The Voynich Ninja

I am not proposing a translation. Instead, I would like to discuss a possible framework for interpreting the relationship between the illustrations and the text.


I've been studying the Voynich Manuscript and a possible interpretation came to mind.
What if the manuscript was created by a physician, herbalist, or early medical practitioner who was not writing continuous prose, but rather recording recipes, treatments, ingredients, quantities, and procedures in a structured system?
In the herbal section, the plants may not represent actual botanical species. Instead, they could represent ingredients used in remedies, medicines, ointments, or preparations intended to treat specific conditions. The unusual composite plants could therefore be visual summaries of the ingredients involved in a treatment rather than illustrations of real plants.
Under this hypothesis, the accompanying text would not necessarily be normal language. It could function more like a catalog or database entry, recording information such as:

• the condition being treated,
  
• ingredients used,
  
• quantities or proportions,
  
• preparation methods,
  
• application instructions,
  
• expected effects.
  

One observation that led me to this idea is the frequent occurrence of similar word families throughout the manuscript. Rather than representing different words in a spoken language, they might represent categories, modifiers, quantities, or variations of the same ingredient or procedure.
The later sections of the manuscript may then describe processes rather than objects. The famous pages with women, pipes, and flowing liquids could represent bodily systems, medical conditions, treatments, or physiological processes. The diagrams may illustrate how a condition develops and how a remedy affects the body.
I also wonder whether the colors themselves carry information. For example, green could indicate a problematic condition, imbalance, or disease state, while blue could represent treatment, transformation, recovery, or a medicinal substance. This is only speculation, but the consistent use of color throughout different sections of the manuscript makes me curious whether it serves a functional purpose rather than being purely decorative.
In this interpretation, the manuscript would not be a conventional book meant to be read from beginning to end. Instead, it would be a structured medical reference system—a physician's private catalog of knowledge, treatments, classifications, and observations.
I am not claiming that this explains the manuscript, but I would be interested to know whether anyone has explored a similar hypothesis, especially regarding the relationship between the illustrations, recurring word families, and possible medical categorization.

Hi,

Yes, this has been proposed and investigated. For example, in 1637 Georgius Barschius wrote to Athanasius Kircher:

"From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls."

Even if some people believe that Barschius was referring to some other codex, the idea that the manuscript is medicinal and is a reference book has been around since the manuscript resurfaced in the XX century, I think.

One of the things that prompted this was the word family daiin / odaiin / ydaiin / sodaiin / qodaiin. These forms cluster on the same pages and appear to share a root with varying prefixes. In a natural language this might indicate grammatical inflection. But in a catalog structure it could equally indicate modifiers applied to the same base item — for example:
daiin → ingredient · base form
odaiin → ingredient · modified (dried? crushed?)
ydaiin → ingredient · variant state
sodaiin → ingredient · raw form
qodaiin → ingredient · third form

This mirrors how a medieval pharmacological record might distinguish between the same substance in different states of preparation.
hypothetical field structure — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. paragraph 1
If I assign functional roles based on position and frequency, the first paragraph of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might read as follows. Color indicates hypothetical role: ■ category/diagnosis, ■ ingredient, ■ operation/process, ■ application/result.
torshor → category identifier (condition or purpose)
qokedy → primary ingredient · root type
daiin → main component
chol → operation (boil / heat?)
chedy → medium (water?)
odaiin → secondary ingredient · leaf
qodaiin → third ingredient · fruit/pod
qokchol → preparation step (steep / infuse?)
okchor → application method (bath?)
dar / dy → unknown function

The question marks and unknowns are intentional. If every word fit neatly, the model would be suspicious. The residue is honest.
what this suggests structurally
The resulting entry reads roughly as: condition → primary ingredient → secondary ingredients → preparation method → medium → application. This field order is identical to the structure of medieval pharmacological texts such as Dioscorides or Hildegard's Physica, and to modern drug catalog entries. The consistency of field position across lines — longer unique words at the start, high-frequency words in the middle, shorter words at the end — is exactly what researchers have already observed statistically in the Voynich text. What I am adding is the suggestion that this positional behavior maps onto a recognizable record schema.

I let your first post through because I didn't see enough to convince me it had been written by an AI. 

Now this is looking like AI slop which is banned. 

Locking the topic and moving to The Slop Bucket