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Month names collection / ...
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It is not Chinese
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Favorite Plant Tournament...
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Upcoming Voynich program ...
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[split] Color annotations...
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Wherefore art thou, aberi...
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Visual dictionary of the ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
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An attempt at extracting ...
Forum: Analysis of the text
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| Months names are all one off? |
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Posted by: Jorge_Stolfi - 28-05-2025, 03:54 AM - Forum: Astrology
- Replies (39)
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Currently each sign of the Zodiac starts around the 20th of one month and ends around the 20th of the next month. I suppose that these dates were chosen so that the solstices and equinoxes fall on sign boundaries. Is that correct?
So the VMS Zodiac is already strange in that the month name written under each sign's icon is only 2/3 correct. Thus for instance Sagittarius is labeled "December", but 10 days of that sign are in November. So the correct label should have been "November-December".
However, I have run into two sources that state that "in the Middle Ages" each sign started on the 1st of the month, instead of on the 20th. Unfortunately those articles did not say when the sync with the equinoxes took place. If the switch happened after the VMS was written, all those written month names are one month off. namely, the label under Sagittarius should have been "November", not "December". And ditto for all other months
Anyway, it seems that the VMS month names were written after the Zodiac sync.
Thoughts?
All the best, --stolfi
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| The Canary islands |
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Posted by: Cile cile - 27-05-2025, 09:33 PM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (11)
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Hello everyone, the Voynich manuscript is a very interesting work and, as I can see on the forum, it intrigues many people to explore different areas of knowledge.
As somebody who's gotten into analysing it fairly recently compared to a lot of people, I used my simple logic to try to find data that matches the information in VM. I know that the similarities I've noticed could just be coincidental, but hopefully what I say can give some a different approach.
In my humble opinion, the manuscript has some connections with the Canary islands. I think that it was written by someone who wanted to note down the unusual plants (as islands do have them since they are isolated), the religion of the Guanches people, their myths, and the use of real life celestial bodies as a seasonal calendar (relating to meteor showers).
And I think that it could possibly explain the rare alphabet used, especially considering the history of the languages present in the area in the past.
I've been looking into this for a while now, there are a few more interesting connections I haven't mentioned, but I want to hear if maybe this was already debunked in the past.
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| Just an idea I have had for long |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 27-05-2025, 08:38 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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This idea has been in my mind for year or so but I am not clever enough to understand nor prove if this could be something that could work.
I have always thought that the glyphs mean more than letters but not gettin nowhere.
Thinking:
Voynich word are about 4 glyphs long, quite short to convey semantic information.
There must be an expansion method, glyphs must pack more semantic punch in them.
Also, in labels the glyphs can stand alone which also could indicate that they are more than bigram-trigram expansions, but whole words.
Idea:
Could Stolfi's core-mantle-crust model, combined with slot system, provide any clue?
Latin is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb), SVO, VSO and poetical mode (OSV,OVS and VOS) structured language, very flexible.
Both Rosam puella amat,Amat puella rosam are acceptable.
Note to reader, I do not know Latin much.
Most deciphrement proposals do not produce grammatically sound language.
If we assume that VMS is based on Latin language, the words and glyph combinations must convey grammatical information, diacritics.
Coming to core-mantle-crust. If core or core+mantle combinations could indicate word and mantle the diacritic how to read the word.
Rosa, rosae, rosam, etc. all from same core+different mantles
Something like Core = semantic content (1-2 glyphs), Crust = semantic modifiers (1-2 glyphs), Mantle = grammatical markers (1-2 glyphs)
Do not take these fixed that core is and mantle is, they can be interchanged. The idea is that we have three components to codify word+grammar, and Stofi's idea has three components.
Then come the slots, if the latin word then depends also on the slot, so even same core+mantle could mean different word in different positions.
There could be then four codebooks:
Book 1: Core meanings for slot positions 1-3
Book 2: Core meanings for slot positions 4-6
Book 3: Core meanings for slot positions 7-9
Book 4: Mantle diacritics and grammar rules
A bit besides the point, but this could possibly give reason for the Currer a and Currer b differences but I haven't given this much of a thought really.
But the idea in my head is that if VMS was made in two different locations, A location and B location, they could have had also two different sets of codebooks
Possible?
