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| A hypothesis on why/how the VMS was made |
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Posted by: Daniel1992 - 17-07-2026, 03:02 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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Long-time lurker, first post - got here through a few YouTube deep-dives (Voynich Talk) like probably half the new accounts on this forum. I want to be upfront: I haven't translated anything and I'm not claiming to have solved the manuscript. What I've got is a hypothesis about why and how it was made, and a guess about where a translation key could still be sitting undiscovered. Would genuinely like people to poke holes in this.
The medical knowledge gap that started it
Early 15th century European medicine was still mostly bloodletting, prayer, and humoral theory. Meanwhile the Islamic Golden Age and Persia had already produced serious empirical medicine - Avicenna's Canon of Medicine is the obvious example, with pharmacology and surgical knowledge way ahead of anything being taught in European universities at the time. That knowledge wasn't sealed off from Europe - it was leaking in steadily through Venetian trade networks and the Crusader contact zone, and Venice's trade routes ran straight up through the Alpine passes into Northern Italy and Southern Germany. Which, notably, is the same general region most researchers place the Voynich's origin.
The Church didn't just discourage foreign or "pagan" science, it had criminalized it outright - Pope John XXII's 1326 bull Super illius specula explicitly equated unauthorized astrology and alchemy with demonic heresy. So if you're a physician in 1410s Alpine Europe with Arabic-derived medical texts, you're not looking at a fine, you're looking at a stake.
And the Church was actively enforcing this in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The Council of Constance ran 1414 to 1418 - the largest assembly of clergy, physicians and scholars in Europe at that point - right on the edge of the Alps. And it wasn't a passive gathering: on July 6, 1415, Jan Hus was burned at the stake there for heresy, in front of the assembled Church establishment. If you're a physician holding "infidel" medical texts, that's about as unambiguous a warning as you're going to get.
This wasn't only about survival
My theory is this was also about money. Medicinal bathing - balneotherapy as i understand it - was seriously lucrative in this period. Physicians and guilds who had superior, more effective treatments (baths, herbal preparations, dosing regimens derived from more advanced Eastern pharmacology) had a real competitive edge over rival practitioners and rival towns. So I think what we're looking at is a physicians' guild or syndicate with two overlapping reasons to hide this material: they'd be executed if the Church found "infidel" science in their possession, and separately, they didn't want competing physicians or guilds stealing their treatments and undercutting their income. Trade-secret protection plus heresy protection, at the same time, from the same document. That dual motive is, I think, a better explanation for why they didn't just bury the source texts under a floorboard - hiding isn't enough when you also want to keep using the knowledge yourself without a rival guild copying it.
By this point cryptography was already a real profession - papal secretaries and royal courts had codebreakers doing frequency analysis on substitution ciphers. If you just Caesar-cipher a Latin translation of an Arabic text, and it gets cracked, you're dead, and so is your guild's monopoly on the treatment. So instead of encrypting a known language, I think they built something closer to an invented notation system (William F. Friedman) - an a priori language organized around categories rather than spoken vocabulary. This actually matches the modern statistical work: the text follows Zipf's law and has real word-structure and entropy patterns consistent with meaningful information - but it doesn't match the underlying structure of any known spoken language. That's exactly what you'd expect from a constructed notation system rather than an enciphered natural language - no natural-language "key" to find because there wasn't a natural language sitting underneath it in the first place.
Why the words are so short
Something that convinced me is the shape of the words themselves. 240 pages of decent vellum works out to something like 14 to 15 calves, which isn't nothing - vellum was a real expense, and a finished multi-volume set of that size would also be a pain to physically hide or move around if you ever needed to. If you're trying to cram several treatises worth of material (herbal/medical stuff plus a whole separate astronomical section) into one book you can actually carry and conceal, you're going to need some form of serious shorthand. That's not a new idea for the period either - Tironian notes had been around for centuries at that point, and the whole concept behind them is a single stroke standing in for an entire word, prefix, or common phrase. Scribes copying legal or ecclesiastical documents used systems like this all the time to save time and material.
