The Voynich Ninja

(06-07-2026, 11:49 AM)Grove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Labelese could lack vowels if they are primarily numerical in nature.

I'm not even sure the vowel space theory or whatever it's called explains how the labels are made and decoded. For what I see labels mostly appear very similar to the running text, there is only some statistical difference in what combinations occur more in labels and in the text. So, if labels are numerical, does this make a large portion of the text numerical too?

(06-07-2026, 11:15 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-07-2026, 08:57 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, I think that so far no one has come up with the idea of viewing the spaces as part of the vowels, as apparent as that may be.

I'm absolutely sure many people have considered this before. It's been over 100 years of active research. However, this hypothesis runs into many problems, that's probably why it never got traction. For example, how does this approach explain the labels? Labels are overwhelmingly consist of a single word, labels with spaces are a minority. Are you suggesting there are no vowels in labels?

Yeah, I overlooked that. Labels are evidence against.

(06-07-2026, 12:13 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(06-07-2026, 11:49 AM)Grove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Labelese could lack vowels if they are primarily numerical in nature.

I'm not even sure the vowel space theory or whatever it's called explains how the labels are made and decoded. For what I see labels mostly appear very similar to the running text, there is only some statistical difference in what combinations occur more in labels and in the text. So, if labels are numerical, does this make a large portion of the text numerical too?

Not necessarily. Some glyph pairs could match to a letter, a number, or a syllable.

(06-07-2026, 02:02 PM)Grove Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Not necessarily. Some glyph pairs could match to a letter, a number, or a syllable.

There are lots of labels that appear verbatim in the text as separate words. If we take the space vowels theory and numeric labels hypothesis, this would mean that for a lot of numbers expressed in Labelese we can replace both the prefix and the suffix with some vowels, since in the running text word boundaries become vowels, and not just "some vowels", but vowel combinations corresponding to the original number prefix and suffix, and end up with some meaningful combination of symbols? I mean this is not totally impossible, but looks very strange to me.

(06-07-2026, 11:15 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm absolutely sure many people have considered this before. It's been over 100 years of active research. However, this hypothesis runs into many problems, that's probably why it never got traction.

I'd be really happy to find a source here, if anyone has tried this before! Above all, defining the bigrams around the blank spaces as vowel ciphers!

(06-07-2026, 11:15 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For example, how does this approach explain the labels? Labels are overwhelmingly consist of a single word, labels with spaces are a minority. Are you suggesting there are no vowels in labels?

That’s exactly what I wrote earlier: Labels are consonants without vowels, which is why they’re so surprisingly short.

And, by the way, that was a known form of cipher in the Middle Ages:
One example of this is Robert Bacon’s thirteenth-century "Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and of Nature and on the Nullity of Magic". The Epistle contains seven secret methods of communication, such as words that omit vowels, hybrid languages (in which words might alternate between Latin and Greek, for example),shorthand and artificial languages, invented languages and alphabets, figurative language, geometric characters, and magic spells."
(Source: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

In addition, medieval scribes omitted vowels for practical reasons as well—for example, in abbreviations, sigla, nomina sacra, etc...

So please, it really isn’t that far-fetched.  (Mainly because they're labels, and that gives you, so to speak, two sources for deciphering them.)

(06-07-2026, 03:01 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That’s exactly what I wrote earlier: Labels are consonants without vowels, which is why they’re so surprisingly short.

So, when a label appears verbatim as a separate word in the text (and many if not most of them do), how does this work? Initial/final consonants are replaced with vowels? Also, if labels are words without vowels, why is the label length distribution so similar to the word length distribution? Citing Stolfi's work, the word type length distribution of labels and space separated text words is practically the same:

[attachment=16368]

Which makes it very unlikely that words in the text and labels are produced in radically different ways, as you suggest.

I don't get it—it's not really that different? Without the vowels, all the other words are just consonant clusters. It's very similar to that.

And of course, the transcribed glyphs of the VMS aren't necessarily vowels, but are simply characters—without any specific meaning—at first.

???

(06-07-2026, 06:08 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't get it—it's not really that different? Without the vowels, all the other words are just consonant clusters. It's very similar to that.

I don't think this would work as you describe. If you simply remove vowels from words, you'll get a lot of consonant clusters that won't appear in a running text. And certainly the length distribution of these clusters won't match the distribution of consonant clusters in a running text.

If you take a label like oty and assume it’s consonants only, then how do you know, when oty as a word in running text is followed by qo that you don’t treat it as a vowel and maintain oty as the consonants only version from labels?

@ all

Let's keep it simple: I don't know.

I've just been looking into labels a bit and realized I need to dig deeper into this. For example, labels are apparently at least 1 glyph longer than normal text—I thought they were shorter, and of course there are far fewer short tokens. But to check this more closely, I’d have to look at the individual pages, identify differences, categorize them, figure out what they’re labeling, etc., etc.

I then asked myself whether it makes sense to delve deeper into the labels, and whether that would bring me any closer to a solution.  In fact, the answer is: No.

Why? The labels have too little “content” to provide any kind of help in solving the problem. Trying to guess exactly what they refer to hasn’t gotten us very far over the past 100 years. This approach doesn’t seem to work. They also contain too little information to be meaningful as frequencies.

So it actually makes more sense to continue focusing on areas where there’s a greater chance of finding telltale patterns.

It’s not without reason that cryptology has, in most cases, focused on larger amounts of text. Unless, of course, a short line served as a crib, but as I said, that hasn’t worked in the VMS for at least 100 years.

This might come across as an excuse, but it isn’t. It’s simply logical.

So, to sum up: For now, I’m retracting my claim that these are just consonants. Not because it has to be wrong, but because I simply don’t know.

And I ask for your understanding that I won’t be looking into this any further, because from my perspective, it won’t get me anywhere.

sorry...

(PS. One thing else I noticed upon closer inspection: The labels in the recipe section are 100 percent qo-free (unless I missed something). That's suspicious, to say the least )