The Voynich Ninja

Seen in this light, it is not dissimilar to Chinese characters. Different sounds are formed into a character that represents a specific value.

(16-06-2025, 09:31 AM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The prior probability of VMS being 'Chinese' (or some other Far East tonal language) is very low. [...] the clearest evidence we have (as pointed out by @oshfdk) are the illustrations, where nothing resembles anything oriental but fits well with European Middle Ages. This is fully expected under the hypothesis VMS in an European language, weird and improbable if the VMS is 'Chinese', which further decreases the (posterior) probability of 'Chinese'.

Yes, this is the mistake everybody makes.  (Even that prof at the Chinese Academy I contacted by mail back then).  "The vellum, ink, pen are European, the letter shapes are European, the order of writing and parag shape and parag-top gallows are European, the hairdos and dresses and castles and month names are European, 'therefore' the language must be European". 

But that 'therefore' is not really 'therefore'.  Those observed facts do not logically imply the conclusion.  They may bias its a priori probability; but, as Bayes said to Holmes, "once you have determined that the forward probabilities of the other hypotheses causing the result are negligible, the hypothesis that has a significantly larger forward probability, no matter how small its a priori probability, will have the largest a posteriori probability." 

Quote:Adding [the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. weirdos] to the Chinese theory further decreases its probability, because now the odds must be multiplied by the probability the two weirdos are actually Chinese signs, which is surely less than 100%

That is not correct.  The probability of the Chinese theory(CT) being correct depends on how likely the VMs contents would be if the theory were correct, compared to how likely that would be if the theory were false. The probability of those weirdos being there on page f1r is higher if the CT were true than if it were false.  Because the CT provides a scenario that would result in those characters, while other theories don't.

Quote: But this means the VMS was written in 'China', and for what I know (I can be wrong, of course, not my field!) in the Far East vellum was never used (no clue about gall ink and the pigments).

Indeed the vellum is European.  I am not convinced that the ink is really iron-gall ink (yes, I read the McCrone report!) but it is definitely not the ink that was used in China (known in the West, curiously, as "China ink").  And the writing instrument was definitely a quill pen, not the brush that must be used to write Chinese.

But, again, the VMS was not written directly on vellum.  It would be a very stupid thing, because vellum (especially with iron-gall ink) is hard to erase.  For that and other reasons, it is almost certain that (under any theory) a draft of VMS was first written on paper, and then the draft was copied onto vellum. 

Under the Chinese theory, the (European) Author probably wrote the draft with a quill pen (as he would have been used to) while he was in the remote country, using whatever ink he had available.    But the passage from paper draft to final vellum was done by an European Scribe, and may have happened either in the remote country or after the Author returned home.  

In the latter case, there is nothing to explain.  In the former case, it would be perfectly possible that the Author (or the Scribe, if they were not the same person) had taken in his baggage some vellum, and maybe the ingredients to make the ink (if it is iron-gall).  Explorers in more modern times, like Lewis and Clark, generally carried paper, pen, and ink.  If paper, why not vellum?

By the way:
I would use a wax tablet rather than paper for writing. Before parchment.
It has proven itself for 2000 years, and it would be contemporary.

(16-06-2025, 05:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That is not correct.  The probability of the Chinese theory(CT) being correct depends on how likely the VMs contents would be if the theory were correct, compared to how likely that would be if the theory were false. The probability of those weirdos being there on page f1r is higher if the CT were true than if it were false.  Because the CT provides a scenario that would result in those characters, while other theories don't.

"the CT provides a scenario that would result in those characters, while other theories don't"

I don't think this is correct. First of all there have been many explanations for these characters. Only recently user Dobri You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a tentative match between these glyphs and a certain European medieval script. I'm not arguing for Dobri's explanation, I'm just stating that alternative explanations, that do not involve unlikely sequences of events, do exist.

