The Voynich Ninja

I'm not sure what Occam would say here. Its basic premise, in the most useful sense of the razor, is that the explanation that requires the least amount of assumption is to be preferred. The premises are:

* We have a whole text in an unknown writing system written by various people.
* Much of the extraneous writing is in Latin script

Wouldn't Occam say that the Latin script should be intelligible, exactly because it is not the weird script? I don't really think Occam helps us here.

To your possibilities I would add this: 
5 - The scribe writes like this because he is trying to write the language of his colleagues, which he is still learning. An Italian in a German speaking group for example. I don't think anything specifically points in this direction though and I don't necessarily think it is the case, but it sounds to me like a reasonably possible scenario.

One often overlooked, but in my opinion crucial property of the marginal writings is that in our best efforts, three out of the four sentences point towards ingredients and recipes (cooking or medicine). 

•  "So nim", as Richard Salomon already knew, is an extremely common phrase in German recipes. It means "then take... (an ingredient)".
  
• It is followed by gasmich, which must be the ingredient. Only an "l" is missing to make of it an acceptable form of "goat's milk" (a common ingredient)
  
• pox leber is also an attested ingredient
  
• Both muss and mel are often read as ingredients. Marco showed some time ago that the reclining figure is applying something yellow to its stomach area, indicating a likely medicinal context.
  

One of the reasons why I am fond of the "pen tests" hypothesis, is that they could really be anything the scribe had in his mind at that moment. Like a common phrase used in recipes. "Maria" is also a common one, by the way. They are unfortunately not very often studied and rather unknown, even though they are frequent.

Here's an extreme case, from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Count the Marias

I would suspect that in pen tests one would normally try to repeat some shape or word a few times? Voynichese marginalia looks mostly like a phrase or a charm with only a few repeating elements.

I would rather believe that at least part of the marginalia are somehow related to the key or mnemonics used to en/decipher the manuscript. For example, if the cipher involves a table of Latin characters, the marginalia could be used to reconstruct this table based on some principle known to the author(s). This would make sense in case author(s) believed the original key or table could be lost.

Recipe-like words in the marginalia would just be a method of obfuscation or a consequence of the active vocabulary of the author/scribe. For example, the author(s) got the encoding table, and wrote a short sequence where every third (or fifth or whichever) letter is part of the table and the rest are just random letters added to create some resemblance of meaning. If you are dealing with recipes, the random words you conjure up when trying to fill in the pattern created by the cipher table would be "so nim" and "gasmish", etc.

Having them be relevant to understanding Voynichese would certainly be my preferred option. But whatever they are, I am convinced that these would have been classified as pen tests had they been found in any normal manuscript. Especially the ones on the last page. (I know they are not in a normal manuscript).

Some scribes would indeed write the same thing each time they cut their pen (some capital letters in the image I posted above). But the same image also contains other types. Like a quick doodle of a human figure (one is found in two out of three of the relevant VM pages). There's even a sketch of an arch. There's "Ihesus Maria" (not very repetitive). There's a phrase I cannot read top left, and another I cannot read top right (the right one may end in Maria as well?). Maria was very popular in these pen tests, and let that be one of the most obvious words on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as well.

Compare also this example from the same article I linked above: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:5 - The scribe writes like this because he is trying to write the language of his colleagues, which he is still learning. An Italian in a German speaking group for example. I don't think anything specifically points in this direction though and I don't necessarily think it is the case, but it sounds to me like a reasonably possible scenario.

That's a fair point, and it's entirely plausible. Could he really mess it up so bad as to make it this much unintelligible though? Both amateur and professional paleographers can in most cases work their way through MSs and read them, despite the fact that neither script, dialect or orthography were standardized as nowadays. To me, the fact that we have somewhat sensible readings like "pox leber", "muss mel", "so nim gasmich" in other folia further reinforces the weirdness of not having such a thing for f17r, where we see what appears to be a whole sentence or cohesive groups of words.


Just to be clear, I do find the pen test and charm hypothesis to be the simplest explanations for this marginalia - but personally I believe the next best thing would be obfuscated text. I can't help but find the correction of "mel" to "del" suspicious - especially since "mel" would make some sense.

Quote:Here's an extreme case, from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

inb4 The VMS was just one big pen test book

Quote:Recipe-like words in the marginalia would just be a method of obfuscation or a consequence of the active vocabulary of the author/scribe. For example, the author(s) got the encoding table, and wrote a short sequence where every third (or fifth or whichever) letter is part of the table and the rest are just random letters added to create some resemblance of meaning. If you are dealing with recipes, the random words you conjure up when trying to fill in the pattern created by the cipher table would be "so nim" and "gasmish", etc.

