(12-06-2026, 10:37 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(11-06-2026, 10:42 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But at the bottom (especially near the bottom-left A, for example, I can clearly see a T there), you can make out the remnants of the text in Voynichese.

That is probably see-through of the text on page f116r.  No?

Quote:It seems strange that the "cleaner" tried to restore the inscriptions by stylizing them as a German font. The page may have contained a mixture of German and Voynichese words, but the cleaner was only able to recover the upper ones (and not entirely accurately).

I believe that the page had only 3-4 lines of pure Voynichese at the top.  The person who tried to recover the written text apparently did not know the Voynichese alphabet.  Either he was an Owner who had not spent any time studying the text, or the clumsy visitor who spilled the water and tried to fix the damage before the Owner saw it, or some librarian who had to recover a bunch of books that were damaged by a roof leak...

All the best, --stolfi

PS. When replying to a long post, please try to trim the quoted text to the specific points you are replying to.

(12-06-2026, 04:53 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As if the scribe changed his mind while writing them.

(12-06-2026, 04:53 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.An exception is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with the nymph, goat and whatever the thing on top is, as this quire contains no further imagery aside from stars.

(12-06-2026, 09:05 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The drawings may have been made by a restorer, because they are too small and do not resemble the author's style (especially the nymph, as you pointed out).

(11-06-2026, 11:05 AM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it was right the opposite:
those (much) later added words from „poxleber“ (it isn‘t) to „mich“ (it isn‘t) are surrounding the 2 Voynichese words „aror Shey“, but do not build a complete sentence with them — maybe the „poxleber“ scribe did not even knew the meaning of both VMS things and was not able to include them.

How to get there?
- the „spell“ with +‘s ends just above those Vords, the last sequence follows with a slight offset downwards
- at this point (and overall), used ink for add-ons looks different from VMS ink
- this last page seems to have served for some VMS scribble drawings and Vords, more like a test field
- writer changed to partially cursive/kurrent scribing, which is not appearing in VMS main text and -time period. (this is also regarding the „months‘ names“)

(13-06-2026, 12:49 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My own thought on this was that the person writing didn't have a word in their language to use. 

I think it might be like people writing the "many names of God, Jesus or Maria" in a charm/curse. At the time people put a lot of weight in knowing the true name of "whoever" because that would mean they have to answer / pay attention. You can find examples of the true name of god being a hundred or more names, because people didn't know and so just gave them all a whirl in the hope one would work. I think it is possible we see this same thing with "Marix Morix Abia Ma Ria", looking for the "true name of "Maria"". 

You can see this idea survive today in things like Japanese storytelling where if you know the name of the wind, or river you may control them (Any "Spirited Away" fans?)

Some of the ideas shown in this thread where not what I expected though and good food for thought. I'm glad there were no "its step 3 in the coding, step 2 is the "plain text" and step 1 is the "actual plain text".. because that one scares me

(11-06-2026, 11:05 AM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it was right the opposite:
those (much) later added words from „poxleber“ (it isn‘t) to „mich“ (it isn‘t) are surrounding the 2 Voynichese words „aror Shey“, but do not build a complete sentence with them — maybe the „poxleber“ scribe did not even knew the meaning of both VMS things and was not able to include them.

How to get there?
- the „spell“ with +‘s ends just above those Vords, the last sequence follows with a slight offset downwards
- at this point (and overall), used ink for add-ons looks different from VMS ink
- this last page seems to have served for some VMS scribble drawings and Vords, more like a test field
- writer changed to partially cursive/kurrent scribing, which is not appearing in VMS main text and -time period. (this is also regarding the „months‘ names“)

(21-06-2026, 01:14 PM)monisusa Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(13-06-2026, 12:49 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My own thought on this was that the person writing didn't have a word in their language to use. 

I think it might be like people writing the "many names of God, Jesus or Maria" in a charm/curse. At the time people put a lot of weight in knowing the true name of "whoever" because that would mean they have to answer / pay attention. You can find examples of the true name of god being a hundred or more names, because people didn't know and so just gave them all a whirl in the hope one would work. I think it is possible we see this same thing with "Marix Morix Abia Ma Ria", looking for the "true name of "Maria"". 

