The Voynich Ninja

(24-01-2026, 01:51 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are two possibilities -the text is meaningful or the text is gibberish. Let's look at both of them:

1) Meaningful text
... 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.

I agree.  We can see that they made certain mistakes that they would not have made if they understood the text.  Like mistaking a paragraph that jumps over a plant for a text in two columns, one on each side of the plant. 

Quote: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).

Agreed!  And that is one of the reasons why I cannot believe any "gibberish" claim.  

I cannot see why the Author would invent a complicated random text generator that could generate the structures we see, and satisfy Zipf's law, and have the right amount of entropy, etc. etc.. 

To fool some stupid Emperor and his cryptographers?  They would not know about Zipf's law etc, and even if they did, they would not expect an encrypted text to have any of those properties.  

To make it look like a natural but unknown language, like Kelley's Enochian?  There were many   methods which would be a lot easier to execute, and would produce text that would look a lot more like language, than a complicated gibberish-generating algorithm...

All the best, --stolfi

One example of a personal and unknown language is with singer Lisa Gerrard.
She often performs with her own words.
And it does not sound gibberish, for me.

But if the VM is not gibberisch and the one and only piece ever done.
How valuable must the content be to invest such effort.

Some examples of Lisa can be found here
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or here with Dead Can Dance [ :-) ]
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(24-01-2026, 07:55 PM)wojnitsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One example of a personal and unknown language is with singer Lisa Gerrard.
She often performs with her own words.
And it does not sound gibberish, for me.

But if the VM is not gibberisch and the one and only piece ever done.
How valuable must the content be to invest such effort.

Some examples of Lisa can be found here
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or here with Dead Can Dance [ :-) ]
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Sigur Ros is another example, they sing in Hopelandic which is a created musical Icelandic language.

In terms of the VMS my understanding is the script is a fully established language, not just personal language, with established links to many other languages “capable of cluster”

(29-05-2026, 12:40 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The 'ignorant scribe' theory is about as old as the concept of Voynich discussion groups. It has some attractive aspects, but mainly to be able to sweep some things we don't understand under the carpet...

I wonder how many Medieval manuscripts on vellum there were (or still exist) that were penned by the authors of their contents themselves?  Rather than by a distinct scribe?

Roger Bacon was a monk, so perhaps he did scribe the final copy of his manuscripts himself. (But there is no surviving manu propria manuscript of his, is there?)

That closing rubric on Bonaventura Dyalogus, which I posted before, seems to be an example of a scribe professionally copying text that he did not understand.  Are there other examples? Possibly examples where the scribe did not even know how to read the text aloud -- like  a scribe copying a Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic text without knowing the sounds of the letters?

All the best, --stolfi

(29-05-2026, 04:31 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Possibly examples where the scribe did not even know how to read the text aloud -- like  a scribe copying a Greek, Hebrew, or Cyrillic text without knowing the sounds of the letters?

These examples could be detected by the scribe substituting letters that look the same, even though the sounds are very different and the mistake creates words that are not pronounceable.  Like the scribe confusing Greek Α with Λ, Γ with Τ, Θ with Ο ... or writing the Σ like Latin E ...

All the best, --stolfi

Novel or at least transformative works were often autographs (which may or may not be lost). But the vast majority of manuscripts were not novel.

But of course the scribe (copyist) would be familiar with the alphabet that he was copying.

(29-05-2026, 06:45 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Novel or at least transformative works were often autographs (which may or may not be lost). But the vast majority of manuscripts were not novel.

Thanks, but my question is about manuscripts on vellum, specifically.

I would think that, by 1430, people normally wrote new stuff on paper.  (On papyrus before that.)  That included letters, notebooks, diaries, ledgers, -- and the draft of novel books.  And there are plenty of examples in libraries, even though paper was fragile and good material for kindling fires.

I would think that vellum was used only for writing that was important and/or meant to last a lifetime of use, including deeds, contracts, decrees, diplomatic and high-level military orders, religious books, chronicles, manuals, and scholarly treatises -- and the final copy of novel books, if the author could afford it.

It was noted earlier, somewhere on this forum, that the price of Gutenberg's Bible printed on vellum was four times that of the same book printed on paper.  Since the labor cost was exactly the same, one must conclude that vellum was at least five times as expensive as paper.

I would further think that the vellum final copy of novel books would usually be done by a hired  scribe rather than by the author himself -- since it would be a slow and tedious task that required good handwriting, firm hand, sharp eyes.

So, the question remains.  Are there surviving instances of Medieval manuscript books on vellum that are known to have been scribed by the author himself? 

All the best, --stolfi

(29-05-2026, 10:56 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would further think that the vellum final copy of novel books would usually be done by a hired  scribe rather than by the author himself -- since it would be a slow and tedious task that required good handwriting, firm hand, sharp eyes.

If the Voynich manuscript is written on scrap vellum/parchment, which has been suggested a few times, it's not clear if the author had any money to hire a scribe. The 5x vellum of a Gutenberg bible may be not a good benchmark for the cost of the Voynich MS vellum, the latter could even be free. Even if the normal practice of producing manuscripts on vellum required hired scribes, I don't think we can conclude that the same was true for the Voynich MS.

These questions are interesting, but would require significant study to answer.

How do we take a representative sample of manuscripts written on paper and parchment from the first half of the 15th century?
How do we define "new stuff"?
How do we (as relative amateurs with only access to digital scans) differentiate between different qualities of parchment?
How do we tell the difference between writing substrate that was low quality to begin with vs artifacts that had the bad luck to become battered and accumulate signs of usage over the centuries?
How do we collect a representative sample of manuscripts written on poor quality parchment?

Without answering these questions and doing the research, all we can really do is speculate.