What is more, I don't think the weirdos look like any Chinese characters I know, even upside down. Chinese script on the elementary level consist of individual strokes. There are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. These rules make the Chinese characters readable in many shapes and styles and the Chinese characters allow for a lot of flexibility in shape, as long as the strokes follow these rules. I don't think any of the red weirdos correspond to a valid Chinese character on a stroke by stroke basis, even if they look superficially similar to Chinese characters like 兀. This is not the way these characters are written, the stroke types are just wrong.

Of course one can say that this is an imperfect copy made by the Scribe from an imperfect copy made by the Author. But then again, this could be a copy of anything then, not necessarily Chinese characters. This could be a copy of Linear B or Germanic Runes then just as likely.

Is there any single specific piece of evidence pointing towards the Eastern origin of the manuscript?

(16-06-2025, 05:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-06-2025, 09:31 AM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The prior probability of VMS being 'Chinese' (or some other Far East tonal language) is very low. [...] the clearest evidence we have (as pointed out by @oshfdk) are the illustrations, where nothing resembles anything oriental but fits well with European Middle Ages. This is fully expected under the hypothesis VMS in an European language, weird and improbable if the VMS is 'Chinese', which further decreases the (posterior) probability of 'Chinese'.

Yes, this is the mistake everybody makes.  (Even that prof at the Chinese Academy I contacted by mail back then).  "The vellum, ink, pen are European, the letter shapes are European, the order of writing and parag shape and parag-top gallows are European, the hairdos and dresses and castles and month names are European, 'therefore' the language must be European".

I never said 'therefore the language must be European', so that's a mistake I did not make. But the book itself, given the vellum ink and pen, seems to have been written in Europe or near Europe, so the further from Europe the less probable a language is. For instance I think Hebrew and Arabic could be viable, but less probable than Latin French or German. Then Hindi is less probable than Hebrew and Arabic, and Chinese/Thai/Viet etc. are even less probable than Hindi.

(16-06-2025, 05:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But that 'therefore' is not really 'therefore'.  Those observed facts do not logically imply the conclusion.  They may bias its a priori probability; but, as Bayes said to Holmes, "once you have determined that the forward probabilities of the other hypotheses causing the result are negligible, the hypothesis that has a significantly larger forward probability, no matter how small its a priori probability, will have the largest a posteriori probability." 

All you say is correct, but the fact is that what's observed does nonetheless bias the prior probability against Chinese, and when we then factor in the evidence to get the posterior probability (I think you call it 'forward probability') we are not in the position of Sherlock Holmes, because it has not been estabilished at all that "the forward probabilities of the other hypothesis are negligible", and much less that "the Chinese hypothesis has a higher forward probability" than, say, coded Latin, French, German etc. etc. coded astronomical notation etc. etc. gibberish etc. etc. On the contrary, the evidence of the illustrations disfavors Chinese even more than the prior already does.

(16-06-2025, 05:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-06-2025, 09:31 AM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Adding [the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. weirdos] to the Chinese theory further decreases its probability, because now the odds must be multiplied by the probability the two weirdos are actually Chinese signs, which is surely less than 100%

That is not correct. The probability of the Chinese theory(CT) being correct depends on how likely the VMs contents would be if the theory were correct, compared to how likely that would be if the theory were false. The probability of those weirdos being there on page f1r is higher if the CT were true than if it were false.  Because the CT provides a scenario that would result in those characters, while other theories don't.

You defined exactly how the probability of the Chinese theory being correct is treated using Bayes. It's also true, as you said, that if CT is correct, then it's more probable the two weirdos, being upside down, badly drawn Chinese character, will appear on a page. It's also true, I'll add, that if the only conceivable way to get to the two weirdos was to draw two Chinese characters (badly and upside down) then the Chinese theory would gain much support. But there are many ways to get to the two weirdos without invoking Chinese (not my field again, but I seem to remember similar examples were found in European manuscripts, and even a random squiggle added for decoration already explains them). Other theories did not explicitly address the weirdos, but for those theories they are not a necessary part: the theories do not depend on the weirdos being this or that. But in CT the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. weirdos are the main evidence against the probability hit the theory would take by considering the complete lack of Eastern visual themes vss. the abundance of visual European themes. Using the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. weirdos partially rescues the Chinese theory, but at a cost: as with every added hypothesis the final probability must be multiplied by the probability of the added hypothesis to be true, which is surely less than one.

