Yesterday, 12:07 PM
Yesterday, 12:07 PM
Yesterday, 12:24 PM
(Yesterday, 12:07 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
And above all, do not forget that, in theory, this is 15th-century vocabulary.
Absolutely.
I am a firm believer in constantly re-evaluating assumptions.
Do we know for sure that Jacobus de Tepenecz was not able to read the Voynich Manuscript?
Do we assume that everyone who was able to read Latin was also able to read their native language?
I am not an expert on the history of the Czech language so if I get something wrong, please let me know.
I had never even heard of Jan Hus before a year or so ago when I started investigating the history of the Voynich Manuscript. As I understand it, the writing of the Czech language was undergoing a lot of changes around the time that the Voynich Manuscript is generally thought to have been created.
I assume that Jacobus de Tepenecz and those after him, if they did know written Czech, it would have been the post-Jan Hus version.
Maybe they did try a simple substitution of Voynichese to post-Jan Hus Czech and failed. Or maybe they thought the text in the Voynich Manuscript was Latin and never thought to try Czech.
Yesterday, 01:12 PM
This July 2025 paper may have been commented on before but I didn't find it in a search. As I have stated before, I think the Voynich Manuscript is more medical and spiritual than alchemical but of course the Czech Shorthand part caught my eye.
Voynich Decrypted Evidence of Czech Shorthand and Latin Alchemical Compression in a 15th-Century Manuscript
28 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2025
Advocate Anwar M Quereshi
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Abstract
Disclaimer This manuscript has been submitted for peer review to the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Oxford University Press) and is currently under editorial consideration. This is a preprint version and may be subject to revisions prior to formal publication.
The Voynich Manuscript has long stood as one of the greatest undeciphered texts in human history, baffling linguists, cryptographers, and historians for over 600 years. Despite extensive efforts, no existing language, code, or cipher has been conclusively mapped to its content. In this paper, we propose a novel hypothesis: The Voynich Manuscript is written in a compressed shorthand system based on 15th-century Czech scribal traditions, interwoven with Latin root words, and infused with the symbolic language of alchemy, herbal medicine, and astrology. Drawing from historical evidence of shorthand practices in the Bohemian region during the late medieval period, combined with the widespread use of Latin in scholarly and esoteric texts, we reconstruct a plausible linguistic framework that interprets each glyph in the manuscript as representing entire words or even conceptual phrases. This interpretation not only bridges linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts, but also provides a consistent rationale for the manuscript's recurring motifs of plants, bathing women, and astrological charts. If validated, this approach could mark a significant breakthrough in understanding the manuscript and reposition it within the intellectual landscape of 15th-century Bohemia. The formalization of the shorthand key and cross-referencing with contemporary Czech, Latin, and alchemical manuscripts for validation and further research.
Voynich Decrypted Evidence of Czech Shorthand and Latin Alchemical Compression in a 15th-Century Manuscript
28 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2025
Advocate Anwar M Quereshi
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Abstract
Disclaimer This manuscript has been submitted for peer review to the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (Oxford University Press) and is currently under editorial consideration. This is a preprint version and may be subject to revisions prior to formal publication.
The Voynich Manuscript has long stood as one of the greatest undeciphered texts in human history, baffling linguists, cryptographers, and historians for over 600 years. Despite extensive efforts, no existing language, code, or cipher has been conclusively mapped to its content. In this paper, we propose a novel hypothesis: The Voynich Manuscript is written in a compressed shorthand system based on 15th-century Czech scribal traditions, interwoven with Latin root words, and infused with the symbolic language of alchemy, herbal medicine, and astrology. Drawing from historical evidence of shorthand practices in the Bohemian region during the late medieval period, combined with the widespread use of Latin in scholarly and esoteric texts, we reconstruct a plausible linguistic framework that interprets each glyph in the manuscript as representing entire words or even conceptual phrases. This interpretation not only bridges linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts, but also provides a consistent rationale for the manuscript's recurring motifs of plants, bathing women, and astrological charts. If validated, this approach could mark a significant breakthrough in understanding the manuscript and reposition it within the intellectual landscape of 15th-century Bohemia. The formalization of the shorthand key and cross-referencing with contemporary Czech, Latin, and alchemical manuscripts for validation and further research.
Yesterday, 01:31 PM
Yesterday, 01:33 PM
(Yesterday, 01:12 PM)pjburkshire Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This July 2025 paper may have been commented on before but I didn't find it in a search. As I have stated before, I think the Voynich Manuscript is more medical and spiritual than alchemical but of course the Czech Shorthand part caught my eye.
