The Voynich Ninja

(02-12-2025, 06:07 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(02-12-2025, 05:52 PM)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Author created an extremely unique uncrackable encryption scheme or language which likely took much thought to even design/figure out.

I also find this hard to believe. One thing I do believe is that people have been thinking too hard about this manuscript, and that a simple solution is probably likely.

While I think a simple solution is also likely, I think "unique uncrackable encryption scheme" and "ultimately simple" are not mutually exclusive. What I believe is that the system The Author created was quite elegant in its simplicity, allowing them to write in it fluently without pauses. To outsiders, it would seem uncrackable. To them, it would seem completely simple and intuitive. Regardless, it would take a non-trivial amount of mental effort to come up with even a relatively simple and elegant solution, because they would need to excersize the creativity to make something truly unique to their time.

Ask any conlang creator if it is a simple and easy process. Even with the most elegant language system in the world, it requires deep thought into the nature of meaning and the practical limitations of language.

(02-12-2025, 06:14 PM)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.fluently without pauses

Many people are of this same opinion. If you look at the writing in the VMS then you will see it definitely has an effortless flow to it. The authors didn't stop between words to think what should come next.

Weirdness is not only innate; it is intentional. While the modern reader may sense this, it is more difficult to prove without a detailed "historical" examination.

However, there are two particular examples of VMs artistic trickery. The VMs cosmos is an intentional oxymoron and VMs White Aries is a purposefully constructed duality and part of a larger structure based on heraldic canting.

(02-12-2025, 05:52 PM)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While agree that it was likely standard at the time to do such practices of writing on paper and transferring to vellum later, we simply can't use that assumption as any definitive evidence for the actual construction of the VMS.

It is not 100% certain, of course.  But it should be a default assumption -- both because of statistics and of the costs of mistakes.  It is the "brain-to-vellum" hypothesis that needs good evidence.

(02-12-2025, 05:52 PM)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Using that logic, [we should assume] many different practices were standard at the time, such as simple substitution ciphers.

Indeed, and anyone learning of the VMS for the first time would be justified in assuming that the text was in Latin or some other European language,  with a substitution cipher.  We don't make that assumption any more, because that possibility was disproved long ago.

Quote:In fact, given the sheer WEIRDNESS of the VMS, I would argue that the author seemed in ways to actively shun the conventions of the time.

Yes, and I myself have been urging people to not make the mistake of assuming the VMS is X -- like, being written with iron-gall ink -- just because most surviving manuscripts are X.

But claims that the VMS is Y instead of the standard X require at least some evidence.  Just because the VMS is known to deviate from the norm in some aspects, we cannot conclude that it must deviate in X too.

Quote:How does the hypothesis of multiple scribes account for the fact that we have numerous pieces of evidence to indicate the "scribes" also illustrated the drawings on the pages, often with the same pen in the same session?

Good question... 

Quote:Here is what I find hard to beleive: (1)The Author created an extremely unique uncrackable encryption scheme or language which likely took much thought to even design/figure out.

I don't believe that, either.

Quote:The Author wrote an entire Proto-VMS, for some reason to encode some meaningful information, using this scheme they designed. This included all the illustrations too(?)

Yes, the Author must have written a draft of the book first.  Like practically every book writer has done, ever.  Logic and internal evidence support that.

The draft must have contained some sketches of the illustrations.  My guess is that the drawings of Pharma (excluding the jars) are straight copies of the Author's sketches.  He must have  made crude hand sketches of the Cosmo diagrams and the organs in Bio (but without the nymphs).  As for the Herbal figures, my guess is that only the text and some details (like the roots) came from the Author's draft, while the rest was invented by the Scribe, with "inspiration" from other Herbal books.

Quote:Then, The Author taught 1-5 additional people how to write in their system, enough that they could reasonably correct mistakes in the original Proto-VMS, know how to rearrange words or sentences that are crossed out.

No, I don't think so.  The Author definitely trained the Scribe(s) to copy the alphabet.  But there  is some evidence that the Scribe(s) could not read the text. 

Quote:how would the scribes know how to correct mistakes without understanding the underlying system?

Well, they didn't.  Unless the Author noticed the mistake while he could still ask the Scribe(s) to fix them.

Quote:Then, the scribe(s) copied the entire Proto-VMS, including illustrations, and drew them often in the same session with the same pen.

Yes, that is how it would have worked if the Author could only afford to hire and train one Scribe at a time.

Quote:Why are the illustrations so seemingly crude if so much preparation went into even the drawings?