So indeed I stand corrected and I could have explained it better: it's not true that adding the weirdos to the Chinese theory decreases its probability tout court. It's instead true that the (unavoidable) decrease in probability caused by the addition of the 'Chinese weirdos' hypotheses is compensated (but only in a small part, imho) by the recovery of some of the probability loss caused by the evidence given by the illustrations.

(16-06-2025, 05:25 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-06-2025, 09:31 AM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. But this means the VMS was written in 'China', and for what I know (I can be wrong, of course, not my field!) in the Far East vellum was never used (no clue about gall ink and the pigments).

Indeed the vellum is European.  I am not convinced that the ink is really iron-gall ink (yes, I read the McCrone report!) but it is definitely not the ink that was used in China (known in the West, curiously, as "China ink").  And the writing instrument was definitely a quill pen, not the brush that must be used to write Chinese.

But, again, the VMS was not written directly on vellum.  It would be a very stupid thing, because vellum (especially with iron-gall ink) is hard to erase.  For that and other reasons, it is almost certain that (under any theory) a draft of VMS was first written on paper, and then the draft was copied onto vellum. 

Under the Chinese theory, the (European) Author probably wrote the draft with a quill pen (as he would have been used to) while he was in the remote country, using whatever ink he had available.    But the passage from paper draft to final vellum was done by an European Scribe, and may have happened either in the remote country or after the Author returned home.  

In the latter case, there is nothing to explain.  In the former case, it would be perfectly possible that the Author (or the Scribe, if they were not the same person) had taken in his baggage some vellum, and maybe the ingredients to make the ink (if it is iron-gall).  Explorers in more modern times, like Lewis and Clark, generally carried paper, pen, and ink.  If paper, why not vellum?

It could also have been an European who knew how to make vellum and ink and produced everything directly in China. Everything is possible that is not logically forbidden, but is any of this probable?

(16-06-2025, 07:08 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way:
I would use a wax tablet rather than paper for writing. Before parchment.
It has proven itself for 2000 years, and it would be contemporary.

Wax tablets were used only for short temporary texts, like shopping lists or messages. 
Even the Romans wrote anything longer or more permanent than that on papyrus.
By 1400, paper had long replaced papyrus.  I wonder whether anyone still used wax tablets.

All the best, --jorge

(16-06-2025, 09:31 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By 1400, paper had long replaced papyrus.  I wonder whether anyone still used wax tablets

Wax tablets were also used in the Middle Ages. Here is an example from the Codex Manesse ( Cod. Pal. germ. 848 ):

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-06-2025, 07:35 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there have been many explanations for [the big red f1r] characters. Only recently user Dobri You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. a tentative match between these glyphs and a certain European medieval script. I'm not arguing for Dobri's explanation, I'm just stating that alternative explanations, that do not involve unlikely sequences of events, do exist.

Under any theory, the creation of the VMS as a whole was an extremely unlikely event.  Someone invented a new script, drew a hundred fantastic plants, wrote ~35000 words in some language/encoding that has resisted all attempts at decipherment by codebreakers, linguists, historians, paleographers, astronomers, etc.  So it is not reasonable to insist that specific steps of its creation be "likely".

Moreover, probabilities are not objective values that one can measure with some instrument or compute from scratch (in spite of what You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says on page 37).  The probability of a proposition is a measure of one's belief in it; and therefore it is inherently subjective, since it depends on what one knows, not only about the proposition specifically, but about life, the universe and everything.  There is no such thing as the probability of something, but only my probability, your probability, that bitcoin investor's probability, ... The only thing that probability theory says is how you should compute your probability of a certain event, based on your probabilities of other events, and your knowledge of the connections between those events -- for better hopes of success in the world, hopefully. 

