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| My Solution – Abbreviated Middle High German |
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Posted by: Thorsten - 26-05-2026, 06:03 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (58)
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I think I've figured it out!
Hello everyone,
I am aware that announcements of an alleged "solution" to the Voynich manuscript are viewed with justified skepticism. The research history of this manuscript is marked by numerous attempts at interpretation, which on closer inspection have not proven to be viable. This is precisely why I consider a critical classification of one's own approach to be essential.
The method presented here is neither a spontaneous idea nor a speculative quick shot. Likewise, the approach is not based on AI-generated interpretations or freely constructed assignments of meaning. Rather, the basis of my work is a systematic examination of the manuscript over several years.
The focus was in particular on the investigation of recurring character sequences, the analysis of possible linguistic patterns, the reconstruction of historical writing and abbreviation practices, and the examination of plausibility in the cultural and linguistic context of the 15th century. All results were continuously validated against the text itself and checked for consistency, repeatability and contextual reference.
In the meantime, I have reached a point where I consider the viability of the procedure to be sufficiently resilient to put the results so far up for public discussion.
I would therefore like to expressly invite you to critically examine the method, formulate counter-arguments, propose alternative interpretations or apply the method independently.
If the approach proves to be flawed, a critical analysis will show. However, if it is upheld, it could result in a new approach to understanding the Voynich manuscript.
Thank you very much for your attention and willingness to deal with the results.
Thorsten
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Why I believe the approach worrks
- The application of my method is reproducible.
- The procedure corresponds to the possibilities and methods of his era.
- After using the method, the text remains fluently legible without additional deciphering aids.
- Recurring words make comprehensible sense when used again in the respective context.
- The text that has already been translated gives a consistent picture in its entirety.
- The content fits plausibly into the historical and cultural environment of the 15th century.
- At the same time, the content provides a comprehensible explanation for why the text was written in a veiled form in the first place.
Reply
Based on my translations to date, the following working hypotheses and conclusions currently emerge:
- In my estimation, the manuscript is written in a form of Middle High German.
- Contrary to previous assumptions, it is probably neither a plant book nor an astronomy work. Rather, the illustrations seem to have a deliberately misleading character. Already in the first paragraph on folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is, according to my interpretation, a reference to this intention to conceal.
- The text does not form fluid sentences in the modern understanding. Instead, keyword-like word sequences are created, which are more reminiscent of notes, mnemonics or thematically grouped thoughts. This is particularly evident on folio f1v: to the right and left of the plant representation, independent blocks of meaning are created. I consider the recurring formation of such interrelated fields of meaning to be a strong indication of the viability of the method.
- The pages translated so far indicate that the manuscript may have been intended as a kind of collection of advice or knowledge for the courtly environment. The focus seems to be on questions of cohabitation, sexuality, partnership and dynastic marriage – especially under the conditions of politically motivated unions.
- For example, I interpret the diagram on folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as a representation of different forms of marital cohabitation. According to my current reading, four possible models are described there:
- a marriage with accepted extramarital relations
- the idealized or socially expected form of marriage
- a relationship with an exclusively sexual partner within the household
- a form of cohabitation marked by jealousy
Hypothesis
A final test for the following working hypothesis is still pending:
- The Zodiac section seems to me less like a meaningful word assignment and more like a kind of word or reference collection. According to my current impression, this section served the author as a control or reference work - for example, to record abbreviations, terms or meanings already used and to avoid unintentional duplication. A memory aid within a system that is presumably strongly influenced by individual rules of memory.
