Let's strike out on an entirely new (for me) aspect of Voynichese - the possibility that it might have a phonology. I've dallied with this on and off for years, but never really had the energy to go down this route. But recently I've had some thoughts that are encouraging me.
Let us reduce the problem to its most reductive position. I postulate the following:
Voynichese has a phonology (ie it can be spoken).
Why not? In the 15th century, many written texts were designed to be spoken aloud, it was a fundamental part of the training of scribes. And if Voynichese does link back to a language, even if the script is unique, the pronunciation is likely to carry through.
Voynichese will be a language that shares enough phonemes with our languages to be recognised in the modern era.
Because otherwise, this is a waste of time.
Voynichese lacks intonations
The lack of diacritics or similar tone indicators appears to bear out this theory, unless line initial or line ending glyphs indicate some such thing. This helps to narrow down the target languages, it can't be a tonal language.
Voynichese is not regular
The creator of Voynichese would have been working off their own assumptions; they obviously did not have access to the huge amount of research into human speech that we do. This would help explain the distinct "Currier languages" - the scribe was making it up as he went along, and incorporating new sounds into his book as he came across them.
Sunshine was an intelligent, but medieval author
We must therefore take a big step backwards and try to put ourselves into the mentality of a medieval intellectual. We may have a vague idea of what we want to achieve, but we lack the knowledge base to apply any scientific system to our method and are therefore making it up as we go along. I can't stress this enough, no matter in which direction we go.
Let us therefore use modern tools to attack Voynichese. We take the IPA and take a long draught, before opening our manual upon the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Quote:The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to represent single sounds, the way You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does with ⟨sh⟩, ⟨th⟩ and ⟨ng⟩, or single letters to represent multiple sounds the way ⟨x⟩ represents /ks/ or /ɡz/ in English.
There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do "hard" and "soft" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in several European languages.
The IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as "selectiveness".You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 31 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are used to modify these, and 19 additional signs indicate You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. qualities such as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 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 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Question
How to identify You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?
The number of glyphs roughly corresponds to most medieval European alphabets, even if no direct correspondence to the Latin alphabet has ever been found. We can thus assume that they are discrete letters, and form phones when merged into tokens. Obviously they do not directly represent phones, any more than the 26 characters of the English alphabet represent all of the different sounds used to speak English.
However, the regularity of glyphs within tokens makes me suspect that they may have a dual function. For example, certain combinations may indicate common word start or endings, and this would help explain away the LAAFU problem.
Question
How many phones are there?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., which are 19 vowels and 26 consonant sounds. Latin; well, it depends on which period Latin. Italian has 32 phones, Spanish just 30. An interesting table of different languages can be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Question
So is there enough regularity in the glyph distribution to permit its phonetic structure to shine through? Well, I think there is. I'm starting to suspect that the glyphs work on both a bigram and digram level -some represent simple sounds, others represent more complicated or regular speech patterns. This is why we see regularity in the tokens, we could be talking about a proto-Italian dialect with the traditional "sing-song" vocal endings of words, etc. Certainly more research into this area is required.
Now, how to translate Voynichese into IPA? Two methods occur to me.
The first is arbitrary match patterns. That is, translating the most common glyphs into the most common phones by language and seeing if we recognise anything. A fun project, but not one I intend to start today.
The second is cribbing. Find words that we think we recognise the words of and try to match to IPA, then see if it works with other words.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet thought of a way to do this without imposing my own cultural reference upon it. Without any target language, it's no more a shortcut than the first option as we need to try lots of matches. It could even be slower than the first option, as we are limiting our options to something that is likely to be incorrect.
Simply an off the cuff thought that I haven't thought through, but, surely the presence of the various 15th century Latin characters hidden on leaves is a hint that the manuscript was originally produced by people with extensive or even native knowledge of western European literary tradition?
IE, it's unlikely that a native writer of a script other than Roman would have used Roman characters in these places.
There is a key to cipher the Voynich manuscript.
The key to the cipher manuscript placed in the manuscript. It is placed throughout the text. Part of the key hints is placed on the sheet 14. With her help was able to translate a few dozen words that are completely relevant to the theme sections.
