The Voynich Ninja

(07-12-2025, 05:19 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What does it tell us, really, that we didn't know before? Many manuscripts have color added or replaced later in life. It's not unusual or suspicious at all.

I see nothing suspicious on the colors being a late addition.  But this issue is very important because the answer will determine whether the colors are meaningful information about the content, or just distracting noise.

(My mother had a copy of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which shows detailed pen-point drawings of ornamental elements from all ages from the pre-history to ~1800.  One day, when I was maybe 3 or 4, I got hold of scissors and paint, and ... you can imagine the rest.

Mamma was ecstatic, actually, She already knew that her boy would become another Raphael or Michelangelo, and this was just a confirmation of that certainty.

But Papà was furious, because that book was an expensive present he had brought for her from Milan or Venice when they were still dating...

So whenever the topic is the paints in the VMS, sorry, but I cannot avoid thinking of that episode... )

All the best, --stolfi

I find it interesting that on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is a massive painting instruction that was obviously ignored. The most likely explanation to me seems that the painter simply forgot to paint it. However I think it does show, as others have said, that colors were added after the plants were drawn. If this was a week or a century after, I can't really tell. It does look like whoever painted it knew how to read the german/voynichese instructions, since they follow them elsewhere in the VM.

(07-12-2025, 06:49 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I find it interesting that on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is a massive painting instruction that was obviously ignored. The most likely explanation to me seems that the painter simply forgot to paint it.

Another simple explanation is it's no painting instruction at all. It's surely possible for the painter to forget the only painting instruction in the whole folio (or both, if you consider the 'F' in the rightmost flower to be a painting instruction too), but it's weird.

(07-12-2025, 03:39 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What if there were still visible star outlines made by the original author when the painter was doing the paint job, but since then the outlines faded into oblivion? I'd definitely invoke MRT here if I was pro-MRT.

But the faintest traces, outside of those cases, are very faint but still visible.  Then why would only those two arms and three star outlines, specifically, fade much more tan other nearby traces?

All the best, --stolfi

(07-12-2025, 10:14 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the faintest traces, outside of those cases, are very faint but still visible.  Then why would only those two arms and three star outlines, specifically, fade much more tan other nearby traces?

Because these lines were still quite visible at the time of retracer 1, so Rt1 touched up everything else, but left these as they were. Then Rt2 skipped this folio altogether, and when Rt3 got it, only traces left by Rt1 were still visible, but not the original lines, so only Rt1 lines got retraced to their present state.

I think I know the drill.

(07-12-2025, 02:04 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-12-2025, 01:49 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(07-12-2025, 01:30 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But several people who have looked at the folio number with  a microscope (not just Rene and others at the workshoop, but, now I see, even the McCrone guys)  all agree that the paint is over the ink.

Do you have any exact quotes on this? 

For the observations by Rene and others at the Folgers workshop, there is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

For McCrone's claim, there is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Rene.  There is another one somewhere, but I cannot find it...

All the best, --stolfi

If the second quote refers to this:

(05-11-2019, 12:09 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This statement was reported in Viennese newspapers after the press briefing in 2012.

However, this is not in the McCrone report and it is also not what was analysed by McCrone.

I should clarify:

this did not refer to the order of the application of anything, just that it was done soon after the parchment was created.
While the latter is normally the case, this was NOT determined forensically.

(07-12-2025, 10:37 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Because these lines were still quite visible at the time of retracer 1, so Rt1 touched up everything else, but left these as they were. Then Rt2 skipped this folio altogether, and when Rt3 got it, only traces left by Rt1 were still visible, but not the original lines, so only Rt1 lines got retraced to their present state.

So you are proposing a variant of the MRT where what I have been calling original (Rt0) is in fact a restoration of an even earlier and fainter stratum (Rt65535).

Pretending that you were serious: the problem with that theory is explaining why Rt0 failed to restore only and precisely those three stars and two arms. 

