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| Could this monastery on the Greek island of Patmos be relevant to the VMS? |
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Posted by: JustAnotherTheory - 08-05-2026, 09:03 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (7)
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So this is not a full "theory" in the sense of the word, but more of a suggestion, to see what others think about it.
Basically, I recently noticed that the monastery on the Greek island of Patmos bears some resemblance to the architectural drawings in the VMS, especially the Rosettes section. It is a bit out of place within the context of the manuscript, because it is not anywhere near Northern Italy. Yet it has several interesting features.
The first is its size:
Here is another view from above:
Keen eyed observers will notice that this monastery, quite strikingly, has ghibelline merlons all around:
The entire complex was built with a concept of "sunken" or multi-storey buildings, which also reminds one of the VMS :
In the VMS rosettes, we see that the different structures are surrounded by what appears to be large bodies of water. Well, Patmos is a small island, so in that sense, it "fits" as well. Furthermore, the island of Patmos was under Ottoman rule for a long time, and there would have been many minarets all around. Just like in the VMS Rosettes section.
The interior of the monastery is lush with frescoes. A few examples remind one of the VMS (on the left hand side images from the VMS folio f1v, on the right, typical fresco patterns on Patmos):
The monastery is called "Monastery of St George the Theologian". Apparently, Saint Georrge, who wrote the Revelations part of the Bible, did so in this exact monastery, hence ist name. You can find some info here:
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The monastery housed a huge and varied library. In fact, it has been called the "one of the most sgnificant monastic libraries of the world". Already in 1080, thousands of books were kept there and there was a professional scriptorium.
So based on the information above, I ask myself (and the dear readers of this forum), whether Patmos could have been a place of relevance for the VMS. Could the VMS have been written here? Are the depictions in the Rosettes section describing this monastery? Could the vast library of Patmos have been an influence for the apparent multi-cultural drawings in the VMS?
What do you think?
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| Structural Translation of the Voynich Manuscript: A Mathematical and Cross-Modal Appr |
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Posted by: Keishi Oi - 08-05-2026, 01:07 AM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
- Replies (1)
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Greetings, researchers and experts of the Voynich community.
My name is Keishi Oi. I am sharing the results of my recent structural and mathematical research on the Voynich Manuscript. The full dataset and methodology have just been published on Zenodo as open-access materials.
I am fully aware of the rigorous skepticism this community holds toward any translation claims. Therefore, I am not presenting a subjective, semantic reading based on human intuition. Instead, I am presenting a complete structural decoding based on the premise that the manuscript is a highly standardized recording system—specifically, a systematic record of a medieval practical pharmacopoeia.
By applying a strict mathematical methodology (The OI-2026 Protocol), this research bypasses traditional linguistic guessing.
Key Methodologies and Findings:
1.Statistical Alignment: I applied dimensionality reduction (Truncated SVD) to map the morphological behaviors of the Voynich strings and a 16th-century Latin Alchemical/Medical corpus into a shared mathematical space.
2.Objective Constraints: Using strict statistical thresholds (Z-score >= 2.0) and geometrically classified grammatical roles, 99.4% of the undefined words were objectively matched to existing Latin vocabulary without a single syntactical contradiction.
3.Cross-Modal Verification: The most critical proof is independent of the text itself. I measured the physical features of the botanical illustrations (such as the number of branch and leaf endpoints). The correlation between the complexity of the illustrations and the frequency of "Material" words in the translated text yielded an undeniable statistical correlation (R = 0.7080, P = 7.70×10⁻²⁹).
The manuscript records highly structured operational procedures (e.g., "ignite," "alkalize") followed by lists of materials, utilizing strict positional rules rather than natural grammatical inflection.
Open Science & Reproducibility:
To ensure absolute transparency, the complete translated text (Voynich_Absolute_Translation_Final.txt), the cross-modal verification data, and the Python source codes are publicly available on Zenodo.
Zenodo Repository:
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I invite the experts of this forum to download the dataset, review the codes, and rigorously test the mathematical proofs (especially the cross-modal correlation). I welcome all objective, data-driven critiques.
