The Voynich Ninja

(04-07-2026, 04:07 AM)agalakhov Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, I personally have another variant of this theory.

The manuscript is a copy. The Scribe was not hired, he was working for himself copying some manuscript not known to us. The original was in a language barely known to the Scribe, so the Scribe had to invent his own way to write down and even to read the glyphs.

Just an experiment: what would happen if a person who only knows Latin would try to copy a text in Greek or, even worse, Arabic without understanding it at all, especially if it is not a very clear writing? Consider the person to be really overconfident about their writing skills. It could even be that someone has mistaken right-to-left script as left-to-right and wrote a "copy" of it in such a way. I can easily imagine a person who owns some book that he can't read but for some reason believes that this book is of extreme value and thus must be copied at all costs.

This would explain many features of the Voynich manuscript including existence of some grammatical structure (the original had it and it wasn't completely destroyed even during such a "copying"), low entropy (the copier has mistaken different words for the same one), prevalence of certain glyphs in certain positions (that's how the copier has read them), slightly different language of two different scribes (they included their personality in their copies) and so on.

Unfortunately, such a theory is very hard both to prove and to disprove. The only real proof would be finding the original, but even if it existed, it is very unlikely to exist today. So I don't believe my theory is of any use, I just keep in mind that what we're trying to read is not necessarily correctly written.

According to this logic, a very inept person took over the rewriting of this ancient book, because, apparently, he made a mistake with all the drawings.

(04-07-2026, 04:07 AM)agalakhov Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The manuscript is a copy.

With that I agree.  The alternative is the "Brain to Vellum" theory -- that whoever composed the text wrote his message directly on the physical artifact kept at Beinecke.   But a copy of what?

Quote:The Scribe was not hired, he was working for himself

That is possible.  People often borrowed books that they wanted and copied them themselves.

Quote:The original was in a language barely known to the Scribe

I agree with that too.  So far, while our scenarios are different, they lead to the same situation.

Quote:I can easily imagine a person who owns some book that he can't read but for some reason believes that this book is of extreme value and thus must be copied at all costs.

Yes, that happened many times.  John Dee was obsessed with a Book of Sogya that contained nothing but some large grid tables filled with letters in mysterious patterns.  AFAIK no one knows how he got it, but if he saw it in someone else's library and the owner did not want to sell it, he surely would have borrowed it and had it copied.

I did that myself twice.  Once I copied by hand half a page of a biography of Jacobus in Latin (which I cannot read), in a library that did not allow xeroxing or photographing.  

And over the last year I digitally transcribed by hand 20 pages of a mysterious manuscript of unknown contents, written in a unique indecipherable script, which you may have heard about...

Quote:so the Scribe had to invent his own way to write down and even to read the glyphs.

This I find questionable.  If the text was written with isolated characters -- like Hebrew, Armenian, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc. -- the person would have to learn to distinguish the various glyphs of that alphabet anyway. Then he should just copy those characters as they were.  Inventing a different original alphabet would not help.  It would only slow down the copying, and the result would not be any easier to read.

And if the script was cursive, like Arabic, I don't see how he could have even started to do that.

Therefore, I agree that then VMS was copied by a Scribe who could not read it.  But he must have copied from a text in the same script.  

Quote:It could even be that someone has mistaken right-to-left script as left-to-right and wrote a "copy" of it in such a way.

I agree that it is possible.  The shape of the paragraphs and other details strongly indicate that the Scribe wrote it from left to right.  But he could have copied from an original written right to left, reading it left to right.  Maybe the line breaks are his own, or maybe he reproduced the original breaks too.

That is, the original may have been

  word06 word05 word04 word03 word02 word01 
  word12 word11 word10 word09 word08 word07
                              word14 word13

written right-to-left, and our Scribe may have copied left-to-right as

  word06 word05 word04 word03 word02 word01
  word12 word11 word10 word09 word08 word07
  word14 word13

or even as 

  word06 word05 word04 word03 
  word02 word01 word12 word11 
  word10 word09 word08 word07
  word14 word13

Either possibility would have embarrassing consequences for anyone who has been analyzing correlations across word and line breaks...

Quote:Unfortunately, such a theory is very hard both to prove and to disprove.

I don't believe this last part (right-to-left original) is true.  But, if it were, one might find evidence of it, even without deciphering the text.  Just as we find evidence that the Scribe wrote left-to-right, and did not understand the text, and wrote Aries in the Zodiac before Pisces, and both before the Bio section...

