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| New video about Voynich Solutions |
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Posted by: Koen G - 06-03-2025, 10:34 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (16)
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My new video is up on YouTube! This time I was helped by Tavi, who did a lot of the heavy lifting on the script.
I wasn't planning to do anymore "why theorists are wrong" videos, but we just felt like this one was necessary. People on YouTube kept telling me the MS was solved (it's Turkish!) or asking about the Turkish solution video they saw. I had to make an answer. So here it is:
Tavi and I wrote it in a way that applies to many VM theories, pointing out common mistakes, strategies used by solvers etc, so it can be used as a reference when a new theory makes headlines.
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| vague thoughts for an approach |
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Posted by: Andreas Heller - 06-03-2025, 04:26 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (10)
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Hello to everyone !
I am new in this forum and I know the manuscript for only two years. What I want to say is: I am a beginner in this subject. So I beg everyone pardon if I am showing up with questions and ideas which maybe had already been discussed several times in the past. It is hard to get an overview. I am a civil engineer and in no way qualified to solve middleage riddles or doing cryptology. But I am deeply interested.
Here are three of my thoughts/questions:
1:
I understand that substitution letter by letter does not work. Assuming a chain of letters corresponds to a word and identical chains do not change the meaning, is it worth a try to substitute hole words . I mean, making a list of the most common words in the script and give them a meaning taking into account the topics of the drawings in the book(or the texts in other herbals ? Are there any attempts made ? Or is the amount of possibilities killing this method? This procedure asumes that the writing is an artificial language. If so, how did the writer manage to do the writing? First he must had invented a dictionary for his new language. But that is a hard way to write so many pages, looking for nearly every word in a list until you become used to it. Substitution is far easier to learn und after a while you can write fluently whithout any aid.
2:
We don`t know if the text has a meaning or not. If it is meaningless, why took the author so much affort in following special rules (some charcaters only at the end, some characters follow only a certain other character..) ? A simple answer could be: because it has a meaning or he wants it to look like a meaningful text. On the other hand, if the author wanted to produce a meaningless text which looks like a meaningful text, why didn`t he use a typical amount of characters?
3: There is a character that appears only at the end of a line. Is there any idea for a good reason? What useful information can such character give the reader ?
If you know any thread dealing with these questions I am glad to know . Thank you!
Andreas
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| Could Voynich symbols encode "directions" on some alphabet table? |
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Posted by: entropyOrInformation - 06-03-2025, 02:19 AM - Forum: Voynich Talk
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Hello! This is my first time here. I'm very interested in probability, statistics, and information theory, and the Voynich manuscript intrigues me due to the strange statistical properties of the text. Since this text has, so far, appeared to not be any known cipher, I started thinking of ways to encode text that someone at the time may have thought of, and could possibly lead to strange statistics. My idea is this: what if the authors used a chart of characters in their native language and, from some starting point, wrote "directions" to the desired character using voynichese symbols. I believe this can explain some of the statistics, inclusing the commonality of "daiin", "daiiin", and other extremely common repeating phrases and word parts, and also the difference in statistics between different scribes.
To illustrate my point, I'll use a simple example. DISCLAIMER: I am not claiming this is the exact method of encoding used in the Voynich manuscript, simply that a similar type of encoding could have been employed. Let's construct a 5x5 table of English letters excluding "z" for now so we have a nice, neat table.
A B C D E
F G H I J
K L M N O
P Q R S T
U V W X Y
Also for simplicity, let's use English letters for our final encoding. Each will encode a "nearest neighbor" direction. Let's use
A = up
B = up and right
C = right
D = down and right
E = down
F = down and left
G = left
H = left and up
We now encode in the following manner. Each letter of the message becomes a word in the encoded text. The letters of the encoded words give "directions" to the letter of the message starting in the middle of the chart, i.e. "M". Note that the encoding here is not unique, this is crucial.
Let's encode the phrase "Hello this is encoded text". For now, let's use the rule that we write a shortest path from "M" to our desired character. One example of this encoding is:
A BB G G CC CD A B D B D BB C AA CC AB BB AB CD BB DE CD
However, this is far from the only way to encode this message. Let's say instead that we desire to create words we can pronounce in our encoded message. We could instead write:
A ACAC EGA AGE ECAC CEC A CA EC CA EC ACAC EB ACH ECAC AB ACAC AB AD ACAC DE CEC
This encodes the same message, but looks very different. Another feature of this type of encoding is that "loops" can be arbitrarily added to any encoded word in any place. For example, the encoded letters "ACEG" form a loop in the diagram, and can be added arbitrarily to any encoded word in any place and not change the meaning of the encoding. Perhaps "daiin" and "daiiin" are loops of some sort? Furthermore, a word can be arbitrarily long in the encoded message, as we can keep a path going as long as we like. Thus we could create fairly arbitrary word length statistics using this method. Additionally, different scribes could prefer different "paths" or ways of encoding, leading to different statistics and encoded word choice. Despite the many ways of encoding, it would be very simple to decode given access to the letter grid and knowledge of the encoded symbol's meaning.
If voynichese is an encoding similar to this, I would assume the characters themselves are more complex paths than the ones presented here, as there are many more than just eight. Perhaps the encoding grid also includes more than one instance of a letter, giving a larger grid and thus more possible paths.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think!