 

While the Scribe was able to write neat small letters with a quill, he apparently had little experience scribing books, and zero experience drawing figures.  He did not use scored guide lines for margins and baselines, and had no notion of perspective drawing (not even the little that artists and professional scribes grasped at the time).  He knew how to use the compass, but could not even divide a circle into four equal parts. I guess that his experience was limited to writing letters and other mundane documents; not even contracts or deeds.

It is pretty clear that the Author was not rich.  The vellum is of very poor quality -- "factory rejects" -- and he tried to use every bit of it, even pages that were undersize or missing a corner.  Thus he probably could not afford to hire a good professional scribe or "scribing factory".

Also, in my view, the decorative elements in the illustrations were not important to the Author, thus he did not care if a few nymphs were missing arms, or if the Scribe got tired of tubs and found more interesting things to draw on them.  And I suspect that the Author created the Herbal section with the format we see, with mostly fake plant drawings, only because he had tried to sell his book of of exotic medical and astrological knowledge, but found that no one would buy it because everybody in Europe expected a herbal to have full-plant figures and that format.

Quote:To me, this feels like a rather elaborate explanation to explain 2 anomalous things about the VMS: ... If these 2 things can be explained in a simpler way with the hypothesis of The Author being the only scribe/illustrator, writing in a custom personal script, directly on vellum, with no draft, over the course of years, I'm inclined to think that's an overall simpler explanation which requires less assumptions.

But unfortunately both logic and internal evidence broadly contradict "Author = Scribe", and thus "Direct Brain to Vellum".    And neither of those 2 things is certain...

All the best, --stolfi

(02-12-2025, 10:33 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While the Scribe was able to write neat small letters with a quill, he apparently had little experience scribing books, and zero experience drawing figures.  He did not use scored guide lines for margins and baselines, and had no notion of perspective drawing (not even the little that artists and professional scribes grasped at the time).  He knew how to use the compass, but could not even divide a circle into four equal parts. I guess that his experience was limited to writing letters and other mundane documents; not even contracts or deeds.

It is pretty clear that the Author was not rich.  The vellum is of very poor quality -- "factory rejects" -- and he tried to use every bit of it, even pages that were undersize or missing a corner.  Thus he probably could not afford to hire a good professional scribe or "scribing factory".

1) Author was not rich and had no money for good vellum.
2) Scribe could write, but had little experience scribing books, zero experience drawing figures, could not divide a circle, etc.

Why would a person who could barely afford vellum, but who could create a paper draft, hire a very poor inexperienced scribe - basically wasting the money and jeopardizing the whole project - instead of just personally copying the MS on the vellum? As far as I remember, initially you needed this to make the Chinese theory believable: the Scribe introduced European styles and imagery while interpreting an oriental draft. But now with a full team of retracers trying to fix quickly fading details, maybe it's time to let the Scribe go?

BTW, is it possible to find out what scribes would take per hour and compare with the price of the vellum?

(02-12-2025, 10:33 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(02-12-2025, 05:52 PM)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While agree that it was likely standard at the time to do such practices of writing on paper and transferring to vellum later, we simply can't use that assumption as any definitive evidence for the actual construction of the VMS.

It is not 100% certain, of course.  But it should be a default assumption -- both because of statistics and of the costs of mistakes.  It is the "brain-to-vellum" hypothesis that needs good evidence.

...

But unfortunately both logic and internal evidence broadly contradict "Author = Scribe", and thus "Direct Brain to Vellum".    And neither of those 2 things is certain...

Here's my case for the evidence of the Author=Scribe and Brain-to-vellum hypothesis:

1.) Lack of pauses in writing and continual flow across pages. This is consistent with stream of consciousness writing, but would be harder if it were being copied from an earlier text, by a scribe who didn't understand the text and was not fluent in it, while also potentially being guided to correct mistakes from the previous author

2.) The fact that the illustrators=the scribe on all pages we can tell. The intricate, highly creative, and unique plant drawings which seem to be a completely imaginary creation were put down first on the herbal section, then text was added between and all around these drawings, sometimes single words in between seemingly hastily drawn sections. This indicates that the entire process of drawing and writing, to whoever made the VMS, were essentially a single, uninterrupted activity. Having these small words spaced perfectly between a plant drawing seems more difficult to believe was done with intense pre-planning. It would require the scribe to not only copy the text, but the text in such specific sizes and spacings to happen to align perfectly with something they just illustrated.

3.) Crudeness/hastiness of the drawings. The fact that even by medieval standards, the drawings show a lack of particular artistic attention to detail, and appear almost as simple unfinished sketches and stick figure drawings, seems more consistent with this being a personal sketchbook to write down ideas than a prestigious herbal to pass down knowledge. It makes sense to spend little time on the illustrations if the author is simply using the illustrations, in that same writing session, to convey some core idea, and then the text, laid down immediately after is expanding upon that idea.

