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Always impressive
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14 minutes ago
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Elephant in the Room Solu...
Forum: Theories & Solutions
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35 minutes ago
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“The Library of Babel” by...
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I've never seen anyone ta...
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1 hour ago
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Textual similarities with...
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1 hour ago
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AI-generated "Voynich man...
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4 hours ago
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The Modern Forgery Hypoth...
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4 hours ago
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Would a NEW Voynich Manus...
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7 hours ago
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116v
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11 hours ago
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Just a hoax?
Forum: Theories & Solutions
Last Post: ReneZ
Yesterday, 11:46 PM
» Replies: 35
» Views: 938
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| Is This a Theory? |
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Posted by: peasy - 30-10-2020, 12:35 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (1)
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Hi All,
Has anyone thought the VM to be a diary? And whomever was writing in it scribbled and drew (like we normally do) as a combination of art journal and writing?
They could have invented their own code to write in, possibly to protect themselves, similarly to what Anne Lister did in the early 1800's, who wrote diaries in her own language, this being done to protect herself and her partner as lesbians. When she died, if anyone found her diaries (even though they were well hidden) it would have been hard to decode, and especially hard for her family to do, so her secret could be safe.
The writer could have been a scientific drawer (i.e: creating plant diagrams) and used this book as a place for their sketches, as well as writing (perhaps they were overly protective of their work and wrote drafts in code? If the VM were a draft of a later diagram book)
Some drawings are similar to botanical art of the time, but there are some parts that strike me as stylistic choices, meaning they were either rough sketches/drafts, drawing for pleasure in a style, or both.
Please let me know if this has already been discussed and disproved, apologies if so!
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| Lindemann and Bowern (2020) is available |
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Posted by: cbowern - 29-10-2020, 02:23 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (15)
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has a new paper by Luke Lindemann and myself, where we pick apart some of the details of character entropy. Here is the abstract. The paper also includes links to some corpus materials which might be useful (freely available from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This paper expands on some of the material from our other 2020 paper (overview for the Annual Review of Linguistics). We have another couple in the works.
This paper outlines the creation of three corpora for multilingual comparison and analysis of the Voynich manuscript: a corpus of Voynich texts partitioned by Currier language, scribal hand, and transcription system, a corpus of 294 language samples compiled from Wikipedia, and a corpus of eighteen transcribed historical texts in eight languages. These corpora will be utilized in subsequent work by the Voynich Working Group at Yale University. We demonstrate the utility of these corpora for studying characteristics of the Voynich script and language, with an analysis of conditional character entropy in Voynichese. We discuss the interaction between character entropy and language, script size and type, glyph compositionality, scribal conventions and abbreviations, positional character variants, and bigram frequency. This analysis characterizes the interaction between script compositionality, character size, and predictability. We show that substantial manipulations of glyph composition are not sufficient to align conditional entropy levels with natural languages. The unusually predictable nature of the Voynichese script is not attributable to a particular script or transcription system, underlying language, or substitution cipher. Voynichese is distinct from every comparison text in our corpora because character placement is highly constrained within the word, and this may indicate the loss of phonemic distinctions from the underlying language.
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| IVTT recipes |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 28-10-2020, 11:34 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (25)
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As suggested by this post:
(23-10-2020, 04:29 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (23-10-2020, 12:45 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Does anyone happen to have separate text files for each folio?
I can make them from Takahashi ( they would be created from the lowercase version ) --You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
For Takahashi with capitals most individual pages can be found on his site --You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
For some other transcriptions you can ( if i understand the manual ) extract pages using IVTT ( a thread with some cmdline examples of IVTT would be nice )
Here's an IVTT recipe to create one file per page. This works with any file in IVTFF format, in particular the five main transliteration files by Friedman (FSG), Currier, Takahashi, GC and Zandbergen-Landini.
It is based on 'csh' scripting language, and can be varied in many different ways. The output files only have the plain transliteration without any annotations.
Code: foreach qq ( A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O Q S T )
ivtt +Q${qq} ZL.txt temp.txt >&/dev/null
foreach pp ( A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X )
ivtt -x8 +P${pp} temp.txt ${qq}${pp}.txt >&/dev/null
end
\rm temp.txt
end
The first ivtt command splits the file into quires, preserving all annotations. The second one splits each quire into pages, removing all annotations.
The result is a series of files: AA.txt , AB.txt , AC.txt etc.
If a page does not exist, the file will be created but will be empty. It could be removed with another line in the script.
