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| New Podcast (German) |
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Posted by: Torsten - 19-11-2025, 09:21 PM - Forum: News
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A podcast in German: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:In diesem Zeitzeichen erzählt Martin Herzog: welche Spekulationen es über das Voynich-Manuskript gibt, wo das Original-Dokument heute aufbewahrt wird, welche Auffälligkeiten die 200 Pergament-Seiten aufweisen, was außer Pflanzen und nackten Menschen sonst noch darin abgebildet ist, was Kaiser Rudolf II. mit dem Manuskript zu tun hat.
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| New podcast |
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Posted by: LisaFaginDavis - 19-11-2025, 02:25 PM - Forum: News
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Here are both parts of my Voynich podcast on "Archaeology Tea Break" with Matilda Siebrecht:
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- Lisa
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| The voynich manuscript as a diabolic tool to lure people into mental health issues? |
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Posted by: Kaybo - 18-11-2025, 01:22 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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I have the feeling that some people can get very obsessed with the manuscript and that it can have a negative impact on their lives. I can see that it tries to lure me into it and it is very difficult to not loose myself. If I read about some theories, then I think some people are too much into it and that this has a bad effect on them.
I just want that out to be a warning. Take a break, if it is overwhelming you.
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| A conceptual internal plant match? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 17-11-2025, 12:33 PM - Forum: Imagery
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With the renewed interest in internal plant matching, I was reminded of a specific case that would be different from all the rest. It's basically the opposite of Stolfi's "complete plant" requirement - more of a conceptual match. I suspect that this is meaningful in some way, though I have no idea how. However, I understand it will appear as a stretch to many people.
I mentioned it briefly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but didn't really focus on it. I will try to explain the situation as best as I can. We are comparing two parts of the drawings on f55v and f 99v : one "literal" visual similarity and one conceptual. It appears that the literal comparison was included in our spreadsheet at some point, referring to an old post by Wladimir D, number 12 here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I liked to think of the thing as a fancy moustache, but Wladimir called it a brush, so let's go with that since he clearly has the precedent. Let's look at the "brush" elements side by side:
So far, we are still talking about a match in shape. I know that they are not exactly the same, but look a bit closer and similarities pile up. Both structures have a horizontal line on top, which leaves an opening for connecting to a vertical stick in the middle. Both are structured symmetrically, with longer parts hanging down towards the outsides. Both have ca. 5 parts on each side, though it's hard to count. The similarity between both structures seems to increase when the far right part on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is considered "extra", which could be defended on the basis of the linework.
Even their absolute size looks somewhat similar, though this is difficult to compare.
Anyway, that's all pretty standard, we have a bunch of comparisons like these. What makes it weird though, is what happens when you zoom out on their respective pages and look to the bottom right of each "brush".
I will argue that these are two elephants, each expressed differently due to their presence in a root and a leaf respectively. I know this is a claim that will elicit booing from the audience, but there is some supporting evidence:
- Voynich plants are commonly accepted to contain zoomorphic and other non-botanical elements. The concept of shaping plant parts like something else is not unique to the VM (see the "plants of the Alchemists" tradition or plants like Palma Christi...) but some of the concrete utterances are not attested elsewhere. The VM plants are unusually prolific in zoomorphic inclusions, even by conservative assessments.
- f99v is on the same side of the same sheet as f102r. This means that originally, the "elephant leaf" (partially hidden in the fold) sat right next to the "mandrake". It's on the same folio that's infamous for having the best small-plant matches with large plants. One of those is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , generally thought of as zoomorphic. Another, corresponding to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , has been given a feline tail on the right, showing evidence for partial zoomorphology.
- What requires more squinting? Seeing the big green leaf as an elephant's head with a curled-up trunk, or seeing it as a reliable rendition of an existing plant species? I'd love to see what the "literal plant pictures" crew makes of this one.
Might one be the being as it can be expressed with the luscious properties of a leaf, and the other with the sharp and wiry properties of a root? You can even overlay them and draw a decent elephant, although this is just for fun as it cannot have been the intention of the MS.
