The Voynich Ninja

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Paul Weiler, published May 3, 2020 on Amazon.com.

This book came to my attention via a post book's author made on Reddit's r/voynich: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The author is very upfront about promoting a book he's selling; I find his candor refreshing. What follows is a lengthy and in-depth post which I found coherent, engaging and not noticeably gimmicky. It presents a subject -JKP- has researched and written about extensively: the derivation of Voynichese glyphs from medieval Latin scribal conventions.

I have not read the book. Paul Weiler is convinced he has worked out a system whereby Voynichese is abbreviated Latin, with Voynichese glyphs mapping to Latin syllables in a one-to-many fashion. This route of investigation has been explored quite a lot and has so far been a dead end. Seeing a couple of Voynichese-as-abbreviated-Latin theories get torn apart here on the Ninja has made me see this possibility as increasingly unlikely. From what I can gather on Reddit and Amazon, Paul Weiler appears to be a German fiction writer. His writing style is fun to read, and the overall tone of his Reddit post suggests someone giving and eager to share. But almost unnoticeably absent from the generous serving of good information he gives, is any actual demonstration of his decoding method. As intrigued and entertained as I am, in these lean times, I can't justify spending ~$20 to read a Voynich theory, without some hard evidence that it might actually be on the right track.

Google and DuckDuckGo searches for +"Paul Weiler" +Voynich turned up no hits. The Reddit user u/PaulWeiler is a new account, with no other posts.

Interesting. He seems to know what he's talking about. Although, is this true?

Quote:The position where the abbreviation character 9 never however occurs, in common medieval utilisation, is at the end of the word. Although there are some Latin words which end in cum or con (but not however in cun or com), these cases are however delimited to certain forms of declension. In this case, the ending has then been written out in full or abbreviated in another manner.

From the very little that he's posted, his "one to many" approach does not appear inherently problematic. But as you say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and there's not much pudding yet. I'm curious to see a translation attempt.


(Doesn't it feel like long ago since we had a good old Latin theory thrown our way?   )

(08-05-2020, 11:49 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Interesting. He seems to know what he's talking about. Although, is this true?

Quote:The position where the abbreviation character 9 never however occurs, in common medieval utilisation, is at the end of the word. Although there are some Latin words which end in cum or con (but not however in cun or com), these cases are however delimited to certain forms of declension. In this case, the ending has then been written out in full or abbreviated in another manner.

What!!!!!!!!!!!!

WRONG, WRONG, and wrong again.

It's at the ends of words about 80% of the time. The rest of the time, it's at the beginning. Some scribes don't use it at the beginning. In other words, in some manuscripts, it's at the end of the word 100% (or 98%) of the time.

And the part about "cum" or "con" is horsepucky. He seems to think that the 9 abbreviation always means "cum" or "con". This is not correct. At the beginning it is usually "com" or "con" and IT DOESN'T MEAN THE SAME THING AT THE END, but the same character is used. It is context-sensitive to the location in the word. This is the part he doesn't appear to have grasped and it is VERY basic. Very basic.

He learned just enough to sound good to someone with no background in medieval script, but not enough to keep himself out of trouble. He's given away that he doesn't know what he's talking about. 

Paul Weiler Wrote:Even the eminent Voynich experts will have some breathtaking experiences.

Not the kind I was hoping for.

I was expecting this reaction
To be honest I'm quite tired and I skimmed his explanation, but this line struck me as strangely confidently stating something that's false.

Paul Weiler Wrote:Why should I, of all people, have been able to see what countless linguists and cryptologists had overlooked? However, this is what actually happened.

This is the kind of thing Cheshire, Tom O'Neill (and a number of other "solvers") were saying, and are still saying.

I don't want to pay $20 for the book based on what I've seen so far, but I bet there is a  g e n e r o u s  dose of imagination (subjective interpretation) involved in his "solution".

Weiler implies in his intro that the VMS was bound in limp vellum at the time Rudolph II purchased it.

Rene, is this correct? Isn't there some evidence that several books were rebound by the Jesuits (ca. Kircher's time) because the original wood bindings were riddled with worms? In other words, after it left Prague?

Let's begin with that there is no firm evidence that Rudolph ever purchased it.

Sigh... his plant IDs are way off base. I find this depressing to read.

The flower doesn't match, the calyx doesn't match, the growth pattern of the flowerhead doesn't match, and the leaves don't match.

Four strikes.


Weiler compares a fairly good drawing of Centaurea (with a thistle-like calyx and groups of lanceolate leaves), You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , with an umbellate plant with palmate leaves and then, with complete confidence, says they are the same. There's no similarity between them.

Then he goes on and on about umbellifers.

The VMS plant is not an umbellifer. You don't have to be a botanist to see that. Any avid gardener can recognize the difference and would notice the scaly calyx as the Centaurea or thistle group of plants. Even the spot inside each scale on the calyx is specific to several species of Centaurea.

Here's one of the Centaureas with (mostly) lanceolate leaves:



Many plants have red stems (one of the key ingredients to Weiler's ID). Some of them have red stems at certain times of the year also.

Only 2 days till he publishes the next part on reddit...sweet. :p

As a side note, I'd encourage all those who publish a Voynich solution to make the publication free to read (except of course for those cases where that is beyond the author's control, such as paid journals).

Why try to collect several hundreds when, if you really are the one who found the solution, you'll collect hundreds of thousands in lectures!