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| How much time and effort may have been put in? |
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Posted by: eggyk - 04-06-2026, 03:57 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Quite often, I see opinions here discussing various theories and judging them based on the amount of effort that would have been required from the VMS author for them to be true. I want to discuss that, even though it's almost definitely been discussed before.
How much effort do you think could have been put into the VMS text, illustrations and/or ciphers?
How much effort from the author does a theory require before you dismiss it as unlikely, and why?
How much effort would a potential decoding require before you dismiss the cipher as unlikely, and why?
I'll start: I think that any amount of effort/monotony, up to the scale of decades of work, sits within what's possible. There are countless examples of people doing extensive monotonous work for no specific reason beyond "why not?". Some people simply want to do something and do it, regardless of utility.
You have communities and individuals everywhere that do things on this scale. Some people go out and collect rocks from different places, some people spend years organising and digitising manuscripts knowing that almost noone will ever look, others build an extensive library of all of the worlds road bollards, electrical posts, and plant species for no reason other than knowing where they are on geoguessr. A group of players in minecraft are attempting to build the entire earth at a 1:1 scale!
Perhaps the most relevant example is the Voynich community itself. Many people set out to research and solve this manuscript, spending hours, days, weeks, months, sometimes years, and sometimes decades putting in 1000s of hours of effort in. Is it so unbelievable that someone may spend an entire year's worth of their free time writing a book meant to be unreadable, just for the sake of it? We tend to assume that if there is meaning in the text then there must have been a use case, but what if the author simply enjoyed writing weird/fancy books?
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| Voynichese is a numeric cipher? |
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Posted by: ololololo - 04-06-2026, 12:10 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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Well, when I wrote my last post, I didn't think about sharing my opinion on this... I think it would be better if I wrote it in a separate post.
During my independent study of the Voynich manuscript (which took about a year), I came to the conclusion that Voynich is most likely a cipher based on numbers. I am not a cryptology expert, but I will try to explain how I came to this conclusion.
Let's start with what I wrote about in the previous post, which is that the text of the Voynich manuscript (or rather, the mechanism of word formation) is very similar to classical substitution: all words consist of a fixed set of characters and bigrams arranged in a certain order. Here you might think that I am reinventing the wheel, having in mind the concepts of "prefix-midfix-suffix" or Stolfa's "crust-mantle-nucleus" model (in fact, this is what some initially thought), however, this is not quite the case. The set of supposed minimal substitution units that I have compiled demonstrates some more dependencies besides the dependencies of position in the word.
I would like to suggest that you look at this from a different angle. If we can easily decompose any word in the manuscript into such minimal units, but at the same time we clearly see that this is not a regular "symbol-symbol" substitution, then we can use regular numbers to help us.
First, I'll add a list of the "letters" I've generated:
1). Single letters: o, d, e*, y, r, l and maybe s,
2). Bigrams: oi, ai(an), or, ol, ar, al, om, am, in, iin, ee (es)*, ch/sh, ir, il, im, qo
3). All gallows and EVA x.
Pay attention to the digrams al-ar and ol-or. Their peculiarity is that in such a combination they repeatedly appear both in words and standing alone. But by swapping the letters (ol-or to lo-ro, al-ar to la-ra), these properties are immediately lost, and the structure of words becomes "more fragmented" (let's take the word for example oralar. It can be decomposed as ol-ar-ar, and as o-la-ra-R. I think you can immediately see the difference between three bigrams and two extra letters around the edges. In addition, there are no words "lara" or "rala" in the manuscript). This remarkable property of bigrams suggests that the letters of the Voynich manuscript are not Latin letters, but numbers.
But if they were Arabic numerals, swapping the digits in a number would result in a different number (for example, 41 becomes 14, 310 becomes 103, and 80 becomes 08), and the meaning would not be lost. However, in the case of digrams, the opposite effect is observed. This already suggests that Voynichese is a cipher based on Roman numerals, as they have the same property: if you take the number 41 = XLI and swap the IXL, you will not get a whole number, as it does not follow the rules of Roman numerals.
This "position effect" manifests itself both at the level of individual semantic units (as in the example with bigrams) and at the level of multiple words and the entire text (this manifests itself in the form of the "prefix-midfix-suffix" pattern). Given the historical context (specifically, the realities of the 15th century, the author's tools, and capabilities), I assume that the Voynich manuscript's cipher is a kind of nomenclature that is additionally encrypted using the letters of an artificially created alphabet (this is not entirely unusual, considering that it was a standard substitution technique for the time, similar to the Theban alphabet), which encrypts both letters and abbreviations.