Best regards,
Keishi Oi
Exaｍple
<1r.1>
①EVA : fa19s 9 hae ay Akam 2oe !oy9 scs 9 hoy 2oe89
②LAT : <MOUENTE> <PERFECTIONEM> <EUADERET> <ADGLUTINATIS> <MARKASITA> <VARIARETUR> <LOCANDO> <PHOR> <PERFECTIONEM> <TACITUR> <INUENISTIS>
<1r.2>
①EVA : soy9 Hay oy 9 hacy 1kam 2ay Ais Kay Kay 8aN
②LAT : <CUSCUTA> <UERTENTES> <DETINERE> <PERFECTIONEM> <LUXATIS> <EUANESCENT> <PRAEUIDUARE> <EUPHRAGIAE> <PASTORIS> <PASTORIS> <SURREPTUM>
<1r.3>
①EVA : s9aIy 2ch9 oy 9ham o8 Ko ay9 Kcs 8ay am s9
②LAT : <CUSCUTA> <SUCCERNITUR> <DETINERE> <IGNEITATIS> <FERMENTATIONES> <REUOCA> <CIRCUNDATA> <SEPARABI> <CONTRAHERE> <LACERTA> <PROPINENTUR>
<1r.4>
①EVA : 8om okcc9 okcoy y oeok9 Aay 8am oham oy ohaN
②LAT : <OPERIATUR> <COGITAUERIT> <DESIDERARE> <DETINERE> <MARITE> <FECTE> <PERE> <COMITIS> <DETINERE> <CIEBUS>
<1r.5>
①EVA : saz9 1cay Kam Jay Fam 98ayai29
②LAT : <IUSQUIAMUS> <IMPERTIUNT> <DESIDERES> <SISSIMA> <CONIURATIO> <NATES>
<1r.6>
①EVA : o8ay !oe Go9 o98ay ! s Foam o8ay9
②LAT : <EXPLICATIS> <APTARE> <applicantur> <UADAT> <ANAGALLIDE> <LIFICANTE> <ANAGALLIDE> <ANAGALLIDE> <NATES>
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| update to Zattera's slot machine |
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Posted by: Labyrinthinesecurity - 07-05-2026, 10:36 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (7)
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Using switchable templates, it looks like we can improve Zattera's slot machine performance:
Metric Before After Change
Generated 3,110 5,524 +2,414
TP types 1,226 1,680 +454
TP tokens 20,454 24,662 +4,208
Precision 0.3942 0.3041 -0.0901
Recall 0.1468 0.2011 +0.0543
F1 0.2139 0.2421 +0.0282
TokCov 0.5491 0.6620 +0.1129
Note that we worked on the IVTFF corpus, not Zattera's homebrew Slot Alphabet.
The improved grammar (F1=0.242) outperforms Zattera's grammar (F1=0.214) when both are scored on our corpus. However, Zattera reports F1=0.270 on his own filtered corpus (~5,105 types), and our grammar was F1-trained on the test corpus while his was not.
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| Currier A/B split is not what we thought it was! |
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Posted by: Labyrinthinesecurity - 04-05-2026, 03:09 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (48)
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Hi all,
Some of you may have seen my earlier work confirming the Currier A/B distinction quantitatively. That paper showed the distinction is real, recoverable without labels, and predictive. But it also left a puzzle on the table that I could not explain at the time. I now have an explanation, and it leads somewhere unexpected.
Of the eleven character pairs I tested, one behaved paradoxically. The e/ch pair had essentially zero global correlation with the A/B split, yet it produced the strongest signal of all pairs at folio boundaries. And when included in clustering, it actively destroyed the A/B partition: removing it doubled the clustering accuracy.
How can a pair be simultaneously invisible globally, maximally informative locally, and destructive to classification? That combination is not possible under a simple two-language model. Something more structured is going on.
The answer turns out to be surprisingly clean. If you look at the vowel that follows the digraphs CH and SH across the manuscript, you find that folios split into two sharply separated groups. The gap between these two states is enormous, and a two-state binomial mixture model fits with a 2,549-point AIC improvement over a single state. Of 197 folios, 195 are assigned unambiguously.
This is not the same thing as the Currier A/B split, although it correlates with it. It is sharper, it operates at the individual folio level rather than at section boundaries, and it persists within the Herbal section alone (where the A/B boundary is supposed to be clean).
I call it a boolean switch: a single binary parameter, set once per folio.
Here is where it gets interesting. If the switch were just replacing graphemes uniformly, every word containing those graphemes would respond the same way. They do not.
When you group words into templates, you find three classes:
- Fixed O templates: these are locked to O in both switch states.
- Fixed E templates: these are locked to E in both switches states.
- Switchable templates: these respond strongly to the switch.
Template identity accounts for 93.5% of the variance. The folio switch accounts for only 7.9%.
So the system has two components: a template structure that determines which contexts are switchable, and a boolean parameter that modulates the switchable ones. The Currier A/B distinction is a blurred projection of this system, not the system itself.
The e/ch pair is paradoxical because it responds to the boolean switch, but only in switchable template contexts. In clustering, the e/ch ratio injects variance along a dimension that does not align with the primary A/B axis. Mystery solved.
Now for the part that surprised me the most
Everything above is derived purely from text statistics. I had no reason to expect it would connect to anything visual. But then I found Koen's morphometric study of the Herbal plant illustrations (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), which classifies plants as A-type or B-type based on twelve visual features: stem-root lines, flower morphology, daisy-type flowers, grass elements, root platforms, leaf venation, and so on. This classification was done entirely from the drawings, with no reference to text statistics.