The Voynich manuscript is not written with letters. It is written in signs. Characters replace the letters of the alphabet one of the ancient language. Moreover, in the text there are 2 levels of encryption. I figured out the key by which the first section could read the following words: hemp, wearing hemp; food, food (sheet 20 at the numbering on the Internet); to clean (gut), knowledge, perhaps the desire, to drink, sweet beverage (nectar), maturation (maturity), to consider, to believe (sheet 107); to drink; six; flourishing; increasing; intense; peas; sweet drink, nectar, etc. Is just the short words, 2-3 sign. To translate words with more than 2-3 characters requires knowledge of this ancient language. The fact that some symbols represent two letters. In the end, the word consisting of three characters can fit up to six letters. Three letters are superfluous. In the end, you need six characters to define the semantic word of three letters. Of course, without knowledge of this language make it very difficult even with a dictionary. And most important. In the manuscript there is information about "the Holy Grail". If you are interested in this topic, I am ready to provide detailed information.
Nikolai.
I am a amateur researcher MV for 4 years. I studied many different theories, information, decoding methods. My opinion, is that the author is Cornelius Agrippa. Many indirect details related to the activities of Agrippa, his work on magic encryption shows his possible participle or authorship of MV. If we take the fact that the last page of the MV was written by the author MV, the amateur experience of grafanalysis showed that the handwritings are very similar.
The three pools of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are actually two seas, plus the fourth largest lake in Italy. The three larger lakes had already been shown on previous pages. This page is basically showing the west shore, the east shore, and the center of the Italian Peninsula, or the landmass that looks like a boot jutting into the Mediterranean Sea.
Notice that the west side is craggy, and the east side is more smooth, with one major prominence at the 'ankle' of the boot, and three 3 other points being visible, the 'knee', the 'calf', and one on the 'heel'.
This drawing shows mountains with streams running into the sea. The sea is the green water body, and represents the Tyrrhenian Sea. The mountains are reminiscent of those in Beatus Maps, or other similar cartography. The tube is the navigable river Arno, Pisa and Florence are to be found on it. Tube rivers are also common in the history of cartography.
If you look at the mountains a different way, they depict the peninsula itself through its two sides. The lower side has seven points, which represents the craggy nature of the west side. Between the last two points, the streams come together, this indicates a turn in the landscape, or the 'toe' of the boot. The grass line further indicates the shoreline the way it might be drawn on a nautical chart. The upper side has four dips, just like the next pool has four nymphs along the southern part of the waterbody, which would be the Adriatic Sea. All four have tubs, which stand for sheltered ports, although the third one is almost invisible as it is painted the same colour as the sea, but at least part of a tub rim is there, it covers the nymph's knee, and a dip in the shoreline is drawn as well, whereas the others do not get this treatment, this is to indicate it is a bigger feature than the others.
I believe this is an example of a deception, although it seems to have its reasons, in that to the casual observer this would keep them from recognizing the prominence, but meanwhile if one is familiar with the shore already, the prominence and dip are indeed represented and recognizable as such, and it makes sense for this tub to be lesser than the others, as the sheltering level of this port is not as high, it is sheltered only on one side, by the prominence itself, whereas the others have lagoons. This is why this one only rates a transparent half tub. But I do not believe it to be coincidence that it downplays the actual features of the prominence.
That the peninsula is drawn as two seas, each with one shoreline, is not surprising either, in that nautical charts are about shorelines, not land. Many times there may just have been rutters for one specific area. The pieces were stitched together, and the land details were filled in later.
The back side of this water body has been stripped bare, this is why it looks like a pool. The features of the blank side of this sea are included on another page of the quire. The stream that connects to the other one is not real, it simply denotes there is a water connection between the two.
The single lake is Trasimeno. It is centrally located, about where it says Italy on the map at the top. Early Ptolemy maps included just the one lake.
These Ptolemy maps came out later, and according to wiki, both of these examples were published in 1467, by the same artist. This seems like it might need looking into. However, the information regarding Ptolemy's atlas was evidently first beginning to be translated around 1406. You can see the mountains go all the way down the peninsula. In the second version below, you can see more interior items were added, more mountains, more lakes.
Trasimeno is the light green lake. It is a different type of lake than the other two, it is endorheic and according to wiki, a depression formed by geologic fractures allowed the present-day Lake Trasimeno to form.
Note the southwest aspect of the stream going off the page. What do we find when we look in this direction?
As can be seen from this north up presentation, Bolsena is actually a bit west of Trasimino, just like in our vms drawing.
If you follow the line of the two lower lakes, about southeast, it points to a city. That city is Rome.
These are the same two lakes on the other side of the page, f84v. The item at the top is a dormant volcano. Both these lakes are volcanic in origin.
Note that the streams are drawn in a southeast orientation this time. Rome would be at the bottom of the page. However i do not believe this to be the end of the quire, as marked. i think it may have been found this way, then marked as such upon binding.
If you would like to see the parallels fleshed out with more comparisons to maps i would be happy to expound on this identification as best i can.
