Here's the idea: First we count the frequency of words that appear in a set of folios written in "Language A", and then we count the frequency of words in a set of folios written in "Language B". We then compare the distributions: a reasonable speculation is that the most common words in A are the same plaintext as the most common words in B.
Here's what you get if you compare the Herbal folios in Language A (1 through 56) with the Recipe folios in Language B (103 through 116):
(The table shows the top ten words in the combined folios, then broken out into the Language A and Language B folios.)
This shows that in Language A the most common word is "8am", whereas in Language B it is "am". (Having said that, the frequencies are quite different.) If you buy the hypothesis that they are ciphers for the same plaintext word, then the glyph "8" is likely a null in Language A. Comparing other frequent words in the same way may reveal insight into how the text is enciphered ... For example, the next most frequent word in A is "1oe" whereas in B it is "1c89": does that mean that "oe" in A converts to the same letters as "c89" in B?
I took this idea and ran with it for a while (in the linked posts from my blog below), but made little headway. I'd be most interested to hear critiques of this approach
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So, a lot of people interested in the Voynich aren't necessarily medievalists, and as a result it sometimes falls that they are not familiar with medieval forms of languages. I am pointing this out because I see a lot of people coming up with ideas and then trying to apply them with modern languages, which probably wouldn't come out right even if one had discovered the correct solution.
While Shakespeare is often erroneously described as writing in "old English" the fact is that genuine Old English would be just about indecipherable to a modern reader (Hwaet we gardena in geardagum...) and the carbon dating of the Voynich puts it into the Middle English period, if we're to talk of English. Probably the most famous poet of the Middle English period was Geoffrey Chaucer, whose writing looked like this:
Compleyne ne koude, ne might myn herte never, My peynes halve, ne what torment I have, Though that I sholde in your presence ben ever, Myn hertes lady, as wisly he me save That Bountee made, and Beautee list to grave In your persone, and bad hem bothe in-fere Ever t'awayte, and ay be wher ye were.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., though I think the best book I've found about learning ME is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
French also looked different historically and used different word endings. Here's an example from Christine de Pisan:
Doulce dame, vueilliez moy pardonner Se demouré ay un pou longuement; Car je n'ay peü plus tost retourner, Dont me desplaist; car trop d'empeschement M'est survenu, mais croiez fermement Que vostre suis, ou soie près ou loings, Le dieu d'amours m'en soit loial tesmoins.
Probably the best resource I've personally found for learning this type of French is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- later than the Voynich but preserving more of the historical forms in a teachable way. There are also several sources about learning Old French, which is an earlier form than Middle French but which might have some useful things to know.
German had Middle Low German and Middle High German.
From Hans van Ghetelen (Low German): De hane quam vor den konnynck stan Vnde sach ene seer drofflyk an. He hadde by syk twey hanen groet, De drouych weren vmme dessen dot. De eyne was gheheten Kreyant, De beste hane, den men vant Twysschen Hollant vnde Franckryk.
Here's Oswald von Wolkenstein (High German): Die mynne füget nyemand wer da nicht enhat wann wo er hin gat man spricht du wicht we dir was wiltu mir ge fiirhin drat hast nicht so richt dich balde von hynnen dein mynnen dir übel ane stat.
Unhappily I don't know much on where to learn these ones but maybe someone else can help.
Italian was even worse than German in having different dialects. Luckily there did come to be some preferred dialects just for the arts, but since we don't know what the Voynich really is it could be all kinds of weird local dialects if it were Italian. But for the same of giving an example, here's a poem by Michelangelo.
Come può esser, ch'io non sia più mio ? O Dio, o Dio, o Dio! Chi m'ha tolto a me stesso, ch'a me fosse più presso o più di me potessi, che poss'io? O Dio, o Dio, o Dio! Come mi passa el core chi non par che mi tocchi?
Even Latin was done a little differently at that time, than the Classical Latin you tend to get taught if you take classes in it. Renaissance Latin is the name given for the kind of Latin that was being done in the 15th century. Here's some random Renaissance Latin by Aaron Petrus.