4.) The fact that the script doesn't match any known language or cipher system, gives significant credence to the idea of a personal language system. Given the statistical patterns, it was clearly written with intention, for some meaningful purpose. That purpose being meaningful personally, is consistent with a custom script, rather than a traditional alchemical herbal meant to make money through convincing a wealthy patron to buy it. A personal language system would make sense to write in fluently

5.) The low quality of vellum. This indicates that perhaps the author was not actually particularly wealthy, and may have come from more humble origins than some have surmised. If the vellum was low quality, and this was a personal project made for personal reasons, that is consistent with direct Brain-to-vellum. To be wealthy enough to afford scribes, but not wealthy enough to afford high quality vellum, seems precarious. Given the seeming rejection of all convention at the time, for essentially everything we can think of, someone more rebellious or of an unconventional background comes to mind.

6.) The fact that the document was "used often, perhaps even daily", an observation by LFD, lends credence to the idea this document was not meant to be something written once and then stored away or sold, but was in essence, a practical daily object. This makes sense as a personal notebook.

These are just the currently well established facts about the VMS. The "personal notebook, author=scribe, direct Brain-to-vellum" hypothesis would make several predictions which could be tested as well. For example, the idea that the VMS was indeed written over a long period of time, rather than a shorter period of time by multiple scribes. With more advanced dating techniques, of perhaps the ink or specific pieces of vellum corresponding to different scribes, we'd expect to see evidence consistent with them being written potentially years apart. Whether this analysis is at all possible remains to be seen, but if significant evidence showed the entire VMS was written in an extremely short amount of time, that would be significant evidence against this hypothesis.

Without anything conclusive, we're still ultimately left with the fundamental problem of VMS studies. "This explanation makes sense to me" can be entirely true for 2 different researchers assessing the same evidence, but with different priors and biases, and coming to different conclusions.

While I believe the "multi-scribe, copied from an earlier text, as a variation of a traditional alchemical herbal" hypothesis is for the most part, an internally consistent narrative which matches some key pieces of evidence, I think the "personal notebook, written directly Brain-to-vellum, by one rebellious obsessive weirdo" is also internally consistent, and consistent with the evidence.

Ultimately, each competing theory has implicit assumptions about the ultimate purpose of creating the VMS. Was it an alchemical herbal, created in collaboration with others to sell to a potential buyer? Or was it a personal notebook, created by a rebellious obsessive recluse, to document their personal thoughts, and encrypt them from others?

The conversation here so far seems to have assumed there's a binary choice to be made between "straight from brain to vellum" and "rough draft on paper."  But aren't there other possibilities besides those?

For example, what if some clever encipherment scheme involved moving tokens around a counting board (as people did at the time when working a problem in arithmetic) and then writing down the result only after it had been safely figured out?

There are plenty of "mathematical" schemes I could imagine for enciphering and deciphering text using counting boards.  These processes might seem cumbersome to us, since we're not used to the technology -- but many people were quite adept at using counting boards in the fifteenth century and might have found this kind of work a lot more comfortable and familiar than, say, looking up values in a table.

Given such an arrangement, it might still have been advantageous to prepare a plaintext rough draft on paper, but what value would there have been in preparing an enciphered rough draft on paper?

This dynamic could explain the cases where it looks like text was written out in short discontinuous bursts, and it would solve the problem of how a moderately complex cipher could respect contingent line breaks without a writer risking the "insanity" of composing directly on vellum.

I'm not especially invested in the specific scheme I've just laid out.  But if some details seem hard to square with either the "brain to vellum" or "rough draft on paper" position, maybe it's worth our while to try to think outside that box.

(02-12-2025, 11:14 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.a person who could barely afford vellum, but who could create a paper draft

It is not that he could create a paper draft.  He must have done so.

Again, writing directly to vellum would cost more than writing a draft first; because big mistakes and changes of mind are unavoidable when writing a new book, and mistakes on vellum are hard to fix.  Possibly requiring discarding a half-filled bifolio.  Thus the fact that he was not rich only makes it more likely that he wrote a draft first.

Quote:Why would [such pauper] hire a very poor inexperienced scribe - basically wasting the money and jeopardizing the whole project - instead of just personally copying the MS on the vellum?

Because the vellum copy had to use small letters and a neat handwriting -- abilities that not everyone had.  Not using a scribe would have jeopardized the project more.

