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Starred Parags: the last ...
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Distribution of Q-Q gaps ...
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L. Rauwolf
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structural medical encodi...
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ORIGINAL stains on the ve...
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On the word "luez" in the...
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Water, earth and air
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| How do paragraph-initial gallows effect a paragraph? |
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Posted by: Skoove - 28-10-2025, 03:41 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Has anyone done a statistical analysis of whether which of the four gallows (or no gallow at all) is used as the first glyph in a paragraph effects the paragraph? I know that the gallows have varied paragraph initial frequency but it isn't immediately obvious to me what their effect on their paragraphs. Especially since different gallows are used as paragraph-initial on a single page.
I have always wondered if it is simply random, topic relevant, perhaps even marking which key to use for the following paragraph? Probably many more theories that one could (and likely have) come up with.
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| The Voynich Manuscript as an Iberian-African Voyage Record |
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Posted by: Kaybo - 27-10-2025, 03:17 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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I want to share some information with you, that may help others.
I think the manuscript is part of an early version of the Roteiro de Guiné, a travel report of the first travels of the Portuguese along the west coast of Africa. The book itself is from around 1500 (the Roteiro) and some researchers think its based on earlier encrypted reports.
Around 1400 the Portuguese started to travel at the west coast of Africa. The information were so valuable that the reports of the travels were encrypted. The Voynich manuscript could be a report that is a transcript of an early travel report. That would mean it could be a homophonic substitution ciphers, with special nautical words have their own letter combination (maybe indicated in the letter columns of the book, were one word is next to 2 letters). Because of the valuable information Portugal was leading in encryption at that time.
What are the hints that can be found in the manuscript. Nautical reports of that time consist of 3 sections a descriptive part of what has been found. Nautical travel information section and a section with the pure log book.
First, the plants that are shown in the manuscript have similarity with plants in Africa. For example the plant on page 34r is a protea. There are many other plants that have similarities, however since it is probably a transcript by a writer that has painted it from oral information transfer they all look like fantasy plants.
Naked woman at that time were a symbol for Africa and it is normal for that time that they are painted in white. It should show the difference between norther world and Africa.
The star section of the book (last pages) are probably the transcript of the log book. It contains a lot of repeating information in short paragraphs that are marked with a star. Its very similar to the log book of vasco da gama You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In the nautical travel information section we find a lot of circles with stars and compass roses. The compass roses have a typical wind god face in the middle which indicates in which direction the wind blows typically in east direction (shown by the direction of the face). This is absolut typical for Portugal around 1400. We found a very similar face in the compass rose of the well known Cantino_planisphere You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . Which was stolen by "Italy" from Portugal around 1500.
However, the most important hint is in the zodiac sign section. There are two circle diagrams of aries. One is with woman that have clothes and the other one is naked. This round diagrams have been used for the astrolabe that has been used to navigate at that time in Portugal. However, if you travel around the west coast of Africa traditional Astrolabe made for the norther hemisphere became useless. You have to mirror the stars to navigate in the southern hemisphere. This was the key point and key secret that aloud Portugal to travel south. The both circle diagrams of aries show the two astrolabe versions, woman with cloth for the northern hemisphere and woman without cloths for the southern hemisphere.
The jars that are shown are typical jars from Sierra Leone of that time. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Why its so hard to decipher the manuscript. Probably because of the homophonic substitution cipher paired with a very telegram style nautical log book style, maybe with a lot of
abbreviations and special nautical words. Maybe some special nautical words have there own combinations.
The paragraph sign is P or variant of the TT, which maybe indicates a new word, or that the TT is a P (for paragraph) or a C (for chapter). However, I am not a linguist. I just wanted to share the information that the manuscript could be a nautical report from the area of Henry the navigator.
Maybe you find other hints that support this theory, I am happy to discuss my findings. Sadly I have no access to very old books from Portugal, it would be interesting to read this copy of the Os mais antigos roteiros da Guiné Valentim Fernandes, Duarte Pacheco Pereira.
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| Raymundi Lulli und Folio 67v |
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Posted by: JoJo_Jost - 26-10-2025, 05:18 PM - Forum: Imagery
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I found this wheel in Raymundi Lulli's book ‘Testamentum duobus libris vniuersam artem chymicam complectens’, published in 1566, and it reminded me of 67v of the Voynich Manuscript, only in a version that was 100 years younger and therefore more modern. But Raymundi Lulli lives 1232 / 1316.
To recognise the similarity, one simply has to imagine placing the two Voynich pages on top of each other, so the idea goes. Here we have the four elements: air, water, fire, earth, and the terms in the Voynich Manuscript in the four corners of the page could be the same words.
