The Voynich Ninja

Quote:PS. Since your user name is just "Rafal" and you are here in the Voynich playpen, I always assumed that you were Rafal Prinke, which I knew from the old Voynich mailing list days.  But now I see you are not, correct?

Yes, I am another Rafal  
I am not famous in old ciphers circles in any way and relatively a newcomer.

Just like Rafal Prinke I come from Poland but that's all. I know his works but he is too esotheric for me and seems to believe in it and take this stuff really seriously.

I have just discovered that to download my papers you must be logged to Academia first.
If that's a problem I make another provisionary download. I will deal with it properly later.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-01-2026, 01:56 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[... important descriptions skipped ...]

The positional preferences together with the vertical effects and other line first word anomalies in particular show that the text cannot be a continuous narrative where words just wrap to the next line at every line break. This and all the other anomalies are going to be difficult for any natural language / shorthand / cypher hypothesist to explain.

I agree with these issues, and find them hard to explain - much harder than the low entropy issue.

If there is a real plain text behind this, some encoding method that left a degree of freedom to the encoder might go some way towards explaining it.

(14-01-2026, 12:47 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree with [positional preferences together with the vertical effects and other line first word anomalies], and find them hard to explain - much harder than the low entropy issue.

But there is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for the "positional preferences" and "line first word anomalies" (that in fact argues against random gibberish).  

Has anyone bothered to check whether it accounts for all those claimed anomalies?  There is a rather easy test outlined in that post...

All the best, --stolfi

(14-01-2026, 12:47 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-01-2026, 01:56 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[... important descriptions skipped ...]

The positional preferences together with the vertical effects and other line first word anomalies in particular show that the text cannot be a continuous narrative where words just wrap to the next line at every line break. This and all the other anomalies are going to be difficult for any natural language / shorthand / cypher hypothesist to explain.

I agree with these issues, and find them hard to explain - much harder than the low entropy issue.

If there is a real plain text behind this, some encoding method that left a degree of freedom to the encoder might go some way towards explaining it.

I completely agree with Rene. To add something here, it would be more likely to see the VMS with these properties if the underlying method of text generation made it more likely for these properties to arise. If the VMS is enciphered meaningful text, for instance, then the mechanism of the underlying cipher should be capable of reliably generating the patterns we see. (The Naibbe cipher currently fails to reliably generate long-range correlations and line-position effects, for instance, so cannot be the exact text generation method.) The same is true for any other text generation proposal.

If the ends of lines wrapped to the starts in a purposefully nonsensical way to fill up space / throw people off, that would explain it and be reproduceable to come degree.
For example if I said "this is my amazing unbreakable cipher! a=aaa b=bbb c=ccc..." then wrote,

fiaaa bbb ccc bbb ccc aab
bca bbb aaa ccc bbb ccbmc
adcc bbb aaa ccc      abagb

We would know abcbcbacbbac is the actual text.

I have just read several books on the ciphers of the period between the 13th and 16th centuries.

Yes, it was common practice in 15th century encryption to write zero Chiffren/words at the beginning and the end, and simply repeat words in the text to confuse the reader. Simply repeating letters was also common. If you look at the VMS text in this regard it makes much sense here. 

For example: Since most paragraphs begin with a gallows, that alone would be a good indication of zero words. 
Has this not been discussed here yet?

(14-01-2026, 08:17 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.to write zero Chiffren/words at the beginning and the end

The writing of the manuscript is so odd that I cannot see that the manuscript will appear any more meaningful if the first and last words were ignored. Neither for us would it look different nor for anyone in the 15th Century.

In the GC transliteration there are 24577 paragraph words in the language B pages and 2390 lines. If each first word and each last word was a trick word to confuse then they would form 19% of the total. For the language A pages it would be higher, 26%.

If indeed it is meaningful then the amount of effort involved in encrypting and writing the text must have been so great that no writer would have welcomed having to add the meaningless and pointless words.

(14-01-2026, 02:45 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If indeed it is meaningful then the amount of effort involved in encrypting and writing the text must have been so great that no writer would have welcomed having to add the meaningless and pointless words.

Perhaps the code is much simpler than everyone thinks...  and yet unsolvable for most people.

Furthermore, not every word had to have been a zero word at the beginning, only those that start with Gallows and have no intrinsic meaning.

If we assume that the first words are nulls then it solves one problem out of many ones but doesn't help with the rest of them at all.

And if we assume gibberish, the expanation could be really simple:

Leader: Hey man, come over here!
Scribe: Yes boss?
Leader: Could you make the initial letters pretty, colourful and big ones, like in all these posh manuscripts?


Scribe: But Meister, that wasn't the deal. I ain't paid for that. And you know I draw badly, I can only write. And we have no time.
Leader: Okay, so maybe just use these high letters when you start a section. It wil be our poor man's initials
Scribe: Yeah, I guess we can do it


I feel it may be really something like that.

There is an inscription in the manuscript (f116v) which has everything to do with a genuine belief in the power of words (even nonsensical ones) and nothing with hoaxing.