Hello everyone,
I would like to share my finding about voynich manuscript. I have deciphered and translated few pages of Voynich manuscript. Based on my translation of first page of Voynich manuscript, I have found the author of Voynich manuscript. He was Giovanni Aurispa. The first page explained about Giovanni Aurispa's life and events during his time.
Especially second and third paragraphs, explained about his life in 1421 untill 1423. When he was ordered by papal court to accompanied Gianfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua to Constantinople as translator. Then he stayed there for two years as a secretary because the son of the Byzantine's emperor fond of him. In 1423 he accompanied John VIII Palaiologos to Rome and Venice in order to get help on man power and resources, because of the black death plague and war against Ottoman.
Fourth paragraph explained about the birth of Florence's catasto in 1427, where Giovanni Aurispa lived from 1425 untill 1427 in Florence. I have attached my ciphers and translation of the first page of Voynich manuscript.
Notes : the language is latin language
there are ciphers I have not included in the ciphers picture, they are
Cl in the word clues
Gn in the word magnas
Nd in the word mundi[
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I would be interested to know how you came up with the alphabet and the word formations. Is there any methodology behind it?
I am curious: how did you come up with him as the author? I don't think anyone else has proposed him before. This is interesting but before you can name the VM's author as Giovanni Aurispa, you need to do more work to prove it.
For example, Aurispa was an historian and is known for his manuscripts collection and his copying and promotion of the Greek classics. He is not known for his own works, of which there were few. I found nothing to suggest he had any background or expertise in herbology, botany, pharmacopeia, astronomy or cosmology either (nor alchemy, as several have suggested). So if he is the author of the VM, how do you explain the rest of the manuscript?
If the methodology you used works for the folios you translated, then it should work for at least much of the rest of the VM. Translate that and if it also makes sense, and matches any related images, then you might be onto something.
It has been suggested, possibly proven, that multiple persons were involved in the VM's creation. If that is so, then Aurispa couldn't have been the sole author. In which case, who co-wrote it?
Aurispa also seems to have been a highly respected person. He had to leave Florence in 1427 or 1428 due to some disagreements but other than that I found nothing to suggest he would have needed to write anything in code. So why did he encipher the text?
And finally, have you compared the VM to anything in Aurispa's own hand? Graphology may be considered a pseudoscience and it is rather like comparing apples and oranges to compare handwriting in an unknown cipher to handwriting that is not but there may still be some conclusions that could be drawn from such a comparison. I found only two samples of Aurispa's handwriting, both copies published in the same book (PDF page 37):
Carteggio di Giovanni Aurispa edited by Remigio Sabbadini, held by the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, scanned by Google
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It will be interesting to see you further develop your theory.
I have no comment to make on the authorship theory, but your solution to the text is not a correct decipherment. The good points in your favour are that unlike 95% of solvers, you have tackled full sentences and even paragraphs, and you've tried to find a solution to the "m" problem.
But the Latin that your system has produced is not recognizable Latin. Moreover, Voynichese cannot be a simple substitution cypher, i.e. it has to be far more complex than a 1:1 mapping. Even a flexible abjad one which your system appears to be. This is due to various unlanguage-like patterns such as glyphs behaving differently depending on the position in the line and paragraph, and especially the entropy problem which Koen explains very clearly You are not allowed to view links.
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Your system and pictures are also missing a step or line of reasoning: e.g. your picture depicts your system as going from EVA fy to Latin "nos", but this is not the case. It is actually going from EVA fy to "ns", and there is a hidden step of adding in an "o". There do not appear to be any rules in your system as to what vowel gets added and when. Moreover, your system states that there are also unhidden vowels in the text: EVA a, e, o, and i, but their values also seem flexible. In the first two lines alone, you have EVA o as standing for "oi", "u", "o", and "ii". You also have EVA a as standing for "ui", "e", "a", and "eo". All this introduces too many degrees of freedom, meaning different people using the system will have different results, and making it easy for your confirmation bias to take hold.
I'm attaching a version of your first pic to illustrate this extra hidden step and vowel issue.
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I would suggest you have a read of rival solutions. All solutions tend to make the same mistakes, and so these threads are useful reading. They usually have comments pointing out the common problems in solutions; giving helpful explanations about the line patterns and Voynichese behaviour that solutions rarely attempt to account for; and showing how confirmation bias makes every "solver" so convinced they have deciphered the manuscript. We could probably do with a separate section in the forum for "solutions", but threads from the past few years that come to mind are:
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (this should be particularly useful for you)
- Cheshire's "Proto-Romance" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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(17-02-2024, 02:16 PM)merrimacga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the methodology you used works for the folios you translated, then it should work for at least much of the rest of the VM. Translate that and if it also makes sense, and matches any related images, then you might be onto something.