Moreover, copying a draft to vellum was a mechanical but slow task.  In this case, it included inventing and drawing all the decorative details, such as the thousand scallops in the big fold-out and the 360 stars nymphs hats hairdos in Zodiac.  I guess that each herbal page took about one hour to produce.  Although poor, the Author must have wanted to pay a scribe than do all that boring work himself.

And, just as the vellum was the best that he could afford, the Scribe was the best that he could afford.  

Quote:As far as I remember, initially you needed this to make the Chinese theory believable: the Scribe introduced European styles and imagery while interpreting an oriental draft.

No, I did not need "Author different from Scribe" for that.  In my "Chinese Theory", the Author was probably European, or at least not "Chinese" -- because he invented the alphabetic Voynichese script to record the "Chinese" source texts.   The draft was in Voynichese.  Therefore, even if he scribed the vellum himself, the fact that the styles and decoration are European still does not imply that the language and source material are European. 

That is, the "Author not Scribe Theory" is irrelevant for the "Chinese Theory".

Quote:But now with a full team of retracers trying to fix quickly fading details, maybe it's time to let the Scribe go?

The "Massive Retracing Theory" too is irrelevant for the "Chinese Theory".  The main restoration pass had little effect on the text itself, and on the drawings it at most changed a few secondary details.  The details added by later retracers, even the Boobs Retracer, did not make the drawings more or less "European".  

Quote:BTW, is it possible to find out what scribes would take per hour and compare with the price of the vellum?

Good question. 

I recall a quote that, adjusting by estimated cost of living, vellum would cost the equivalent of US$2 per folio.  But I don't know how that varies with size and quality. 

Transforming the skin of one calf or sheep into vellum requires tens of hours of hard manual labor.  Perhaps one can get 10 VMS-size folios out of that?  

The Scribe could have been a Starving Student, who may have charged a fraction of what a professional Scribe would.  Maybe less than US$1 per page?  It would help explain why the Scribe seemed so careless at times...

All the best, --stolfi

While I personally favour the idea that that MS is largely a fair copy of an earlier draft, this is just my modern feeling. It would be good to have some indications from known historical examples, if there are any. 

Has this been studied? Has anything ever been published about it?

Undoutebdly, manuscripts copied in scriptoria would have been penned directly on parchment, but these were copies anyway, so should not be representative examples.

How about a 'life's work' like the Liber Floridus of Lambert de St.Omer or other autographs? I'm not looking for guesses but for historical information.

(02-12-2025, 11:58 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The conversation here so far seems to have assumed there's a binary choice to be made between "straight from brain to vellum" and "rough draft on paper."  But aren't there other possibilities besides those?

For example, what if some clever encipherment scheme involved moving tokens around a counting board (as people did at the time when working a problem in arithmetic) and then writing down the result only after it had been safely figured out?

There are plenty of "mathematical" schemes I could imagine for enciphering and deciphering text using counting boards.  These processes might seem cumbersome to us, since we're not used to the technology -- but many people were quite adept at using counting boards in the fifteenth century and might have found this kind of work a lot more comfortable and familiar than, say, looking up values in a table.

Given such an arrangement, it might still have been advantageous to prepare a plaintext rough draft on paper, but what value would there have been in preparing an enciphered rough draft on paper?

This dynamic could explain the cases where it looks like text was written out in short discontinuous bursts, and it would solve the problem of how a moderately complex cipher could respect contingent line breaks without a writer risking the "insanity" of composing directly on vellum.

I'm not especially invested in the specific scheme I've just laid out.  But if some details seem hard to square with either the "brain to vellum" or "rough draft on paper" position, maybe it's worth our while to try to think outside that box.

I think that while such speculation is useful for coming up with potential new ideas about the VMS, ultimately a true "solution" would have an overarching, cohesive narrative. If you can come up with an internally consistent narrative which is also consistent with the evidence, then that's great, and could help in developing a potential overall solution.

The reason why this conversation has shifted to a binary, of Brain-to-vellum by an individual, vs multiple scribes copying an earlier text, is because each theory provides an overall narrative which could potentially explain multiple pieces of evidence at once. I think such hypotheses, which create an overall narrative which can explain more things at once, are where VMS speculation should head to potentially develop actually testable and falsifiable theories.

Personally, what interests me most about the VMS is to evaluate a "grand unified theory of the VMS". Some overarching narrative which explains all of the evidence perfectly coherently, makes falsifiable predictions, and those predictions prove correct. If you can come up with a cohesive overall narrative which combines multiple perspectives, I would encourage it and be interested to hear what your overall narrative is. 

Otherwise, I think making piecemeal theories doesn't necessarily explain the evidence better.