Chemical processes are described, for example: washing the black into the white (air), and then the various possibilities are described in the circle, for example through distillation, extraction, etc.
I then translated the page in its entirety and compared it with the texts in the rays on the second page – in the somewhat desperate hope of finding a key, but unfortunately I found nothing. Nor did I find anything in the other inscriptions, but perhaps someone else here will discover something I overlooked (which is certainly not unlikely)... But it could just as well be something completely different...
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| The Voynich is for espionage and uses a key cipher. It has no inherent meaning. |
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Posted by: Ransom - 25-10-2025, 03:09 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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Just sharing a possible way to reframe the VM - what if it's not a 'text' but an espionage tool?
There's a reason it defies linguistic analysis - like a Soviet numbers station, it relies on temporary keys for externally imposed meaning.
Think about it. The Holy Roman Empire or one of its constituent states needed spies, and few people could read or write. Memory was far more critical then as it is today - so the system it represents was ingeniously designed to enable even illiterate people to memorise, encode and transmit vast amounts of intelligence securely.
This would have allowed for widespread espionage in an age of low literacy, so anyone regardless of education level could reliably spy for the state.
I posit a three-part system:
(1)
Illustrations: Functioning as topical reference guides, forming mind maps and vivid memory aids to organise information visually and unambiguously.
Observe the resemblance of the plants to the modern pedagogical tool:
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The plumbing and human figures could well be organisational charts for mapping out the structure and management system of say, a church, a city or a village. Think Renaissance LinkedIn.
Astrological charts may have been used to denote periodic patterns or strategic timing. This explains why they don't map to reality; they're meant to be memorable and 'sticky' to viewers, yet encode information in specific ways.
(2)
Text: A set of code words with familiar linguistic properties that make them easy to recall under pressure, yet meaningless without external keys.
Consider the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" (1972), which is gibberish yet follows English cues and so is easy to memorise. This explains its resemblance to natural language and following of Zipf's Law.
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(3)
Keys: The temporary and disposable assignment of meanings to the code words, ensuring operational security. There is therefore no 'sense' to be found in the text itself, and this explains the lack of punctuation and failure to 'decode' it.
Any written keys would have been memorised and destroyed, and any written references using a codename — thus explaining the Manuscript's uniqueness and lack of attestation.
Excerpts would have been copied for field use from this master volume, then used and destroyed on mission completion or periodically.
Crucially, this framework appears to satisfy all five of Lisa Fagin Davis' criteria (first principles, reprodicibility, accounting for linguistics and codicology,text that makes sense and integration with the illustrations).
More details on my Substack here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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| Inside the Voynich Network: graph analysis |
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Posted by: quimqu - 24-10-2025, 11:35 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hello all,
You may know I’ve been working on the Voynich Manuscript using machine learning and data science. Lately I’ve started a new line of research: the study of the Voynich through graphs.
Graph analysis is still quite new in languages studies, but it’s becoming a powerful tool in machine learning. It lets us see how words connect and interact. The idea is simple: each word (token) becomes a node, and we draw edges between them whenever they occur near each other in the text. Those edges can have weights (how often the pair appears), directions (which one comes first), and other information. When you do this, the text becomes a network, and that network has a structure we can measure.
In my case, I built co-occurrence graphs using a sliding window of 5 tokens. Two words are connected if they appear close to each other. I also repeated the same process for several other texts:
- Latin (De Docta Ignorantia, Platonis Apologia, Alchemical Herbal),
- La Reine Margot and Old Medicine French texts,
- Catalan (Tirant lo Blanch),
- Spanish (Lazarillo de Tormes),
- English (Culpepper),
- and a sample of the synthetic text generated by Torsten Timm.
Once you have the graph, you can study things like community structure, modularity, and assortativity: basically, how tightly the vocabulary groups together and how predictable those connections are. Well, yes, it looks this crazy...
The Voynich graph has thousands of nodes and over a hundred thousand weighted connections. It’s not random: it shows clear clusters of related tokens, similar to topic domains in real languages.
When comparing modularity (how strongly the graph is divided into communities) the Voynich ranks around 0.25. For context:
- Scholastic and alchemical Latin texts are around 0.28–0.33.
- Narrative texts like Tirant lo Blanch or La Reine Margot are only 0.14–0.19.
So the Voynich has a structured, technical-style network, closer to medieval treatises than to prose literature.
Nothing new here: I looked at entropy, which measures how predictable the next word is from the previous ones. Lower entropy means the text is more repetitive or rule-bound.
In this comparison, the Voynich again behaves more like Latin scholastic or medical texts, highly structured and formulaic, than like natural flowing prose.
To visualize everything together, I used a radar plot combining graph properties (modularity, assortativity) with token and character-level entropies. Each text forms its own fingerprint.
