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| Repetition of words |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 24-09-2025, 01:42 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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It is possible for the same word to be repeated in a text in English and I think in other European languages, although I think it is quite uncommon to find the same word repeated. However it is quite common to find the same words repeated in the Voynich. Has anyone researched how often words are repeated in other contemporary manuscripts? What is the probability that the following word will be the same as the previous word?
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| Spaces in the Voynich |
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Posted by: Mark Knowles - 24-09-2025, 01:36 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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The spacing of words in the Voynich is somewhat uneven, has anyone compared this with the spacing in other contemporary manuscripts? Is the Voynich particularly unusual in this regard?
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| why the voynich ist celtic |
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Posted by: Petrasti - 21-09-2025, 12:26 PM - Forum: Imagery
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In the appendix, I have combined PDFs with texts from the University of Chicago, the Celtic scholar and medievalist Helmut Birkhand, and the naturopath and shaman Wolf Dieter Schorl with images of the voynich manuscript. As I mentioned in my post "A Journey into an unknown World" In the Voynich manuscript we find ourselves in a pagan Celtic worldview with a language mix of Celtic and Old or Middle English. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In a very interesting new article by quimqu, "Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript," a PC-based program assigns words from the manuscript to topics. According to this analysis, the biological and cosmological sections belong to Topic 1 and thus to the same topic.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I'm also adding Dana's post, which suggests a "spurtle" in the hand of a nymph. Spurtle have been used in Scotland since the Middle Ages.
There was a nice post on folio f85r2 that, based on the figure in the south with the "cloud rings," attributes the manuscript to an English origin. Unfortunately, I can't find that post anymore. If anyone still has the post, it would be great if you could attach it.
It's also understandable how a Celtic pagan manuscript could have been written in northern Italy. Scottish monasteries and wandering monks from Scotland and Ireland were widespread in southern Germany and Switzerland during this period
the celtic moon and month.pdf (Size: 436.19 KB / Downloads: 54)
the nymphs, Helmut Birkhan.pdf (Size: 238.01 KB / Downloads: 39)
Poppy flower.pdf (Size: 441.39 KB / Downloads: 19)
nymphs and cetics.pdf (Size: 1.56 MB / Downloads: 23)
Plant Riutals by Wolf Dieter Storl.pdf (Size: 415.54 KB / Downloads: 27)
handfasting a wunderful old tradition.pdf (Size: 189.08 KB / Downloads: 26)
Spurtle.pdf (Size: 172.52 KB / Downloads: 14)
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| Is quire 10 a single bifolio, or two folios stitched together? |
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Posted by: Jorge_Stolfi - 20-09-2025, 12:16 PM - Forum: Physical material
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Apologies if this has been asked an answered before.
According to tYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Quire 10 consists of a single bifolio with one flap (f69.1) on one side of the binding, and 2 1/2 flaps (f70.1, f70.2, f70.3) on the other. However, on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., there seems to be a gap between folio f69 and folio f70; as if those two were separate pieces of parchment, loosely stitched together.
Maybe there is a triple fold there, that hides a strip of the bifolio? But I see no sign of it on the images of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
All the best, --jorge
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| How were the circles drawn? |
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Posted by: Jorge_Stolfi - 19-09-2025, 10:00 PM - Forum: Physical material
- Replies (13)
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How were circles in the Cosmo and Zodiac sections drawn?
The general smoothness of the traces indicates that they were drawn with some mechanical implement, rather than by free hand. In several (all?) pages one can find a pin prick at or very close to the center of all the circles on the page, consistent with the circles being drawn with a compass.
However, in many cases the circles are not quite round. Typically, in an image editor like Gimp one can get a geometrical ellipse that matches, say, 3/4 of the circle very precisely, down to a pixel or two in the BL 2014 images, with a center that is a few pixels away from that pinprick. The height and width of the ellipse may differ by up to 2% for the larger circles. This discrepancy is probably due to the parch not being flat when it was imaged.
But other parts of the circle will then deviate from that geometric ellipse by several mm over spans of several cm. Worse still, the drawn circle often fails to close: the two ends miss each other by a couple of mm and run parallel for a few cm.
Some of these deviations could be explained by the parch being not just curved but badly warped when it was imaged. But this cannot account for the circles that don't close. Possible explanations for these errors could be the parch moving and warping while the circle was being drawn by the Scribe, or the compass being some improvised contraption that was not as solid as it should have been.
The traces of the circles are very thin, only 0.2 mm or less wide. Some of the traces are continuous but very faint, to the point of being partly invisible in the BL 2014 images. They may have been drawn with a hard pencil-type point, such as a lead (real Pb) pencil.
In some pages, these "pencil" traces were apparently retraced in ink by hand, resulting in a visibly jittery double trace; but these cases are better discussed in the context of general retracing discussion.
But in many cases the "pencil" traces alternate with thin ink traces, with no deviation. The ink traces are just as thin as the pencil ones. They are sometimes continuous too, but sometimes break down in random dashes and dots.
Therefore, I believe that the full circles were drawn with a compass with a pen-like attachment. The parts that look like drawn in pencil must be where this attachment basically ran out of ink and merely scratched the parch, leaving just a smudge of whatever little ink that was still adhering to it.
The attachment cannot have been an ordinary quill pen, because that would surely have produced much broader traces. Today compasses usually come with special pens for ink, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. This tool can draw very fine lines and was massively used for technical drafting (including by me, in high school and college) until ~40 years ago when laser printers became available.
The screw with knurled nut, visible in that mage, lets one vary the thickness of the trace. It can be dispensed with if one only needs traces of a fixed width. All one needs is a tweezer-like pair of steel prongs with properly shaped tips, that can hold a drop of ink between them by surface tension
This compass accessory must have been widely available at least since the 1800s. But would it (or something equivalent) be commonly available to scribes in the 1400s? Centuries before steel pens became common? The need for it surely was there...