The method can be applied to the rest of the manuscript, producing results that make as much or little sense as what was posted here. As Tavie mentioned, it has been done with several different languages by several different people. Basically:
1) apply a quasi-simple substitution mapping Voynichese to the target alphabet;
2) hammer the result into relatively similar target-language words;
3) translate the resulting word salad by using a dictionary or Google translate, ignoring all grammar;
4) pretend it makes sense, make up something using the English words picked in step 3.
I discussed the method here: You are not allowed to view links.
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Instead of translating pages and pages, it is more useful to discuss the details of the Latin grammar in the text.
Checking word and bigram frequencies of the supposed Latin is also helpful and does not require knowledge of the language (e g. How many words end in -um or -us? How many occurrences of "et", the most frequent Latin word?).
Another useful exercise is picking an actual Latin text and encoding it with the supposed cipher process: does the result show the typical features of Voynichese? (Spoiler: no, it doesn't)
Thank you all for giving your opinion about my finding. I want to explain few things about the ciphers :
1. Ciphers for consonants are rigid. One symbol means one cipher.
2. If you browse the manuscript, you will find stand alone symbol for example symbol for letter ST, M, R, T, also S. But you will also find that stand alone symbol with a vowel symbol at front ( two symbols ). So these two form are making their own words example sto and aestu. My opinion is the consonants symbols have vowel, eventhough the vowel symbol is not written. This is the reason why the first word of my translation of the first page is " Nos " eventhough there is no vowel symbol in the middle of N and S symbols.
3. The words start with vowel will be written with vowel symbol, except for letter X symbol. You can see the examples in the translation exis, axos, and exemeristi.
4. You can see in the ciphers picture, I did not put certain vowel letter for vowel symbols. Because any symbols can be any vowel letter. In the manuscript you will find these kind of symbols at the end of the word : cg, ccg, cccg, ccccg. These examples show us the prove for my opinion.
5. I have not deciphered all the symbols in the manuscript, so I am sure there are other rules I have not figured it out yet.
My conclusion about Giovanni Aurispa is based only on the translation, the story of his life in the second and third paragraphs explained it all. As I mention before, I have translated few pages of Voynich manuscript. Here is another translation explained about the plant Welwitschia Mirabilis.
Hello!
Can I ask you a few questions? These are things that I suspect, but I could be wrong....
I guess that the topic of the Voynich MS is relatively new to you. You only found out about it recently, or if you already knew about it longer, you did not read very much about it... Is that correct?
I also guess that you have not looked at any other solutions from other people and this is your own idea. Is that correct?
Third: you are not very fluent in Latin, but only know the basics.
Fourth: you did not use Google Translate, but a Latin dictionary.
I will be happy to explain why I am asking this. Note that the last two questions are not really that important.
I agree with Tavie that the solution cannot be correct.
Beside Marco Ponzi's method to test your solution, I can propose another one:
take the most frequent words in the manuscript, for example:
Chol daiin Chedy qokaiin ol
and see if their translation also gives very frequent Latin words.
Thank you ReneZ for your opinion, I will be happy to discuss further so that we can solve this manuscript together with everyone here. Yes, I am well aware that I am not latin language expert and my translations are full of mistakes or errors or holes. That is why i joined this forum to share my finding and hoping anyone out there could give opinion, suggestion, correction, input, or anything that could help improve my translation, especially from latin language expert.
As I said earlier my ciphers and translations are not complete or perfect, but if we use the ciphers we can find, if not all, most of the word in latin language. And the meaning of the words have connection with the subject. For example, my translation about Welwitschia mirabilis. We can find all properties about the plant such as, only has two leaves in its entire live, has many seed or grain crop, start with leafy winged and changed into fountain leaves, and so on.
What are the chances that all of these words ( properties ) appears in this subject?
Thank you for suggesting Welwitschia, I didn't know this plant, very informative. However, I didn't quite understand where you saw his name in the text? I'm having some difficulty reading the images you posted, could you redo this in simple text.
Welwitschia Mirabilis is a plant that is endemic to the Namib Desert of Namibia and southern Angola. Is this the plant you mean ?
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