Steps for decryption
The following steps are required for decryption:
- A character substitution according to the mapping table
- If necessary, use of the syllable table to determine the beginning and end syllables
- If applicable, identification of the part of speech based on the suffix
- Completion of the letter sequences using a Middle High German dictionary
- If necessary, assign a single letter that can be identified as an independent word to the corresponding word
Sample translation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. – First section
Mittelhochdeutsch
perment mouz vür ûnbedäht, eʒ unhëlsam wît wiʒen, allzemal von bîzeichen wârheit,
verheiʒen schërz iʒ. sîn behëren menschensin. weiʒ êren alleʒ. alleʒ tuoen vnde
undernëmen wandelbaerlichs iʒ. umbehin wint alich ez sîn allergelûngenst dezem vërs
trügesam einhëllens. Iedoch liuterunge verlieselichs. alde ez diernin überein iʒ üeben
værens. mittelmaeʒic alein gereitʒ kein... ... underdëʒer wîs
Hochdeutsch
Das Pergamente muss auf Unwissende, die das Offensichtliche ausgiebig betrachten und auf der Suche nach dem Inhalt sind, wie ein Scherz wirken, der sich über den menschlichen Verstand erhebt. Was es ehrt: Es wurde alles getan und entfernt, was tadelswerte ist. Alles um es herum wirkt wie etwas Nichtiges. Alles in Allem ist es bestens gelungen, so etwas gegenüber täuschend Übereinstimmend zu wirken. Dennoch sind die Ausführungen verlustreich. Ansonsten stimmt das Mädchen zu: es wiederholt ausüben gefährdet uns. Diese Mittelmäßigkeit allein reizt keinen ...
... AUF DIESE ART UND WEISE
English (Automatically translated)
To the uninitiated—those who scrutinize the obvious at length while searching for the true substance—the parchment must appear as a jest that transcends the limits of human intellect. To its credit: everything objectionable has been scrupulously purged or removed. Everything surrounding it seems utterly trivial by comparison. All in all, it has succeeded admirably in presenting such a deceptively convincing facade. Nevertheless, the execution itself is flawed. In this regard, the girl concurs: attempting this again would put us in peril. This mediocrity alone holds no allure for anyone...
... IN THIS MANNER
I have published some selected pages on my Google Drive (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) for review. The previous deciphering of 10 pages resulted in a preliminary dictionary with currently about 800 entries.
In addition, I also provide the substitution table I use, including its derivation, as well as an overview of the identified prefixes and suffixes and an example sequence for the translation to make the procedure comprehensible and reproducible.
I would like to point out that all materials are still subject to an ongoing revision and validation process. In particular, the assignment of individual Middle High German words remains the subject of continuous examination due to the reduced spelling and the associated scope for interpretation.
I am aware that I will not have hit all the words correctly. Therefore, the procedure itself should be at the forefront of a review.
I also ask all those who read the German variant of the word transfer to keep in mind that not only Voynich symbols were transferred, but also a transfer from Middle High German to New High German had to take place. This is deliberately a word-for-word transfer that is as direct as possible using a dictionary. As a result, the text naturally reads a bit bumpy in places.
I am not an expert in this field. Nevertheless, I think that the basic context can already be seen.
To all those who are now looking for a clear, fixed algorithm, I would like to say: In my opinion, you are already starting from a modern way of thinking. This idea is closely linked to the computer age or to actual cryptographic encryption.
The author was probably not interested in creating a mathematically clean system. The aim was to disguise content – and to be able to read it again later. Whether a rule was applied consistently or a mnemonic bridge was sufficient at another point, whether work was done from memory or improvised spontaneously – all these are possibilities of this time.
The Voynich manuscript is probably not a text that can be translated with elegant source code at the touch of a button.
I therefore think that a serious decryption of the VM will end up with something that seems almost old-fashioned in our time: manual work.
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| Who is even still working on a solution for the VMS? |
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Posted by: JoJo_Jost - 25-05-2026, 05:21 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (77)
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When I look around here, there are very few people who are committed to working on a solution over the long term (e.g. Stolfi, Rubin Novacna, myself, u.a), and many of the “one-hit wonders” who pop in, propose a completely off-the-wall solution, and then disappear again.
That’s why I’m interested in the question: Who here is still honestly and consistently working on a plausible solution? And in what direction is it heading?