What's interesting is that Voynichese looks like it's doing something similar. The words are strange in a very specific way, almost none of them run longer than 8 or 10 characters, there's basically no doubling of letters, and you don't get the kind of irregular, messy variation you'd expect from a word in an actual spoken language. It behaves more like a constrained set of building blocks getting recombined over and over. To me that's more consistent with each "word" acting as something like a compressed tag or instruction rather than a word in the normal sense - closer to how a note-taking shorthand collapses "the patient should boil the root for three hours" down into a handful of marks, rather than how someone would actually write out a sentence.
Why the text changes character between sections (Currier A/B)
The herbal section deals with descriptive/botanical data, while the pharmaceutical section handles preparation and dosage. The astronomical section deals with positional/cyclical data - degrees, houses, timing. If you're building a notation system for compression, you can't use the same symbol logic for "root" and "planetary degree" - the underlying data types are just too different. So I think the Currier A/B split isn't two languages, it's the same compression system straining differently against two different kinds of source material, plausibly worked on in parallel by different specialists within the guild (the manuscript does show five distinct scribal hands, and there are no corrections or erasures anywhere, which reads more like fluent transcription of already-organized material than someone inventing content on the fly).
Timeline as I see it
- 1404–1438: vellum C14 range
- 1414–1418: Council of Constance - possibly the point where physicians/scholars from different areas converged and pooled source material under cover of a legitimate gathering
- July 6, 1415: Hus's execution: the likely trigger that turned "let's hide this eventually" into "we need this encoded now"
- 1415–1420ish: the actual writing
- Fashion and architecture in the illustrations (hairstyles, hats, tunics, and specifically the swallowtail/Ghibelline merlons on the castles - a known regional signature of North Italian/Alpine construction) all point to pre-1430, consistent with the C14 window and consistent with the scribes drawing what was physically around them at the time.
The actual point of this post, where I think the missing piece is
None of the above gets anyone a translation, and I think people sometimes oversell "cracking the logic" as equivalent to cracking the text. What I think is actually missing is a physical key (Rosetta Stone) some kind of reference document the guild would have needed internally to keep their own notation consistent across scribes over multiple years, especially given the two-domain (medical/astronomical) split. A guild encoding valuable trade secrets wouldn't operate purely from memory; there'd almost certainly have been an internal reference list, even an informal one.
Given the Constance connection, my guess is that if anything like that survived, it's more likely sitting uncatalogued in a regional Church, guild, or municipal archive near Constance/Lake Constance than in a well-known collection - the kind of document that wouldn't have been recognized as significant unless someone was specifically looking for Voynich-adjacent notation. The other possibility I keep turning over: the Habsburgs apparently acquired a lot of documents from this region, maybe there is some related material - including a key, or reference notes, or even correspondence about it - could been archived and could still be sitting somewhere in the Viennese court archives uncatalogued as because nobody was looking for it.
That's really the actionable part of this theory, if there is one: has anyone here done archive work specifically in the Constance regional archives, or in the Viennese Habsburg court records, looking for guild/physicians' notation systems or references to a "hidden" or "coded" medical text from this period? That seems like the piece that would actually move this from plausible narrative to testable claim, rather than more statistical work on the manuscript itself.
Happy to be told I'm missing something obvious, genuinely posting this to get it stress-tested, not to declare victory.
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| My "Attempt" to Solve the Manuscript. |
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Posted by: J_Voy - 17-07-2026, 09:49 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Now, I've been interested in the Voynich Manuscript for quite some time now, and for that time I knew that this site was the go-to place for Voynich research. I've also taken note of some various Voynich Solutions, especially those using Simple Substitution to crack the Manuscript, and i have had confirmation bias in my head for a long time, basically, my theory was that no matter what, if you manipulate the manuscript enough, you will find what you are looking for, to test my theory, I "solved" the manuscript in a single afternoon.
This solution is NOT meant to be taken seriously, and is meant to:
1. Test the confirmation bias hypothesis.
2. Parody other Voynich solutions.
I know that simple substitution is not the right answer, but I tried anyway! Wish you all the best.