You can see this idea survive today in things like Japanese storytelling where if you know the name of the wind, or river you may control them (Any "Spirited Away" fans?)

Some of the ideas shown in this thread where not what I expected though and good food for thought. I'm glad there were no "its step 3 in the coding, step 2 is the "plain text" and step 1 is the "actual plain text".. because that one scares me

Hi, there are frequent misreadings of the gothic characters. The v is often mixed up with r! Therefore the correct reading is ma vix, mo vix (vix refers to a historical Bavarian word meaning "wax", azia, ma+via. It is all explained in my study on folio 116v published on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. There are surprising new findings. The study consists of twenty pages. I transcribed the texts in its entirety. Enjoy reading it.
Kind regards, Monika

(11-06-2026, 08:55 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The below is a speculation, but if the Voynich manuscript is a ciphered codex, it seems to make sense.

The marginalia are mnemonics for the key that would allow a person who knows the principles upon which the cipher is built to read the text.

Let's assume Voynichese is a cipher. Given then the Voynichese is not fully made of characters of any known alphabet, the cipher almost certainly has a substitution step, where after some preprocessing (whatever it be: chunking, permutations, transpositions, numeric coding, etc) resulting Voynichese sequences are substituted with plaintext (let's suppose Latin) characters. This mapping of the preprocessed result to Latin is likely arbitrary, in the sense that you still need to remember the actual mapping tables, even if you knew exactly how the preprocessing step worked. This creates a problem for the author of the encoding system, if the substitution tables are lost or forgotten, recovering them may be a very hard process, and even knowing how the cipher works won't easily yield the plaintext. Basically, we have just had You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (good example, bad puzzle), where the basic principle was identified very quickly, but the actual mapping took years to uncover with complex modern computational techniques.

The solution to this problem is too keep the substitution table in the manuscript as a quick mnemonic that would be self evident for a person who knows how the cipher works, but won't make any sense for anybody else. Maybe there is some interplay between the list of Voynichese characters from 1r or 57v with the Latin phrase from 116v, maybe they are unrelated and the whole mnemonic is contained in 116v, or maybe parts of the mnemonic are hidden on different pages (116v and 17r).

Including Voynichese in the mnemonic may let the reader quickly verify that they understood the mnemonic correctly, in which case Voynichese probably just encodes the plaintext sequence that comes immediately before or after it. The table is structured in a way that makes it similar to some phrase, to hide its purpose.

A quick practical example of how a mnemonic may work, that certainly has nothing to do with the actual Voynichese. Imagine a cipher that is made of glyphs @#%^*+$ (this exact sequence of seven glyphs is written at the beginning of the book), and you know that 2 glyphs should encode a single Latin character. 

On the last page of the book there is the following:

MICHITON ODALABAS MULTAS PORTAS ZYWEG FOX VHEK JUSQ MARIA (49 Latin characters with some spaces thrown in to make it look like a phrase, which it is not)

Then there is the following line
#@@##@++#^ NINJA SEARV WHIL IT'S STIL COLDE

Can you use this mnemonic to recreate the cipher table and decode the following:

#%@$ *%*^ +*#@^%*% @#*+ @+@^+^ $%#^#@%^%#@%$*@*^#%+ $+^@ #+ +%*$%@+@


How this works exactly:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Just write the phrase as 7x7 table and use the glyph sequence for rows and columns, then you can map glyphs to the plaintext by selecting the first glyph for the row and the second for the column. #@@##@++#^ decodes to NINJA, which lets you quickly verify that the mapping actually works. SEARV WHIL IT'S STIL COLDE is a meaningless padding to make the whole text look like a recipe in an obscure language.

Code:

  @#%^*+$ @ MICHITO # NODALAB % ASMULTA ^ SPORTAS * ZYWEGFO + XVHEKJU $ SQMARIA

This way you only have to remember the basic idea that you map two glyphs to a single character and that by combining the sequence of glyphs @#%^*+$ from the first page with the strange phrase from the end of the book you can always recreate the mapping.

There is also a not very encouraging alternative that the manuscript is meaningless and the inscription on the last page is just made to look like a mnemonic for the key to give prospective buyers some hope of decoding the manuscript, but actually means nothing. In this case including the pieces of the ciphertext is just a way of showing that this inscription was made by the original author and not by a later clueless owner.