(24-09-2026, 04:26 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (24-09-2026, 02:38 PM)npcompl33t Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am starting to suspect something similar. Do you have a theory on the order the sections would have been written in?
I am quite confident that Zodiac was written before Bio/Balneo, because the Scribe's was visibly learning to draw the nymphs when he started the former.
I also believe that Pharma is earlier than Herbal, because some details of the plants in the latter You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. (However, the Herbal version is often mangled, as if the Scribe did not understand the Pharma sketch. So maybe the Pharma sketches were made by the Author himself, or by a different Scribe.)
But I don't know about the order of Herbal A vs. Herbal B, or between any other pair of sections. Maybe all Pharma copies are in one of the two Herbals?
All the best, --stolfi
Interesting, I've uncovered a few more likely rules and it is looking to me like Pharma represents more of an in-between point between A and B. The link you shared, many of the Herbal examples are explicity Herbal B, which i would hypothesis was actually written after Pharma. And Herbal B, was written after that.
So the order would be Herbal A -> Pharma -> Herbal B
My reasoning for this is I think many A words can be mapped onto B by treating the pharma as a midpoint.
chy, while common in a, mostly vanishes in Pharma, and Pharma seems to inject e before o, but it has not fully adopted the common -edy form in other sections.
For example, see the following graph, where the bars represent frequency. Blue =Herbal A, Orange = Pharma , and Green = Herbal B.
[
attachment=17887]
or another one, for two of the most problematic words, chol and chedy.
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attachment=17888]
Granted I'm making an assumption, but to me it does seem to represent a transition point, less -chy, more e, before the full -edy bonanza that is Herbal B.
I agree with Stolfi.
Here's another chart on this topic; as you can see, the pharmaceutical sector aligns very well with A...
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attachment=17895]
You are making your task difficult.
The scenario I like to imagine is that the language is an invented one and that there was no formal guide or reference for it, and the author did not feel obliged to have to follow any particular standard, and was happy to allow the language to 'develop' in the gaps of time between writings of the different sections. It was not all written in one go and there are no hard rules.
(26-09-2026, 07:16 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the pharmaceutical sector aligns very well with A...
But not completely.
Some time ago I computed page-page correlations of the A pages to try to identify if there were any odd or irregular pages.
My observation was that the language A writing in quires 1 to 7 is slightly different to the language A writing in quires 15 to 19, and that the Herbal A pages in 15 and 17 correlates slightly better with the pharma pages than with the Herbal A pages from the earlier quires.
One consequence of this would be that the Herbal A pages in 15 and 17 are correctly placed and have not been shuffled out of the earlier quires as a result of any rebinding of the manuscript.
(26-09-2026, 09:17 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The scenario I like to imagine is that the language is an invented one and that there was no formal guide or reference for it
There was a method they adhered to. But I can’t explain why they consistently followed this rule.
The weary scribe Quire 13 could simply start writing nonsense like
dpqokyln. In the case of a forgery, it doesn’t matter so much what words are written. It’s enough that this text is simply written.
(26-09-2026, 12:27 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The weary scribe Quire 13 could simply start writing nonsense like dpqokyln
I think you are being unfair about quire 13. The language in quire 13 seems to show less variability than in the rest of the manuscript. I tried earlier [ You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. ] to give some evidence to support this.
And also if you look at the gallow word suffices ( see attached ) you see that quire 13 gallow word endings are more regular than in other sections. 84.7% are formed from the global top 15 suffices.
(26-09-2026, 12:27 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the case of a forgery, it doesn’t matter so much what words are written.
No, it does matter.
In order to create the deception the writer understood that he had to give the manuscript a semblance of genuineness, give it some definite structure. Otherwise unstructured random and nonsense writing would have been quickly dismissed as a fraud. The fact that the manuscript has existed to this day and that we are debating it is proof that the writer succeeded.
But there are clues to the deception. We today can see something of the way it was done. The structure of gallow words is one of the clues. The language clusters are also a clue. They suggest that the writer did not have a firm 'method', but had a free hand to vary and was happy to allow the writing to change and develop.
(26-09-2026, 02:08 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.No, it does matter.
If the author was trying to sell this to someone, then it wasn’t really important to him who would expose it. He needs to fool the buyer (and to do that, it’s enough to make an impression) and get away with the money.
If it’s just important for him to fill the space with text, then he doesn’t necessarily have to always stick to the same rule.
You can find many reasons why he doesn’t have to adhere to any rules. He could take the easier path, couldn’t he?
Moreover, if a medieval person were shown beautifully drawn letters in any order, they would have no reason to think that it was a hoax. Who knows how people communicate in other countries? Who knows what language they speak?
We can speculate all day what the scribe(s) intentions were or how they would've approached creating a hoax. We cannot know for sure.
The fact of the matter is there's no apparent grammar in Voynichese, the prefix-suffixes rules are haphazardly ignored every now and then, and AFAIK it's the only manuscript of its time (that we know of) that would've used such an unusual/anachronistic cipher to encode a whole book. Matching plants and labels have yielded basically nothing in terms of decipherment.
Although it could be a cipher or a conlang, there's kind of enough evidence that points to gibberish as well.
(26-09-2026, 05:20 PM)RadioFM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Although it could be a cipher or a conlang, there's kind of enough evidence that points to gibberish as well.
And there is ample evidence suggesting that this is a highly structured cipher that encodes a language.
But neither can be proven.
, at least not yet.