I've been working on a thesis regarding the provenance of the VM and have been paying special attention to the New World hypothesis as I'm fortunate to live very close to one of the best New Spain/Aztec manuscript collections in the country (U.S). Although skeptical (as I am with any claimed origin), I'd like to thoroughly review the subject and have been focusing on a paleographic analysis against codecies of colonial New Spain and indigenous documents. One of the contentions made in Janick and Tucker's 2018 "Unraveling the Voynich Codex" is that the signature of their purposed author, Gaspar de Torres, can be found concealed at the top of f1v.
See here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I was curious about this claim and have a some experience with Photoshop so I decided to do my best to reduce as much of the concealing ink as I could. I'd like to share my results with this community and gather some feedback. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
For the sake of duplication, I completed this using Gimp 2.8.16. I used the original image on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and processed it with Unsharp-Mask, followed by Despeckle and then adjusted the contrast. Although I do believe there's a word or name there, I don't believe it to be Gaspar de Torres. It appears to me that the capitalized "G" and "T" Janick and Tucker point out are simply part of the overlying ink. The word/name that I see is "D i o/g d v/y o/? t a l" followed by "G a b/l/r/ e/a s y. Interesting to note is that the second word appears to be larger and with heavier ink on the what appears to be the "G". This could simply be a result of the author re-inking their quill, or perhaps something else entirely. I'm not sure.
I'd like to know your thoughts on this. It's entirely possible that there's nothing there and that I simply rorschach tested myself into seeing something. I've also considered applying this method to other areas of the manuscript and wonder if it's worth pursuing. I've already spent hours teasing these words out of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and need to move on to other parts of my research, so I hoped others here may be interested in pursuing this further.
It's wise to be careful about VMS "translations" that rely on an assumption of "polyglot" in order to be meaningful. The reason is simple... with enough degrees of freedom even nonsense text can be made readable (or almost readable).
But... I thought it might be worth discussing this subject because some languages are inherently polyglot.
For example, I was just reading a 14th-century letter in Frisian, and it is such a weird experience because it's English, Norse, Norse, English, Norse, German, English, Norse, Norse, Norse, English, English, German... It's a blend of these languages and if you know all three, you can pretty much read it.
I did notice that the grammar leaned more toward English than Norse (which in itself is interesting because Old English and Middle English sometimes have Norse grammar mixed in, but only bits of it, here or there, not the whole thing).
So, if Frisian were enciphered and someone were looking for word or letter-frequency patterns, it might still be possible to decipher a relatively simple substitution code, but... it would be a challenge, because it mixes three languages with different spelling structures.
In some ways, English is polyglot as well. A huge proportion is French, words like chauffeur, entrepreneur, bureau, critique, beau, recipe, bourgeois, valet, hors d'oeuvre, depot, chamois, ballet, armoire, cafe, a la mode, cliche, decor, savant, fiance, etc.
The "eau" combination is common in French but not otherwise characteristic of English words. Patterns like this could throw off computational attacks because they would not be consistent or in the same frequency as in the parent language.
Following the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I would like to compare the VMS with the Fontana's works which are, as Nickpelling says, the best matches for the Voynich. Let's say for example Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber.
Both of them, the VMS and Bellicorum..., are contemporary and some pages have the same layout. The VMS pages have plants with a weird script and the work of Fontana also has an image with some lines of an encrypted text. For more similarity, most plants are fantastic like most of the images in the Bellicorum..
Given these evidences and observations, we can do some hipothesis or assumptions. Par example: the script of the Voynich is a cipher with an underlying language or the exotic alphabet of a natural language. This is a valid and legitimate assumption...but has not worked in many years of research. Why?
We don't know why Fontana encrypted the text. It was not to hide it because there are lines in Latin and the cipher is a simple substitution, easy to decipher. A modern theory is that it was a kind of copyright. I don't believe it. Too anachronistic.
In my opinion, in the invented script of Fontana there is a call to the supernatural forces. It's the power of magic. Fontana invokes this power so that his machines and artifacts work.
Is it the same for the VMS script? I think so. This of course is another assumption. The script is not the human language but the language of the stars. The same magic in both cases.
I'll present a statement which I believe is true, and I wonder what you think about it. Note that the statement starts with an IF clause. I don't believe the IF clause is true, but assuming this as a given, then I do believe the consequences are true.
IF Voynichese does not represent natural language, then:
- it is still intended to look as if it does
- it is intentionally deceptive
Some arguments are the following:
- High resemblance between Voynichese glyphs and scribal conventions, both in form and positioning.