It may take some time getting used to these two-character codes, but they have some advantages.
The shell syntax ??.txt matches all pages in their correct order.
The first character indicates the quire: A=1, T=20
One can add further ivtt arguments to select only one Currier language, one illustration type or only text in paragraphs (for example).
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| The clerical shift |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 27-10-2020, 07:09 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (2)
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Regarding a recent posting on a technique of word alteration as a method of encryption, there seems to be some interesting further possibilities.
The basic system takes the first two letters in a word as valid, then shifts all other letters one space forward in the alpha-numeric sequence.
Then, there's a brief clerical 'arms race' when the shift changes to two, three or more spaces.
And if someone was serious about more complex methods, there is the potential for stepwise increase of the shift value according to some mathematical formula. This opens a variety of possibilities with differing, specific structures. Easy to use when the structure is known. Otherwise it's clearly more difficult.
So the basic example, besides its simple structure, was in the Latin script and Latin language - with a picture as well. So its fairly obvious when a simple solution yields an obvious result. The creative use of the clerical shift would create a lot more problems, even if it were restricted to the Latin script and language.
Now consider the VMs. We don't know the script or alphabetic sequence. We don't know the language. And we don't know the nature of the clerical shift, if there was one.
What level of complexity is required to create a virtually unbreakable encryption that can be easily used with a known key?
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| I believe I found the translation for the word blue, flower, and spot! |
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Posted by: geujfys - 19-10-2020, 09:24 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (11)
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I originally posted this on the Voynich subreddit, but I will post here as well.
I did some analyses on the document, seeing if words followed certain types of illustrations. I looked at a bunch of pages with prominent flowers and found a word that consistently followed these pages (chckhy in EVA). I then looked for words next to my candidate for the word flower, and I found a word that consistently followed illustrations with blue in them (ykchy in EVA). This word for blue would act as a modifier for the word flower. I did the same kind of analysis again and found a word that followed illustrations with spots very consistently (chkeey in EVA).
I believe this is the first claim for a "translated" adjective. The chain of verification these words have with each other makes them at least a little more legitimate. I also did some more analysis, which you can see here: [color=var(--newCommunityTheme-linkText)]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/color]
If you do not want to read the whole article, I encourage you to look at the pages "chkeey" appears on (7v, 17v, 30r, 33r, 39r, 50v, 82r, 93v, 99r, 100r, 111r, 11v). I use this link to view the manuscript: [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif] If there is a word for spot in the Voynich manuscript, chkeey is certainly the best candidate for it.[/font][/font][/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif][font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Please tell me what you think. I would like some more input.[/font][/font][/font][/font]
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| Sci-Fi short story by Harry Turtledove |
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Posted by: MarcoP - 19-10-2020, 09:25 AM - Forum: Fiction, Comics, Films & Videos, Games & other Media
- Replies (3)
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A friend who shares my enthusiasm for classical SF and knows of my interest for the VMS sent me a link to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a recent short story by Harry Turtledove.
If you like the genre and you don't expect plausibility and 100% accuracy, it is very enjoyable.
Dr. Feyrouz Hanafusa is a curator at Yale in the 23rd century. Space exploration is still ongoing, and signs of life have been discovered on a planet near TRAPPIST-1. Signs, Dr. Hanafusa realizes, that suspiciously resemble drawings in the Voynich manuscript, which no one has been able to decipher for over eight hundred years.
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| Old Polish (geoffreycaveney's theory) |
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Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 13-10-2020, 02:20 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (50)
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In the course of my research on West Slavic languages in the medieval period, I have come across interesting descriptions of the early orthography of Old Polish in the medieval period. A short summary can be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
The point is that medieval Old Polish spelling appears to have been highly inconsistent and ambiguous:
"c" could represent the phonemes now written as "k", "c", "ć", "cz", or "dz"
"z" could represent the phonemes now written as "z", "ż", "ź", "s", or "ś"
"s" could represent the phonemes now written as "s", "ś", "sz", "z", or "ż"
Thus they wrote "Zeraz" to mean "Sieradz", "faly" to mean "chwali", "rech" to mean "rzecz", and "vmoch" to mean "w moc", to cite just a few examples of medieval Old Polish spelling practices.
The table below gives many more examples of both the spelling letter values and numerous words as written with these spelling practices.
It would be interesting to analyze the entropy and conditional entropy statistics of such documents as the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that were written with these medieval Old Polish spelling practices.
Geoffrey
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