COPIOSE AC LVCVLENTER mi Aaron quae ad cantum planum pertinere uidebantur, hucusque executus es ut nihil abste omissum putem, quod siquis ignoret uitio dandum sit. Dii boni quam multa et quam praeclara sunt, quae priore libro complexus es. Ex quo quidem coniecturam facio qualia futura sint, et quam praeclara et cognitu digna, quae sequentur. Et quando finem cantui plano: et primo libro te fecisse hesterno die mihi significasti, tui memor promisisti alteram operis partem aggredere, Incredibile dictu est, quanto tenear audiendi reliqua desyderio. Vide quaeso, quinque diebus te dictante, me excipiente, ac interpraete quid sit effectum, et quae iacta sint fundamenta, immo quantum iam creuerit opus, ut si etiam partem hanc illius solam quis edat magnum quidem, ac non parua laude dignum efficisse purandus sit.
In medieval languages, spelling rules were generally very flexible, people wrote according to their own dialects, you sometimes find weird letters that don't exist anymore (Þ and ʒ in English are always springing to my mind.) The examples are just some random examples to give a gist of the kind of differences you'd see compared to the modern forms of these languages.
Knowing how to read them is probably going to be helpful to anyone trying to decipher the Voynich. Has anyone got some recommendations for helpful books or websites for learning medieval languages?
I was looking at an old book called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it being an old guide to reading medieval writing styles and abbreviations.
Something I noticed on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is that the way they're writing P looks a lot like voynich 4o.
But this got me thinking -- might it be that 4 and o are always together because it's actually one letter? Are there any examples where 4 is not followed by o?
Posted by: R. Sale - 06-09-2016, 07:20 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Hey, I'm all for constructive discussions. I'm even in favor of constructive investigations. The whole problem is that so much of the investigation of VMs illustrations is based on appearance - the interpretation of appearance, the comparison of appearance. And it seems pretty much a given fact in many instances, that some people are going to go one way on a particular comparison and others will go in another. How can this sort of dichotomy be avoided, if the intent of the VMs author is to actually communicate.
Instead of investigations based on appearance, a different method of investigation needs to be be applied. One in which the content illustrated in the VMs is not compared, but rather analyzed and quantified - in the very simplest of terms. This changes the comparison from visual to ideological and simply numerical. The twins of VMs Gemini do not look identical, but they are still a pair. And the two goats of the VMs Aries pages, despite their obvious visual differences, are clearly a pair as well. The operating paradigm is no longer simply visual. The paradigm is no longer qualitative; it is quantitative. It is binary. It is the presence of pairing at the start of the VMs Zodiac. And rather than being a complex and elegant sort of paradigm, pairing is one of the simplest and most basic of patterns. And it doesn't require a lot of discussion. Pairing either exists or it does not. And the difference from other paradigm proposals is that pairing does exist in these VMs pages because it was put there in the construction of these illustrations.
Any steganographers might want to try a little trick. Lay a sheet of blank paper over You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and cut out little holes so you can just see the two blue-striped patterns in the upper left part of that page. It's another pairing, not necessarily identical in appearance, but paired none the less. Hidden, yet paired by their historical grounding. Paired in the origins of a religious tradition. Confirmed repeatedly within the illustrations themselves, perhaps best, for an investigator well-acquainted with obscure heraldic furs.
How does an investigation proceed when the signs provided by old traditions are not understood?
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Posted by: stellar - 06-09-2016, 05:43 AM - Forum: Astrology
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Another possible way to look at the folios 67r1 & 2 could come from a Solar Event like an eclipse. What was interesting is the South Node lines up with the dots from 67r2 from the solar fire image.
I went over the charts for Solar Eclipses from 1404-1438 and compared them to 67r2, but this one was special for 1431. The possibility of finding a date for the document is remote at best using this method. However I find it striking.
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The eclipse takes place in the evening in the sign of Aquarius; yet out of the charts, Aquarius is missing in the Voynich Manuscript with Taurus listed twice.
Also the following image on 67v1 shows the 2 suns that are have gone into flowers, just a thought.
Okay, so, my own favorite idea for the Voynich at this point is that some/most of the writing is nulls or other junk writing just put in to confuse things. I'm inclining to think that there was some kind of grille or lattice that one put over the page to obscure the unimportant writing, and that this device was at some time lost or destroyed, leaving us with the mystery we now have.
Reason for this is, I notice a particular diagonal line formed by the text on the left side of almost every page, like letters have been forced to fit into the space in a certain way, and I also see evidence of more such lines on nearly every page. I see also a strong tendency for certain shapes to repeat within some of these diagonal gatherings. Sometimes the diagonal lines might be partially left blank but the page regions that have writing still make the diagonal shapes.
