The Voynich Ninja

(28-03-2023, 07:10 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I found the most appealing, apart from the object itself, was the fact that there was still very little scientific consensus despite the manuscript containing a wealth of material. That a mystery like that could still exist in the 21st century. 

So I guess what initially sparked my interest in Voynich research is the fact that an exceptional item like this exists, and the desire to learn more about it.

Yes, the exceptional nature of the Voynich manuscript is certainly a draw. The fact that there is so little is still known for certain about it, though there are certainly plenty of theories, is very intriguing. Also the prospect of maybe being the person or a person involved in cracking this puzzle open is enticing.

I had read about the Voynich manuscript in the 1990s, in a magazine which my brothers bought which featured unsolved mysteries. I dismissed it as probably a forgery, or even simply made up to sell magazines to teen boys.

Then the anniversary of the Wow! signal in 2012 made me wonder how we would even decipher a xenolanguage. Given the current lack of such language examples, I looked for undeciphered documents to consider. I was pleased to learn that the Voynich manuscript had been carbon-dated to the early-1400s and was therefore not the forgery I assumed it to be. Hence my interest.

(29-03-2023, 11:49 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Then the anniversary of the Wow! signal in 2012 made me wonder how we would even decipher a xenolanguage. Given the current lack of such language examples, I looked for undeciphered documents to consider. I was pleased to learn that the Voynich manuscript had been carbon-dated to the early-1400s and was therefore not the forgery I assumed it to be. Hence my interest.

That is an interesting angle.

I guess I looked at the Rosettes folio almost as if it were a treasure map. Though finding the X where the author originated from was highly unlikely to reveal gold or jewels or anything of monetary value, unfortunately.

I was just going to write a book in the genre of mystical urban fantasy,  even started writing, but I realized that I need more knowledge about the mythology of various mystical creatures to continue, so I started to study information about it on the Internet. I remember that I found a site of mystical content with a clear conspiracy undertone. I thought that this is exactly what I need. Mystical things were twisted so believably (at first glance) with real events that I, fully understanding that it was just a well-presented fiction, was delighted. And it happened that the Voynich manuscript was mentioned there, as a mysterious grimoire of some ancient immortal race, the text even had a link to the Wikipedia article. I had never heard of this manuscript before, so I got interested, read about it on Wikipedia, went to the Beinecke Library page with a facsimile, and that's how it got going. Maybe that's why Voynich's manuscript seemed to me somehow special and mystical. I never began to finish the book I had started, because I was too engrossed in the manuscript, and later the idea seemed too frivolous. However, I wrote a small fairy tale based on the illustrations of Quire 13, and I am happy about that.

Well, I've always liked movies like Indiana Jones and archeology from an early age, but perhaps the most recent event that somewhat shaped my interest was visiting the National Palace Museum in Taipei in 2017. There is a calligraphy work by Zhang Xu:  He was kind of like the Jackson Pollock of the Tang Dynasty, or the other way around . Around six months ago, I searched Wikipedia to find the name and type of calligraphy: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as I wanted to find out more info.

While I won't suggest the Voynichese is or isn't asemic writing: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the illustrations have at least some, and I've always had an interest in shapeless forms; in college chemistry courses, I learned atoms without a lattice are amorphous- such as glass, as opposed to quartz.

While I think it would be quite time consuming to carbon date every page of the VMS- I am curious if there have been any date differences between the drawings and the text itself. Maybe someone has the answer- I apologize if I haven't looked enough, but as asemic writing is defined as ""having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning".You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art." The VM illustrations do appear to use quite a bit of asemic transformations- ambiguities which today might look like cell membranes, to micelles, to mammalian anatomy, to vegetables. But also, if a clear distinction could be made from the date of the illustrations- that is, if the illustrator lived during the same time as the text writer (or was the same person), then focusing on the text alone should not be prioritized, as the clues in the image could reveal more. Yesterday I read the in D'Imperio's Elegant Enigma (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) claims about Roger Bacon having anachronistically developed a compound microscope, and thought, how hilarious and unlikely it would be if he developed the resolution of a scanning electron microscope, which has the resolution to depict organelles instead of the macroscopic plant stems and bulbs in some of his drawings. If it were asemic, it would be more likely to interpret as being a plant...or a bath, but as Freud supposedly said, sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar" 

By the 1600s, compound microscopy was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I haven't checked if there was any trade or purchases of Dutch microscopes by owners such as Tepenecz. Again, it might look obvious that the illustrations were written at the same time as the Voynichese, as the text is too neatly surrounding the drawings, but that could suggest the writing was written significantly later maybe not 100 years, but 50?