All the best, --stolfi

(04-07-2026, 12:44 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This I find questionable.  If the text was written with isolated characters -- like Hebrew, Armenian, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc. -- the person would have to learn to distinguish the various glyphs of that alphabet anyway. Then he should just copy those characters as they were.

Depending on how the original as written, this is not always true. Horizontal lines could be barely visible or there could be extra connecting lines between the glyphs. The spaces could be uniform in within and between glyphs.

Here, "u", "n" and "ii" are very similar. There are connection lines between some glyphs so one could mistake i.e. "un" for "i□i" and thus invent a glyph "□" (square "o") that did not exist in the original.

There is well-known example of modern Cyrillic handwriting:

So, for the question "in a language that is normally written with isolated characters, are these characters always distinguishable for a person not knowing the language?" - the answer is definitely "no" for both modern and medieval writing.

The unusual "-aiin" - "aiiin" pattern everywhere could be simply explained if "ii" and "iii" are indeed parts of one glyph. Here in other thread there was a suggestion that this could be something like "ων". Here one can probably prove that the Scribe indeed has meant "iii" as three glyphs. But what if the Scribe himself did not know the difference?

(04-07-2026, 03:26 PM)agalakhov Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-07-2026, 12:44 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This I find questionable.  If the text was written with isolated characters -- like Hebrew, Armenian, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc. -- the person would have to learn to distinguish the various glyphs of that alphabet anyway. Then he should just copy those characters as they were.

Depending on how the original as written, this is not always true. Horizontal lines could be barely visible or there could be extra connecting lines between the glyphs. The spaces could be uniform in within and between glyphs.

Here, "u", "n" and "ii" are very similar. There are connection lines between some glyphs so one could mistake i.e. "un" for "i□i" and thus invent a glyph "□" (square "o") that did not exist in the original.

There is well-known example of modern Cyrillic handwriting:

So, for the question "in a language that is normally written with isolated characters, are these characters always distinguishable for a person not knowing the language?" - the answer is definitely "no" for both modern and medieval writing.

The unusual "-aiin" - "aiiin" pattern everywhere could be simply explained if "ii" and "iii" are indeed parts of one glyph. Here in other thread there was a suggestion that this could be something like "ων". Here one can probably prove that the Scribe indeed has meant "iii" as three glyphs. But what if the Scribe himself did not know the difference?

About szynszyla... The example you gave is far from szynszyla (I speak as a person for whom Russian is his native language). The Cyrillic н is written without loops, so it should have been distinguishable. The example illustrates not a feature of the font, but a feature of the handwriting.
But it leads to the idea that I described in the post itself: the scribe could adapt the original alphabet to suit his convenience, so that at least it would be convenient to write with a pen, but in the process he could copy some letters incorrectly.

(04-07-2026, 04:07 AM)agalakhov Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
The original was in a language barely known to the Scribe, so the Scribe had to invent his own way to write down and even to read the glyphs.
Just an experiment: what would happen if a person who only knows Latin would try to copy a text in Greek or, even worse, Arabic without understanding it at all
[..]

This variant of a theory is under some doubts:

- "1 scribe"? It is more likely that there were several, maybe 3-5 scribes

- most VMS writings look very fluent, nearly elegant. 
Even though Voynichese is not cursive / kurrent. 
If somebody tries to copy unknown or barely known characters, he may "read" them as "the strange 9", "the tailed m" etc. -- but is he enabled then to write them down as accurately and unshakened exactly as we see them? 
No. At least not with many trials and corrections. 
And there were several people doing it.

- different handwritings of VMS appear between big-rounded-nearly-feminine and small-harsh-tight -- especially the smaller-sized writing style is very firm, straight and evenly: was this really a sloppy somehow-copying scribe ?

- if you want to live an experience, fetch some text in an (for you) uncommon alphabet, maybe arabic, some Indian thing or just Vietnamese, which is Latin alphabet with weird add-ons; 
copy it by hand, and you will have a result that looks far away from being fluent. 
Each sign will be a struggle and exactly will look so at the end.

- you may get out of line (even more when there are not any lines on your 'paper') when you are writing too fast; 
this will not-so-easy happen while you are fighting with single, unknown letters you need three looks for to be sure what to do

I don't think a small group of scribes copied some unknown, badly readable script with a lot of creative shortcuts and a lets-get-ready attitude here;
I think these scribes knew exactly what they do, 
were "at home" within the source language and well educated/trained in this character set.

