The Voynich Ninja

(03-12-2025, 09:54 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Note that "imply ignorance" is your interpretation, not some universal truth.

Er, are there any "universal truths" about the VMS?

Quote:My take here is that the Voynich Manuscript, as we know it, could be a draft. Written on cheap vellum for some reason... Suppose, the author was traveling and keeping this draft with her/him and working on it. In the future after finishing the work and then maybe hiring professional scribes and artists to create the final book, the draft would no longer be of use, other than memorabilia. ... if the Author was traveling the world, maybe keeping it dry was not an option. Maybe a bit weathered appearance of the Voynich Manuscript is not from later neglect, but its original state from the time it was being created.

Well, so you are opening up to the idea that the Author my have obtained the contents somewhere else in the world.  Good... 

It does make sense that a traveler would write his travel notes on vellum with iron-gall ink to protect them from water damage.  However, travelers had other means to do that, such as hermetic recipients.

The 13-ship expedition that "discovered" Brazil in 1500 included a professional scribe whose job was to keep records of everything seen during the trip.  When the expedition reached Brazil, he sent an interim report back to the Court in Lisbon, by one of the ships.  This report was a 23-page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in rag paper. Now, where would people worry more about water damage than on a transatlantic sail ship?...

But the VMS does not look at all like the notes that a traveler would write down during his trip.  Such notes would have no decoration, and would use the vellum more fully, with narrower margins and no big blank spaces.  The Pharma section could be such a draft, perhaps.  Not the others...

Quote:And since we have no idea about the text, maybe the mistakes in the text are corrected or highlighted. The fact that we can't see corrections doesn't mean there are no corrections. Maybe each Sh means "ignore this piece and skip to next ch", who knows.

But, if it was a draft, why not just cross out that part?  And how would he disguise insertions and reorderings, which are very common types of corrections?

All the best, --stolfi

(03-12-2025, 11:40 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Er, are there any "universal truths" about the VMS?

It is real. It has been around for at least a century. It has naked ladies. The collective effort put into attempts of understanding it likely far outweighs the effort put into creating it.

(03-12-2025, 11:40 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, so you are opening up to the idea that the Author my have obtained the contents somewhere else in the world.  Good... 

One of my authors is stuck in prison and needless to say is quite envious of your authors traveling the world.

(03-12-2025, 11:40 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It does make sense that a traveler would write his travel notes on vellum with iron-gall ink to protect them from water damage.  However, travelers had other means to do that, such as hermetic recipients.

This is a so-called non-sequitur, the fact that there are other methods doesn't mean vellum is not a viable alternative. Also, ship scribes may still have a luxury of their own cabin where they can store their watertight containers and write on a proper desk, etc. The traveling author is a real adventurer, crossing deserts, mountains and rivers on a trusty horse or on foot and has to write the manuscript in places that offer no protection from the elements whatsoever.

(03-12-2025, 11:40 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the VMS does not look at all like the notes that a traveler would write down during his trip.  Such notes would have no decoration, and would use the vellum more fully, with narrower margins and no big blank spaces.  The Pharma section could be such a draft, perhaps.  Not the others...

These are not travel notes, it's a proper book designed and drafted while traveling. Maybe there even were paper notes for quick drafting and sketching, but these were temporary, because they couldn't survive the harsh conditions of the journey. The idea was to make it as close to the final version as possible while traveling and then give it to the scribes. There was also a charm on the last page, that should have protected the draft against nasty retracers, but it got damaged first and then was rendered ineffective by the very first attempt to retrace it. Alas.

(03-12-2025, 11:40 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But, if it was a draft, why not just cross out that part?

Because it's in a cipher and it is much easier to crack a cipher if you can clearly see one word being crossed out and replaced by another. Good cipher would even encipher the mistakes in the cipher.

(03-12-2025, 11:40 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And how would he disguise insertions and reorderings, which are very common types of corrections?

For only 0.5 Coynich I can make up a plausible way of doing this too. Payment upfront. 

To the main question, and I shall adopt a "defensive curl" here.. 
Obviously not. 

If it did you would have to somehow answer, 

1. Why did you do paint reminders/instructions?
   
2. Why did you ignore them? - Your own instructions. 
   

I think the crystal maze experts may find some answers, but they will not be more likely than "you didn't.".
I also think this casts some serious doubt on scribe = artist (edit, I should say "painter") too, for pages involved.

If we decide to say well.. maybe the painting was way later. Why do paint instructions then?
Maybe the paint instructions were later? - Why ignore them then? 

The only options for me are (that do not need "..but with extra steps"); 

1. Painter didn't really care much for your instructions
   
2. Scribe accidently copied some instructions from things they were copying from
   

All avenues point to more than one guy, and not "brain to vellum". It had planning, and planning that some people ignored.

I am wondering why up to seven people made an extensive manuscript
and did not produce additional scripts using the same method.
For me it seems to be a strange thing to develop a special language or code for only one piece.

Sometimes it looks, for me, more familiar when mirrored.

But this are ideas of a very newbie.

(23-01-2026, 10:07 PM)wojnitsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am wondering why up to seven people made an extensive manuscript and did not produce additional scripts using the same method. For me it seems to be a strange thing to develop a special language or code for only one piece.

There may have been multiple Scribes copying the thing to vellum.  But we have no reason to think that there more than one Author -- the person who devised the script, choose the contents, composed the text, recruited the Scribes, and got the book from them.  It is quite possible that he was also the single person who could read the book...

Over the last 600 years thousands -- if not millions -- of books have been destroyed by all sorts of disasters, burned for all sorts of reasons, lost, or just left to rot away.  