I cross-validated my boolean switch against the morphometric classification on 101 Herbal folios (excluding quire 8). The results:
Boolean switch vs. morphometrics: 96.0% agreement, Cohen's kappa = 0.870, Fisher's exact p = 3.5 x 10^-15.
Currier vs. morphometrics: 78.2% agreement, Cohen's kappa = 0.106.
Read that kappa for Currier again: 0.106. Once you correct for base rates, Currier's section-level labels have almost no predictive power for plant morphology. The boolean switch, derived from a single text ratio, predicts the visual classification of the plant drawings with near-perfect accuracy.
Every Currier discordance is resolved by the switch
Of the 27 folios where my switch disagrees with Currier's label, 18 have morphometric data. In all 18 cases, the plant illustration sides with my switch, not with Currier. The probability of that under the null is 3.8 x 10-6.
These are not marginal cases. Folios like f31r, f34v, f39r, f43r, f46r, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are all traditionally classified as Currier A because they fall in the f1-f57 range. But their text is E-dominant, and their plant illustrations show B-type features (daisies, grass, root platforms, unidirectional leaves). Conversely, f87r, f90r, f93v, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are traditionally Currier B, but their text is O-dominant and their plants show A-type features (stem-root lines, A-type flowers and calyxes).
The switch is not just a better statistical classifier. It is detecting the same organizational principle that the illustrator(s) was(were) following.
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| Upcoming lecture and article |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 04-05-2026, 02:19 PM - Forum: News
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If you're going to be at next week's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), I'll be presenting some of the work Colin and I have done applying Latent Semantic Analytics to the VMS in a virtual session on Thursday at 1:30 PM Eastern: "Resequencing the Voynich Manuscript: Linguistic, Paleographic, and Material Evidence" (Session 96). Abstract: "Combining material evidence with novel linguistic analytics undertaken in collaboration with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and others, this paper will present a radical and potentially game-changing hypothesis about the original structure of the Voynich Manuscript." The session will be recorded for ICMS registrants.
In other news, the first of two articles on this topic by Colin and myself will be published online by Digital Humanities Quarterly later this week. I'll post the link once it's available.
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| Top-down views of architecture in medieval manuscripts |
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Posted by: JustAnotherTheory - 03-05-2026, 11:57 AM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (4)
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I recently came across the manuscript: Florence. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Amiat.1 (viewable You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), that has an intersting folio. It is 2v-3r, and it looks like this:
Visually, this has nothing to do with the VMS, but I found the concept interesting. It is a top-down view of a palace/bathhouse (can someone confirm this?). If we assume that some circular illustrations in the VMS depict also top-down views of places, such as a bathhouse ("hammams" were already proposed many times for explaining the Rosettes section, for instance), then maybe this is a unique parallel to that kind of imagery.
Recall the "top-down" illustrations from the VMS, such as this one:
And now examine the features of the first picture. All around the edges, we see columns:
And inside, some kind of altar or table with jars on it:
If the VMS author(s) indeed intended to replicate some sort of top-down architecture, then this might somehow provide a clue to it. Can someone more knowledgabe help to translate what this is in the original MS? What are thery trying to depict here?
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| A semantic encoding system? |
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Posted by: Jonas Barnun - 03-05-2026, 01:11 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (15)
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Having watched the Youtube videos of Voynich Talk, I understand there are only a limited numbers of glyphs in the VMS, certain glyphs appear only at the beginnings or ends of words, some glyphs strongly predict which glyph may follow them, and repeated word families occur throughout the text so a simple cypher letter to letter of a natural language does not match.. Being based in China and very familiar with Chinese characters, it made me think of the following hypothesis: may be the individual glyphs do not represent sounds or letters in the normal alphabetic sense. Rather, they would function more like the strokes used to build characters: meaningless on their own phonetically, but combined according to structural rules to create distinct semantic units. The unit would therefore be the whole “word,” not the individual glyph. This could be in turn used to encode a natural language such as Latin, Italian, German, or Greek encoded in these symbols (as if using some form of ideograms to encode an existing language). Similar-looking words would not necessarily have related pronunciations, but could represent entirely different concepts generated through a a combinatorial system.
What do you think? This could help explain why the manuscript statistically resembles natural language in some respects while not resembling in other aspects?
It would not exactly the same as but a bit like the so-called Wubi typing method in Chinese where each letter refer to a shape or radical combining a set of letter helps to type in characters. Except here there would be an agreed method to assign each word to a character. The weak point of this theory is if it’s highly random it requires XV century copyists to master a whole system which is as complex as Chinese just to produce a single manuscript, that sounds a bit extreme knowing that learning such system would take many years especially in the absence of other texts to learn from...
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