Core combinations:
8 basic cores
With crust combinations: ~8 × 10-15 possible crust patterns = 80-120 core+crust stems
Across 8 slot positions: 80-120 × 8 = 640-960 distinct semantic meanings
To write botanical text just from hat:
Plant names: 20-50 words needed
Plant parts: 50-100 (root, leaf, flower, bark, etc.)
Properties: 100-150 (hot, cold, dry, moist, sweet, bitter, etc.)
Actions/effects: 100-150 (heals, causes, prevents, strengthens, etc.)
Medical terms: 100-200
Common words: 200-300 (and, of, with, for, against, etc.)
In my mind this system could plausibly generate grammatical Latin with sufficient vocabulary for botanical description. Enough words could be generated, the grammatical encoding could be enough to handle Latin's complexity.
Yes, there are still things that need explanation, like how we could distinguish words like malum (apple) and malum (evil), how gender would be conveyed, tense (if present at all).
And yes, it would be quite hard system to learn, but just as an idea that I have had in my mind for long and as I do not have the brain capacity to develop this further, so I hope someone here can say the final word for it.
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| Comparisons with Mexican Illustrations |
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Posted by: SiestaGuru - 25-05-2025, 10:45 AM - Forum: Imagery
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Hi, I found some noteworthy similarities in some older Mexican works with the VM. I hadn't seen these discussed before and so and wanted to share. All the mentioned codices are written after the supposed VM origin time, so the VM can not have used them as inspiration.
These two images are from Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, supposedly written from somewhere between 1547 and 1560 on European paper.
The caverns in Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca are the Chicomoztoc, a mythical origin place for the Nahuatl people. The shape of the inner structure and the way the border of it is drawn in my opinion strongly resemble the structure on the VM rosetta. The fact that it is in a circle and that the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca drawing also contains this structure on top with intertwined half circle doodles, just like we often see in the VM further, as well as the plants on the outside add to my suspicion these could be related somehow.
Note that it's unlikely that this describes the exact same object, since Chicomoztoc is very specifically 7 caves, and the VM illustration has more 'cavities'
Another similarity I found in Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca is the following, again with a VM image on the rosetta:
What struck me here is that both objects have 'grass' growing out of them, and that the VM just like the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca example may have two 'pipes' coming out of it on the right hand side
You can find a scan of Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's quite the interesting book to go through, it's visually just as interesting as the VM in my opinion, but since we already know the language it probably doesn't get as much attention
Another interesting thing to look at are the books of Chilam Balam (17th and 18th century). Scans can be found here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
This book contains some astronomical diagrams which in my opinion resemble the VM in a few ways:
For comparison, here's the VM images of sun, moon and these 'little circle guys' you see both in the VM and in the books of Chilam Balam
Chilam Balam also contains a zodiac. I don't think it's an amazing correlation with the VM zodiac, but it's the worst either. It's at least a sign that the same subject material was considered here
Another book is 16th century codex tudela, scans here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
This book contains some hebral drawings, some really cool but clearly unrelated aztec drawings and what particularly struck me,though I may be overimagining things some very similar folio numbers. I also noted some similarities in the script with the VM, particularly that a couple of words appear to start with something that looks very similar to the common VM word prefix: "4o". A couple of the characters also vaguely resemble the gallows characters we see in the VM.
Finally, in codice dehesa from the 16th/17th century (scans: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), which apparently also discusses Chicomoztoc, I noticed a few characters that resemble a sloppy version of the overexaggerated gallow characters you sometimes see in the VM at the start of a page:
Brief analysis
I won't say that any of these are slam dunk evidence for a new world origin hypothesis. There's quite a few counterarguments against it like the carbon dating, medieval european style, material properties, etc. You also clearly do not see what you see in most Mexican codices: displays of humans/gods in elaborate and distinctive mesoamerican style clothes and accessories and in general a Mexican style is missing in the VM.
But I do think there's a few signs in here that there may have been some shared culture between the VM and some of these Mexican codices which I cannot easily explain through the columbian exchange. Particularly, it seems unlikely that Europeans came up with Chicomoztoc or inspired Mexicans to draw it in this particular way, while the style and contents of drawings on the Rosetta appear unique within Europe and do not seem to have had much impact.