When we plot entropy (what should be the syntactic freedom) against modularity (what should be the lexical structure), each text takes its own position in what you could call a complexity space_
The Voynich lands right in the middle, between the tightly structured Latin technical and medical compilations, and the more free-flowing narrative works like Tirant lo Blanch or La Reine Margot. It’s not as rigid as scholastic Latin, but not as loose as prose either.
The same pattern appears when comparing character entropy (morphological freedom) to modularity: again, the Voynich sits halfway between those two worlds. This suggests the manuscript has an intermediate level of organization: structured enough to follow internal rules, but not fully regular like formal Latin treatises.
It might reflect a controlled or encoded version of natural language, or simply a writing system with its own conventions. It’s also interesting that the same language can produce very different results depending on the type of text: a Latin medical recipe and a Latin philosophical dialogue, for example, can have completely distinct structural profiles. That gives a sense of how much “style” and “purpose” shape the internal geometry of a text.
It’s also worth noting that the Torsten Timm generated text, which is algorithmic, shows a very similar position in this “complexity space.” That means internal consistency and structured co-occurrence can emerge from both linguistic and mechanical systems. So, these results don’t demonstrate that the Voynich encodes a real language, only that it behaves like a text with rules, not pure randomness.
As always, any thoughts are welcome!
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| Pale texts |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 23-10-2025, 06:52 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Regarding faded ink and various retouchings: Here is a page of fairly pale text, but it does have scattered darker portions and does not appear to be reworked.
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| copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? |
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Posted by: JoJo_Jost - 23-10-2025, 07:30 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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I'm working on a translation – yes, yes, big laugh – I know, but it's already working reasonably well. I still have various doubts myself (nothing to do with AI), but I already have several small paragraphs that are even starting to make sense. I know that's what they all say (I've been reading here for some time now) and then the system breaks down in the face of the harsh Voynich reality. It wouldn't be the first time for me either – so it's all good – I'm calm.
On the subject
Now I come across these wretched duplications in the lines, which cause me massive headaches because my decoding breaks down like knocked-over porcelain. Lines without these duplications work, with them – they don't.
Then I noticed something very interesting, which leads me to a theory that I want to question here – in my translation attempts, it seems as if there are often several different versions of a small but very similar section of text, and these variations only concern conjunctions and declensions, which are also similar in the variations.
Thesis: It seems as if the writer himself tried to decode something, or more likely to decipher it, and since he was unsure, he simply wrote the two versions one after the other. Version a / Version b.
Of course, I did some research, and found that this was common practice, especially when copying texts – but only a few times and not as consistently as in the Voynich Manuscript.
So at the moment, I have this idea:
The manuscript is a transcription of a possibly older manuscript that was written in shorthand and was therefore very difficult to read and possibly also smudged or in poor condition, and the writers - who transcribed it - tried different variations that they could recognise in it and wrote them one after the other.
This would also explain the theory that several different scribes tried to decipher this text. It was probably also translated into the language commonly used at the time. That could - by the way - also be the reason why the plants are so difficult to recognise; they are also plants copied from a ‘notebook’.
What do you think, could it be that these are all different variants of a decryption, or is that too far-fetched and I'm just telling myself that to save my translation code? I'm not sure myself right now ?
Thank you for your comments on this!
Jojo Quote:
Quote:
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| Ms. Plut. 73.16, medication-education |
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Posted by: bi3mw - 22-10-2025, 10:26 PM - Forum: Imagery
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While searching for older templates for the VMS, I came across Ms. Plut. 73.16. What was striking was the rough structure in the depictions of plants (which can also be found in older illustrations by Dioscorides, for example). In addition, however, there are multiple depictions of patients lying down during treatment. This would be a new interpretation of the illustration on folio f82r. Furthermore, there is a strange pipeline that allows water (?) to run over a plant.
Ms. Plut. 73.16 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Die Medikamenten-Lehre Friedrichs II, 13th century
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edit - Machine translation of the text (to be treated with caution):
“And with the same water, he shall sprinkle himself with a branch of the purified oak tree as the sun sets, with his right hand, and pray thus: Holy Goddess Earth and the rest who are written at the beginning.”
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| Reading the text on the containers on the botanical pages |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 21-10-2025, 01:49 PM - Forum: Imagery
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On the pages with the small plant drawings(roots and leaves) there are tall containers on the far left side of the pages. These containers often have text written in the middle of them, however the text is often hard to read as the containers are painted over with colours such as red. Has anyone worked out how to make this text stand out more, so that it can more easily be transcribed? (There are also other labels on these botany pages which are faint and hard to read, particularly on the far right hand margin.) It would be nice if all the text is as readable as possible.
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