The following is from an email I wrote back in 2015:
Quote: I'm starting to realise that any eventual "solution" of this book is likely to be philosophical, not analytical.
I've argued in the past that the transcriptions are worthless for the sort of mathematical decryption being looked at by the uninformed net. But without them, we're lost, so it's a catch 22 problem. What comes out is only as good as what went in....
The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are too analytical. We are used to reading that everything can be broken down to quantifiable molecules and processed via mathematical models to produce an answer.
The Voynich is becoming the exception that proves that rule!
But it's not an alien object - we do have access to the mentality of the era that produced it. We just have to "unlearn" our modern preconceptions.
There are clues in the imagery that show a certain mentality, but they're not obvious until you start learning about late medieval / early Renaissance mentality and knowledge. Hence the constant "wild theories" when people try to project their own preconceptions onto the book.
Notwithstanding that, a re-examination of the core concepts, bearing in mind the historic epistemology, is, I hope, capable of producing some interesting new nuggets of information.
It strikes me that it's as true as ever.and in fact the last few 'theories' are doing this They're abandoning the analytical to try to translate what 'feels right'.
So, how do we strike a middle path and translate this document?
If we assume this is a late middle ages Latin document with lots of shorthand, what's the next step?
This is something Wladimir D brought up on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. letter-forms similar to the marginalia, so I thought I would post an illustration of the discrepancy between most of the "a" characters and the last "a" in oladaba8, which he rightly notes is shaped differently from the others.
It might just be pen variation or a slip of the hand, but because the oddball "a" is similar to the main text "a" (which has a more slanted stem), it might be worth noting it here:
Since there seems to be a Voynichese "i" in Vix and two Voynichese tokens bottom left, is it possible this character is a Voynichese "a" and perhaps is meant to be pronounced differently (or understood differently in some other way)? Or had the writer been writing Voynichese and gotten used to writing the letters differently and slipped and wrote it that way unconsciously?
I only just recently found a 2016 post by JKP that compared the heads and noses of the two Aries, coming to the conclusion that they were drawn by different people, with clearly different levels of skill.
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I can't post images in the comments over there, so I figured I'd bring the discussion here.
I just wanted to add that the same can be observed about Taurus: the while Dark Taurus' head is pretty confidently drawn, the light Taurus is... rather unfortunate looking.
Like the two Aries, they have very different noses and eyes. Light Taurus has the same weird head tilt as Leo.
This makes me want to agree with JKP's observation that there are two artists at work here. I like JKP's idea that there was some sort of elder being called in for assistance.
In both cases, it is the first animal that has a poorly drawn head, and the second one looks a lot better. Maybe the "senior" artist saw what had been done in the first Aries and Taurus, and seeing how awful they were, stepped in to finish the second ones?
As JKP notes, the timeline for the process is hard to guess.
I'm not sure whether these remarks can be taken much further, or if anything else might suggest two artists at work for the other Zodiac roundels too.
Anyway, although I'm late to comment on this, I thought it should be given some space for discussion on the forum.
This is a subject I have not looked into yet, so I don't know how common or rare examples are. At first glance, it looks like moon faces are not uncommon.
However, several of the faces in the VM celestial bodies are quite characteristic, so it might be informative to find parallels.
I found one stylistic parallel for the frontal face, which is unfortunately a bit late (1491). The BSB site is incredibly slow for me atm so I can't look in the rest of the MS.
I can think of so many different ways that frame shifting can occur in ciphers that I thought it deserved its own thread.
On the simplest level, imagine a code ring with an alphabet on each wheel. If we spin the wheel so that A matches up with V (instead of A), then we have created a new frame of reference from which the code is derived. Thus, F is A, L is G, etc. It's a simple Caesar cipher.
We can use the same frame of reference for the entire block of text or we can shift the wheel every few characters (based on a regular number of characters or based on some pre-arranged pattern or marker).
Now, if this were a genetic frame of reference, we would examine groupings according to known patterns. However, if a mutation occurs (an insertion or deletion), a sequencing error would affect the boundary expectations, and thus the accuracy of the subsequent patterns.
This can happen in a code ring also.
Imagine you invented a cipher in which you have organized the letters into groups (groups of words, or groups of a certain length, or groups with certain delimiters) and you shift your code ring (your frame of reference) each time you reach a group boundary. If you miss a boundary then a "mutation" occurs and the text that follows may be off.