The only idea I have for how to test this, would be to line up printouts of the pages over a light table, and compare the text placements on top of each other -- I would expect there to always be diagonal lines in all the same places if this were correct. The trouble is I cannot actually test it like that, because the MS was not flat-scanned -- the pictures we have are just photos of the open book, so the pages don't lay flat, and as a result they cannot be accurately compared due to arching, bending, camera angles and other distortions. (I mean, I can't even get the front and back edges of the same folio to line up accurately most of the time because of the way it was photographed -- and I know from having tried it, that if you can't get it to line up accurately it's hopeless to guess where the text truly does or doesn't overlap.)
Transcripts are useless for this because the actual number of letters wouldn't stay the same, just the page-placement (and it might even be that only parts and pieces of the individual letters are important.)
I've been trying various simple methods like looking at pages through cheese graters and laying sticks or strips of paper over them, but there are hundreds or maybe even thousands of possible combinations there (and of course I don't even know what language I'm looking for underneath.) I don't think the idea's been disproven yet, it's just I don't have a proper way to check it.
So, I am asking -- does anyone have any idea how I could perhaps check this, with available resources? Some way to see what parts of the pages are favored for writing?
If you can't understand what I'm talking about, feel free to ask more questions. I've been ridiculed elsewhere for asking for help with this, by people who can't seem to understand what I'm getting at.
A lot of sources speculate, that maybe, origin of this manuscript is Georgian.
I don't think so.
Why?
Because I'm Georgian and I don't see any similarities neither in writing style, possible grammar and by means of illustration.
If you want to check by yourself, here is huge PDF - 154mb, it has samples of almost all kinds of Georgian texts, from early 9th century to 19th century:
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(Please note, imagery is not given is not sorted by years, first it is sorted by subject - religious, literature, scientific, and then - years).
I don't see any similarities with Voynich script at all. From my point of vision, Voyinich fonts looks more like maybe cyrilic/greek origin, then Georgian or Armenian (which have similarities in glyphs, but totally different in spelling and reading).
And just have look at this book. It is same origin as Voynich manuscript is believed to be (herbia/medical/science and almost same era) and it depicts certain natural event. Can you guess it without google?
This is something that I've known for a while now, and I have kept it secret, but I think it's time to reveal it to the community. I also posted it to Stephen Bax's website and the VMS mailing list:
I have located about 26 patterns that the text breaks down into. Almost all of the Voynich text (170,000+ characters) may be formed from these 26 units. If there is no other way to explain why the manuscript does this, then this may be a clue to the solution of the manuscript.
Here are the patterns:
And here is an example using the patterns from the May Zodiac:
And here is an example from a random page, folio 9v:
Don't take my word for it - Print off the "Units of the Voynich script" and try to break down the text into the 26 (or 27) patterns that I've described. I find that they work 79 out of 80 times (maybe the Scribe made a spelling error on the exception!)
I believe that each unit may substitute for a Latin script letter. For example, qo = a, ar = b, y = (u)s, etc. We all know that these patterns keep re-appearing in the Voynich text, and they seem to have meanings independent of their words, or their location in words.
For example, we have daiin, but also qodaiin, chodaiin, qochodaiin, qoar, and qoaiin. It looks like these words are just composed of smaller building blocks: qo, d, aiin, ar, ch, etc.
So why am I posting this now?
1) I would like your feedback. Can these patterns be explained another way or other methods? Or could they really be the "alphabet" of the Manuscript?
2) If this is the key, then I'll need the community's help. Since I still don't know what language to look for, I would rule out phonetic patterns in languages that I'm not familiar with. If the manuscript is Italian or Hebrew, for example, I might never recognize it. I have tried some Latin and German substitution and got some grammatical Latin phrases, but they may be false positives.
Also, the Units chart may not be 100% correct. There may need to be changes (I'm not 100% certain about the last patterns).
But if this is the key, let the games begin!
![[Image: wordfrequenices.jpg]](https://voynichattacks.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/wordfrequenices.jpg)
![[Image: CrpP31MVYAAOJVB.jpg:large]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrpP31MVYAAOJVB.jpg:large)
![[Image: H_1658.JPG]](http://geomanuscript.ge/upload-files/samecniero/H_1658.JPG)
