The Voynich Ninja

Hello to everyone !
I am new in this forum and I know the manuscript for only two years. What I want to say is: I am a beginner in this subject. So I beg everyone pardon if I am showing up with questions and ideas which  maybe had already been discussed several times in the past. It is hard to get an overview. I am a civil engineer and in no way qualified to solve middleage riddles or doing cryptology. But I am deeply interested.
Here are three of my thoughts/questions:
1:
I understand that substitution letter by letter does not work. Assuming a chain of letters corresponds to a word and identical chains do not change the meaning,  is it worth a try to substitute hole words . I mean, making a list of the most common words in the script and give them a meaning taking into account the topics of the drawings in the book(or the texts in other herbals  ? Are there any attempts made ? Or is the amount of possibilities killing this method? This procedure asumes that the writing is an artificial language.  If so, how did the writer manage to do the writing?  First he must had invented a dictionary for his new language. But that is a hard way to write so many pages, looking for nearly every word in a list until you become used to it. Substitution is far easier to learn und after a while you can write fluently whithout any aid.

2: 
We don`t know if the text has a meaning or not. If it is meaningless, why took the author so much affort in following special rules (some charcaters only at the end, some characters follow only a certain other character..) ? A simple answer could be: because it has a meaning or he wants it to look like a meaningful text. On the other hand, if the author wanted to produce a meaningless text which looks like a meaningful text, why didn`t he use a typical amount of characters?

3: There is a character that appears only at the end of a line. Is there any idea for a good reason? What useful information can such character give the reader ?

If you know any thread dealing with these questions I am glad to know . Thank you!

Andreas

I would suggest that you try to educate yourself on a specific topic related to Voynich research that you think is productive and try to become an expert on that topic. You will be more valuable that way.
There is a tendency for researchers to jump from topic to topic. I think what the manuscript needs is more specialists and fewer generalists.

Hi and Welcome! 

1:
I believe what you are referring to (loosely) is a system published by Johannes Trithemius in 1506, known as the "Ave Maria Cipher" (Hale Mary Cipher). There was another more cumbersome version in his earlier 1499 "steganographia". I don't know a lot about ciphers, only enough to follow others ideas, so I would say watch the below regarding this.   

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2: 
This is a very big topic. Basically we don't know.


3: 

I think the most logical explanation is that it isn't a new character but a flourish to an existing character to be fancy at the end of a line.
That might not be right of course, it just requires the least amount of explanation.

Quote:I mean, making a list of the most common words in the script and give them a meaning taking into account the topics of the drawings in the book(or the texts in other herbals  ? Are there any attempts made ? Or is the amount of possibilities killing this method?

This is a valid approach but surprisingly nothing serious was done in that matter. You may be the first
You may check how I use this approach with another mysterious manuscript - Rohonc Codex: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

With Voynich it seems much harder than with Rohonc. In "normal" language the most common words should be things like "and", "to", "in", "so" etc. But in Voynich script we don't have good candidates for such words. Most common words like "daiin" behave differently than "and". There was some advanced statistical research made about it. If I understand it correctly, statistics seem to show that Voynich text is not random and is kind of clustered by subjects but we are unable to recognize typical parts of speech: nouns, verbs, conjunctions etc. We don't know even where supposed sentences start and where they end.

We can't even recognize any numbers. In many unknown scripts (Babylonian cuneiform, Mayan script, Linear B etc.) numbers were broken first because they are very regular. In Voynich Manuscript we couldn't do it.

It is all very puzzling. Would this supposed artificial language be so different from everything else? 

(06-03-2025, 04:26 PM)Andreas Heller Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, if the author wanted to produce a meaningless text which looks like a meaningful text, why didn`t he use a typical amount of characters?

My hypothesis is that the manuscript was written to create a deception, to fabricate some bogus writing to make people believe that there was some distant land where they used a strange alphabet and where they knew the secrets of herbal medicine, astrology and witchcraft. Any claim that the secrets had been unlocked would have been of immense curiosity, and could have earned the writers a small fortune.

Any writing in the local language would have raised doubts that it was from somewhere distant.

Artificial language or conlang threads.

