The Voynich Ninja

(14-07-2026, 11:29 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure what exemplars you're looking at, but in the ones I see it definitely looks like 撇 (the down left stroke) crosses 横 (the horizontal one) to me.

Indeed, even in Clerical Script there is always a "head" protruding above the horizontal line.  But it can be quite short, about as long as one stroke-width.  

If those are indeed Chinese characters, note that they were copied by an Author who almost certainly never studied Chinese writing (so much so that he got them upside-down) and then re-copied by a Scribe who had never seen Chinese writing before.  Thus it would be understandable if he omitted the "head".  

The middle horizontal stroke of capital letters A, E, H often crosses the legs and sticks out on the sides; but a copyist would not consider those protrusions significant, and would not feel obliged to reproduce them. 

Quote:No dictionary I've checked wants to go to bat for three strokes in the order implied by what's in the VMS,

What do you mean?  My dictionary says 大 is three strokes, and that is how I have learned to draw it:
[attachment=16569]
The VMS symbol, whatever it is, is supposed to be three brush strokes too. (Although the outline of this brushed symbol was drawn by the Scribe with a sharp quill, in brown ink, and then he or someone else filled that outline with rusty-red paint.)

All the best, --stolfi

(15-07-2026, 07:14 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The middle horizontal stroke of capital letters A, E, H often crosses the legs and sticks out on the sides; but a copyist would not consider those protrusions significant, and would not feel obliged to reproduce them. 

So, the hypothesis here is that he copied a single character upside down from a model that was 1200 years obsolete and did not to transmit the features by which we would confidently identify it? Is there any set of errant marks that COULDN'T be linked to a Chinese character under such a flexible analysis?

(14-07-2026, 03:22 PM)Oscroft Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've no idea if my anecdotal story is of any use, but when I married my Thai wife 40 years ago she helped me with my spoken and written Thai (and she still reminds me I'm not very good). One thing she noted was that in my early attempts my writing looked like school attempts - especially with copied round forms rather than confident native strokes. Might there be a contrast between experienced and inexperienced Voynich scribes Here?

I think this is a good point. Initially, one is not writing but 'drawing characters'. It takes a while, and continuous practice, to change that.
So how long would this have taken the Voynich MS scribe(s)? 
Interestingly, we have a data point for that.
Anyone who has seen the 2009 Austrian documentary will know that there was an actor writing Voynichese on parchment. While he wrote slowly, the character forms were good.
This role was played by Gordon Rugg, and he had practiced the script, but not for any excessive amount of time. The Voynich script is (apparently) easy to learn to write fluently, rather quickly.

(15-07-2026, 11:28 AM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So, the hypothesis here is that he copied a single character

It is actually three characters.  The one in the NW NE corner is too damaged to tell for sure, but its graphic style seems to be the same as that of the other two, so it probably shares at least some of their history and meaning.

For the other two, "badly copied upside-down Chinese characters" seems to be the theory that best fits the visible details and has a plausible story.

From all these years I have followed the Voynich scene, I recall only one other explanation that made some sense.  It said that the page contains a dedication to a royal couple, and the two big glyphs on the left side were sideways letters "K" and "Kn", abbreviations of "König" and "Königin".  But that explanation has several problems.  Why were the letters written sideways?  Why were the titles of the monarchs highlighted in bright red, rather than their names?  (In fact, where would their names be?)  Why are the shape and calligraphy of those letters so unlike those in use at the time?  Why is the "n" (if that is indeed an "n") centered on the midline of the "K", rather than sitting on the baseline?  

Quote:why ... did not to transmit the features by which we would confidently identify it?

Here is my proposed story for how those two glyphs came to be:

1. Some Chinese person writes two or three characters with a brush.
   
2. The Author ???
   
3. The Scribe copies the characters upside down, drawing the outlines of their strokes in brown with a sharp pen.
   
4. The Scribe or someone else fills the outlines with rusty-red paint.
   

In step 1, there are several possibilities for what the characters could have been and what they meant.  They could have been the title of the book of which the VMS was extracted from.  They could have been the name of the Dictator, which he wrote down in a scrap of paper and the Author felt that he was obliged to reproduce. They may have been the Author's own name, approximated in the local language and written as the locals would write it.

There are also many possibilities for step 2.  Maybe the Author just brought the paper with the original characters to Europe, and gave it to the Scribe.  Maybe the Author tried to copy the characters on his draft, either with his quill or with a Chinese brush, trying to reproduce the width and "serifs" of the original brush strokes, with unknown degree of success.  In this second case, maybe it was him who upended the characters, misled by the way Chinese books are bound...

