Hello! I recently watch Lisa's lecture at the University of Toronto, available here (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). She presented some evidence that the MS was originally meant to to be a collection of singlians, kinda like a pamphlet today if I understand correctly, instead of bound as a book. She explained it much clearer and accurate than I have here, so I recommend you watch.
This prompted a question for me: was the intention to have the MS bound despite its singlian nature? This, of course, prompts several follow-up questions.
1) Would a 15th century scribe be aware/knowledgable about binding practices?
2) Would a typical MS be bound before being authored or authored then bound?
3) What does the handwriting/paleography of the script suggest about the authors' experience and knowledge of writing?
4) If the authors were not experienced, could they have written the MS as singlians still intending for them to be bound?
I do not have any answers for these, just some questions I was left with after watching. I would love to hear what you guys have to think about this!
What are your candidates for the prettiest and the ugliest nymph in VM?
I believe they are all supposed to be pretty but due to low skill of the artist most of them aren't.
Anyway here are my types:
The left one would be the ugliest. She looks like she is 85. She is totally flat. Or she looks like a guy.
The right one would be the prettiest. For me she's generally cute and quite proportionate just one raised hand is too long and another begins too high. But you may struggle to find any better.
My previous thread was locked and moved to the ChatGPT section. This was justified: I made the mistake of using AI tools to compile and format my raw notes into a "paper", which resulted in generic, AI-generated prose. I apologize for this breach of forum etiquette.
However, the underlying data—which I extracted manually—deserves a proper discussion.
Who I am & My Approach:
I am a researcher in Quantum Physics and Cosmology (Associate Professor). I am not a linguist. I approached the Voynich Manuscript not as a language to be read, but as a dataset to be solved, looking for signal consistencies, astronomical constants, and noise distribution (Zipf's Law).
1. Content vs. Container: Carbon-14 dates the vellum (15th C.), not the origin of the data. Medieval scribes frequently copied antique scientific tables.
2. Mul.Apin Correspondence: The 12 zodiac signs in Folio F72 match the standard Babylonian names (documented in Hunger & Pingree, 1989, MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compendium, AfO Beiheft 24).
Note: These suffix values are hypothetical assignments. No clear statistical pattern (frequency, alphabetical order) justifies them yet. This is a recognized weak point in my model.
Test 3: Calculation Examples
Word | Calculation | Value -------|------------------------|-------- okal | ok (31) + al (1/60) | 31.0167 qokal | qo (30) + al (1/60) | 30.0167 chol | ch (24) + ol (2/60) | 24.0333 dar | d (7) + ar (3/60) | 7.0500
Test 4: Precession Dating (The strongest evidence)
The prefix ok- (Value 31) is consistently associated with "Principal Star" or Pleiades groups.
- Current Position of Pleiades: ~60° ecliptic longitude - Voynich Value (ok-): 31° - Difference: ~29° - Precession Rate: 1° per 72 years - Precession Calculation: 29° × 72 years = ~2088 years - Implied Observation Date: 2025 - 2088 = 60 BCE to 100 CE
This suggests the manuscript contains observational data from the Classical/Hellenistic era, copied onto 15th-century vellum.
Test 5: Zipf's Law
The Zipf coefficient of my parsed corpus is 0.81, compared to ~1.0 for natural narrative language. This "flatter" distribution is consistent with tabular/measurement data rather than prose, similar to astronomical tables or accounting records.
Hello everyone, my name is Surayya. I have a unique perspective on the biological section of the Voynich Manuscript.
Based on Islamic eschatological signs (End of Times), I believe the high number of female figures represents a future era where women significantly outnumber men.
Furthermore, I believe the interconnected pools of water reflect the normalization of actions/sins in the final era, where morality flows like water and becomes common. The script represents the 'Seed' (Male element) and the drawings represent the 'Field' (Female element).
I haven't seen this analysis posted here before. It's been suggested that repeating word sequences (like sheol sheol sheol) are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. caused by scribal error. If this were the case, you would expect there to be differences amongst the different scribal hands, reflecting different levels of experience, scribal accuracy, etc. So to test this, I wrote some code to analyze the variations of word repetition among the 5 different known hands. In summary, these are the results (from the RF EVA transcription given You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.):
I then did a Bayesian analysis, modeling the repetition probability of each hand as a Beta distribution and calculating the likelihood that the different hands actually represent different repetition rates. The hands with more words (1, 2, 3) lead to a narrower, 'tighter' distribution because we have more data. The low-resource hands (4 & 5) have broader distributions (the repetition rates are consistent with a larger range of underlying repetition probabilities). For 3-word repetitions, there isn't enough data to draw meaningful conclusions except to say that there's nothing to indicate any statistically significant differences. For 2-word repetitions, here are the results.