Does anyone know?
All the best, --jorge
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| Eight-Folio Reproducible Sampler of the Voynich Manuscript |
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Posted by: Kvncmd - 19-09-2025, 03:23 PM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
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Hello all,
My name is Kevin Akkerman-Dam, and I would like to share an eight-folio sampler of the Voynich Manuscript (MS 408) that I recently developed.
The sampler is designed to be fully reproducible and includes:
EVA-ready transcriptions for each folio
Temporary identifiers and glyph clustering
Modern English translations aligned to EVA sequences
A condensed summary table highlighting patterns across folios
The folios span across the manuscript’s main thematic sections (Herbal, Astronomical, Balneological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, and Recipes). I also included two additional “complex” folios (81v and 107r) to test robustness on denser layouts and multi-step sequences.
My goal is to provide a consistent methodology that allows other scholars and enthusiasts to reproduce the process and verify results, without reliance on proprietary tools.
PDF can be found in the attachments!
Eight-Folio Sampler for Voynich Manuscript (MS 408).pdf (Size: 639.48 KB / Downloads: 55)
I welcome feedback, critique, or ideas for how this might be expanded. My hope is that this sampler can be a useful resource for the community and support ongoing Voynich research.
Best regards,
Kevin Akkerman-Dam
*Edit*
I"ve originally submitted this research to The Beinecke Library.
To which they responded with "Though the Beinecke Library owns the Voynich manuscript, we do not systematically compile or publish research about it You might want to present your findings to one of the communities that follows the Voynich Manuscript, such as the one hosted here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or the subreddit at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.."
Hence this post.
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| Voynichese Generated via Part-of-Speech-Based Dice Model |
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Posted by: hiro k - 18-09-2025, 02:11 PM - Forum: The Slop Bucket
- Replies (3)
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Hello Voynich researchers,
I would like to share a structural hypothesis regarding the generation of Voynichese text. Inspired by linguistic modeling and probabilistic generation, I propose that the author may have used a mental or mechanical system akin to “dice” categorized by grammatical roles—such as conjunctions, nouns, and verbs—to construct each word or phrase.
? Core Idea
Each grammatical category (e.g., conjunction, noun, verb) corresponds to a pool of syllables or word fragments. The author may have randomly selected one item from each pool to form a structured word. This method would produce words with consistent internal structure while allowing for variation and creativity.
? Experimental Simulation
Using a simple model, I generated words by randomly combining syllables from three pools:
Conjunctions: qo, re, da, ai, ke, zu
Nouns: ched, dain, ol, shar, tor, lem, vok
Verbs: chy, dy, kar, mor, tin, sek, ral
Examples of generated words:
qolemchy, redaintin, kesharkar, zuvoksek, aidainmor, revoktin, ...
These words resemble Voynichese in terms of length, internal structure, and syllabic repetition.
? Related Research
This hypothesis aligns with and extends ideas from:
Torsten Timm’s grid-based word generation model
Luis Acedo’s Hidden Markov Model analysis
Claire Bowern’s linguistic structure studies
? Implications
If valid, this model suggests that Voynichese may be a structured pseudo-language generated through a creative but systematic process. It bridges randomness and grammar, and may reflect a cognitive or artistic experiment rather than a natural language.
Note: I am Japanese and not a native English speaker. Due to language limitations, my replies may be slow or imperfect, but I will do my best to respond thoughtfully. I appreciate your understanding and welcome any feedback, questions, or suggestions.
Thank you very much.
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| Comparing the Voynich by Word Position Profiles |
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Posted by: quimqu - 18-09-2025, 11:31 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Hello everyone,
while working on the idea of my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I tried a small exercise. Imagine that the Voynich is a positional substitution cipher, where each position in a word is encoded independently.
What I did was to take the Voynich tokens in EVA transliteration, look at them position by position, and record the distribution of characters. But I deliberately ignored which character it was. In other words: at position 1 we might have 40% of one character, 30% of another, 20% of a third, and so on. Just the shape of the distribution, not the labels.
Then I repeated the same procedure for several different languages. My working assumption is that if the corpora are large enough, the positional distributions should be similar within texts of the same language. Here is the result I got from the texts I currently have available:
| Corpus | Distance | Tokens |
|---|
| Alchemical herbal (Latin) | 0.327 | 6,536 |
| De Docta Ignorantia (Latin) | 0.374 | 37,121 |
| Tirant lo Blanc (Catalan) | 0.395 | 419,309 |
| La Reine Margot (French) | 0.396 | 112,803 |
| Ambrosius Medionalensis (Latin) | 0.402 | 117,734 |
| El Lazarillo de Tormes (Spanish) | 0.403 | 20,060 |
| Simplicius Simplicissimus (German) | 0.415 | 189,804 |
| Romeo and Juliet (English) | 0.451 | 24,822 |
| The English Physician (Culpepper) (English) | 0.460 | 135,362 |
So what does this mean? In this experiment the texts that came out closest to the Voynich were in Latin (especially the “Alchemical herbal” and “De Docta Ignorantia”), followed by Catalan, French, and Spanish. German and English were clearly further away.
Of course this does not prove the language of the Voynich, but it is interesting that the nearest matches are all Romance or Latin texts, and the Germanic ones sit lower down the ranking. It suggests that, at least under this positional-distribution approach, the Voynich behaves more like Romance/Latin than like Germanic languages.
Note: I used the "Alchemical herbal" transliteration from Marco Ponzi and the german Simplicius Simplicissimus version of Jorge Stolfi.
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