Seriously, I understand that the MRT is unpleasant because it introduces one unknown variable -- the retracing layer -- for every millimeter of ink trace on the VMS, and thus can explain almost any puzzling detail as a "retracing error".  

But reality is not constrained to be pleasant...

All the best, --stolfi

(09-12-2025, 04:02 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So you are proposing a variant of the MRT where what I have been calling original (Rt0) is in fact a restoration of an even earlier and fainter stratum (Rt65535).

Pretending that you were serious: the problem with that theory is explaining why Rt0 failed to restore only and precisely those three stars and two arms. 

This is very easy to explain by adjusting the argument a little. As you said elsewhere, the paint binder can create some kind of protective film that makes it harder for the ink to get to the vellum. Maybe Rt0 did try to restore these lines too, but ended up putting ink on top of the paint where it just flaked off after a while, so by the time of Rt2 neither the original scribe lines nor Rt0 lines were visible.

(09-12-2025, 04:02 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Seriously, I understand that the MRT is unpleasant because it introduces one unknown variable -- the retracing layer -- for every millimeter of ink trace on the VMS, and thus can explain almost any puzzling detail as a "retracing error".

For me both MRT and the Chinese theories are not very attractive for two reasons:
1) I don't know of any specific evidence that would point towards either of them, so to me they look like conjectures built on very little ground (this is my subjective assessment, of course)
2) If true, neither of them allows for any easy progress in understanding the manuscript. I might entertain a dubious theory that offers some obvious way forward, because you can just take a theory like that for granted and trace it through to the end reading of the manuscript and check if something legible comes out. Both MRT and the Chinese theory basically lead nowhere in practice.

(09-12-2025, 09:52 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is very easy to explain by adjusting the argument a little. As you said elsewhere,

I meant, why was that situation specific to two whole arms and three whole stars -- instead of an half an arm here, half a leg there, a head over there, etc.

(09-12-2025, 09:52 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't know of any specific evidence that would point towards either of them

Neither theory has categorical evidence, like a glyph that looks unmistakably like a Chinese character or a 17th century C14 date for the dark ink.  However, both have lots of evidence that is hard to fit with the opposite theories -- which do not have any comparable evidence of their own.  What evidence is there that all the brown ink is original? Or that the language is not monosyllabic?

And neither theory requires assuming exceptional or unattested events, like a community of half a dozen anticlerical doctors who devised a new alphabet and a complicated encryption scheme to hide their secret knowledge of ... pansies? Or defective pens and inks that will switch unpredictably from nearly transparent tan to nearly black, at random, over a 200+ page book, and a Scribe who can't recognize the glyphs and body parts that he penned just a few moments before...

Quote:If true, neither of them allows for any easy progress in understanding the manuscript. ... Both MRT and the Chinese theory basically lead nowhere in practice.

Quite the opposite.

The MRT offers a quite plausible solution to hundreds of baffling puzzles about image and text details, like most hapax weirdos, words with os that should have been ys, and those crowns in the Zodiac. It would save Voynichologists from wasting time on trying to explain those details as intentional. It may make it possible to identify sources for the image elements that we can't recognize because they were mangled by the retracers.

The "Chinese" Origin theory does not immediately give a decipherment, but makes specific predictions about language statistics and word structure, and about the form a decipherment would take.  It says that each Voynichese word type is a syllable of a certain monosyllabic language, thus certain words should occur in patterns that would occur in a text of the expected nature (herbal, materia medica) in such a language.  And that the concepts represented in the Bio, Cosmo, and Zodiac sections would come from an East Asian culture, not from the "European" culture.  And so on...

All the best, --stolfi

(09-12-2025, 12:22 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I meant, why was that situation specific to two whole arms and three whole stars -- instead of an half an arm here, half a leg there, a head over there, etc.