When I was in graduate school at Yale in the early 1990s, I worked at the Beinecke Library as the assistant to the curator of pre-1600 manuscripts (then Robert Babcock) and he put me in charge of Voynich-related correspondence (among other duties). I was answering letters from all over the world, fulfilling requests for images and microfilm, and responding to reference questions about the manuscript. My brother, who is now a professor of computer science at the US Air Force Academy, was in graduate school at the time working on a cryptology PhD thesis, and I was convinced that together he and I would solve this thing once and for all! Ah, the naivité of youth...  

It all began on a rainy Sunday afternoon, while I was staying at a quaint hotel in Wales. I was browsing through the hotel's library, looking for something intriguing to pass the time. That's when I stumbled upon a copy of Nick Pelling's book, "The Curse of the Voynich: The Secret History of the World's Most Mysterious Manuscript." The title alone was enough to pique my curiosity, and I couldn't help but dive into its pages.

As I began reading, I became more and more fascinated by the Voynich Manuscript's enigmatic history and the numerous attempts to decipher its contents. 

Pelling's book provided an in-depth account of the various theories and efforts to decode the manuscript, which only fueled my interest further. The more I read, the more captivated I became by the mystery surrounding the Voynich Manuscript. That wet Sunday afternoon in Wales marked the beginning of my fascination with this enigmatic document, and I've been exploring its secrets ever since.

David, somehow your reply is giving me chat gpt vibes :p Maybe it's the implausible premise that you encounterd Curse in the wild.

Didn't want to litter other threads up, so here goes.

I'm fairly new to the forum, I've been a lurker for a few months at this point. I am a researcher and an assistant professor with a PhD in Computer Science.

One beautiful day I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for the Voynich Manuscript and what attracted me the most was the peculiar way the apparent words were written - their repetition and similarity to each other. Yes, I have indeed been mesmerized by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and I vividly remember that particularly the line qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy seemed otherworldly to me.

I eventually became quite invested in getting to know the manuscript and started studying various theories regarding its creation and the interpretation of its contents. Throughout the weeks, I went from being convinced that it's an old written language of some sort, to believing that Stephen Bax and Derek Vogt were right about the Voynich phonetic system, to getting frustrated and beginning to think it's a giant troll or hoax, to becoming a believer that it is, as Beinecke named it, a Cipher Manuscript.

So, for some time now I've been closely studying the VMS, not only consulting the useful popular transliterations but also trying to read the MS raw. Nowadays I find the Curve-Line system proposed by Brian Cham to be the most compelling. I have been working on an extension of that theory, which tries to account for, among other stuff, the horizontal and vertical bars in the script. The horizontal bars, which can span multiple glyphs, appear to me as if they are modifiers of the glyph "values" encased within. I also suspect that the tails appended to the e and i glyphs are some sort of modifiers that, along with their location within the word, might affect a word's "weight" or numerical value.  The gallows seem to be either composed of a vertical bar and a tail, or the q character and a tail. I based this finding on the fact that I have seen the vertical bar standing on its own as an apparent glyph. If I muster up enough courage I might elaborate on my findings somewhere one day.

I also must confess that I have a feeling of dread that Voynichese was constructed with the use of a large, proprietary dictionary that hasn't surfaced yet.

I enjoy spending hours just scanning the details of the VMS with my eyes. The peculiar nature of the glyphs. The fascinating marginalia, which mix a familiar script with Voynichese. Some time ago I even ordered a Zieler calligraphy set to try and write some Voynichese myself (and to try to improve my handwriting, which is just terrible!). Here are some results:





Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself, and express my sincere thanks to everyone who is working on solving our favorite mysterious MS. I hope it will be solved within our lifetime.