My Voynich Solution.pdf (Size: 545.85 KB / Downloads: 37)
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| Could a chemist reproduce inks of medieval quality, then apply them to vellum? |
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Posted by: conlangyalesbaby - 16-07-2026, 02:31 AM - Forum: Physical material
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Recently, I have researched the manuscript and have concluded its a conlang of some sort that's not an out right language. It does not have known properties of what acts like normal grammar. It repeats way to often. Maybe it's a book of chants. I have used eva to apply it to several languages to listen to the sound of MS-408. It's very exotic, yet it drums to a beat that you notice no matter what language you choose after several listening sessions. The repeat affect is over whelming.
Could a chemist reproduce the medieval inks and then lay the text down on 15th century vellum? How hard would that be to do and is it possible. Someone mentioned that the Iron Gall might be tomato paste. I have come across some forgery ideas about Wilfrid. Of course if the author of the MS-408 was a forger he would add provenance material as well.
Just because a document follows zipfs law that does not preclude it from behaving like near gibberish. It may contain some words, but might mostly be something that the mind may only comprehend if it had the inside scoop and the construction may have favored prefixes and suffix's. Is there any talk about a 1912 binding and why would that be?
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| Is there any protocols to identify what sort of document MS-408 is? |
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Posted by: conlangyalesbaby - 15-07-2026, 10:40 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
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They say its been around for 600 years. Would that be plenty of time to at least identify the properties of the document, so the users could target a cipher for that structure? Can we agree it's a conlang with low entropy, yes or no? Many have reported it does not behave like a normal language, if it's constructed, it does not have to follow other language rules. What I know there is a great deal of repeating structure to the text. Since the document was long would this be a tactic if the author did not want the contents of MS-408 to be known?
Also some formal structure needs to be utilized as an assment tool as to develop for anyone serious who does not upload a Ai theory even if it is a cipher, it needs to be refereed by a group or someone who understands what it would convey if it's repeatable by anyone.
Do you think a document that has repeatable words at the rate of the MS-408 borders on gibberish?
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| [split] Designing the glyph system |
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Posted by: Pointless.. - 15-07-2026, 08:32 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Depending on what you mean with layman, but in my understanding of the 15th century society, the creator of the manuscript writing system had to have some qualifications and knowledge that were not at least so common in that era.
The creator of the manuscript's writing system must have been well educated in Latin to scribal proficiency and schooled in its inflectional grammar, such that the stem-and-ending structure of the word functioned as an internalized model. Possibly also further trained in the positional numerate tradition of commerce,as I believe these two formations, grammatical and arithmetical, underlie the writing system's architecture.
He also has to have had exposure to at least one, but possibly more, non-Latin scripts and languages like hebrew ( final-form allography, root-and-pattern word-model), sufficient to derive a structural features from them and to apprehend the separability of script from language, but also the exotic-alphabet compendium genre at a depth adequate for convincing imitations.
He possessed some knowledge of an astro-medical practice — herbal, pharmaceutical, calendrical, balneological, and gynecological — at the taxonomic level required to enumerate and factor the domain, though not necessarily at the level of its foremost practitioners.
All this requires no university formation or no cryptographic training but at least personal interest to it, and no mathematics beyond enumeration.
It might indicate an unusual conjunction of otherwise ordinary competences in one individual.
In my understanding, no one in that era had applied a positional slot-system to the encoding of text.
The positional micro-notations were used, but every one of them served number, record, or shorthand; the transfer to running text has no living precedent within his reach.
My conjecture: To encode their original source text, before the creator designed the glyphs, he did estimate how many glyphs were needed to produce the desired result.
How he estimated is an interesting exercise of thought. He had exposure to other languages, and some of them have around 23 letters like Greek, Sami, native Italian, classical Latin or standard Portugese, and Hebrew.
The rigid positional system he designed further restricted the expressivity, so he must have taken that in account too. To write a 1000 word source document, what kind of system I need, how many glyphs, how many positions, how many rules/grammar.
