The Voynich Ninja

(10-04-2026, 08:46 PM)CorwinFr Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Since when are you on this ? What is your best guess ?

2017. Best guess: probably a mix of self-citation with something else that adds constraints.

Hi oshfdk, I have redo eveything you have the clear analysis. Plant names from the herbal section reappear as building blocks inside recipe words in the pharmaceutical section, revealing that VMS words are compounds (preposition + ingredient + grammar), which allowed us to separate the text into a readable skeleton of connectors, terminators, and content words, and to begin identifying ingredients by matching their distribution pattern across folios against medieval pharmaceutical sources.



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(10-04-2026, 10:24 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-04-2026, 08:46 PM)CorwinFr Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Since when are you on this ? What is your best guess ?

2017. Best guess: probably a mix of self-citation with something else that adds constraints.

Hi nablator I woul love your view on this
Herbal plant codes are embedded inside pharma compound words, suggesting a shorthand system where recipes reference their ingredients through reusable root codes. 

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My earlier phonetic decryption contained a methodological bias (Perseus validation too permissive, ingredient correlation was Zipf noise at p=0.92). A corrected V2 is on Zenodo.

I've since taken a completely different approach, bottom-up structural analysis without assuming any encoding. The main finding: herbal plant codes are systematically embedded inside pharmaceutical compound words, linking the two sections structurally.

Are you still using AI LLMs?

(12-04-2026, 11:32 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are you still using AI LLMs?

Hello tavie,

Yes I use Claude Code for the computational work, I'm not really coding myself anymore.

This thread is about my previous paper wich was wrong. The phonetic parser was returning valid Latin words almost every time, giving a false positive feedback loop...

The new work is different, no parser, no phonetic assumption. It's purely structural, more like studying how a pharmacist writes shorthand, the way they write ASA for acetylsalicylic acid or APAP for acetaminophen. Arbitrary codes memorized through daily practice.

From this idea I see each herbal page as possibly one entry in the pharmacist's personal codebook. The first word on the page could be his shorthand for that plant, like ASA is our code for aspirin. Folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. starts with pched, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with pcheod, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with foch, etc.

What's interesting is that these roots seem to reappear embedded inside compound words in the recipe section: o.pched.y could mean something like "with [f26v plant] in...". Same root, different context. As if the herbal section is his reference dictionary and the pharma section uses it.

Now it's not perfect, 92% of herbal folios have a distinct first word but 5 words are shared by 2 or 3 folios. One case makes pharmacological sense tho, Sonchus and Hieracium (both Asteraceae, latex composites) share the same code tshor, wich is what you'd expect if a pharmacist considers them interchangeable. Two other pairs are on adjacent folios. The last two I can't explain.

53% of pharma block-initial words (first word of each starred paragraph, 154 out of 286 blocks across f103r-f116v) contain a herbal root as substring. I might be wrong about what it means but the pattern is in the text, anyone can check it.

Under the hood I parsed the full ZL v3b transcription into a structured dataset where every word is decomposed into its components (root, prefix, suffix, logogram status). This lets me link any hypothesis to the actual text, test alternatives like K&A mappings or other transliteration schemes, and run statistical checks against the 8 medieval corpora I assembled. It's all on GitHub if anyone wants to play with it or break it.

OK for the paragraphs. The ZL transliteration has only well-separated paragraphs, there should be more if stars mean anything but stars don't align well with paragraphs on some pages so their starting line is unclear.

(13-04-2026, 06:58 AM)CorwinFr Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I might be wrong about what it means but the pattern is in the text, anyone can check it.

I need to understand what you mean exactly first.

Quote:53% of pharma block-initial words (first word of each starred paragraph, 154 out of 286 blocks across f103r-f116v) contain a herbal root as substring.

As you haven't published a list of roots I have to guess. How did you extract the roots? Did you remove all o/qo prefixes and edy/dy/y/or/ar/ol/al suffixes or some such rule? Please elaborate.

(13-04-2026, 08:52 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.OK for the paragraphs. The ZL transliteration has only well-separated paragraphs, there should be more if stars mean anything but stars don't align well with paragraphs on some pages so their starting line is unclear.

(13-04-2026, 06:58 AM)CorwinFr Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I might be wrong about what it means but the pattern is in the text, anyone can check it.

I need to understand what you mean exactly first.

Quote:53% of pharma block-initial words (first word of each starred paragraph, 154 out of 286 blocks across f103r-f116v) contain a herbal root as substring.

As you haven't published a list of roots I have to guess. How did you extract the roots? Did you remove all o/qo prefixes and edy/dy/y/or/ar/ol/al suffixes or some such rule? Please elaborate.

Thank you deeply to take into account this. Let me a week I have a hard week ahead I will create a little synthesis hopefully as clear as the Voynich... No i mean crystal clear !

(13-04-2026, 08:52 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I need to understand what you mean exactly first.

Good question, and it made me recheck the claim properly. Short answer: the 53% is an artifact. I'm retracting it.

How it was computed

Take the first word of each herbal folio, strip the longest suffix from a fixed list (ol, or, ar, al, dy, am, etc.), keep roots ≥3 chars. That gives 108 unique roots. Then check if any of those roots appear as substrings inside the 286 pharma block openers. Result: 158/286 = 55%. Original null test against random VMS words gave p=0.002.

Why it's wrong

The null test drew random words from all positions in the VMS. But block-initial words have a very different character distribution: 81% of herbal roots and 87% of pharma openers start with a gallows (p, t, k, f). When I control for this and draw random block-initial words instead:


Herbal roots match fewer pharma openers than random block-initial words. The overlap comes from shared gallows+digraph patterns in block-initial position, not from a herbal-pharma link.

The claim is retracted. README, paper, and GitHub updated: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

The 7 other structural properties and the fingerprint identifications are unaffected, they use separate methods with separate null tests.

I'll be stepping away from Voynich work for a while. Need to stop working on this at 2am. Thanks for pushing on this, it's exactly the kind of scrutiny

(12-04-2026, 10:16 PM)CorwinFr Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi oshfdk, I have redo eveything you have the clear analysis.

The attached PDF seems to contain a list of claims, not the analysis or any supporting evidence. The claims by themselves seem quite arbitrary to me. I'm not saying your approach is wrong, but it would be nice to have at least one piece of specific evidence that supports the claims. What's the strongest argument that supports your hypothesis?