turkish and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and there are quite a few more since translation of Persian documents into machine-readable Latin text would open up a great many important historical documents to a larger research community).


Unfortunately, I see the same problems here as I see with most of the Latin "solutions".

First of all, it is interpreted as a substitution cipher without consideration for letter frequency and position. This is the PRIMARY problem I see with supposed VMS "solutions" and it usually goes unexplained (and often un-noticed) by the solver. Also, there is no explanation for letter pairing and you cannot explain Voynich text without accounting for this.


For example, in Turkish, the letter "k"  can be found in any part of a word, here is a modern example:

dketr mstfa amara dr mwrd kearkerd mghz twdahat mkhtsra ma dhd ! f'ela mkhtsr! nzr bdad ltfa agur maalad mfsl tr shbt

In contrast, in the VMS, EVA-m is almost always positioned at the ends of tokens and very frequently at the ends of lines. This position is consistent with the Latin -ris abbreviation, which is the same shape as the VMS glyph and is almost always at the ends of words and also frequently at the ends of lines (as an end-section marker, or as an etcetera marker). In other words, in the VMS, this glyph is positioned like a ligature or abbreviation, not like a letter (I'm not saying it is an abbreviation, I don't know what it is, but it does not behave like an alphabetic letter in Latin-character languages or in Farsi).


Similarly the "o" glyph in the VMS is very frequently at the beginnings of tokens and very frequently precedes EVA-k or EVA-t, but you can see from the above romanized example, that "o" or "ö" does not appear frequently at the beginnings of words.

Hopefully that's enough information to get the idea across. Let me know if you need more examples.

The section on possible ligatures is worth considering because ligatures were widely used in the Middle Ages over a great geographical distance (e.g., both Latin characters and Indic characters had the same concepts). In other words, the use of ligatures was widespread at the time and it's quite possible, if the VMS is linguistic (or even if it is symbolic), that it includes ligatures:

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However, the same frequency and positional considerations would have to be explained for ligatures, as they would for individual characters, by anyone proposing a solution.

It fascinates me that this site includes so many concepts that are essentially the same as in medieval Latin scripts.

For example, their interpretation of EVA-sh as a ligature starting with c and ending with r or c, with an apostrophe in between, is exactly the same process that is used to read Latin abbreviations, and even uses most of the same letters:

[attachment=3981]

In Latin, this very common ligature can be read as cer, c'r (with more letters in between), cet, cert, ci, and anything that looks like c, r or old-style t with letters in between (the "cap" is an apostrophe symbol in Latin that can be one or more characters). It's the exact same concept.

I notice they have taken the "red weirdo" in 1r upper-right and interpreted it like a word (or two syllables). I don't think it's a word. I think it's an embellished initial. Many embellished initials were written with a "2" shape on the left and then the rest of the shape to define the letter was added to the right (e.g., to make the letter U).

Capitals were not used as much in the Middle Ages as they are now, but when they were, they were often embellished, frequently large, and also sometimes written with red or blue pigments.

They interpreted EVA-l as xir-on, kir-an, kir-ek. If you know Greek, you can immediately see the relationship between this and Greek.

When I created my transcripts, I didn't use EVA, I used my own system and I transliterated EVA-l as x because it reminded me of Greek chi and thus would be easier for me to remember, but I am doubtful that this shape corresponds to k or x in Voynichese, as the author suggests.

The author believes that the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was added at the same time period as the VMS author.

I think this is possible, but not highly likely. The foliation is similar to shapes in the text because most of the shapes of VMS glyphs follow Latin conventions, but if the radio-carbon dating is accurate, then the folio numbers were probably added later. They are in a style that was uncommon in the early 15th century (but prevalent by the end of the 15th century).


The quire numbers, however (which were left out of the analysis on this page), ARE in a style that was used in the late 14th century and early 15th century. This style had mostly died out by the end of the 15th century (note especially the numbers 4, 5 and 7).

Apart from the fact that the Turkish language cannot be compared in this way.
It is actually Ottoman and was written from right to left, just like in Arabic. So the same question arises, why from left to right, if it is not supposed to be a translation.
There is a difference between Ottoman and Byzantium.
Latin alphabet only since 1923, introduced by Atatürk.
These variations make it very unlikely for me, even if it looks very similar to Latin today. ( word structure )

I think it's possible that some people wrote Romanized Persian, many languages were converted to Roman and Cyrillic-style characters and some langauges are still written in two or three different character sets.


If the creator of the VMS were trying to obscure the content without having to laboriously encipher it, Romanized Persian might be a good way to do it (just as a western language written with Arabic characters would not be noticed by most westerners).


But... the positional and frequency characteristics of the VMS are wrong for ANY natural language, so regardless of what language a person chooses for a solution, that person HAS to explain these differences if they are proposing a simple-substitution transliteration.

(13-02-2020, 05:27 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But... the positional and frequency characteristics of the VMS are wrong for ANY natural language, so regardless of what language a person chooses for a solution, that person HAS to explain these differences if they are proposing a simple-substitution transliteration.

Isn't this almost like a paradox? Most researchers here believe that any proposed solution should explain the positional frequency characteristics of the VMS, which are wrong for any natural language. 

So are we expecting a constructed language to be the answer? Or meaningless text? I believe it is unfair to say that the solution should explain the frequency numbers. All languages have a number of linguistic phenomena underlying it. For example as someone pointed out, in English we have multi to multi correspondence for letter/letter combos to sound. But if someone proposes such a solution, we ignore it saying it has many degrees of freedom. I dont think English would ever be reconstructed by people with this mindset in the future if it were to be a lost language at the time.

If a solution seems inconsistent, apply it to more pages and show the person why it seems stupid. I think without knowing the querks of the language its impossible to say why the frequencies are what they are..

Common_Man Wrote:
...
So are we expecting a constructed language to be the answer? Or meaningless text? I believe it is unfair to say that the solution should explain the frequency numbers. All languages have a number of linguistic phenomena underlying it. For example as someone pointed out, in English we have multi to multi correspondence for letter/letter combos to sound. But if someone proposes such a solution, we ignore it saying it has many degrees of freedom. I dont think English would ever be reconstructed by people with this mindset in the future if it were to be a lost language at the time.

I didn't say any solution should explain the disparity in letter frequency. There are ways the text might be manipulated to come out like Voynich text. Sadly, the people who offer substitution solutions do not explain this discrepancy in their methods, they don't even acknowledge it. I daresay many of them haven't even noticed it because they cherry-pick the words that seem to work and ignore all the rest (in other words, they ignore about 85% of the manuscript).


What I was pointing out, since this thread is specifically about a substitution-style solution on turkicresearch.com is that anyone proposing a simple substitution cipher MUST explain the positional and frequency anomalies that differentiate their substitution solution from natural language. There is no natural language that has the positional characteristics of Voynich text. Even syllabic Asian languages do not function this way.

That's why all the people trying to do it this way (at least the ones I've seen so far) stall after picking out about 5% of the words that seem to work with their system. The next step, for those who keep going, is to start proposing that it is polyglot, or that each VMS glyph can represent multiple letters. Then they can maybe get up to 10% or 15% "hits" using their cherry-picking method. Applying their method to the rest of the text results in gibberish. In other words, they are SELECTING what works and ignoring what doesn't (which is easy to do when there are 200 pages of text) while simultaneously ignoring questions about the lack of grammar.