I like approaches like these - having some degrees of freedom when writing the filler text could explain a couple of statistics observed, and it would certainly look like gibberish and not obey many of the patterns of natural languages. I always wonder though, did they really intend to have a few sentences worth of text while writing whole paragraphs of filler text? And could this system be somehow extended or modified to the Labelese we all know and love?

Without digressing from the subforum's maintopic: Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's. "gas mich" actually stands out as being remarkably different from the rest of the words. Again, it could just be pen tests, spells, or it could simply be me high on goat milk and qokain.

(02-02-2025, 06:36 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Recipe-like words in the marginalia would just be a method of obfuscation or a consequence of the active vocabulary of the author/scribe. For example, the author(s) got the encoding table, and wrote a short sequence where every third (or fifth or whichever) letter is part of the table and the rest are just random letters added to create some resemblance of meaning. If you are dealing with recipes, the random words you conjure up when trying to fill in the pattern created by the cipher table would be "so nim" and "gasmish", etc.

I like approaches like these - having some degrees of freedom when writing the filler text could explain a couple of statistics observed, and it would certainly look like gibberish and not obey many of the patterns of natural languages. I always wonder though, did they really intend to have a few sentences worth of text while writing whole paragraphs of filler text? And could this system be somehow extended or modified to the Labelese we all know and love?

I was referring specifically to the marginalia and not Voynichese. I don't think Voynichese is a (highly) verbose cipher. There could be some redundancy, but there are many quite short labels in the MS, a lot of them differ by just a single glyph, if these are meaningful, you can't have too many nulls per a meaningful character. I think Voynichese should be a quite simple to write (so that writing 240+ pages is feasible) one-to-many (which would explain apparent lack of clearly identifiable words from the image context) cipher, also preferably one that can be read off the page with no complex processing (otherwise it will make little sense to use it for a whole book). With these constraints there are not that many options actually. Also, though I'm much less certain about that, I like the idea that the specific choice of the cipher and the weird style of drawings were to hide the identity of the author and make it impossible to identify her/him from a sample of their handwriting/doodling. This would explain why the whole manuscript is encoded and there is not a single clear word in the plaintext language, other then a few marginalia, and the Latin letters in the marginalia are often distorted/unnatural.

(02-02-2025, 06:36 AM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Without digressing from the subforum's maintopic: Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's. "gas mich" actually stands out as being remarkably different from the rest of the words.

I'm not sure everyone agrees on which character is which in the marginalia, to begin with. Is there a piece of marginalia that has a universally accepted unambiguous reading?

[attachment=9909]

To put it simply, one word alone is worthless for a translation. You need the context and have to translate the whole sentence.
The example of a text. It is from ZO (Zurich Oberland). This is where I was born and grew up. The grammar is far removed from modern times. But when I read it, the difference is small, it is still spoken like this. (With minor exceptions).
Whether it's “mulier, malier or molier” it's the same, or sometimes not. It changes from region to region.
Ich komme, i kum, ich chumme is the same. wir, mer, miir is the same.
The sentences f66 and f116 are clear to me, I don't need to discuss them any further.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

(02-02-2025, 07:16 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Is there a piece of marginalia that has a universally accepted unambiguous reading?

On the internet, nothing is universally accepted. This applies to the Voynich and to any other subject (vaccines, climate change, earth’s shape…)

(02-02-2025, 08:29 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(02-02-2025, 07:16 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Is there a piece of marginalia that has a universally accepted unambiguous reading?

On the internet, nothing is universally accepted. This applies to the Voynich and to any other subject (vaccines, climate change, earth’s shape…)

Let's try to be more specific.

Is there any piece of marginalia for which you are certain about what it reads and if anyone would disagree, your first reaction would be to assume they don't know what they are talking about?

Probably, one of the most unambiguous for many people is "maria" on f116v. If someone said it's not "maria", but "ma ria" with some specific meaning, and the cross is not a divine sign here, but specifically inserted to separate two words, would you dismiss this as likely nonsense? 

(The above is just an example, I have no idea what it actually reads.)

[attachment=9916]

Let's give it a try.
What might this word mean?
Perhaps the closest thing to the word would be “löffel” spoon.  Or not?
I'll clarify it later in context.

That’s very much more understandable.

Poxleber in 116v line 1 is quite readable and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The page contains the illustration of a quadruped. I don’t see how that reading could be wrong.

Another very solid one is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The parallel with the Vicenza ms is convincing.

I also think that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are right about “So nim geismi[l]ch”, in 116v line 4. In particular, “so nim” is very frequent You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..


The Latin text in 116v lines 2 and 3 is also largely readable, but it appears to be a charm mostly made of meaningless words (as often was the case): this makes it impossible to validate character shapes by referencing possible meanings.
In general, it’s true that some of the characters are ambiguous: that is often the case with medieval scripts; the additional problem is that we have little context and the meaning of much of the marginal text is unclear, therefore ambiguities cannot be solved.

EDIT: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. compares transcriptions of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by four different researchers.