Why letters and abbreviations?
I came to this conclusion because the list of "letters" I provided is quite flexible. For example, it is easy to see that ch and sh are equivalent (in the sense that words using these letters are almost identical to each other: chey - shey, cheody - sheody, char - shar, chdar - shdar, chckhy - shckhy).
It's not suitable for letters alone, or for abbreviations alone, but it's fine for both.
**
With bigrams, we can conduct a small experiment that shows features that are not typical for substitution. Let's exclude ee(es), ch/sh, and qo from the list. From the remaining list, we can select al-ar and ol-or. We can generate a pair of words by taking a pair like ol-*-in and replacing the asterisk with ai: olaiin, oraiin, and alair. These patterns are not typical for regular substitution, but they align well with the typical numerical cipher-nomenclator. Thus, we should read the words of the manuscript not as words, but as an ordered sequence of numbers, e.g. chey as 50-10-5 (this is not a translation, this just an example of how it might look).
It's inconvenient/impractical/difficult to do!
Maybe that's true, but it's possible, even for the 15th century, plus, given that the manuscript is a product of collective labor, the argument about its bulkiness loses weight, because a group of skilled people would definitely be able to encrypt the text faster than a single person.
It's inconvenient/impractical/difficult to read!
The manuscript is essentially not a work of fiction, but a reference book (all herbals are reference books), which means that the reader does not have to spend time deciphering the entire book. By knowing the key, they can apply it to the relevant pages without any problems.
Apparently, the book was not written for a wide audience (as evidenced by its design and lack of decryption), but for someone who at least knew the key. This suggests that there should have been no difficulties... if the book had fallen into the right hands  .
...And super-highly interested fact...
Let's look at the top right corner of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. page. In the context of the Roman numeral version, it takes on a new meaning...
Rotate the red symbols 90 degrees to the left, and you will get the Roman numeral 102. Such a bold coincidence, and on the first page... Could this be the key?
P.S. I am not an expert, and what I have written may be complete nonsense. The purpose of this post is not to prove that I am right, but rather to reach out to you, to find out your opinion, and to discuss this version together.
I hope this will help whoever deciphers the Voynich manuscript.
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| A Hypothesis: The Voynich Manuscript as a Physician's Knowledge Database |
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Posted by: Vaclav Hucek - 03-06-2026, 09:57 AM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
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I am not proposing a translation. Instead, I would like to discuss a possible framework for interpreting the relationship between the illustrations and the text.
I've been studying the Voynich Manuscript and a possible interpretation came to mind.
What if the manuscript was created by a physician, herbalist, or early medical practitioner who was not writing continuous prose, but rather recording recipes, treatments, ingredients, quantities, and procedures in a structured system?
In the herbal section, the plants may not represent actual botanical species. Instead, they could represent ingredients used in remedies, medicines, ointments, or preparations intended to treat specific conditions. The unusual composite plants could therefore be visual summaries of the ingredients involved in a treatment rather than illustrations of real plants.
Under this hypothesis, the accompanying text would not necessarily be normal language. It could function more like a catalog or database entry, recording information such as: - the condition being treated,
- ingredients used,
- quantities or proportions,
- preparation methods,
- application instructions,
- expected effects.
One observation that led me to this idea is the frequent occurrence of similar word families throughout the manuscript. Rather than representing different words in a spoken language, they might represent categories, modifiers, quantities, or variations of the same ingredient or procedure.
The later sections of the manuscript may then describe processes rather than objects. The famous pages with women, pipes, and flowing liquids could represent bodily systems, medical conditions, treatments, or physiological processes. The diagrams may illustrate how a condition develops and how a remedy affects the body.
I also wonder whether the colors themselves carry information. For example, green could indicate a problematic condition, imbalance, or disease state, while blue could represent treatment, transformation, recovery, or a medicinal substance. This is only speculation, but the consistent use of color throughout different sections of the manuscript makes me curious whether it serves a functional purpose rather than being purely decorative.
In this interpretation, the manuscript would not be a conventional book meant to be read from beginning to end. Instead, it would be a structured medical reference system—a physician's private catalog of knowledge, treatments, classifications, and observations.