Another conjucture: What he did is possibly a lossy encoder, not encoding everything, but an intended receiver is able to recover the missing information - from the context or other clues (markers, flags), or has acces to other material ("reading guide")
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| Possible T and O map |
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Posted by: NisabaAlmah - 14-07-2026, 01:19 AM - Forum: Imagery
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If you look at this section of the map, it looks like the classic medieval T and O maps which trace their providence all the way back to the ancient Babylonian Mappa mundi. Interestingly the word in the spot that you would expect to be labeled Africa, has the same number of letters.
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However, the space you would expect to say Europa has one too many letters...unless that weird symbol with an extra long tail isn't actually a letter.
The only thing is, if that assumption is made then the matching letters between the words don't match, but if it's some kind of marching cipher that we might not expect them to. Though it's hard to imagine such a cipher being used on a text that has words so haphazardly strewn about, unless there's some kind of marking added to tell you where to start...like an extra letter that's not a letter marking giving you a clue.
Of course there's nothing definitive but just some thoughts I had while flipping through the pages and thought "hold up I've seen that before", which happens to me a lot while browsing the document but when I start trying to match the letters to the expected words it all seems to fall apart. There's a lot of classical medieval occult imagery throughout that anyone who's studied the grimoires will immediately recognize, but it never seems to match up with any established lineage even if you go in odd directions like the Arabic Picatrix.
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| Least effort generator |
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Posted by: tikonen - 13-07-2026, 09:21 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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Disclaimer. This is a hobby project and I'm not trying to solve the manuscript, I think it's a medieval scam. Just hoping to hear ideas, comments and critique.
My working assumption is that the manuscript is a forgery made to part rich people of their money. I've been thinking how it was generated in seemingly consistent way. Maybe it was done by sweat shopping few cleric students for pocket money and minimal time and and money was invested to train them.
So I guess there was possibly a template or a collection of tokens the scribes used to learn to generate VM's fantasy words with some personal twist, mistakes and tweaks. The binomial distribution of a word length gives some support to this idea, indicating that the word lengths may be random. After some practice the tokens were not needed anymore and scribe would just make it on the fly. VM's high word "kindness" to the previous rows could also support this idea.
To test the feasibility of this idea I wrote a simple program that when given a word from VM it finds a minimal number of predefined tokens in order to construct the word. I did not consider words that are used only twice or less and the ones with rare letters.
Here is and example of one token list set I conjured.
Word is constructed by picking a token from each list (or skipping it) and concatenating them to a word.
As you can guess list s0 is considered first when building a word, then list s1 and so on until s5 as last. A token from each list can be used only once for a word.
This limited example already covers (with above mentioned filtering) 34% of all the unique words and 75% of all words (many words are used multiple times). With this set the average number of needed tokens for common words with >=50 instances is 2.1. (For >=10 it's 2.5). So basically one can generate most VM words by picking just few tokens.
s0 = ['qok', 'qoke', 'qot', 'ot', 'd', 'q', 'l', 'yk']
s1 = ['ch', 'sh', 's', 'ok']
s2 = ['e', 'o', 'r', 'k']
s3 = ['r', 'k', 'o', 'e']
s4 = ['cth', 'ckh']
s5 = ['daiin', 'aiin', 'ain', 'ey', 'edy', 'dy', 'y', 'ar', 'or', 'al', 'am', 'air', 'ody', 'ol']
Example: Word 'chedy' would be token 'ch' from list s1 and 'edy' from s5.
Position on each token in each list reflects how often it's used in VM words. Each word may have multiple "solutions", algorithm picks shortest.
It's relatively easy to make a larger set for >95% word coverage but then of course the average number of token picks increases (slowly).
Some points:
- One can generate non VM words if tokens are chosen totally randomly. Some external rules are required.
- Real VM words do not use much s2 and s3. Omitting them drops coverage from 75% to 66%.
- Impossible to draw line how much is template and how much is just random on the fly variation of scribes
- There are some words that have high occurrence but complicate the set, they need a token that is used mostly on that word.
I don't know if this has any merit but at least it's an interesting exercise.
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