This begs the question: isn't the shape of the leaf actually too good? Did 15th century Europeans have access to images that capture the qualities of elephants to this extent? We're all familiar with the ridiculously bad examples from bestiaries, they get posted a lot (if you haven't seen them before, google "medieval elephant", you're in for a treat). But those tend to be from early centuries, when depictions of animals in general weren't particularly reliable. To test whether the elements of the leaf were known as elephant properties by the early 15th century, we must find at least: - the trunk is able to curl upwards
- the trunk has a "ribbed" texture, or something like that
- the ears are large
- if the root also refers to the elephant, we must see some tusks that are much longer than those of a boar and point forward instead of straight up, with an upwards curve
At first glance, it appears that there are many elephant images, but certainly no standard. All of the properties I mentioned are toggled at will in every possible combination. But it's not hard to find them combined. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from an early 14th century bestiary basically has them all, including the profile of the head, position of the eye, and even right facing depiction:
![[Image: minimg102376.jpg]](https://bestiary.ca/beastimage/minimg102376.jpg)
WAIT A MINUTE
I just saw something while writing this post and reading the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. page about elephants where I found the above image. When I pointed out that the elephant is right next to the mandrake on the same foldout, I did so because I wanted to show a similarity of symbolism in plants, as well as the connections between this particular small-plant foldout and the large-plant pictures of the herbal section. But apparently the bestiary entry for elephants is all about mandrakes?
Quote:Male elephants are reluctant to mate, so when the female wants children, she and the male travel to the East, near Paradise, where the mandrake grows. The female elephant eats some mandrake, and then gives some to the male; they mate and the female immediately conceives. The female remains pregnant for two years, and can only give birth once. When it is time to give birth, the female wades into a pool up to her belly and gives birth there. If she gave birth on land, the elephant's enemy the dragon would devour the baby. To make sure the dragon cannot attack, the male elephant stands guard and tramples the dragon if it approaches the pool.
So not only do we see the VM elephant leaf facing a mandrake root. It is also positioned above remarkably blue and flowy roots, which is part of the same mandrake-eating story: the elephant eats the mandrake, then gives birth in a pool. Guess I got more conceptual connections than I expected...
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| Negative Reviews of the Voynich Manuscript |
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Posted by: rikforto - 15-11-2025, 12:33 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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For the amusement of the forum, I have curated someYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Feel free to add any you feel I have neglected.
Quote:This book is trash. It is pictures of a book and the language is not modern. You cannot read anything - just look at a few pictures.
Utter trash - translate the book!
Indeed, why has no one thought of translating the book? Is anyone in the Voynich community working on that?
Quote:An unnecessary publication of meaningless babble. Don't waste your money on this. Wait till someone finds its origin and worth before buying; but I suspect this will never happen. And if you're an artist looking for inspiration or insight into something profound, don't be fooled. You won't find it here.
Always glad to see a fellow critic of the art, I suppose.
Quote:It's a good book other than the fact that there was nude people. I brought this for my son. I in dump going through and tearing out the pages and super gluing the ones that had some on one page to others.
Ah yes, the inherent eroticism of the balenological section, I believe we can all relate.
Several people seem to have reviewed different products, which contain some incredible crankery I had not seen before.
Quote:The author dreamed of Leonardo da Vinci and the twin he didn't have offering her the solution to the manuscript. It's all a recipe for absinthe. Never mind what the actual text might say! The author's dreams have spoken. This is a terrible waste of time.
AI has been a terrible development in a lot of ways, but outsourcing dream crankery to a machine is one of the more unforgivable. You used to have to get your insane ideas from Leonardo da Vinci's dream twin, but now we've automated the process, taking the human touch out of it. Chat-GPT lacks the verve needed to fabricate this.
Quote:The author isn't an academic schooler! Book is a rant on jews God and herbs. The book also needs editing.
I sympathize! Never once in my life have I seen a rant about "Jews" that did not desperately need editing, though that's rarely the biggest problem I have with them.
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| Confirmation that spaces are really spaces |
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Posted by: quimqu - 14-11-2025, 11:41 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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It seems I can now confirm with objective data that the spaces in the Voynich text are real functional spaces.