I am not claiming that this explains the manuscript, but I would be interested to know whether anyone has explored a similar hypothesis, especially regarding the relationship between the illustrations, recurring word families, and possible medical categorization.
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| The Unsolved Mystery of Lorem Ipsum |
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Posted by: Torsten - 02-06-2026, 04:24 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I came across this youtube video about the history of the Lorem ipsum text — the world's famous placeholder text. Maybe others find this video also interesting.
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A few points that I think could be of interest:
Lorem ipsum has been used as placeholder text since 1966. For decades nobody knew what it was or where it came from.
"Lorem ipsum" was created by taking real Latin text from Cicero and modifying it — removing key words that carried meaning, adding non-Latin letters, garbling phrases. The modifications were small and selective. The result looks like Latin but is unreadable. It fooled everyone for decades until one scholar noticed a rare word and traced it back to its source.
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| Voynichese's letters |
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Posted by: ololololo - 01-06-2026, 06:25 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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During my independent research of the manuscript text, I may have been able to compile a list of letter combinations that form all of the words in the manuscript, and here it is:
1). Single letters: o, d, e*, y, r, l and maybe s,
2). Bigrams: oi, ai(an), or, ol, ar, al, om, am, in, iin, ee (es)*, ch/sh, ir, il, im, q
3). All gallows and EVA x (appears rarely and only in Voynich B).
*I can't be sure about e, because it can double like letter i, and I think the combination es is like in.
Although I doubt it, you can consider chy/shy and dy to be separate bigrams if you want. Ol, or, al, ar included in the list of bigrams because they are statistically inseparable (there are many separate ol and or, as well as parts of words: chol, poror, ykor and etc).
In fact, these combinations can be used to create any word in the manuscript, for example:
daiin = d+ai+in
chey = ch+e+y
chedy = ch+e+d+y
dy + d+y(unbelievable)
shapchedyfeey = sh+a+p+ch+e+d+y+f+ee+y (or sh+a+p+chedy+f+ee+y)
rchseesy = r + ch + s + ees + y
qokaiin = q + o + k + ai + in
otolaiin = o + t + ol + ai + in
doaro = d + o + ar + o
It looks bulky, but it seems to be true, as you can see, words are made up of not only individual letters, but also of bigrams.
If the encryption algorithm is based on substitution (which is likely to be the case, as there is nothing more appropriate for the 15th century than substitution), then the substitution alphabet contains between 26 and 28 letters (26 if we consider e, ee, and es to be equal and ignore x, which is only found in Voynich B). By the way, the Latin alphabet contains 26 letters.
In my opinion (just in case it's interesting), the letters of the mysterious alphabet are hidden behind numbers, and the numbers are hidden behind the Latin letters themselves. This can explain the presence of bigrams, which are not typical for regular substitution.
Although... at the same time, this is a convincing argument in favor of mystification, as this method can produce as many words as you like.
P.S. Sorry for my bad English, text made by translator.
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| Mapping Voynich connections through rare tokens |
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Posted by: quimqu - 01-06-2026, 12:55 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Most of my initial Voynich analysis focused on the most common tokens (I suppose it is the easiest way to start analysing the text). But this doesn't give us much information. So I started wondering if the opposite approach might actually be more informative.
Instead of looking at the global vocabulary, I analysed rare and semi-rare tokens. Not hapax legomena, since many of those could just be scribal noise or transliteration errors, but tokens appearing only a few times across the manuscript. My reasoning was simple: rarer tokens are potentially more specific, and therefore easier to trace between folios (and it might have less errors as they are repeated in the MS).
I built page-to-page networks based on shared rare tokens. The result was surprinsingly structured. Most pages remain weakly connected, but a few behave like hubs that link otherwise distant lexical communities.
The strongest case was f86v.
This is especially interesting because You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a pure text folio. It has no obvious visual structure like zodiac diagrams or herbal labels. Yet it repeatedly emerges as one of the most connected pages in the manuscript when analysing rare-token overlap.
What caught my attention is that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. does not connect strongly to just one section. It shares selective vocabulary with multiple areas of the manuscript, especially Marginal stars, but also Biological, Herbal, Cosmological and others.
Another thing that stood out is the behaviour of the Marginal stars section itself. Several folios from this section repeatedly emerge as hubs or dense local connectors. This suggests that the section may contain a relatively coherent but highly reused layer of vocabulary, possibly acting as a bridge between otherwise more isolated parts of the manuscript.