Quote: from a model that was 1200 years obsolete

I suggested that the original characters were in "Clerical Script" because I guessed that the original version of the top weirdo could have been 大, and some "Clerical" versions of this character have a rather small "head".   But neither assumption is necessary for the Upended Hanzi theory (UHT).  

Anyway, while the Clerical Script indeed stopped being "the" Chinese script many centuries before 1400, it remained in use to this day for "fancy" writing -- like we may still use Old English fonts or the embellished cursive calligraphy of centuries ago.  I saw photos of a couple of modern Chinese buildings with their names written in that script on the facade.  

Thus the Clerical Script may have been used on the title of the Source Book.  Or a Chinese friend of the Author may have used it to write the Dictator's name or the Author's own name, when asked to.

Quote:Is there any set of errant marks that COULDN'T be linked to a Chinese character under such a flexible analysis?

Yes, many.  For instance, any character that contained a largish round stroke, like an "O" or "C" or "D" or "U" would be unlikely to have been a copy of a Chinese character.  Also any character that was a closed diamond or triangle, any character that looked like a Latin of Greek letter, or an Arabic digit, or any other recognizable Western symbol.  

Or any character that had uniform-width strokes ,without the brushstroke-like  "serifs" we see on those two glyphs...

All the best, --stolfi

(15-07-2026, 06:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

1. Some Chinese person writes two or three characters with a brush.
   

[...]In step 1, there are several possibilities for what the characters could have been and what they meant.  They could have been the title of the book of which the VMS was extracted from. 

We are in China in the 1400s so the source book is almost certainly printed, and the first presses that specialized in Clerical Script are 3 and a half centuries away. Getting Clerical Script done meant finding an artist (and he would be seen as first an artist) to do specialized work based on Han Dynasty inscriptions. Such a person would still do most of their work in Regular Script, and if engaged to demonstrate the characters for some hapless foreigner who did not know up from down would almost certainly show them the expected forms. Indeed, if you were to hire a specialist for this work, the great majority of them would not know Clerical Script in this era. I also do not know that "fancy" is the sense the few Ming artists who used it were going for as much as "archaic" and "deeply Han", but art criticism is not my forte

There is an outside possibility as it certainly wasn't a totally lost art, but the set of circumstances that would lead to it being in the VMS are weird, expensive, and as far as I can tell pointless

(15-07-2026, 06:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For the other two, "badly copied upside-down Chinese characters" seems to be the theory that best fits the visible details and has a plausible story.

From all these years I have followed the Voynich scene, I recall only one other explanation that made some sense.  It said that the page contains a dedication to a royal couple, and the two big glyphs on the left side were sideways letters "K" and "Kn", abbreviations of "König" and "Königin".  But that explanation has several problems.  Why were the letters written sideways?  Why were the titles of the monarchs highlighted in bright red, rather than their names?  (In fact, where would their names be?)  Why are the shape and calligraphy of those letters so unlike those in use at the time?  Why is the "n" (if that is indeed an "n") centered on the midline of the "K", rather than sitting on the baseline?  

JKP's work You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. showing possibly similar characters.  And one of our discussion threads You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  

Not saying these are right but they do not require to be turned sideways. Or upside down either.

(15-07-2026, 09:17 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the first presses that specialized in Clerical Script are 3 and a half centuries away.

First, again, neither the 大 nor the Clerical Script are essential for the UHT. They are just among many, many possibilties.

You know that printing was not done with moveable type, but with full-page carved wood blocks, right? 

That was one of the things that Matteo Ricci felt worth putting in his first reports to Rome.  As he describes it, a calligrapher wrote one page of text on a sheet of very thin paper.  The sheet was then glued onto a flat smooth wood block, and a specialized worker carved away all the blank areas.  The remains of the paper were then washed off.  Matteo was quite impressed by the speed and accuracy of these carvers.

Thus any printer could print a book with any font or artwork that the client could draw on the paper master.  The three pages of the ZHB that I posted a few days ago included line drawings of several varieties of "aconite" from different regions, as well as two "font" sizes and some negative (white-on-black) characters (namely, the quoted SBJ text).   