Sounds good but it's copy-pasted AI slop: the author didn't even notice the made-up transliteration lines in the article. See MarcoP's posts about hallucinations: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Relying on AI so much doesn't usually lead to trustworthy conclusions. The AI was very probably just pretending to do the work of comparison and validation, because it's much faster and when the user is happy with the result, why not just skip the boring tasks?
Also, as MarcoP mentioned on reddit, all claims of "compressed" and "shorthand" are wrong:
Quote:In particular, you don't mention character entropy: that figure tells us that Voynichese may be an expanded natural language (eg a verbose cipher), it certainly isn't a compression. This was discussed by René Zandbergen: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Yesterday, 02:03 PM
10 hours ago
It's always the same story: if a solution doesn't fit the statistics, the problem is the statistics... 
9 hours ago
Mode IA
The citation "Stoklasa, J. 2005. Czech paleography: shorthand and notarial scripts in medieval Bohemia" appears to be a fabricated or fictitious reference.
There is no record of an academic book, paper, or monograph by this title or author in historical, paleographical, or linguistic databases. Instead, this specific phrase appears as a contextual reference or cited authority in a recent speculative paper regarding the Voynich Manuscript titled "Voynich Decrypted: Evidence of Czech Shorthand and Latin Alchemical Compression in a 15th-Century Manuscript" by A.M. Quereshi.
If you are researching the actual historical landscape of medieval Bohemian writing, true academic sources focus on Gothic scripts, administrative records, and specific copyists from the region:
Gothic and Bastard Scripts in Bohemia: In 15th-century Central Europe, formal textual scripts gave way to "bastard" scripts, which mixed cursive hands with more rigid structures. You can explore actual textbook treatments of this evolution in chapters like "Gothic Writing in Bohemia and Moravia" featured in comprehensive references such as The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography.
The Case of Crux of Telč: For a genuine, deep-dive case study into 15th-century Bohemian scribal practices, manuscript transmission, and personalized paratextual additions, look into research surrounding the scribe Crux of Telč (1434–1504), such as Passionate Copying in Late Medieval Bohemia.
Shorthand and Abbreviations: Authentic medieval secretarial shorthand typically stems from much older Roman shorthand roots known as notae tironianae (Tironian notes), which heavily influenced medieval Latin scribal abbreviations across Europe.
Are you looking for this citation to verify a claim about the Voynich Manuscript, or are you conducting broader research into medieval Czech scribal practices? Let me know so I can direct you to the right historical documents.
The citation "Stoklasa, J. 2005. Czech paleography: shorthand and notarial scripts in medieval Bohemia" appears to be a fabricated or fictitious reference.
There is no record of an academic book, paper, or monograph by this title or author in historical, paleographical, or linguistic databases. Instead, this specific phrase appears as a contextual reference or cited authority in a recent speculative paper regarding the Voynich Manuscript titled "Voynich Decrypted: Evidence of Czech Shorthand and Latin Alchemical Compression in a 15th-Century Manuscript" by A.M. Quereshi.
If you are researching the actual historical landscape of medieval Bohemian writing, true academic sources focus on Gothic scripts, administrative records, and specific copyists from the region:
Gothic and Bastard Scripts in Bohemia: In 15th-century Central Europe, formal textual scripts gave way to "bastard" scripts, which mixed cursive hands with more rigid structures. You can explore actual textbook treatments of this evolution in chapters like "Gothic Writing in Bohemia and Moravia" featured in comprehensive references such as The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography.
The Case of Crux of Telč: For a genuine, deep-dive case study into 15th-century Bohemian scribal practices, manuscript transmission, and personalized paratextual additions, look into research surrounding the scribe Crux of Telč (1434–1504), such as Passionate Copying in Late Medieval Bohemia.
Shorthand and Abbreviations: Authentic medieval secretarial shorthand typically stems from much older Roman shorthand roots known as notae tironianae (Tironian notes), which heavily influenced medieval Latin scribal abbreviations across Europe.
Are you looking for this citation to verify a claim about the Voynich Manuscript, or are you conducting broader research into medieval Czech scribal practices? Let me know so I can direct you to the right historical documents.
9 hours ago
(9 hours ago)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The citation "Stoklasa, J. 2005. Czech paleography: shorthand and notarial scripts in medieval Bohemia" appears to be a fabricated or fictitious reference.
Another AI hallucination. It happens when the "author" checks absolutely nothing.
8 hours ago
(9 hours ago)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Are you looking for this citation to verify a claim about the Voynich Manuscript, or are you conducting broader research into medieval Czech scribal practices? Let me know so I can direct you to the right historical documents.
I'm not looking for any citation or historical documents. What I am looking for are living, breathing humans who can read Czech and who have an interest in the Voynich Manuscript.