The Voynich Ninja

IIRC in 13th or 14th century (Castilian) Spanish, 'j' is most often just a positional variant of 'i', primarily written after an 'i' and 't's (though not always) or at a wordbreak. There are however some few instances of 'j' and 'y' standing for semiconsonant /j/ around this time, and even more rare instances of an uppercase 'J' (sitting distinctly above the line level) used for /ʒ/, although this sound would most frequently be written with 'x', 'gg' or 'ggi' I believe.

As always, orthography was not standard and varied greatly depending on the period, place, and mood of the scribe.

(26-01-2025, 04:56 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
So, getting back to the Voynich MS, there is a strong case for Latin as the default manuscript language of that time in Europe (as far as I understand), there is a strong case for Germanic languages, because there is something that looks like traces of German in some of the marginalia, and there is a case for Romance languages, because of the month names. Even if the marginalia are not by the author, it's a bit more likely that they were added in the same general region where the manuscript was created. As far as I know, there is no specific reason to include Czech, Arabic, Hungarian, etc., other than to cover all the bases or explain why the manuscript hasn't been decoded yet.
[..]

And that's were the fun is...

Really getting back to Voynich MS means:

there is not a "(strong) case" but exactly nothing showing any of VMS is related to Latin or Latin-based languages. Not a trace.

There is not a "(strong) case" for Germanic languages but only a few scribbles at some pages which are very doubted to belong to original VMS and MAYBE are made in some "Germanic".

There is not a "case" for "Romance languages" but some later scribbled words in a spelling that does not fit to any Romanic language by now. Or is this discussion successfully finished? The "months" are suspected "occitan" since some time, thats all.

There is not any (in this Forum) accepted origin location of the VMS, neither of the possibly later add-on scribbles. Even if, there is no reason to underestimate the travel speed and distance of a book: it could have been written in Moscow and "enhanced" in Lissabon without any obstacles, and could have shown up in Prague or Rome somewhere later during the centuries.

There is no chance that all those important double consonants like -rr-, -ff-, -nn-, -mm-, -tt-, -ss- etc., which are crucial for Latin and all it's derived languages, are contained somewhere in the VMS by a "clever encoding", "magical cipher" or such.

All tries with Latin (and there were a lot) failed, due the incompatibility of VMS structure, spelling, words with pure replacements AND with all decoding principles.
This includes all Romanic languages, Romanian, German and West-slavic languages as well.

So, there is specifically not a single reason to try it with Latin(-based), and every other language may be a better shot...

(19-06-2025, 04:56 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is no chance that all those important double consonants like -rr-, -ff-, -nn-, -mm-, -tt-, -ss- etc., which are crucial for Latin and all it's derived languages, are contained somewhere in the VMS by a "clever encoding", "magical cipher" or such.

All tries with Latin (and there were a lot) failed, due the incompatibility of VMS structure, spelling, words with pure replacements AND with all decoding principles.
This includes all Romanic languages, Romanian, German and West-slavic languages as well.

I suspect that the Voynich manuscript is not compatible with a normal manuscript plaintext in any language at all. No matter what the language is, as long as the corpus is large enough there ought to be regularities in the form of repeated expressions with some systematic changes. The easiest way to look for them is looking for what I call the longest repeats with a gap or gaps, patterns like ABC and ADC with sufficiently long A and C and short B and D. Like those I found in a Chinese MS in this post: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I believe that these would be present in a large enough book written in a natural language, no matter what language, topic or script. A pattern of A*C where A and C are a few words long and the central part is short and takes multiple values are expected to repeat tens of times in a manuscript of the size of the Voynich MS. And they do in books of comparable size.

There are no patterns of this form in the Voynich MS that would be long enough or repeat more than 2-3 times. Hence, if Voynich MS has some meaningful plaintext underneath, it's likely this plaintext has been randomized in a way that removes this structure. This randomization is possible, and even expected, when using a one-to-many cipher, that has several possible encodings for one plaintext. The general idea of one-to-many ciphers was certainly known at the time when the Voynich MS was created, most (all?) of the ciphers in Francesco Tranchedino's list are of this kind.

Unlike these ciphers, the Voynich MS doesn't appear to be a simple one-to-many substitution, but my bet is still on it being a "clever encoding" and not a natural language plaintext. And if it is a clever encoding, then I suppose Latin should be the first candidate. It's possible the plaintext is actually Slavic or Tatar or Chinese or some exotic forgotten language. But it's quite unlikely that  Voynichese, as it is written, is just a simple transcription of that language.

(19-06-2025, 04:56 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.all those important double consonants like -rr-, -ff-, -nn-, -mm-, -tt-, -ss- etc., which are crucial for Latin and all it's derived languages

Picky and irrelevant in the context of this thread, but it's not true geminated consonants are crucial for all the languages derived from Latin. Ie. all Italian languages (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) north of the La Spezia-Rimini line (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) do not use geminated consonants at all.

(19-06-2025, 06:22 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Picky and irrelevant in the context of this thread, but it's not true geminated consonants are crucial for all the languages derived from Latin. Ie. all Italian languages (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) north of the La Spezia-Rimini line (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) do not use geminated consonants at all.