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Starred Paragraphs are Pythagorean Sentences, or Maxims |
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Posted by: SherriMM - 24-05-2026, 06:26 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (9)
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New blog post and theory: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
To summarize, "I believe the starred paragraph section of the Voynich are a collection of sayings, or moral maxims (or ethical aphorisms, or gnomes), of Pythagorean beliefs, of the specific collections proposed below:
In this section of the Voynich we have 324 stars, each aligned more or less with a sentence or a few. There are also at least two missing folios (109r / 109v and 110r / 110v). Each folio averages around 14 stars, with some like 103r higher at 19, and three folios at the lowest end of 10 stars (105r, 105v, and 116r), and the rest vary in amount. So if we assume our 4 missing folios at 14 stars each, it would give us 56 added stars, or 380 total goal (324 we have plus 56 estimated missing = 380). With me so far?
Here’s what I suggest:
- The Pythagorean Sentences = 123
- The Sentences of Clitarchus = 130*
The Golden Sentences of Democrates = 80 (some have 84?)
- The Similitudes of Demophilus = 59**
Adding these up we get 392. Pretty close to our 380 estimate.
It would mean our missing four folios would have to total 68, or average of 17 stars per page. Well within existing Folios (remember 103r has 19). I wonder if Folio 58r / 58v belongs in this section as well, which would bring our missing stars total down."
Please see my blog post for more information.
To clarify, I do not mean it is a word-for-word copy - I am still on the team of the text as a cipher.
I will post my other theory in a new thread, but this theory is very related to the overall theme of a Pythagorean influence. I would love some discussion on this, and welcome all corrections and feedback.
All the best,
Sherri Mastrangelo
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| Decipherment Attempt: A ~1425 Alchemical Manual in Latin Scribal Shorthand |
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Posted by: jredder - 21-05-2026, 06:22 PM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
- Replies (6)
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Hey everyone, what's the happyhaps?
I'm new here, the only other post I made was an introduction post. I'm not an academic, no affiliation with anywhere. I am an IELTS and TEFL certified ESL teacher living abroad (abroad being not my home country lmao).
I don't like mysteries. They confuse and frighten me. A door that never opens is just a wall, and a wall where a door should be is useless. To me, the Voynich Manuscript was a door where a wall should be.
The framework I developed and I are proposing that the Voynich Manuscript is a highly detailed alchemical workbook written in an idiosyncratic scribal shorthand Latin produced by a northern Italian alchemist around 1425 CE.
The author, very likely a Padua graduate from the faculty of physica, has this book full of stuff mostly to keep mercenaries alive. The author was almost certainly a Holy Roman Empire loyalist working to keep the HRE condottieri alive during the conflicts in Northern Italy between the HRE and the Papal authorities.
I know Latin has been proposed before, and every attempt to tie the two together has been beaten to within an inch of its life, but I promise this is at least a bit more robust of a framework than what this community is used to. Greek was proposed nearly to death by people before Ventris eventually proved Linear B was just some old weird Greek.
And I am not only asking you to trust me. I think I am my own worst skeptic, but that is certainly not true, especially not here.
I built tools to test all my work. From beginning to end, you can test it.
The link is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
All the code I used is there, you can run it on the website or copy and paste it and run it on your own machines.
There is also a live translator on the website so you can test what I made and see if it makes sense. Either it works or it doesn't lmao.
The framework was done while doing tests on the entire corpus at once mostly, instead of trying to make sense of every page individually. That was too much work and led to nothing.
The shorthand is kind of like an agglutinative abjad system, though there's no good way to describe it efficiently. You'll see when you look at my work.
The book is divided into multiple parts, I'm sure you're aware.
1st section: Herbal section. This section is chimera, or combinations of different parts of plants all frankenstein'd into one plant. It functions as a visual recipe for the potion. They were drawn in the Doctrine of Signatures, which was a common way to draw medicinal plants in medieval Europe, drawing them not by how they look but by what alchemical and chemical principles they had within them. The text on these pages are almost entirely harvesting instructions, distillation purity, what kind of distillation is required, etc. This is just the recipe section of the book.