So, well, I can only say that my probability for the basic premise of the Chinese Theory (CT)

• "around 1400, some European traveler spent a few years in a country where they spoke a monosyllabic language with complicated writing system, saw some books that seemed to have important knowledge unknown in Europe, decided to take them home, and the only viable way he could do that was to record dictation from them in a phonetic ste(not ga!)nography system he devised." 
  

is quite high, while yours is apparently very low.  

One of the reasons my probability is high is that there definitely were thousands of Europeans who traveled to that "Generalized China" (including Tibet, Burma, Vietnam, etc.)  before the 1400.  Even You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  Only a few of those travelers were recorded in history;  Marco Polo was just one of them.  So the first part of the CT should be accepted by everyone who know of those contacts.

Quote: Chinese script on the elementary level consist of individual strokes. There are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. These rules make the Chinese characters readable in many shapes and styles and the Chinese characters allow for a lot of flexibility in shape, as long as the strokes follow these rules.

Yes, but the "lot of flexibility" is really You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. For instance, the two lower strokes of 冬 can be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Quote:This is not the way these characters are written, the stroke types are just wrong.

They definitely are. But people who do not know Chinese script will not know about the stroke order and direction.  Ask any such person to copy a Chinese character using an ordinary pen.  Then ask some other such person to copy the first person's drawing...

Again, when lay people try to imitate Chinese script, they focus on the features that most obviously distinguish them from Roman letters, namely the varying stroke width and the "serifs" created by the brush motion at the end of certain strokes. They will generally miss the features that are most important, like the direction and angle of the strokes, how they connect and cross, etc.

Quote:this could be a copy of anything then, not necessarily Chinese characters. This could be a copy of Linear B or Germanic Runes then just as likely.

Linear B and other really ancient scripts (cuneiform, Hittite hieroglyphs...) would not be known anywhere in the world by 1400.  In overall shape and stroke arrangement, BOTH You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. weirdos resemble upside-down Chinese characters more than characters of any other script that could be easily known in Europe at the time -- including Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, Georgian, Runic, Hebrew, Arabic, Ethiopian, ...

Quote:Is there any single specific piece of evidence pointing towards the Eastern origin of the manuscript?

You mean an Eastern language and Eastern semantic contents.  I gave already a few circumstantial pieces of evidence, such as 

• the word structure (quite unlike that of "European" languages, but just like that of the "Chinese" languages);
  
• the lack of identifiable articles, copula verbs, inflections
  
• the relatively large number of duplicated words, like chor chor
  
• the division of the Zodiac into 12 sectors of exactly 30 units, which may originally have been 24 sectors of 15 units;
  
• the Zodiac starting with Pisces;
  
• and the similarity of the Starred Parags section with the Shennong Bencao Jing, which is being discussed separately.
  

(16-06-2025, 10:48 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Wax tablets were also used in the Middle Ages. Here is an example from the Codex Manesse ( Cod. Pal. germ. 848 ):
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Nice! 

But is that really a wax tablet?  Considering the round tops, could that be a picture of Moses showing the Ten Commandments to the Hebrews?

The following is a copy of a painting by Raphael that my mother made ages ago:
[attachment=10828]
Can you guess what historical event it is depicting?

(Hint: note the papyrus plant at the lower right corner.)

On probability, I will just say that whatever the Voynich is, after all the time that has been spent examining it, it must be something that seemed improbable:  whether it is a cypher or shorthand system that would not be expected for the time; a conlang that is far more advanced than the ones we know about; or a meaningless hoax that again is also far more complex than we would have expected for the time.  So if we ever solve the mystery, our Occam's razors will have to be blunted a little bit and tolerate a certain amount of improbability.  How much is yet to be seen.  

