This is something I discussed many, many years ago. Nobody came up with a conclusive answer. So here it is again : is this a humanoid face in the bottom right of the rosettes?
How likely is it that we will be able to learn more about the author of the Voynich Manuscript?
On the assumption that, once we can read the Voynich Manuscript, the following are true:
1) we identify a named author;
2) he was European;
3) lived some time between 1400 and 1450;
4) had at least a moderate education and income; and
5) is not otherwise known to history.
I know that for England (for example; I do not believe the author was English) there are likely to be other documents of the period which identify clerks by name, either contracts, legal documents, accounts, and so on. But what if the author was Italian, German, Polish, Czech, or other? Will we be left with a name only or is there likely more that we can discover?
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.
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![[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)