2nd section: Zodiac section. You see, chemistry and alchemy weren't different things, right? They were the same thing, and they were both governed by the stuff in the sky. You needed to harvest or distill different stuff under different conditions. Harvest peony at night so the woodpeckers don't see you and peck your eyes out (this is a real thing lmaooo), harvest nightshade... at night. Harvest sun flowers when the sun is out, etc. The zodiac part is the reference for harvesting instructions. When certain things happen, moon cycles, etc. This part doesn't have much in the way of instructions, just observations.
3rd section: Balneological section. The weird one, aye? In medieval Europe, there was no periodic table of elements. When you wanted to talk about chemistry and alchemy in visual form, you had... allegory. See, alchemy was divided into three different principles that governed the whole thing. Mercury, Sulphur, and Salt. The mercurial part of alchemy was the raw essence contained within plants and the earth (above ground) that could be extracted and refined. Mercury, volatile, feminine (certainly a choice), and cool. When you see women going through the tubes, it is a very on the nose way to illustrate raw, volatile Mercurial essence going through distillation tubes. The author practiced secular alchemy, pioneered by the OG Maria the Jewess, and we know this because he uses her Balneum Mariae. The balneum mariae used aqua frigida (cold water for cooling the distillation rig) and aqua vitae (the alcohol that you actually distil with). Cold is blue. Life is green. The balneological section is distillation instructions.
4th section: Cosmological section. This one is insane, truly, to look at; however, it's much more simple than the secrets of the universe. It is... topdown equipment setup guide for a Tribikos, or a three alembic distillation rig, which is an invention of, you guessed it, Maria the Jewess.
These are the four main sections for creation, and the last two sections deal mostly with what happens after production, which honestly I am not super interested in explaining here.
As an example of what the parser shows on any given folio, here is a section from 13r:
foli--em radic--em cohobatum Sol-foli--ae
Luna-cum recipe-Luna-cum radic--am canal--us
Leaf, root, cohobation, solar leaf, lunar conditional harvest command, root accusative, vessel noun, etc.
The Tria Prima, which is the governing force behind Southern Alpine alchemy, is encoded in the grammar. Solar markers on solar governed plants, lunar on lunar, and none on salt governed, because nobody cared when you harvest or prepared 99% of roots. They were considered shielded, unaffected by what happens above the ground. It's all encoded in the grammar.
The clearest example of this is folio 28r. Before I looked at the illustration, the parser flagged simultaneous solar AND lunar markers on the same lines, which is statistically unusual. Most folios are dominated by one or the other. My prediction was that the illustration would show a plant requiring both celestial conditions simultaneously. I panicked, thinking my theory was unraveling in front of me, but it was just mandrake. This goofy lil' weirdo is the one plant in all of medieval herbology whose harvest protocol explicitly requires both solar and lunar timing at once. I did not know that before I looked at the picture. I didn't know much of anything before I looked at anything.
As a second example, here's what the parser produces on Folio 70r2, the April zodiac page:
The 2nd ring reads: Solis... cohobatum+magna_mutatio... canal... cohobatum+mensis... inde... cucurbit... foli... Lunam... Solem
That's: Sun's conditions... cohobated charge at Great Mutation scale... vessel... monthly cycle... thereupon... flask... leaf material... Moon... Sun
The token cccc appears exactly once in the entire 40,702 token corpus. On this page. In the astronomical c-series, repetition marks temporal scale: c = day, cc = month, ccc = year. cccc = the Great Mutation. I didn't know what the Great Mutation was when the parser flagged it, which again made me panic because the primary distillation token should only be able to max out at ccc, triple distillation, because... tribikos. The Jupiter-Saturn water triplicity conjunction of 1425 CE, the single most significant astrological event of that generation, falls in March-April 1425. The carbon dating window for the manuscript is 1404-1438. The cccc token sits on the April page. The author was writing during or immediately after the event and marked it in real time. That narrows the composition window from 34 years to roughly 1425-1430.