This all is just throwing up one old question again (we should make a poll about it):
"where the scribe(s) and draftsman/-men just complete idiots, or not?"

When VMS turns out (again) to be unexplainable, this is the last refugee for many theorists:
to assume that the VMS authors made massive, bizarre and numerous mistakes...

Another question is: why the VMS is singular? Whatever it was, either the group of people created it was really small, or the work was highly illegal so that all other copies have been destroyed. The latter also speaks for a very small group of people, or else we would have enough information for correct attribution. And a larger group would probably use the same script for less vulnerable objects like some engravings. In order to have a large group of scribes, there has be a teacher, they have to practice, they would leave some trail.

(04-07-2026, 09:37 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."1 scribe"? It is more likely that there were several

Well, experts disagree on that point.  And anyway I believe there is an important fact that invalidated their analyses.

Quote:most VMS writings look very fluent, nearly elegant.

Well again, I beg to differ.  Character shapes, size, spacing are all extremely irregular.  Not from page to page, but from word to word on the same line.  Not at all like the handwriting of those professional scribes who worked at the "book factories" of the time.

Quote:If somebody tries to copy unknown or barely known characters, he may "read" them as "the strange 9", "the tailed m" etc. -- but is he enabled then to write them down as accurately and unshakened exactly as we see them? ... Each sign will be a struggle

I don't believe in the theory of a copyist who worked from a "cold start".  But, in its defense, consider what we did over the last 40 years.  We looked at this completely original and unknown script for a while, decided what was the alphabet, and then proceeded to copy transcribe it (digitally) assuming that alphabet.  For each glyph we had to decide whether it was an r or an s, an a or a y, two words or one, a glyph or a dirt smudge... Now and then we ran into a "weirdo" -- a glyph that was too unlike any of our canonical shapes; then we choose a special code for it, and forged on.   It was indeed slow and tiring work -- but we did copy the whole book.  Multiple times.

Quote:I think these scribes ...were "at home" within the source language and well educated/trained in this character set.

Agree with the second part, but it does not imply the first part.  People who transcribe Etruscan or Linear A have a good knowledge of the alphabet, but no idea of the language.  At one point I had memorized the Phaistos Disk alphabet myself...

I believe that the Scribe (or "each" Scribe, if you will) was recruited by the Author himself and trained by him on the alphabet.  The Scribe had to practice copying it until the Author was satisfied with the result.  But that probably happened in Europe, and the Scribe was some local guy who was not a professional book copyist but had some writing experience -- a student, a small-town notary, lawyer, or accountant, a letter-writer, ...  There was no need to teach him the language (or the encryption, or the gibberish-generation algorithm)...

Quote:When VMS turns out (again) to be unexplainable, this is the last refugee for many theorists: to assume that the VMS authors made massive, bizarre and numerous mistakes...

I believe that indeed the transcriptions that we use contain a large number of errors, due to various causes (including  some causes which most Voynicheers refuse to recognize).  Maybe as many as one error every 10 words or more.  And most of the apparent errors are not bizarre, but can be explained by similarity of shapes and other likely excuses.

Yet, a high rate of errors would not make the solution impossible. It would only frustrate some simplistic approaches, and would require a lot more work to find (and prove correct) than a typical cryptographic puzzle would. 

All the best, --stolfi

(04-07-2026, 11:22 PM)agalakhov Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Another question is: why the VMS is singular?

I have seen estimates that only 10% of the manuscript books that existed at the time have survived to this day.  The rate must be lower for paper books, and for ugly or boring notebooks, loose sheets, etc.

Thus it is quite possible that there were another ~10 books in Voynichese on vellum, and/or  ~30 on paper; and the one at Beinecke is just the only one that survived.

All the best, --stolfi

I would like to reiterate the essence of this thread and my thesis in particular. There is a possibility that the VMS in its familiar form is not a copy of the original, but rather a "free interpretation" of it. The supposed scribes may have adapted the writing system to their own needs, making it easier to write, which could have led to a loss of meaning for the entire manuscript or made it more difficult to understand (it is possible that one of the scribes may have thought that they "understood something" in Voynichese, leading to some self-interpretations). I find this more likely than a mass of errors from clumsy scribes. It makes more sense to have an error in their interpretation than an error in their writing. 
I don't believe in the "scribe's mistake", but beyond assumptions, it's very satisfying food for thought...