Main rare-token hubs detected in the network:
| Folio |
Section |
Observed behaviour |
| f86v |
Text-only |
strongest transversal hub |
| fRos |
Cosmological |
cross-section connector |
| f111r |
Marginal stars |
dense lexical hub |
| f113r |
Marginal stars |
dense lexical hub |
| f115v |
Marginal stars |
highly connected |
| f108v |
Marginal stars |
bridge-like behavior |
| f72v |
Zodiac |
unexpectedly connected |
| f67r |
Astronomical |
distant lexical links |
| f89r |
Pharmaceutical |
cross-section overlap |
| f76v |
Biological |
emerges at relaxed thresholds |
The heatmap below shows one example. Each colored signal corresponds to links between You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and different manuscript sections using only semi-rare tokens. The x-axis follows token order inside the folio itself.
The important point is that the signals are sparse and selective. The page does look like a connector between different lexical neighborhoods (maybe references to text within the MS?).
The Rosettes foldout also behaves in a similarly unusual way. It does not dominate the network as strongly as f86v, but it repeatedly appears as a transversal connector between distant parts of the manuscript.
I am not claiming this proves that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a summary page or an index. That would be too speculative. But I do think these results support a weaker idea: some folios seem to reuse selective vocabulary drawn from multiple textual communities across the manuscript.
Maybe the most common tokens tell us how the text is generated, while the less common ones tell us how the manuscript is organized. I also think the existence of hubs is difficult to explain with a fully random distribution of rare tokens. If these tokens were placed randomly across the manuscript, I would not expect them to accumulate repeatedly around specific folios acting as lexical connectors between otherwise distant pages.
I think this opens a new way of checking for relationships between folios and sections.
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| Colorization - what was it's purpose? |
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Posted by: Dunsel - 31-05-2026, 07:20 PM - Forum: Imagery
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I'm taking a break from my computational attacks on the Voynich. I decided to look at the illustrations. Before I begin, I fully claim to be art ignorant.
But, here's my observation/question.
I got GPT to help with this bit. I took a page from the Voynich herbal section and a page from a 15th century herbal book, Erbario and asked it to remove the color from both images.
Now, I'll ask you to look at these two closely at how much information about the plant these images provide. If this were a "field guide" herbal, could you identify the plant from these line drawings?
Next, click on the spoiler link below and ask yourself, how much additional information regarding identification was provided by adding color?
My interpretation, and I can visually apply this to other Voynich illustrations: Adding color didn't provide me with a lot more information. Unlike Erbario where the colors would aid in identification, I think adding color to the Voynich plant may have made it more difficult to identify.
I know, this is nothing new. Just my musings.
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| Hoax theory discovery by running lang analysis program according to my methodology |
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Posted by: maskci - 31-05-2026, 04:20 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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The proposed methodology aims to discover the exact processes with which VMS might have been created if it is made for the sole purpose of impresisng people back then and possibly generating life changing income.
(I wont be able to run any programs for the below protocol so this is why Im posting this here)
As per You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
..apparently the deviation is significant eg. 2.5 for Voynichese compared to 3.5-4+ for Latin or Greek and other such metrics.
Assuming:
-> When copying and glyphizing they might want to further obfuscate, eg cutting out words, we standardize the scribes' behavior into potential patterns of 'organic transformation'
Methodology:
First data set - Take a body of texts they might have had access too, ideal assumption, texts plausibly available to a Central European scribe in the early 15th century, Latin herbals, Arabic medical texts, Hebrew manuscripts, and similar period-appropriate works.
Second set - broader - assuming we may not know precisely what materials the scribes had access to - casting a wider net across contemporaneous written traditions.
Run simulations against VMS and preferably whole and in parts by scribe author, as well as permutations, to find patterns of 'organic transformation' potentially done by the scribes that yield Voynichese 2.5 or other metrics from transforming the originals using various patterns.
Expected results:
We might find out an array of algorithms that are logical to a human scribe that produce the 2.5 distribution instead of 3.5 or 4+. Some of them look UNCANNILY PROBABLE EG skip first 3 lines and last 3 of a standard page over a 40 page window surprisingly yields this. Bonus points if we find out scribe 2 taught scribe 3 their tactic and 1 and 4 had their separate method, and they both yield 2.5 by copying the middle of the page in a circle.