I did two Monte Carlo permutation tests (in the live repo on my website)
The first one shuffled the semantic assignments, taking all the Latin mappings and randomly reassigns which token gets which Latin value, then runs the parser 1000 times with randomized meanings. If my framework were just lucky or memorizing stuff, you'd expect randomized assignments to score similarly. But they do not! The maximum random coverage it could get across all 1000 runs was 28.02% with roots and suffixes both, where mine got up to 52.1% with my framework.
The second one scrambles the actual characters inside every token in the book. This destroys the internal structure of the text, and then tests the grammar against the fake corpus, which is now all noise. If the parser was just exploiting pure character frequency patterns rather than real structure, it would still score pretty well on random text. It could only do 14.21% in 1000 runs, while my framework did 41.62%.
This is me trying to attack my framework from all directions. One asking "are the right words being assigned to the right meanings" and the other asking "is there actually structure here to find and have I found it?"
They both returned p values of... 0.0000.
Papers are on Zenodo, go take a look:
A Computational Decipherment and Explanation of the Voynich Manuscript - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Tribikos Confirmation, 52.1% Corpus Coverage, and a Complete Translation of Folio 70r2nd_ring - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Tear it apart lads, and as always...
Thank you for taking the time to look at my work. Truly, this community is a blast.
If you have any questions, feel free to message me. I'll be around to talk about it.
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| Proposed architecture of the Voynich system |
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Posted by: Labyrinthinesecurity - 21-05-2026, 04:43 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (9)
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The IVTFF cleanly separates captions (next to drawings) from the rest of the text.
I thought that captions could be semantic rich, and maybe different from the rest of the text from a grammar perspective?
Looks like they are.
Captions follow the following pattern, overwhelmingly: o-K-V-F (o + stop + vowel + final consonant), repeated 1-2 times. The ch/sh and e slots are used sparingly. What's more, captions dont carry the A/B distinction signal.
So... what if captions where surfacing semantically meaningful words, whereas words not containing o-V-K-F where just "elaboration"?
We would then have two channels in Voynich.
I ran some stats, and look at the results:
Semantic channel (o, a, t, k, p, f, d, l, r, n, m, y, s): stable across sections, preserved in captions, 73% of all glyphs
Elaboration channel (ch, sh, e, ee, q, i, ii, cXh): varies by line position, varies by A/B "language," largely absent from captions.
Semantic words have 29% redundancy => reasonable, close to natural language
Elaboration has only 3.2% redundancy => it's essentially memoryless. It barely depends on the previous elaboration. This is consistent with elaboration being either random padding, a simple positional marker, or an independent cipher layer.
Entropy Comparison
Each Voynich word carries approximately: - 7.73 bits of semantic core information (the message)
- 2.78 bits of elaboration information (position + dialect + some morphology)
- Total: 10.51 bits per token
The elaboration's 2.78 bits decompose further into:- PREFIX (~1.76 bits): primarily encodes line position (ch/sh at start, ∅ at end, q in middle)
- INFIX (~3.38 bits): encodes section dialect and some core-specific morphology
These two sub-channels share only 0.147 bits of mutual information (8.4% of prefix entropy), they are nearly independent.
Let me make two conjectures:
1) the Voynich has two layers: a semantic core (73% of glyphs, 49% of vocabulary) and an elaboration layer (27% of glyphs, carrying almost no sequential information)
2) proposed word architecture: [ELAB_PREFIX] + [SEMANTICAL_PREFIX] + [SEMANTICAL_STEM] + [SEMANTICAL_SUFFIX] + [ELAB_INFIX] + ...
ch/sh/q o/a/∅ k/da/ka/... y/n/l/r/m/∅ ii/ee/e/i
Example decompositions:
Full word Elabprefix SemPrefix Stem SemSuffix Elabinfix
chol ch o — l —
okaiin — o ka — ii ...
daiin — ∅ da — ii ...
shedy sh ∅ — — e + (d=stem, y=suffix)
qokeedy q o k — ee ...
Thoughts?
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