For a long time I have seen people on the forum questioning whether the spaces in the Voynich are real or artificial, and whether they have any specific role. So I prepared a small experiment to see how coherent the spaces really are and whether they might have a clear function within the manuscript’s writing system.
What I did was apply a Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) segmentation model. This model does not need to know anything about the language. It simply takes the entire text as a sequence of characters with no spaces or punctuation, identifies which pairs of characters are most frequent, and merges them. After a certain number of merges, the model produces a set of segments that can be interpreted as statistical morphemes. With these segments, you can try to reconstruct the original words by segmenting them into the most likely units, and then compare whether these boundaries match the original spaces.
Before applying the method to the Voynich, I validated it with Latin. I took a Latin corpus, removed the spaces and punctuation, and trained the BPE model on the continuous sequence of characters. Once I had the set of segments, I tried to segment the original Latin words and counted how many word beginnings and endings were correctly recovered. With a simple model, the results are roughly: - About 82 percent correct word boundary detection.
- About 67 percent of words completely correct (the predicted start and end boundaries match the real ones).
- An average of about 3 segments per word.
These results show that even a very simple and completely blind method can reconstruct a large share of real word boundaries.
After that, I applied exactly the same process to the Voynich. First I concatenated all the text from paragraphs and long lines (avoiding labels), removed the spaces, and trained the BPE model on the continuous sequence using the same parameters as for Latin. The model produced a fairly compact set of about 265 unique segments. Then I returned to the original Voynich words and segmented them using the model’s dictionary.
The results are surprisingly high. Out of roughly 37 thousand words:- The model correctly recovers around 90 percent of word beginnings and endings.
- About 8 out of 10 words have both boundaries correct.
- The average is fewer than 2 segments per word, which suggests a fairly stable structure.
This suggests that the spaces in the Voynich are not random. The model, which only sees character statistics and knows nothing about meaning or how words are constructed, is still able to predict the same boundaries that the writer marked with spaces. If the spaces were decorative or had no function, the model should not be able to recover them with this level of accuracy.
It appears that the spaces in the Voynich show strong internal coherence, comparable to or even higher than that of real Latin text subjected to the same procedure. The spaces seem to mark meaningful units in the system, not arbitrary additions.
As extra, here I attach a list of the morphemes found:
Total number of segments: 67931
Number of unique segments: 265
Top 50 most frequent segments:
'ol' 2121
'ch' 1868
'or' 1599
'y' 1513
'ar' 1453
'aiin' 1444
'd' 1371
'che' 1361
's' 1301
't' 1233
'daiin' 1230
'al' 1201
'l' 1153
'o' 1118
'qot' 1026
'k' 1006
'sh' 1002
'chedy' 976
'e' 966
'ot' 948
'chy' 887
'she' 869
'qok' 860
'ain' 823
'ok' 814
'chey' 808
'eedy' 796
'ey' 791
'yk' 784
'dy' 779
'chol' 740
'olk' 737
'p' 736
'dar' 679
'edy' 668
'ody' 650
'yt' 639
'eey' 628
'dal' 628
'am' 611
'cth' 549
'ee' 546
'r' 542
'cho' 539
'chor' 531
'od' 520
'qo' 504
'chdy' 481
'shedy' 454
'os' 445
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| Quasi-Datable Phenomena |
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Posted by: R. Sale - 14-11-2025, 08:40 PM - Forum: Imagery
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This is just the start of a list of 'things' in the VMs illustrations that seem to have certain chronological information associated with them, shall we say. The more specific, the better. The first example is the Cosmic Comparison with BNF Fr. 565 (Paris, c. 1410) and Harley 334 (Paris, 2nd Q 15th).
The clothing style of tight cuffs on bloused sleeves occurred c. 1420 - or 1420-1430 or something like that, and comparatively similar hat styles have also been shown to prevail in the first half of the 15th C. as well.
The half-arcaded tub with nine women (f78v) might be connected to Harley 4431 (Parie, 1410-1414) Pizan's Muses.in an arcaded tub.
Other examples?
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