By the 1400s most writing in Europe was on paper, as opposed to vellum (calf or lamb skin), because it was cheaper.  Just for that reason, if there was other writing in Voynichese besides the VMS, it was more likely to be on paper.  But paper, like wood, will be literally eaten by mold in a matter of months, unless it is kept dry all the time.   

Paper was also great for kindling fires, packing bullets into guns, wrapping fish, etc.  Now, in an epoch without newspapers and paper towels, where would the kitchen maids, soldiers, and fishmongers get their paper from?

Thus only a very small fraction of the books that existed in the 1400s still exists today. The fraction is even smaller for short documents, booklets, letters.  And it is smaller still for books and documents without illustrations, or which people did not know were important -- for instance, because they could not read them. 

So, even if there were hundreds of documents and books in Voynichese in the 1400s, it would not be strange if the VMS was the only one which survived.

And only a fraction of the books and documents that did survive has been looked into.  Thousands of books have been sitting unopened for the last hundred years on shelves, closets, and trunks.  So maybe there are more document in Voynichese.  Maybe even a dictionary and grammar...

All the best, --stolfi

I find this very hard to believe. If there had been countless VM-style documents, they would have been mentioned somewhere. Even if the originals did not survive, some comment about them in other literature would - as with many works of antiquity now lost. We can therefore safely deduct that VM-style documents were never common or part of public knowledge.

I have laid out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. why I believe the VM was a failure. In so far as something like this was never attempted before or after. At least not to the degree that it became a widespread technique. We can therefore also deduct that the VM neither is an efficient cipher system, nor a practical transliteration of a foreign language. Whatever the reason for its creation was, I do believe it was highly personal. From the amount of work and detail, I am certain it was important and made sense for one or a small group of individuals, but not necessarily beyond that.

I have no idea if the VM was written straight to vellum but the peculiarities of the text with line and paragraph of a function make me believe there was a draft. It's not random babble the author came up with on the fly. Even if it does not have meaning, it must have been constructed by some algorithm. And the writing is too fluid for frequent pauses.

(24-01-2026, 01:30 AM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And the writing is too fluid for frequent pauses

I see evidence of frequent pauses and hesitation: the scribes didn't know where the spaces should be any more than we do. The baseline is not only wobbly it deviates wildly from the horizontal every few glyphs. Crazy spaces and baseline jumps would not happen if the scribes were only copying a text.

Personally I am pretty convinced that the text had some draft. I won't tell you if it was on paper or wax tablet or something else but there should be some.

There are two possibilities -the text is meaningful or the text is gibberish. Let's look at both of them:

1) Meaningful text
If the text is meaningful then it was written in some cipher or custom script. If it is a custom script then it may represent some exotic language as Jorge says because we may say with big probability that it doesn't work with any European language.
For me  it is safe to assume that the scribes were not fluent with Voynichese and hadn't written a lot of texts in it before. Writing in cypher or uknown language requires a lot of attention and you usually make many errors. So they just needed a draft

2) Gibberish
There are actually different kinds of gibberish. To make it simple lets say there is random gibberish and structured gibberish. If Voynichese is gibberish then it is structured gibberish and not random gibberish.
Random gibberish appears for example during glossolalia. When people are doing it spontaneously ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ) then their talking are just loose words, they don't make patterns.
Writing gibberish without any preparation would give the same effect as glossolalia - stream of words not having any structure, most of them unique and not following Zipf law.
And Voynichese is systematic. If it is meaningless then it was created with some system (allowing some improvisation however). For me it would need a draft.

(24-01-2026, 01:30 AM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If there had been countless VM-style documents

I did not mean "countless", but the Author probably had half a dozen or more notebooks, drafts, appendices in the same script.  Or even another book or two like the VMS.  Its would be strange if they did survive.  The survival of the VMS was a fluke.

Quote:they would have been mentioned somewhere. Even if the originals did not survive, some comment about them in other literature would - as with many works of antiquity now lost. We can therefore safely deduct that VM-style documents were never common or part of public knowledge.

The "comments about other books" we read in ancient books usually were about other important books that readers would know or care about.   In that I agree with you: I am confident that very few people, besides the Author, could read Voynichese.  Perhaps no one.  

All the best, --stolfi

(24-01-2026, 01:30 AM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have no idea if the VM was written straight to vellum but the peculiarities of the text with line and paragraph of a function make me believe there was a draft.

(24-01-2026, 01:51 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Personally I am pretty convinced that the text had some draft. I won't tell you if it was on paper or wax tablet or something else but there should be some.

I am pretty sure that there was a draft, and it was on paper.  Vellum was hard to erase and too expensive to discard if one made a big mistake, like skipping a paragraph and noticing only two pages after.  If it was on vellum, one would have to discard a whole bifolio.  In a draft, one could scribble "Insert the parag *** here" and write the "***" text on the next page.  One could cross out words, insert words, overwrite, etc.  One could tear off half a page and throw it away...

Writing straight to vellum would be like typing a report on a keyboard connected directly to the laser printer...

All the best, --stolfi

PS. Reminded me of this academic joke.  Told by Math professors, of course:

Three Deans are waiting for the University budget meeting to start.  The Dean of the Physics Department complains:

"These budget meetings are always a big stress for me.  Every little project that our researchers come up with needs new equipment that costs half a million of more. The electricity bill alone eats up all our regular allowance..."

"Well, that at least is a problem we don't have in my Department," says the Dean of Maths.  "The only equipment our researchers need is paper, pencils, erasers, and dustbins."

"Same for us," says the Dean of Philosophy.  "Except that ours do not need erasers or dustbins."