But I still draw a line between the improbabilities of these options, and the idea that there is an unamended plaintext/natural language.  I don't see how this is possible.

(16-06-2025, 05:06 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:By Top Row, I mean the first line of each paragraph but with its first word and last word omitted so as to isolate a top row effect from separate paragraph/line start effects and line end effects.

This is not sufficient, since the second word on the first line of a parag may have one-leg gallows, or may be special in some other way.  To look for line break anomalies, one should exclude the first line of the parag entirely, and look only at internal breaks.

No - that bit you've quoted was specifically for examining distortions in the first lines of paragraphs ("Top Row") so it has to include the Top Row.  

The way I went about it was to firstly strip the top row, line starts, and line ends from the text. What was left was used as a basis for comparison.  This was used to generate expectations for what we should see in each of those positions and see if there were any large gaps between expectations and actual values.

(16-06-2025, 05:06 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Those changes will add '*' to a relatively small percentage of the text, say 10% of all words.  What remains still has hundreds of stretches of several dozen consecutive words without any '*'.   Even if the text uses some fancy encryption and/or is in some "exotic" language, those fragments should be enough to decipher it.  I cannot imagine an encryption scheme that would be viable for a text of that size and could have been conceived in that epoch, but cannot be deciphered without knowing every character of the text.

What I mean - and I'm guessing the reason nablator brought up Nick's list - is not necessarily that it is undecipherable but that it is flat and so cannot be an unaltered plaintext.  If there was ever natural language, something has been done to it. 

(16-06-2025, 05:06 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Line patterns at different positions of the text are serious problems for any idea that we are only seeing a natural language.

Considering the above conjectures for one-leg gallows and m/g, I don't think they are a significant problem.

The one-leg gallows problem still shows something has been done to the natural language plaintext, unless we consider it is meaningless.  An easy explanation like p = k or p = ke could still just about be in the realm of "unamended plaintext" but this is not the case when we see a more complex explanation is required if we want to make an equivalence between k words in the lower lines and p words in the Top Row.  If we think p is somehow replacing k, something is being done to the other glyphs in the word too.  

Top Row words show other behaviours than simply an absence of k and a surplus of p and f.  The word types are different than expected.  There is a Top Row effect.  Word initials can be different, word middles, and word finals.  Line Start words are different than expected.  Line End words are different than expected.  

If the text is meaningless, this doesn't matter since there's no expectation for a reasonable consistency between glyph behaviour at the different positions of the text.  But if it's not meaningless, all this implies a process - or set of processes - applied to a plaintext.  And given the odd effects at those "extreme" positions (Top Row, line start, line end), it would seem odd that there isn't some kind of process being also applied to the "pure" part of the text i.e. all mid-line words below the Top Row.  This seems more likely given the "drift" between sections, among sections, and even within the same folio.  And I'm suspicious that processes are behind the word break combinations that were first identified by Currier and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in more detail by Emma and Marco even though they propose a linguistic explanation.  And then there are the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Patrick Feaster studied:  my work looks at behaviour at absolute positions but his focuses on trends going "rightwards" and "downwards" throughout a paragraph.

(16-06-2025, 05:06 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Said another way: if line breaks were significant (as in a poem, song, list, etc.) we would expect the lines to have variable lengths.  The fact that they are all of about the same length, except at the ends of paragraphs, is strong evidence that the line breaks were chosen "on the fly" wherever the writing reached the right margin. 

Yes, I think so too, and this is why I suspect there is a degree of scribal agency (again assuming that it is not meaningless).  It implies to me that scribes knew at least a part of the system well enough to be able to convert one word type into another when a line break occurred in their version of the text that wasn't in any original that they were copying from.  This might not be much knowledge if it is only about easier things like adding s to initial a words, y to initial ch words, or q to initial o words when under another o word at line start.  But if the mutations are more complex, greater knowledge may be needed.