If you are deciphering the text, you have to work out the frame of reference and how the groups are organized. Even if the enciphered text is accurate, it's possible that a "mutation" (a mistake) might occur in the decipherment process, then the rest would come out wrong. (This concept would also apply to reading relative-notation music systems. If you start off on the wrong note, the notes that follow will be in the wrong key.)
A "frame shift" can be a deliberate part of the encipherment process. Cipher wheels have been invented that can shift multiple times or at predetermined intervals. In the Middle Ages, they sometimes created charts full of shifts (usually regular shifts). In fact, we already have a forum thread to discuss a specific kind of shift.
In the 1460s, Alberti was using multiple substitution codes, and indicated the frame [of reference] shift in the text itself. So markers and shifts did exist in the 15th century.
If frame shifts were used in the encirpherment, they would also have to be part of the decipherment process.
The VMS does not show evidence of being a simple substitution code, nor does it show signs of being a regularly shifted substitution code (the same common tokens show up throughout the manuscript on almost every line). But it is possible there are markers—certain glyphs show up with great regularity in places where one might expect more variety, so it is possible there are larger blocks of text that might have to be interpreted with some kind of shift in mind. In fact, the first time I saw the VMS, I wondered if the P and Eva-k gallows at the beginnings of paragraphs were "keys" that meant, "This paragraph is to be decoded according to this pattern." (I soon realized it wasn't that simple and that they might be pilcrows or symbols, or letters, or something else entirely.)
Anyway, M. Hoffmann stated that one needs a degree in science to understand frame shifts. I don't agree. I think it's something that can be understood on a logical level, and even though the above is a very simple example, the concepts can be applied with varying levels of complexity.
my name is Dr. Michael Hoffmann. I am a geneticist, and I am pretty sure that I have decoded Voynich. 21 pages are translated completely, and the first line of 120+ pages of the manuscript also. I started working on Voynich some weeks ago, because I am on sabbatical and I needed a project.
The text inside Voynich is latin, and for translation it requires I) a decipher chart (which is in the attachment) and II) knowledge of frameshifts (i.e. syntax movements). Since I am the only one today who can read that script I am searching for followers helping to translate the whole manuscript. You do need knowledge of latin, at least that what we call a "grosses latinum" in germany. A degree in science is essential to accept the frameshifts/syntax movements; although some pages do not follow that rule, which might be due to the fact that Voynich is written by at least four different authors, and all of them obtain a different style.
Inside Voynich, spoiler alert, you can find poems and also texts about finance, as well as thoughts of, at least at that time, strange things, and cooking recipes. At least two of the authors are female. On a cooking recipe I am actually working, and it is page 150 of the digital copy provided by the yale university. This recipe is entitled "the five wings". If you are interested in discussions about Voynich translation, please feel free to contact me.
And please find as an example attached translated page 92 of the digital copy provided by yale (latin and german). It is about the treatment of perotinitis (disease of the guts) with extracts of blue lotus. As in most cases the plant depicted on a page is decoration, on this page (and on some others that deal with medicine) it is not. I hope you can read the attachment, I had to minimize the original because of the 500 kb limit rule here.
I know that I ruined some myths here. However, with a scientific approach you can finish everything. Yeah.
I hope some of you find my post interesting,
with best regards
Dr. Michael Hoffmann
ps: because of the prefix I chose (book) I can state that I have published this story on amazon. I do not have send this story to science or nature simply because translation is not my work, it is a hobby.
Unfortunately, I don't have time to blog about this, which is too bad because I have so many examples, but one thing we have to keep in mind about the VMS main text is that constructed alphabets (and also a high proportion of cipher texts) are almost all different from evolved alphabets in certain specific ways.
What many constructed alphabets and ciphertexts have in common is
many disconnected letters,
letters that tend to be more upright than slanted, and
often more rounded forms.
In time, as people get used to writing new glyph shapes, they tend to write faster and the script tends to become more connected, sometimes more slanted, and often more angular (partly due to speed, partly due to the connectedness).
If you look through the various scripts on Omniglot, you will find that many of the ones that "feel" more like VMS glyphs were alphabets invented by missionaries in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. This gives an idea of what I mean by "constructed" texts. When a script is newly invented, the designers seem to be thinking more about shape than ease of quick writing.