The Voynich Ninja > Library and Research > Pre-Modern Cryptography > Voynichese a conlang?
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The Voynich Ninja > Voynich Research > Analysis of the text > The Constructed Language Hypothesis
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And from the wikipedia article.
"The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript words led William F. Friedman to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language."
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[Edit] 
ConLangs have a certain spillover into Codebook theory, as you noted. Idk if anyone has ever tried Codebook theory in a systematic way.
The section specific vocabularies seem a bit small for this but papers by Montemurro and also Bowern hint at topic related text.
Jorge Stolfi thought vms words could be numbers used for indexing in a codebook.

(06-03-2025, 04:26 PM)Andreas Heller Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a character that appears only at the end of a line. Is there any idea for a good reason?

Within the manuscript many strange things seem to happen at the ends of lines. Also when a line is split by a diagram ( frequent in the herbal pages ). In many of the herbal pages the writing seems to finish right at the very point when a diagram starts.  A coincidence, or the result of artificial padding? You will see this clearly, for example, in f15r, f26r.

It seems that when the writing was approaching a diagram or coming to the page edge and the writer could see that he was running out of space he would often do a number of things:

• Fill the remaining space with a small word. s, dy, or, am, oky  are frequent.  oky  occurs more often at a line end than would be expected if the text was a continuous narrative with words wrapping to the next line if there was no more space. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were all those small words really necessary around the fork of the plant stems?
  
• Squeeze the last words together and eliminate the gap between them. Is  cholalaiin  in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. really one word? Or  ototaykal  ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )? 
  
• Truncate a word.  m  seems to be a popular character for this. But some of the ‘hands’ use it more than others.
  

From what I can see the line end behaviour and a lot of other variations in the text of the manuscript could be explained by different personal styles and preferences of the writers. Most likely knowing that the text would be undecipherable they did not feel it important to be precise or to follow any particular writing standard.

(06-03-2025, 04:26 PM)Andreas Heller Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.3: There is a character that appears only at the end of a line.

Is there ? 
Which one ? I cant think of one in EVA, unless maybe a rare one , or maybe in one of the other transliterations like V101 .

In EVA, here are 2 words that only ever occur at the end of  a line, --   'ram' and 'oram'.

1) If I understand correctly, you are suggesting a one-to-one mapping between Voynichese and plain-text words. This approach is often referred to as a “nomenclator” (the dictionary you mention). Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota was a medieval artificial language conceived along those lines. Bowern and Lindemann, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., discuss some statistical evidence that partially supports the idea, but there are problems. One is the consecutive repetition of identical words (e.g. daiin.daiin.daiin): these occur with a frequency that is not seen in European languages. Another problem is that one would expect to find frequent repeating bi-words like the English “of the”, but these are rare in the Voynich manuscript.

2) If the text is meaningless, it is not clear that the author was consciously following “designed” rules. See Gaskell and Bowern You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., for a discussion of how spontaneous meaningless text often shows regularities (depending on the writer).

3) A possibility for a preference to appear at the end of lines is that a character is an abbreviation: the scribe chooses to use it more often to squeeze a word into a line. This kind of preference is sometimes seen in medieval manuscripts. But the problem of line-effects (and paragraph-effects) is much more complex in Voynichese. See Patrick Feaster, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

In your second point, you are approaching a key question which does not yet have an answer, but I think that it has a likely answer.

This is:
Is it possible to make a translation table from words in Voynichese to words in some plain text language, and do a word-by-word translation that makes sense?
(This includes the case where there is no similarity between the Voynichese and the PT word).
In other words: could a dictionary be made?

The consequences in case the answer is NO are enormous. It means that the vast majority of approaches that people have been taking are ruled out. No substitution cipher for example.

This is hard to prove, and the single word entropy value for the text is normal enough to keep the possibility open.
The number of Hapax (words that appear only once) is rather unusual, but the main problem is the lack of repeating sequences.

To answer this question, all the analyses about word structure (which I think are valuable) play no role.

Identical word repeats (which are relatively high) do play a role and it is another argument against it.

Similar-word repeats (which are also high and certainly unusual) would not play a role.

Torsten Timm's text generation method, which is proposed as an argument against a meaningful text, could be used in two manners.
1) It is used word after word when creating a text. In this case there is no meaning and no dictionary.
2) It is used to set up the dictionary and then the dictionary is used to translate a text. In that case there is a dictionary.

As you see, this question has a lot of implications, and there is plenty of room for more thinking.