Calligraphy ("nice writing") presumably was an essential part of education at the time, as it was recently before the invention of the laser printer.  Any Chinese calligrapher must have been familiar with various styles of characters, including Clerical and Oracle, and could produce a more or less acceptable result in any style.  Just like a Western calligrapher worth his ink should be able to write a passable Chancery, Old English, Fraktur, etc.  It is not like Clerical was a precisely defined set of shapes.

(By the way, I recently spent a couple of days fighting with my laptop, trying to get my Postscript generation library to produce figures with Chinese text.  I found that there are now three main styles of Chinese fonts -- "sans-serif" like Helvetica for Latin letters, "flowing" that look like painted with curved brush strokes, and "squarish" where the strokes are mostly straight (but still with the "serifs"as would be created by a brush) and fill the allotted square space more completely.  The latter apparently were developed for use by printers, since the straight strokes made for faster carving.)

Quote:Getting Clerical Script done meant finding an artist (and he would be seen as first an artist) to do specialized work based on Han Dynasty inscriptions.

As I wrote, if the Author copied the characters from the source book, they would have been the book title or the name of the author, on the cover or on the first pages.  Those could be on any "font", independently from the "fonts" used in the rest of the book.  Just like a print of Les Miserables or The Sermons of St. Francis may have the title stamped in gilded letters on the cover...

Quote:I also do not know that "fancy" is the sense the few Ming artists who used it were going for as much as "archaic" and "deeply Han"

Well, as I wrote, I found photos of modern buildings with their names in big Clerical-style letters on the facade.  Like the railway station on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

All the best, --stolfi

(15-07-2026, 09:27 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP's work You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. showing possibly similar characters.  And one of our discussion threads You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 

Thanks Tavie! 

But finding a similar character or abbreviation somewhere else is not enough.  With zillions of Medieval manuscript online, one will surely find several matches to any glyph with 3-4 strokes.  We saw this happen not only with the big red weirdos, but with every glyph of the Voynichese alphabet...

To be worth of notice, a proposed solution for the big weirdos must include a plausible explanation for why those symbols were put there.  Why would someone place a fancy capital Greek gamma and a Tironian abbreviation for "er" as the ornate initials of those two paragraphs?

If they are abbreviations of the Author's name or the book's title, why write just the initials in big color letters and a "foreign" script, and then write the rest of that info (?) in plain Voynichese letters, not even a little bit bolder or bigger than the bulk of the text?  

The UHT at least has an answer for that question: because those two characters would not be initials or abbreviations, but the whole name of the book or author.  Like 

• Sun Tzu = 孫子 Sūn Zǐ ("Master Sun")
  
• The Art of War = 兵法 Bīng Fǎ
  
• Lao Tzu = 老子 Lǎo Zǐ ("Master Lao")
  
• Way and Virtue = 道德 Dào Dé
  
• Shennong = 神農 Shén Nóng ("Divine Farmer")
  
• Zhenghe = 政和 Zhèng Hé (the 1111–1118 CE period)
  
• Daguan = 大觀 Dà Guān (the 1107–1110 CE period).
  

The Way and Virtue (Dào Dé) is the main text of Daoism, known in the west as Dao De Jing or Tao Te Ching ("Jing" or "Ching" means "Classic Book").

The source for the SBJ around 1400 CE in China would probably be the massive encyclopedia Zenghe Bencao (Materia Medica of the Zenghe Period), first published in 1116; or maybe its earlier edition, the Daguan Bencao (Materia Medica of the Daguan Period), published in 1108; both during the reign of Emperor Huizong.

All the best, --stolfi

I believe if the MS-408 were Chinese or an Asian dialect than the glyphs would have had numerous representations.  Also the nymphs don't look Asian.

(16-07-2026, 04:44 AM)conlangyalesbaby Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I believe if the MS-408 were Chinese or an Asian dialect than the glyphs would have had numerous representations.

What do you mean?

Quote:Also the nymphs don't look Asian.

This is a common off-hand reaction to the Chinese Origin theory.  

But Beinecke MS 408 was almost certainly not written straight brain-to-vellum.  The Author of the VMS (who probably was European, or at least not Chinese) must have composed a draft on paper, with rough sketches of the drawings, and then recruited a Scribe to copy that draft to vellum and flesh out the details of the drawings.  

The Scribe was almost certainly European, and this last step most likely happened in Europe. We now know that many details on several diagrams were (badly) copied from other European books that were popular at the time.  Thus any features of the drawings that are clearly European -- like the dresses, Zodiac signs, and some castles -- could be contributions of the Author and/or the Scribe; not copied from the Chinese source book(s). 

--All the best, --stolfi