Beyond the visual similarities between some of the images and some of the script and the general sense of unfamiliarity, I think it's also particularly noteworthy that the contents of some of these Mexican works has a similar sort of feeling to the VM of being partially scientific and partially religious/occult without containing the more familiar western religious/occult symbols. Belief in a sun god was widespread in mesoamerica and it would not surprise me if the VM astronomical diagrams in the VM have some religious sun god connotations
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| Another solution |
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Posted by: dfs346 - 24-05-2025, 06:39 AM - Forum: News
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Apparently equally applicable to the Voynich manuscript, the King James Bible, La Chanson de Roland, La Divina Commedia, Njal's Saga, The Tales of Genji, The Tibetan Book of the Dead ...
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| sorted anagrams |
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Posted by: extent_of_foxes - 22-05-2025, 01:38 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (2)
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How's this for a method of creating a text with oddly low entropy?
- Start with a plaintext in a language written in an alphabet.
- Take each word and put the letters in some fixed order, possibly alphabetical, possibly some other order.
- If there are now clusters of duplicates of the same letter, maybe remove duplicates, or maybe slightly change the order to move them apart.
- Remove the spaces between the words, and insert new spaces wherever you like.
- Replace the letters with symbols, using a simple substitution cipher. Small shifts are allowed for aesthetic reasons, such as to move "c" before a gallows to create a benched gallows.
Based on a not-terribly-reproducible analysis of the first 10k EVA-letters of the manuscript, I came up with "qptkfscheoldaginmry" as a guess at the order of the letters. I then manually read through the first 10k EVA-letters and inserted spaces where the letters "jumped back in the order", that is, at the supposed breaks between words in the plaintext. This was surprisingly subjective. For example, my rules allow "qotor" to be a single word containing two of whichever letter maps to EVA-o, with one of them moved before the "t" to avoid the double "o". But it also seems that "qo" is a common two-letter word. So should "qotor" be split into "qo" and "tor"?
The most common apparent two-letter words are (anagrams of): qo ty ky ch ol dy sy sh or da so.
The most common three-letter words are (anagrams of): cho chy sho shy dar tor kol tol kor tey she ody car cha.
The most common four-letter words are (anagrams of): chor tchy chol kchy shol shor dain chey shey char keey pchy.
I notice some patterns among the common (anagrams of) words: cho sho chy shy, chor chol shor shol, tor kor tol kol. It's certainly possible that a real language could have words like this, especially if the patterns are not as strict as they appear to be, as an artifact of the sorted anagram process. It's still striking, though.
There are some words that just contain several EVA-e: ee, eee, eeee. Roman numerals, with "iiii" instead of "iv" for some reason?
I attempted to match the common words here with (anagrams of) common words in Latin, Italian (modern; I couldn't find historical word frequencies), and a very small corpus of historical French. Sometimes it seemed promising for a while but eventually none of my attempts worked out.
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| Question about unicity distance |
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Posted by: kckluge - 21-05-2025, 11:54 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I could swear there was a reference to unicity distance in a recent comment, and I was going to ask this there, but for the life of me I can't find it -- so here we go...
Unicity distance "is the length of an original ciphertext needed to break the cipher by reducing the number of possible spurious keys to zero in a brute force attack" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It's a potential way of trying to fomalize the "too many degrees of freedom" critique of proposed Voynich solutions as well as other possible prunings (i.e., if you can't get a coherent stretch of plaintext from a 28+ character long stretch of the ciphertext you haven't proposed a credible solution of the text as a simple monoalphabetic cipher).
What I can't quite figure out is how to correctly compute the unicity distance for something like Brumbaugh's proposed cipher. To recap for those unfamiliar with his "solution", encipherment proceeded in two stages:
1) Convert from plaintext letters to digits using the following grid:
a, j, v = 1
b, k, r = 2
c, l, w = 3
d, m, s = 4
e, n, x = 5
f, o, t = 6
g, p, y = 7
h, q, u = 8
i, -us, z = 9
2) replace each digit with one of several glyphs corresponding to that digit
So, for instance, his hypothetical enciperhing of one of the labels near the upper right corner of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is
P E P P E R --> 7 5 7 7 5 2 --> (EVA) s a r ch a r
so each of the three instances of the digit 7 gets replaced by a different Voynich script glyph ('s', 'r', and 'ch'), while both 5's get replaced by EVA 'a' (for the purposes of this discussion ignore that EVA 'r' also maps to the digit 2 here -- that has to do with how Brunbaugh sees variant forms that get grouped together as 'r' in EVA...)
Is there someone out there who knows how to compute the unicity distance for a cipher like this, and if so could you walk me through it?
Thanks,
Karl
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