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| List of "weird" vords |
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Posted by: Rafal - 05-03-2025, 08:58 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (45)
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I wonder, did anybody tried to make a list of "weird" or "rare" Voynich vords?
Mosts of vords are very regular and schematic but there are exceptions which are not so common but not so rare as well.
It's probably about 1-5% of words but it's just my guess.
What is a "weird" vord is subjective but I'll give you some examples from page f116r:
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- llory: double "l" is rare and weird
- amom: "m" in the word middle is rare
- ykoloin: bench made of "y" and "o" is rare
- qo: "qo" alone is rare
- raiin: vord starting with "r" is weird
- chll: double "l" is maybe not so rare but still feels weird
As I said its subjective and you may agree or not with me that these vords don't fit the grand scheme.
But is there any subjective collection of such vords made by someone, possibly with explanation why there were "weird" to him?
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| Lingua Volgare Shorthand |
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Posted by: ginocaspari - 02-03-2025, 11:33 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (55)
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Dear Forum Users,
we have recently elaborated on a possible solution proposing lingua volgare written in shorthand. The preprint has been posted on SocArXiv.
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The Supplementary Information can be found here:
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We are looking for specialists in lingua volgare shorthand to replicate our solution and mitigate our confirmation bias. In our humble opinion, the difficulty of Voynich lies in the layered nature of the problem. We propose that the Voynich is a single substitution cipher applied to a medieval shorthand. The single substitution cipher is algorithmic and reproducible. However, the underlying text is written in shorthand and this is the real issue. Lingua volgare shorthand texts are notoriously ambiguous and even with proper language knowledge, they can remain hard to understand. The shorthand nature of the text is also why the Voynich exhibits such strange statistical properties (namely the low entropy of bigrams). Again, it is crucial to understand that a shorthand displays very different statistical properties in comparison to its source language.
We address the entropy problem in a longer explanatory text and we also identify grammatical material. We have reached out to specialists in lingua volgare shorthand personally, in order to allow for a replication by someone other than the authors (Caspari & Faccini). But of course we very much appreciate attempts by lingua volgare experts outside our immediate circle. The explanatory text can be found in the supplementary information section. We use seven criteria established by Prof. Claire Bowern to guide our argument.
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Furthermore, we provide a list of 400+ words which can be read in lingua volgare. The words form part of a consistent vocabulary featuring a plethora of terms related to plants and horticulture. All words can be found in the texts of authors roughly contemporary with the creation of the Voynich. Each word in the list of the supplementary information is joined by a remark and context of the word in a source of the time. Often the example sentences feature additional words we also read from the Voynich. Here is the link to the vocabulary list (for convenience we have also supplied PDF files of the same list separated into vocabulary and comments):
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Our proposed solution also identifies agglutinating characteristics of the Voynich including the identification of relative pronouns and articles which we find are key to understanding the mechanisms behind the text's creation. This phenomenon finds frequent correspondences in the lingua volgare manuscripts of the time.
We look forward to constructive criticism and a well-informed discussion.
Sincerely,
Gino Caspari & Agnese Faccini
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| Full Voynich Solution -- Deceptive Fundraising |
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Posted by: asteckley - 01-03-2025, 03:08 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (19)
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A new Voynich "solution" has just been posted on a Facebook group "Decoding The Voynich Manuscript".
It is presented as a complete decoding and accompanying description of the entire Voynich Manuscript produced by a large language model. As a data scientist and research engineer who has worked with and developed these AI models, I can assure all that the solution is complete nonsense. To the extent any of it might be "accurate", it will be a hallucinagenic compilation of the hundreds of observations extracted from all the Voynich enthusiasts' written claims in blog, posts, and books.
There is certainly nothing wrong with producing and publishing the kind of document that he has done-- the document is fun to read and is really very entertaining. And it is obvious that his solution does not match the contents of the manuscript.
HOWEVER, he has also posted a GoFundMe page to raise funds.
I believe this "crosses the line". (He actually dares to say "
No scams here, just a dream to expand".)
Many people, hopeful about these kinds of solutions to the Voynich, may not recognize that the claims within the document are technical nonsense and that it is describing "research" that never really took place. They may believe that the "further work" that he is wanting funds for has some legitimacy and hope.
Hopefully, this will be recognized and reported to GoFundMe.
His document:
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His GoFundMe page:
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| AN OPTICAL APPROACH FOR DECODING THE MYSTERIOUS VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT |
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Posted by: Scarecrow - 25-02-2025, 07:28 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (3)
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A novel (?) approach from Bucharest university reseacher Costin-Anton-Boiangiu et.al.
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The current paper presents several optical approaches used for investigating the decoding of the Voynich Manuscript. Over the past century, there have been numerous decipherment claims, but none of them can be accepted as the true solution. Most of them focus on the syntax analysis of the text, trying to correlate the Voynich text with well-known languages. In the current paper, we present a short history and description of the manuscript, as well as an innovative technique used for attempting its decoding. Our paper presents the use of several optical approaches, such as various distortions, words and character scrambling, in the attempt of correctly identifying voynichese words with the help of OCR
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