Potential difficulties: 1. Too many probable patterns yield it. 2. Can't discern scribes (small difficulty)
Finalizing: potentially get a hoax hypothesis that is A to Z(pun intended) a functional hypothesis, describing the full process of the scribe crafting it for the gold grab, that actually makes sense because of their psychology when creating the VMS.
I hope for someone here to run it and let us know the results?
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| The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes |
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Posted by: Dunsel - 28-05-2026, 06:06 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I decided to start another thread on this. While it ties directly into my work on the copy/mutate ledger (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), this deserves to be tied into my previous work on the bigram <ed> and to have it's own post because of the.... "Huh?" factor. This may already be known but I'm just discovering it so pardon if stepping on someone else's work.
Here's my previous posts on that subject for reference.
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In those posts I try to describe the differences between Currier A, which is Scribe 1 and Currier B which is Scribe 2+. They are dominated by the difference between the bigrams <ho> and <ed> with I defined as ED0 and ED+ regimes. My work on the generator focuses on Scribe 1 because of this apparent "regime shift" in order to try to gain stability in generator production.
Today, I decided to explore that a little further to see what effects I would need to anticipate should I decide to model Scribe 2+ and here's the interesting results I got.
First, I had codex create a basic machine learning script that would scan through the pages created by specific scribes (excluding any pages/sheets classified as being from 2 different scribes) and I had it look for syllabic chunks, things that resembled syllables. After creating 5 data files, one for each scribe, I had codex create a second script that would combine and compare those results to see how different scribes used different chunks. Here's the result:
Both charts are sorted by Scribe 1 counts for comparison.
Total count top chunks used by each scribe:
Normalized count of top chunks used by each scribe:
Here's my interpretation of what I'm seeing:
To me, this looks cumulative and directional. The later scribes are not replacing the earlier ecology, they are amplifying parts of it and reducing usage of other parts.
And it's monotonic. Usage is consistently moving in one direction without reversing by scribe.
Taking this method of ML chunking one step further, I had codex examine these syllables by quire and sheet and create a PCA chart (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). In this chart, a dot represents a sheet. The number above the dot represents the quire number.
Possible explanations for this because this does not look like random drift:
- Source-pool inheritance: Different scribes may have preferentially copied from different quire/sheet pools, which matches my proposed sheet-source pool idea for page creation. Furthermore, if pages were created using source sheets, the chunk ecology may suggest that later scribes preferentially reused sheets already created by earlier scribes and may have preferred the most recent scribe's work. (sorry, had to list this one first because of my working theory, not that it has any other specific weight.)
- Regime reweighting: The scribes may have used slightly different weighting systems for selecting or constructing words while still operating within the same broader production framework.
- Progressive stabilization: Over time, productive word families may have become increasingly dominant, with prefixes and endings becoming more specialized and certain chunks becoming structurally “sticky.”
- Scribal training lineage: Later scribes may have learned from already-shifted exeamples. Scribe 5 inherits an ecology already shaped by Scribe 4, Scribe 4 inherits one shaped by Scribe 3, and so on.
- Section/topic dependence: I have not specifically tested this yet, but different scribes are known to work in specific sections, so some chunk ecology differences could reflect section-specific production behavior rather than purely scribal differences.
And there are certainly other plausible explanations as well. What I'm seeing though is that the chunk ecology appears structured and directional rather than random.
EDIT: To test if this n-gram chunking might be section specific I reproduced the PCA chart with Herbal only pages. It's still showing a clean separation between scribes.
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| Notes on Four Sources Cited by Layfield and Davis (2026) |
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Posted by: Torsten - 28-05-2026, 02:07 PM - Forum: News
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Notes on Four Sources Cited in "The Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to the Voynich Manuscript'' by Layfield and Davis (2026)
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Quote:Layfield and Davis apply Latent Semantic Analysis to the Voynich Manuscript and engage with a substantial prior literature on the manuscript's two Currier languages, A and B. This note documents four places where the paper's characterization of cited sources does not match what those sources say. In one case, the cited classifications differ from the citing paper's representation of them, and the cited author's disclaimers about the labels are not carried into the citing paper. In another, the cited paper's terminology is attributed from a different paper, and the cited paper's own contribution on the same question is not represented. In a third, the cited paper does not address the topic of the citation. In the fourth, the cited paper draws the opposite conclusion from the one it is cited to support. Each can be verified directly by readers consulting the cited works.
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