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| Positional allography? |
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Posted by: Frigorifico - 11-03-2025, 07:40 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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It is well known that some symbols only appear at the end of words, the beginning, or followed or preceded by some specific symbols. This is often used to argue that voynichese can't be a real language because no language behaves this way, but what if these aren't different symbols? What if symbols change shape depending on where they are in the word?
This is something that happens in many real scripts, such as Arabic, Mongolian, Syriac and a few others. Letters have often three or four forms: initial, medial, final and sometimes they also have an isolated form. These shapes are often similar, but they can be quite different in a few cases. This is called "positional allography"
However the reason these scripts have this feature is because they are "cursive" in a way, they are designed so that people need to lift their pen as little as possible when writing, which required letters to "flow" into each other and thus change shape
The voynich script is not like this, so it wouldn't need to behave like this... But what if it does anyway?
What if the Author was exposed to Mongolian or Arabic or whatever and that inspired them to make a script in which letters changed shape depending on their position?
This would reduce the number of letters, but it could increase clarity. Also, we could look at letters that never appear at the end or beginning of words to look for the other shapes of those letters
Thanks for reading!
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| Can we make assumptions based on the manuscript finding its way to Rudolf? |
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Posted by: zachary.kaelan - 10-03-2025, 05:06 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I'm wondering if the manuscript finding its way into the hands of a collector 180-odd years after creation - presumably as part of a group of other, unrelated books, liking having changed hands multiple times - increases the probability of the manuscript being a hoax to make money. On the other hand, manuscripts changed hands by force all the time. People that tend to go to such lengths to conceal information tend to have a reason to believe said information is important and has a risk of being intercepted. The manuscript doesn't seem like it stayed with its original creators for very long, which in my mind increases the chances of it either having not been important to them, or them having had valid cause to worry that it would fall out of their hands.
While the creators could've all died and the manuscript sold off by a heir, I would think part of the point of putting so much money and effort into creating a high-quality manuscript of secret knowledge would be so that it could be preserved, for future generations of whatever group or family they were a part of.
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| The Zodiac as a "Labors of the Months" |
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Posted by: SherriMM - 07-03-2025, 11:03 PM - Forum: News
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This is my first post here, please let me know if this has already been discussed at length.
I published a blog post today, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.in which I briefly detail that the zodiac section is depicting suggested agricultural occupations for each month, related to similar "Labors of the Months" artwork of the time, which explains why the zodiac name labels are generalized, and why Aries (March) labeled "April" and Taurus (April) labeled most likely "May", are depicted twice, possibly as the most important, or work heavy, time of year. I also note that the medieval calendar year started in March, the new year being the 25th, which is why Pisces appears first.
Thank you for your thoughts on this.
All the best,
Sherri Mastrangelo
(Note: my site is mainly for genealogy research, so please ignore the sidebars and other content)
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| Hypothesis regarding small alphabet |
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Posted by: ViolaGuy32 - 07-03-2025, 06:39 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Is it possible that the reason that the Voynich script appears to have only 13 or so letters (when accounting for positional variation) is that multiple letters could use the same glyphs? This phenomenon can be found in early Arabic writing. In the Arabic script, there are many sets of letters which are only distinguished by the i'jam, small dots written above or below the letters. However, in early examples of the Arabic script, such as the Burmingham folios, only the rasm is present, and not the i'jam (or harakat). This leads to many sets of letters appearing identical in some or all positions, despite them making completely different sounds. This causes the script to appear to only have 15 distinct letters, despite actually the Arabic script actually having 28 letters.
Is it possible that the Voynich manuscript exhibits a similar phenomenon of multiple letters appearing identical in some or all positions, and thus actually has a larger alphabet than it appears to?
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| New video about Voynich Solutions |
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Posted by: Koen G - 06-03-2025, 10:34 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (16)
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My new video is up on YouTube! This time I was helped by Tavi, who did a lot of the heavy lifting on the script.
I wasn't planning to do anymore "why theorists are wrong" videos, but we just felt like this one was necessary. People on YouTube kept telling me the MS was solved (it's Turkish!) or asking about the Turkish solution video they saw. I had to make an answer. So here it is:
Tavi and I wrote it in a way that applies to many VM theories, pointing out common mistakes, strategies used by solvers etc, so it can be used as a reference when a new theory makes headlines.
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| vague thoughts for an approach |
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Posted by: Andreas Heller - 06-03-2025, 04:26 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hello to everyone !