This is easy too, when retracers performs their work, they often misunderstand or misinterpret parts of the drawing. If an arm or a star had faded significantly so that only a few visible strokes remained, the retracer might overlook it completely. So, essentially, the outcome is the function of which shapes the retracer was able to recognize and which not. Those that were not clear, the retracer would skip and they would fade into total oblivion. Maybe this is also related to the styles and strokes that the original scribe used, those that were easy to interpret would be more likely to get enhanced by a retracer. There is literally nothing a good retracing theory cannot explain. Any anachronistic element could be a result of the XVIII century retracing of an original drawing that the retracer failed to recognize for what it really was. I'm not even so sure the original writing didn't look like this 我要吃饭了, then it faded so that just a few strokes remained, and after 3-4 iterations it turned into pchoey. 

(09-12-2025, 12:22 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Neither theory has categorical evidence, like a glyph that looks unmistakably like a Chinese character or a 17th century C14 date for the dark ink.  However, both have lots of evidence that is hard to fit with the opposite theories -- which do not have any comparable evidence of their own.  What evidence is there that all the brown ink is original? Or that the language is not monosyllabic?

There is no good evidence that there is a language, as far as I know.

As for the ink there is fairly good evidence that it's original in that in the text there are very few places in the manuscript where different strokes are overwritten on one another. If there have been massive retracing attempts they would be visible and more or less universally accepted by now. I'm not sure about the others, to me your diagrams with (A) (B) © (D) don't look convincing so far, they just fail to show what they intend to show.

(09-12-2025, 12:22 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And neither theory requires assuming exceptional or unattested events, like a community of half a dozen anticlerical doctors who devised a new alphabet and a complicated encryption scheme to hide their secret knowledge of ... pansies? Or defective pens and inks that will switch unpredictably from nearly transparent tan to nearly black, at random, over a 200+ page book, and 

I'm not sure what's so exceptional here. New alphabet? An encryption scheme? Anticlerical doctors? As for the ink density variation, there have been other examples of medieval manuscripts posted here that show a lot of variation in ink density. Even if not at the scale of the Voynich MS, this was certainly something that did happen.

(09-12-2025, 12:22 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a Scribe who can't recognize the glyphs and body parts that he penned just a few moments before...

This is your interpretation, my interpretation is that the scribe chose or had to write/draw the symbols and images the way they turned out for reasons that we don't know, because we have no idea what these images should have depicted and how this text should be read.

(09-12-2025, 12:22 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:If true, neither of them allows for any easy progress in understanding the manuscript. ... Both MRT and the Chinese theory basically lead nowhere in practice.

Quite the opposite.

The MRT offers a quite plausible solution to hundreds of baffling puzzles about image and text details, like most hapax weirdos, words with os that should have been ys, and those crowns in the Zodiac. It would save Voynichologists from wasting time on trying to explain those details as intentional. It may make it possible to identify sources for the image elements that we can't recognize because they were mangled by the retracers.

The "Chinese" Origin theory does not immediately give a decipherment, but makes specific predictions about language statistics and word structure, and about the form a decipherment would take.  It says that each Voynichese word type is a syllable of a certain monosyllabic language, thus certain words should occur in patterns that would occur in a text of the expected nature (herbal, materia medica) in such a language.  And that the concepts represented in the Bio, Cosmo, and Zodiac sections would come from an East Asian culture, not from the "European" culture.  And so on...

These don't have good easily testable predictions. One condition under which I can accept a doubtful theory as some kind of a working hypothesis, is if it offers a way to quickly and definitely settle it by following it through and checking the result. For example, if someone appeared on the forum and said "Voynichese is just a graphical representation of the vocal apparatus as used to pronounce proper Latin, flourishes represent tongue movements, bases represent mouth configuration, gallows represent glottal configuration", this would sound dubious but this gives some specific predictions that could be tested in reasonable time. I don't think MRT or the Chinese theory make any predictions that could be tested in reasonable time (say, a week or two) to get a definite yes or no answer. This wouldn't be a problem if there was some specific evidence for these theories, but for the MRT and the Chinese theory as far as I can see, there is the absence of both the specific evidence and any readily testable predictions.