The Voynich Ninja

(26-08-2025, 09:46 PM)schimmelchampagne Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi! This is my first post. I am new to the Voynich world (if not to the manuscript itself). Last month I wrote a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on 116v and thought I'd share it here. I am a linguist and wrote this with a linguist audience in mind so I apologize if it's too technical. I fully anticipate that people will disagree with me as this seems pretty different from some of the current theories on 116v I've since read, but I'd be happy just to have others engage with the ideas

Those texts have already been interpreted and dissected in million different ways, but your article brings several new and interesting takes!

Some nits:

• Most Voynichologists seem to read the month of June as "yony" not "yong".
  
• For me the month of April is "abiril" not "aberil".
  
• Yes, most consider the superscript sign at the end of "septẽb" as a scribal abbreviation.
  

You suggest that the first line says "pox leher isinon putis fer"  and guess that it could mean "I can read [the following] and if not you can do" Indeed, I never noticed, but if you reading is correct, could well be Portuguese or Spanish!  

Phonetically, in what I think would be the Portuguese pronunciation of the time, your English phrase would be "posu leer i si non podis ler". (In modern  Portuguese spelling, which is rather not phonetic, it would be "posso ler e se não podes ler".) The "h" in "leher" seems a plausible spelling for the time.

In fact, afaik the only Romance languages where April is pronounced and written with "b" instead of "p" are the Iberian ones -- Portuguese, Spanish , Catalan maybe? etc.  isn't that so?

One problem with that interpretation, though, is that your readings of the letters do not seem to be very popular.  Another problem is that the sentence, while syntactically correct, does not seem to make mush sense on this book, in that place...

But my own theory for "Michitonese" (not very popular either, I am afraid) is that the person who wrote those sentences was not an European -- could be, say, an Arab, Turk, Persian, etc -- who was trying to write in some European language, but had a very rudimentary oral knowledge of the same, and only a basic notion of the Latin alphabet and spelling.  I imagine him asking someone how they would say X, and then struggling to write it down.

In particular, the funny marks above the "br" of Abri, the "ber" of November, and other places remind me of the short vowel marks of Arabic script; but on the other hand some are clearly the dots of the "i"s.  If so, then November could be not "novembr" but "novembri", which is indeed phonetically the name of the month in Portuguese...

All the best, --jorge

(26-08-2025, 09:46 PM)schimmelchampagne Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi! This is my first post. I am new to the Voynich world (if not to the manuscript itself). Last month I wrote a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on 116v and thought I'd share it here. I am a linguist and wrote this with a linguist audience in mind so I apologize if it's too technical. I fully anticipate that people will disagree with me as this seems pretty different from some of the current theories on 116v I've since read, but I'd be happy just to have others engage with the ideas

Welcome from another relatively recent member! From my point of view, your post is a good approach to the matter and perfectly understandable without a linguistics degree. The reading of the first sentence in particular seems interesting.  

My only issue with the interpretation as some Romance language/dialect from the Pyrenees or even further west is that it complicates the history of the manuscript significantly and is at odds with most of the other information pointing to Northern Italy/Southern Germany/Augsburg/Prague, both for the manuscript's creation and the first appearances we know of. Sure, ~200 years is a lot of time to circulate within Europe, but every transfer would have increased the probability of leaving traces behind, beyond some barely understandable notes.

For that reason, I have been wondering for a while whether some of these plain text notes might not be later additions, i. e. in the manuscript's post-Kircher period in Rome. From all that we know, it ended up in a Jesuit collection there without much attention to it for the next few centuries. However, the Jesuits always had members from all over catholic Europe and beyond. Particularly after the dissolution of the order in the Spanish Empire and France in the second half of the 18th century, many of them ended up in Italy. Some of those exiled Jesuits may have added their attempts to make sense of the manuscripts at that point... this dating is probably unlikely due to language and script, but since since all other explanations are not without issues either, it might be worth considering.

(27-08-2025, 08:35 AM)N._N. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My only issue with the interpretation as some Romance language/dialect from the Pyrenees or even further west is that it complicates the history of the manuscript significantly and is at odds with most of the other information pointing to Northern Italy/Southern Germany/Augsburg/Prague, both for the manuscript's creation and the first appearances we know of.