- Weirdos on first page, one of which I have recently found a parallel for in an initial "V".
- Layout as left-aligned paragraphs following the images to a large extent
So in conclusion I would say that the VM text either is natural language, a real text written in a way we don't understand
OR it is intended and designed to look as such
Here is a try to make list of substantial tests which may be useful to evaluate proposed simple solutions. Distilled, extreme descriptions are given. Pros and cons of applicability are considered.
It's assumed, that solution consists of the Algorithm which converts Voynichese to Text and claims that it is written in Language. The Algorithm must also have ability to convert Text and Language back to Voynichese.
Letter frequency test Letter frequencies of Text must match ones of Language.
There statistical methods to compare vectors of frequencies are needed.
+ It may be the only test which not only tests, but is also able to find solution.
+ It may cope with "null symbols" by considering relative letter frequencies.
+ Allows a lot of variations - frequency of adjacent, first, last letters, etc.
Word frequency test Word frequencies of Text must match ones of Language.
There statistical methods to compare vectors of frequencies are needed.
+ May be also useful if Voynichese word for some reason matches several Language words.
- Certain words and word forms may be ommitted due to stylistical reasons, which affects results in unknown way, so comparison methods there may be much trickier.
Word combination test Translations of the most frequent Voynichese word combinations are meaningful and common.
+ Good test for repetitive text and when at least something is known about sentence structure.
- More subjective than others.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Algorithm must distinguish meaningful and meaningless Voynichese text.
Number of test cases depends on required precision, but it should be quite high (6 originally proposed by the author are obviously not enough).
+ Ideal test for "black boxes".
- Number of false positives is unknown in advance and may be quite high.
- In some sense manuscript itself is big "Klaus' test", so for sufficiently advanced Algorithm this test is redunant.
Rene's test Text written in Language when transformed by the Algorithm to Voynichese must possess all properties of Voynichese.
Need method to determine if given text is Voynichese or not. It may not match Rene's proposal exactly, since the test requires not only convertability (which goes without saying) but also matching certain criteria.
+ Ideal test to remove pair <Algorithm, Language> from consideration.
- "Null symbols" can affect results in non-obvious way.
- Difficult to perform when Language is constructed language - no source texts.
Productivity test Each attested Voynichese word can be constructed with the Algorithm.
It's may be somewhat complicated to perform this test manually.
+ Analysis of words which do not pass this test may point to erroneous part of the Algorithm.
- Proper names, composite words, "null symbols" are substantial obstacles.
![[Image: _ver016196601ill0005.gif]](https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ver016196601_01/_ver016196601ill0005.gif)
![[Image: 240px-Tyrrhenian_Sea_map.png]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Tyrrhenian_Sea_map.png/240px-Tyrrhenian_Sea_map.png)
![[Image: Voynich-Manuscript-people-in-pool.jpg]](https://allthatsinteresting.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Voynich-Manuscript-people-in-pool.jpg)
![[Image: screen-shot-2017-09-08-at-11712-pmpng.pn...ress&w=609]](https://fsmedia.imgix.net/ac/a8/f5/ae/7eb4/48c8/8760/9e9020afc675/screen-shot-2017-09-08-at-11712-pmpng.png?rect=0%2C0%2C609%2C305&auto=format%2Ccompress&w=609)
![[Image: 5c6f09c811d89c5626f637cb7310a212.jpg]](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5c/6f/09/5c6f09c811d89c5626f637cb7310a212.jpg)
![[Image: 800px-Cales_nell%27Italia_di_Tolomeo.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Cales_nell%27Italia_di_Tolomeo.jpg/800px-Cales_nell%27Italia_di_Tolomeo.jpg)
![[Image: Ptolemy_Cosmographia_1467_-_Italy_a.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Ptolemy_Cosmographia_1467_-_Italy_a.jpg)
![[Image: Map-of-Italy-indicating-the-position-of-...igital.png]](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giorgio_Mancinelli/publication/322083474/figure/fig1/AS:579489843630080@1515172553117/Map-of-Italy-indicating-the-position-of-Lake-Bolsena-and-Lake-Trasimeno-A-digital.png)
![[Image: Rome_Italy_SAR_IM_Orbit_45796_20040123.jpg]](https://earth.esa.int/ers/ers_action/Rome_Italy_SAR_IM_Orbit_45796_20040123.jpg)
![[Image: scaletowidth?d=404]](https://cdn.thinglink.me/api/image/911013662611734530/320/10/scaletowidth?d=404)
![[Image: f084v_crd.jpg]](http://voynich.nu/q13/f084v_crd.jpg)
