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 ?
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.”
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.
We all have seen it - strange pipes and women bathing in green water in weird pools:
I don't know if it was already discussed but I haven't seen such a discussion.
So would would you say about a theory that it's not about bathing at all but about eating and digestion?
The pipes and pools would be stomach, intestines, spleen etc.
The green colour makes also sense then. If you vomit, then it's often kind of green so the artist could imagine the stomach as full of green liquid.
And women? Well, that's the hardest part to explain. I think we can exclude that the author was a cannibal So maybe they symbolically represent "components" of the food we eat? Of course the author didn't know about proteins, sugars or carbohydrates so he could think of four elements (earth, air, fire, water) or somthing similar. Or maybe some cosmic forces ruling your digestion?
By the way, if you were a kid in the 80s you may recall this series where everything inside a human body was represented as busy little men. Could VM author do something similar?
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For more than a century, the Voynich Manuscript (VM) has resisted every tool of human ingenuity. Traditional cryptanalysis, linguistic analysis, and computational modeling have failed to yield a definitive solution. Some claim the VM is a hoax; others believe it conceals an unknown language.
This thesis advances the DAI Anchor Method, a cryptographic-linguistic framework I developed through years of independent research. Unlike earlier attempts, the DAI method identifies recurring triadic anchors --- structural keystones within the script --- and builds meaning outward from their patterned invariance. By combining cryptographic rigor, statistical testing, and morphological mapping, I argue that the VM represents a structured, meaningful language system, not random gibberish.
I dismantle competing arguments, including Timm and Schinner's "self-citation" model, Rugg's hoax hypothesis, and Crowe's statistical skepticism. While acknowledging the manuscript's unresolved nature, I show that morphological regularity emerges far beyond baseline distributions like Zipf's Law.
This work is not the final decipherment but a foundational challenge. My methods demand review, critique, and rebuttal. I invite other researchers to test the DAI Anchor Method --- to refine it, or disprove it. Either way, the era of treating the Voynich Manuscript as statistical noise must end.
Like a responsible parent, I have been trying to pass on to my computer my Superior Pareidolia skills. Specifically, the ability to see inked details that were painted over.
The Painter who applied the semi-opaque tempera colors often painted over inked outlines. Examples are easily seen where these inked strokes were still dark and clear, like (A,B) below.
Besides obscuring those strokes, it seems that the painting also washed away some of the ink, and sometimes deposited it a short distance away, as in (D).
Thus any ink strokes that were already quite faint and faded, like (E), must have become invisible to the naked after being painted over. And that is why we need Artificial Superior Pareidolia.
The idea is as follows.
Take an image of an area which is suspected of having "invisible" drawings or text under some semi-opaque paint.
Select a set of pixels A representative of what one wants to detect, like places where there is definitely ink covered by green paint.
Select one or more additional sets B, C, ... that are to be distinguished from A -- like places where there is green paint with but almost surely without ink underneath.
Look at the colors of those pixels as points of three-dimensional space, within the unit cube where (0,0,0) is black, (1,1,1) is white, (1,0,0) is red, etc. Here is an example with three subsets of a page, representative of blank vellum (red), dark text ink (green), and green paint over blank vellum (blue):
Approximate each cloud ou points A, B, C, ... by a trivariate Gaussian probability density function (PDF). This can be visualized as a fuzzy ellipsoid with varied dimensions along three axes, with some generic orientation in space.
Take each pixel of the image and use Bayes's formula to estimate the probability that the pixel belongs to each distribution A, B, C, ... or is an "outlier" that probably does not belong to any of them.
Write one grayscale image for each set, showing the probability of each pixel belonging to that set.
Ideally we should do this with high-resolution uncompressed multispectral images with frontal illumination and linear encoding. But we don't have multispectral scans for any of the pages that may have significant details hidden under the paint. (The herbal pages have green paint, but the ink that can be seen under it is just boring nervures or leaf outlines. At best, those images could be useful to validate this approach.) And even those that we do have are taken with oblique lighting that creates light and dark spots at every tiny bump on the vellum surface.
So we must do with the Beinecke 2014 scans, which have frustratingly low resolution (some ink traces being only a couple of pixels across), only the three RGB color coordinates, oblique illumination, non-linear "gamma" encoding, and complex JPEG compression artifacts. But, sigh, that is life...
[To be continued]
All the best, --stolfi
[Sorry for the big images, but I couldn't figure out how to insert only a thumbnail of the attachment, with the full version opening on a click. Is that possible?]
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First word in line 6 looks like VMs vords ending with "-in".
First word in line 16 is similar and the first letter in the second word appears similar to VMs "ch".
Other letters "a", "o", "q' and "'9" may be too common?
I've always thought (perhaps even assumed) that the manuscript appears to written left to right and the spacing of the 'words' make best sense if this was the case, but do we have any real 'smoking guns' that show/prove this is definitely the case?
Have any handwriting experts suggested that the hand writing is left to right based on the ductus of the words?
Colin Layfield, Claire Bowern, and I spent a few hours with the Voynich Manuscript yesterday at the Beinecke. At Rene's request, I took some pictures comparing the stains inside the front cover with the wax stains on the Marci letter. They clearly allign in terms of rough size and distance from one another, although the shapes aren't the same, and it's difficult to see how the letter could have been folded and laid into the manuscript in such a way as to leave those stains. So I don't think we can say FOR SURE that those stains are related to the Marci letter's wax, although they certainly MIGHT be. Images here, including a close-up of the watermark:
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There are creases of several different folding patterns visible in the Marci letter, but because it has been carefully flattened it is not possible to see exactly how the letter was folded.
![[Image: Cascade.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Cascade.png)
so the artist could imagine the stomach as full of green liquid.![[Image: 250px-Once_Upon_a_Time_Life.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/71/Once_Upon_a_Time_Life.jpg/250px-Once_Upon_a_Time_Life.jpg)