Again, the "Northern Italy" clues only tell us that the Scribe(s) who actually wrote the text on the parchment and drew the illustrations was/were from Northern Italy.  The "Southern Germany/Augsburg/Prague" clues only tell us about where the manuscript may have been ~200 years after that.  The similarities of the Michitonese lines and month names to specific scripts and languages, like German or Latin charms, only tell us what language the person(s) who wrote those bits meant to write them in.  

Those clues do no tell us anything about the Voynichese language and encoding, about the Author who gathered the sources and composed the text of the manuscript, or about where he was when he did that. 

Those clues also do not tell us anything about the Michitoner who wrote the Michitonese lines, about the Monther who wrote the month names, or about where those persons were at the time they did those things.

All the best, --jorge

(26-08-2025, 07:45 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A recent development is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. pointed out by Michael/Magnesium. It uses 8 for 's', and (in my opinion) makes 8 as 'd' very unlikely (though not much can be entirely excluded, as always).

Thanks, Marco, this is indeed very helpful! Accordingly, this would be the more probable transcription:

poxleber pinen p?tpfer
+ anchiton oladabas + ???l.tos + te + cere + portas + N +
six + marix + morix + vix + abia + maria +
palsen pbren so nim gasmich

But now what about the medial short-s in palsen?

(27-08-2025, 09:30 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Again, the "Northern Italy" clues only tell us that the Scribe(s) who actually wrote the text on the parchment and drew the illustrations was/were from Northern Italy.  The "Southern Germany/Augsburg/Prague" clues only tell us about where the manuscript may have been ~200 years after that.  The similarities of the Michitonese lines and month names to specific scripts and languages, like German or Latin charms, only tell us what language the person(s) who wrote those bits meant to write them in.  

Those clues do no tell us anything about the Voynichese language and encoding, about the Author who gathered the sources and composed the text of the manuscript, or about where he was when he did that. 

Those clues also do not tell us anything about the Michitoner who wrote the Michitonese lines, about the Monther who wrote the month names, or about where those persons were at the time they did those things.

All the best, --jorge

Sorry, but this is clearly a misleading oversiplification. Everything we know about the manuscript, every kind of reasonable research reveals connections or information that we may not yet be able to piece together, but which might ultimately help getting closer to a solution, whatever that might be. As with pretty much every historical 'fact', we have to accept that we don't know everything about it or might possibly be wrong about certain aspects. This does not mean that we should adopt a nihilistic view that nothing can be proven and nothing is connected. It just means we need to be honest about probabilities, limitations etc. to avoid falling into the same trap as the overly confident solvers.

In my upcoming lecture at the University of Toronto, I will be discussing exactly this issue - putting the material evidence into a timeline that tells the manuscript's story from its origins to today. I will also be revealing some new and extremely important results from the computational and codicological work I have been doing with Colin Layfield. You can register here:
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(26-08-2025, 11:33 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.afaik the only Romance languages where April is pronounced and written with "b" instead of "p" are the Iberian ones -- Portuguese, Spanish , Catalan maybe? etc.  isn't that so?

I guess that’s mostly correct for Romance languages. According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., we can add the Sardinian dialect (Abrile).

It’s probably worth remembering that, as pointed out by Yulia aka Searcher, “Aberil” for “April” is documented in German-speaking Switzerland (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. popped up).

The word “poxleber” appears in a 1503 source from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

(27-08-2025, 10:20 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But now what about the medial short-s in palsen?

Good point.

(26-08-2025, 09:46 PM)schimmelchampagne Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi! [..] I fully anticipate that people will disagree with me as this seems pretty different from some of the current theories on 116v I've since read, but I'd be happy just to have others engage with the ideas

Hi.
Nice blog posting.
I personally prefer to not do anything about f116v, since I see it as a collection of different characters, alphabet and language(s) scribbled into page much later than main text, which is not helpful at all.

But if you want to read this last line (minus the leading 2 Voynichese words) as something in German, I would take the 8 here (and just here!) as a „d“ or „k“.
„Palken“ would be interesting, but I consider a usage as „d“ here:

„palden phrey so nim gar mich.“   — „bald frei so nimm doch mich.“
= soon free so just take me.

(„gas“ does not work, I understand it as an overdone „r“ —> „gar“) But there are too few letters even to decide it clearly as german text line.

Would understand this as a nasty comment coined to the VMS nude lady at the very beginning of that line… as said: I don‘t find the f 116v very helpful.

Is it possible to add any medieval font to the font selection here? Might be best for such discussions.