So, we cannot be certain that the VMS glyphs are similar to the scribe's native script because it MIGHT be a constructed alphabet or MIGHT be a cipher text and thus may have certain characteristics in common with other invented texts (e.g., Georgian, which was a constructed alphabet, or various ciphertexts). Resemblance to natural scripts (e.g., Italic/Humanist, which is more spaced and rounder that Gothic Cursiva) might be coincidental (and it might not... but we don't know for sure).
But, as frustratingly obtuse as the VMS can be, I think there are some clues in the main text. For example, the way the swept-back tails are drawn is very typical for 15th century script and might illustrate habits of the hand. Whether the leaning-back letters are normal for the scribe who designed the VMS glyphs is very difficult to determine (I have found a small number of hands like that), so the "a" might be an invented shape rather than the scribe's usual shape, although the "o" might be the scribe's natural "o" since it doesn't lean. There might even be a systematic reason for the backleaning letters. For example, maybe leaning glyphs are numerals, or cipher-letters, or something that was originally intended to stand out from regular letters (as on folio 116v) so they could easily be distinguished at a glance.
Marginal annotations in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (top), You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (bottom) and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seem to me particularly interesting because they mix Latin-alphabet and Voynichese words. Two of them (66r and 116v) also include illustrations of naked women. The shape of the characters in these marginalia seems to me largely consistent with the characters that Rene Zandbergen and Alain Touwaide consider possible colour annotations. Finally, the presence of an 8-shaped character in both scripts is noteworthy: Latin scripts often include 'd' and 's' with two loops, but not as symmetrical as EVA:d d.
In 1954, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. thought it possible that the whole manuscript (last page included) was written in a single hand: "In my opinion the whole manuscript is by the same hand with the possible exception of the last page; but I am by no means sure of that".
While thinking of a single hand for the main body of text and these mixed-alphabet annotations may be too much, the author of the annotations seems to have been part of the environment that produced the manuscript, or least close enough to write Voynichese and draw nymph-like figures.
Here I would like to discuss the script used for these annotations, without going into the well-known problems of their interpretation. Since there are transcription ambiguities, not all characters can be identified with certainty. I have assembled a tentative (and obviously incomplete) 116v alphabet, also based on a character-by-character analysis by Vogt and Schwerdtfeger (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 2010). I expect there will be different opinions about some of the characters, still there should be enough agreement to discuss the script as a whole.
In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Nick Pelling discussed a parallel for f17r, which also compares very well with 116v: Basel University Library A X 132. In the same post, he provides digitally enhanced images of the 17r marginalia that make the presence of Voynichese clear. Unluckily, the available image from the Basel ms is quite small. Also, it consists of a single three-words sentence, so many characters are missing. This is an enlarged, cropped and manually equalized detail:
I guess the sentence reads:
Vocabularii hebreic(us) et grec(us) - I cannot read the following two words: vi gr(ecis)?? Hebrew and Greek dictionaries
The first lines of the Hebrew-Latin dictionary are visible in the lower part of the image. They seem to me to be in a totally different script. For instance, the first line of the main text reads:
(A)lma v(ir)go abscondita
Compare the 'b's in the marginal sentence with that in abscondita, or the gs in grecus and virgo. Actually, comparing the first line with the main body of text makes clear why the script of the first line is special.
Basel A X 132 marginal sentence is a good parallel: finding better images of a longer text with a similar script would already be a success.
Some comparable features:
the initial v matches the first letter in "umen"? (116v first line)
the 'h' (with ascender and descender) is similar to that in 'anchiton' (116v second line)
l and b are also good matches, but with less triangular loops
lines are thin, with no outstanding bold strokes.
In his comment on Pelling's blog, JKP has pointed out some differences:
Quote:I notice greater connectivity between letters and a different style of “r” in both -lary and hebre- Also the stem of the g extends above the loop (which means the stroke order is different from the VMS g) and the descender is shorter and more curled, also the base of the ell has a serif and connector (and the first leading stem on the first letter is very long).
I think his observation about r is particularly important. This script uses two different kinds of 'r', one shaped like a '2', the other more like a 'v'. In the Voynich marginalia, only the second kind appears. This seems important: something specific to hunt for in other candidates. Of course, a perfectly 8-shaped final s would also be welcome.
![[Image: MarginaliaVariableA.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/MarginaliaVariableA.png)
![[Image: CodeWheelShiftReference.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CodeWheelShiftReference.png)