In summary: Mostly, hands have repetition rates that are consistent with each other. The largest statistically meaningful difference seems to be between hand 3 and hand 1. The Hand 1 mean rate is 0.753%. The hand 3 mean rate is 0.546%. The probability that Hand 1 > Hand 3 is 96.6% according to this model. Interestingly, hand 4 seems consistent with all the other hands (except 1) despite the fact that hand 4 seems to mostly write in "labelese" and not "prose", indicating that the repetitions may actually be a feature of the language rather than a mistake.
I also ran this analysis on the version of the EVA transcription by Lisa Fagin Davis where some of the gallows characters are taken to be substitutions of each other. The results are broadly similar, and I get around 84% likelihood of hand 1 > hand 3
There are some limitations here due to limitations of my script, for example I haven't counted word repetitions that cross line boundaries. But this seems unlikely to change the result.
What are my conclusions? Well it's no surprise when it comes to the VMS but it's hard to conclude anything. The consistency of repetitions amongst the hands seems to indicate that the repetitions are a language feature, not mistakes. The higher rate of repetitions for hand 1 vs hand 3 could either be due to mistakes or differences in Currier A (which is predominantly what hand 1 writes in).
Je publie aujourd'hui les résultats complets d'une analyse statistique et linguistique ressortent sur le manuscrit de Voynich (corpus EVA).
**Thèse :** Le manuscrit est un manuel de procédures encodé en base 60 babylonienne (sexagésimal) avec des racines sumériennes phonétiques. Il ne s'agit pas d'un récit, mais d'un ensemble de données.
**La méthode :** Une seule règle d'analyse syntaxique déterministe (« Maximal Munch ») a été appliquée à 12 079 mots (3 727 uniques). Aucune exception, aucun tri sélectif.
Règle : - **Préfixe** = Premier digramme reconnu (correspondance la plus longue) → Valeur entière (base 60) - **Suffixe** = Fin du mot de la liste fermée → Valeur fractionnaire (base 60) - **Corps** = Caractères restants → Contenu phonétique
**Principaux résultats numériques :** - Préfixe `ok-` = 31 → Position des Pléiades (environ 31° dans l'Antiquité, correspondant au calcul de précession pour l'an 0) - Préfixe `ot-` = 32 → Culmination solaire - Préfixe `qo-` = 30 → AN (ciel) - Préfixe `ch-` = 24 → G (grand) - Préfixe `sh-` = 25 → MUD (sang) - Préfixe `cth-` = 26 → KUR (montagne/terre) - Suffixes `-ol` = +2/60, `-al` = +1/60, `-ar` = +3/60, `-or` = +4/60
**Note statistique :** Coefficient de Zipf = 0,81 (plus plat que le langage naturel ~1,0, cohérent avec les données tabulaires/techniques).
**Ce que je demande :** Vérifiez les calculs. Examinez les corrélations sumériennes. Trouvez les erreurs. L'algorithme d'analyse syntaxique complet et le lexique complet sont ci-dessous.
According to recent results of Lisa Fagin Davis (which was also suggested earlier) Voynich Manuscript wasn't originally bound a a book but was a set of loose sheets.
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If I understand it correctly binding not only messed the original order of bifolios but also made you see only half of a bifolio together with a half of some other, random bifolio when you open a book which was never originally intended.
Take Quire 13:
Let's take an example. If I understand correctly page 78v is on the same same side of bifolio as 81r.
(Actually it shouldn't even be called be bifolio because such term suggests belonging to a book but lets leave it)
So the original author who worked with loose sheet of calfskin actually saw with his eyes something like this:
Is it possible somewhere online to browse Voynich Manuscript this way?
Perfectly I would like to have an update of the websites like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and voynichese.com but don't know if it is going to happen
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks to me like a brussels sprouts plant with the leaf buds twisting around the stalk like a vines, and the foliage on top as well, the leaves on the side are also pretty common with brussels sprouts, the empty stalk on the bottom is also something you can see on the plant.
You might say that the leaves look more like those of an oak and that the leaves on a brussels sprouts plant are too smooth, But it might be a different cultivated breed from the 15th century seeing that there are many vegetables that have curlier leaves and that originate from the wild cabbage (savoy, collard greens, kale, kalettes and wild cabbage itself).
Hi, all, just wanted to let you know that the account book cited by Stefan Guzy that records the purchase of books from Widemann on behalf of Rudolf for 600 Fl. is now available online: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The relevant transaction is on line 2 of image 48 (direct link above).
These images are much more clear than the reproduction in Guzy's 2023 publication, in which this is plate 7 (“Rudolf II. und das väßl mitt allerlai selzamen büchern. Neue Erkenntnisse zur älteren Besitzgeschichte des Voynich-Manuskriptes,” Neuerscheinung: Herold-Jahrbuch, Neue Folge, 28 (2023), 65-143)
![[Image: schema13.gif]](https://voynich.nu/q13/schema13.gif)