I am new in this forum and I know the manuscript for only two years. What I want to say is: I am a beginner in this subject. So I beg everyone pardon if I am showing up with questions and ideas which maybe had already been discussed several times in the past. It is hard to get an overview. I am a civil engineer and in no way qualified to solve middleage riddles or doing cryptology. But I am deeply interested.
Here are three of my thoughts/questions:
1:
I understand that substitution letter by letter does not work. Assuming a chain of letters corresponds to a word and identical chains do not change the meaning, is it worth a try to substitute hole words . I mean, making a list of the most common words in the script and give them a meaning taking into account the topics of the drawings in the book(or the texts in other herbals ? Are there any attempts made ? Or is the amount of possibilities killing this method? This procedure asumes that the writing is an artificial language. If so, how did the writer manage to do the writing? First he must had invented a dictionary for his new language. But that is a hard way to write so many pages, looking for nearly every word in a list until you become used to it. Substitution is far easier to learn und after a while you can write fluently whithout any aid.
2:
We don`t know if the text has a meaning or not. If it is meaningless, why took the author so much affort in following special rules (some charcaters only at the end, some characters follow only a certain other character..) ? A simple answer could be: because it has a meaning or he wants it to look like a meaningful text. On the other hand, if the author wanted to produce a meaningless text which looks like a meaningful text, why didn`t he use a typical amount of characters?
3: There is a character that appears only at the end of a line. Is there any idea for a good reason? What useful information can such character give the reader ?
If you know any thread dealing with these questions I am glad to know . Thank you!
Andreas
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| Could Voynich symbols encode "directions" on some alphabet table? |
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Posted by: entropyOrInformation - 06-03-2025, 02:19 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Hello! This is my first time here. I'm very interested in probability, statistics, and information theory, and the Voynich manuscript intrigues me due to the strange statistical properties of the text. Since this text has, so far, appeared to not be any known cipher, I started thinking of ways to encode text that someone at the time may have thought of, and could possibly lead to strange statistics. My idea is this: what if the authors used a chart of characters in their native language and, from some starting point, wrote "directions" to the desired character using voynichese symbols. I believe this can explain some of the statistics, inclusing the commonality of "daiin", "daiiin", and other extremely common repeating phrases and word parts, and also the difference in statistics between different scribes.
To illustrate my point, I'll use a simple example. DISCLAIMER: I am not claiming this is the exact method of encoding used in the Voynich manuscript, simply that a similar type of encoding could have been employed. Let's construct a 5x5 table of English letters excluding "z" for now so we have a nice, neat table.
A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y
Also for simplicity, let's use English letters for our final encoding. Each will encode a "nearest neighbor" direction. Let's use
A = up
B = up and right
C = right
D = down and right
E = down
F = down and left
G = left
H = left and up
We now encode in the following manner. Each letter of the message becomes a word in the encoded text. The letters of the encoded words give "directions" to the letter of the message starting in the middle of the chart, i.e. "M". Note that the encoding here is not unique, this is crucial.
Let's encode the phrase "Hello this is encoded text". For now, let's use the rule that we write a shortest path from "M" to our desired character. One example of this encoding is:
A BB G G CC CD A B D B D BB C AA CC AB BB AB CD BB DE CD
However, this is far from the only way to encode this message. Let's say instead that we desire to create words we can pronounce in our encoded message. We could instead write:
A ACAC EGA AGE ECAC CEC A CA EC CA EC ACAC EB ACH ECAC AB ACAC AB AD ACAC DE CEC
This encodes the same message, but looks very different. Another feature of this type of encoding is that "loops" can be arbitrarily added to any encoded word in any place. For example, the encoded letters "ACEG" form a loop in the diagram, and can be added arbitrarily to any encoded word in any place and not change the meaning of the encoding. Perhaps "daiin" and "daiiin" are loops of some sort? Furthermore, a word can be arbitrarily long in the encoded message, as we can keep a path going as long as we like. Thus we could create fairly arbitrary word length statistics using this method. Additionally, different scribes could prefer different "paths" or ways of encoding, leading to different statistics and encoded word choice. Despite the many ways of encoding, it would be very simple to decode given access to the letter grid and knowledge of the encoded symbol's meaning.
If voynichese is an encoding similar to this, I would assume the characters themselves are more complex paths than the ones presented here, as there are many more than just eight. Perhaps the encoding grid also includes more than one instance of a letter, giving a larger grid and thus more possible paths.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!
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