If you say so… nice try. This is about pronounciation, but writing/spelling depend on doubled consonants as well as main Italian. These are just some dialects, pretended as languages.

But even if: they are just a small, picky and irrelevant exception from the rule
double consonants are crucial for Latin, and VMS does not deliver enough or any.

Thats why all ˋLatin Lovers´ failed with their Latin translations since 500+ years and the cute little castle was never found right south of the Alps.

(19-06-2025, 08:32 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you say so… nice try. This is about pronounciation, but writing/spelling depend on doubled consonants as well as main Italian. These are just some dialects, pretended as languages.

I'm sorry (and I'm also sorry for being off-topic), but you are very wrong on this. Italian languages are true, bona-fide languages. From You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :

Quote:Almost all of the Romance languages spoken in Italy are native to the area in which they are spoken. Apart from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., these languages are often referred to as dialetti "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.", both colloquially and in scholarly usage; however, the term may coexist with other labels like "minority languages" or "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view." for some of them.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The label "dialect" may be understood erroneously to imply that the native languages spoken in Italy are "dialects" of Standard Italian in the prevailing English-language sense of "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or variations of a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.".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 is not the case in Italy, as the country's long-standing linguistic diversity does not actually stem from Standard Italian. Most of Italy's variety of Romance languages predate You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and evolved locally from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., independently of what would become the standard national language, long before the fairly recent spread of Standard Italian throughout Italy.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. In fact, Standard Italian itself can be thought of as either a continuation of, or a language heavily based on, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Saying 'these are just some dialects pretended as languages' is, I'm sorry to tell you, offensive, both for the languages itself and for their speakers, past and present. They are true languages, not mutually intelligible at all neither with standard Italian nor among them. Even, each of the languages is within itself much more varied than Standard Italian, and does have a number of actual dialects (in the proper meaning of the term), which can be so different one from each other to be barely understandable by speakers leaving a few tens km apart (just to give you an example: 'water' is 'àkwa' ['a.kwa] in Brescia, Italy, but 'àyva' ['aj.va] in Bienno, ~40km northwards, and it's the same language: Eastern Lombard (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.))

As a minor point, about the 'nice try' and  writing/spelling: I told you I was being picky, don't take it badly! I just wanted to make clear that it's not true, at all, that geminated consonants are important for all Romance languages: they actually have zero importance in some. Then, of course, every author is free to use doubled consonants for whatever important orthographic uses he wishes (there are no agreed-upon orthographies, for instance, for local Italian languages), so doubled consonants might be important, nonetheless, in written language (but I'd rather think first of Dutch or even English before than, say, Eastern Lombard (*) or Venetian). And they are surely important in Latin.

(*) to be completely honest, some orthographies of Eastern Lombard indeed use two doubled consonants: -cc for the phoneme [ʧ] at word final, and -ss- for intervocalic [s]. Both are unfortunate (and actually useless) choices imho. As a curiosity, doubled vowels (actually pronounced as two distinct vowels) are instead quite common, and the vowel 'a' is even tripled in the imperfect tense of a few (but commonly used) verbs, ie. laàa [la.'a.a] (he/she/it/they washed, kaàa [ka.'a.a] (he/she/it/they pulled out, quarried...).

I don't mind some off topic, but as far as my investigation goes, the double consonants or vowels are not a problem at all. Most kinds of one to many ciphers can and will hide their presence.

(19-06-2025, 09:54 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't mind some off topic, but as far as my investigation goes, the double consonants or vowels are not a problem at all. Most kinds of one to many ciphers can and will hide their presence.

The urbino court ciphers had glyphs for doubles that were variations of the singles, so I agree that it would've been easy for "normal" ciphers of the time to disguise double consonants. I don't think the absence of double glyphs in the VM can be taken at face value as a proof that it isn't a romance language.

Venetian is a language separate from Italian with many local varieties. Its exact place within the Romance language family remains somewhat controversial. Both Ethnologue and Glottolog group it in the Gallo-Italian branch (and thus closer to French and Emilian-Romagnol than to Italian). [8][7] Devoto, Avolio and Ursini reject this classification,[15][16][17] and Tagliavini assigns it to the Italo-Dalmatian branch of Romance. [18]

Venetian differs from standard Italian phonetically, most notably in that ‘dz’ is pronounced instead of the Italian ‘dsch’, and in the absence of the typical Italian consonant doubling (e.g. Zanipólo for Giovanni e Paolo).

The location of Rene's castle on his site is interesting. Even though it has nothing to do with the VM, it is still located in an area where double consonants were not used. Exceptions prove the rule.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

(20-06-2025, 12:19 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Venetian is a language separate from Italian with many local varieties. Its exact place within the Romance language family remains somewhat controversial. Both Ethnologue and Glottolog group it in the Gallo-Italian branch (and thus closer to French and Emilian-Romagnol than to Italian). [8][7] Devoto, Avolio and Ursini reject this classification,[15][16][17] and Tagliavini assigns it to the Italo-Dalmatian branch of Romance. [18]

Can you post the links to the references in square brackets, please (or a link to the original quote)? I'm interested in reading which arguments Devoto etc. used to reject Venetian from the Gallo-Italic branch. I side with Ehtnologue etc. on this, but reading and evaluating the opposing arguments would be nice.