A semantic encoding system? - Printable Version

A semantic encoding system? - Printable Version

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A semantic encoding system? - Jonas Barnun - 03-05-2026

Having watched the Youtube videos of Voynich Talk, I understand there are only a limited numbers of glyphs in the VMS, certain glyphs appear only at the beginnings or ends of words, some glyphs strongly predict which glyph may follow them, and repeated word families occur throughout the text so a simple cypher letter to letter of a natural language does not match.. Being based in China and very familiar with Chinese characters, it made me think of the following hypothesis: may be the individual glyphs do not represent sounds or letters in the normal alphabetic sense. Rather, they would function more like the strokes used to build characters: meaningless on their own phonetically, but combined according to structural rules to create distinct semantic units. The unit would therefore be the whole “word,” not the individual glyph. This could be in turn used to encode a natural language such as Latin, Italian, German, or Greek encoded in these symbols (as if using some form of ideograms to encode an existing language). Similar-looking words would not necessarily have related pronunciations, but could represent entirely different concepts generated through a a combinatorial system.

What do you think? This could help explain why the manuscript statistically resembles natural language in some respects while not resembling in other aspects?

It would not exactly the same as but a bit like the so-called Wubi typing method in Chinese where each letter refer to a shape or radical combining a set of letter helps to type in characters. Except here there would be an agreed method to assign each word to a character. The weak point of this theory is if it’s highly random it requires XV century copyists to master a whole system which is as complex as Chinese just to produce a single manuscript, that sounds a bit extreme knowing that learning such system would take many years especially in the absence of other texts to learn from...

RE: A semantic encoding system? - Rafal - 04-05-2026

Hi! Welcome to the forums!

If I understand you correctly, you suggest that Voynich could be written in logographic script, just like traditional Chinese script. It codes ideas but not how the words sounds phonetically:
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Well, it is one of options. One of very many options. You probably realized so far that Voynich Manuscript is one big mystery Smile

By the way, if you have some background in Chinese, you may be interested in this thread:
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RE: A semantic encoding system? - Jonas Barnun - 04-05-2026

Thank you Rafal for your reply! I am very excited to write a post in the Voynich ninja forum, while I am getting deeper in the VMS rabbit hole!

(04-05-2026, 01:58 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I understand you correctly, you suggest that Voynich could be written in logographic script, just like traditional Chinese script. It codes ideas but not how the words sounds phonetically:
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In a sense yes, but in this theory the specificity of the Voynichese logogram would be that it uses a set of letters to “draw” a single logogram rather than being drawn like hieroglyphic or Chinese. However I am realizing while this theory is not impossible but first it is hard to prove and second if true the VMS would be impossible to decipher without a Rosetta Stone of some sort.

I will check out the Chinese thread but from the start I am already doubtful of voynichese being a phonetical rendition of Chinese because mandarin entropy is probably not as high as Voynichese (no statistics on that but Chinese is quite simple one consonant followed by any vowel forms a unit and there are not many limitations like we see in the VMS but I could be wrong).

RE: A semantic encoding system? - Mauro - 04-05-2026

(03-05-2026, 01:11 AM)Jonas Barnun Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Being based in China and very familiar with Chinese characters, it made me think of the following hypothesis: may be the individual glyphs do not represent sounds or letters in the normal alphabetic sense. Rather, they would function more like the strokes used to build characters: meaningless on their own phonetically, but combined according to structural rules to create distinct semantic units.

Yeah, it's surely one of the many possibilities, and a nice idea. It's functionally similar to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. hypothesis, where glyph 'chunks' represent concepts, which are then concatenated to form bigger semantic units.

RE: A semantic encoding system? - Jonas Barnun - 05-05-2026

(04-05-2026, 05:49 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yeah, it's surely one of the many possibilities, and a nice idea. It's functionally similar to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. hypothesis, where glyph 'chunks' represent concepts, which are then concatenated to form bigger semantic units.

Thank you Mauro! Yes it’s exactly this, I did not know it existed. I checked the wikipedia article you sent. It’s facinatimg! And I noticed, among examples of a philosophical language, there is Wilkins’ system (a language mentioned very briefly in Borges short-story the Congress I was reading yesterday) so I zoomed in on his system and I checked the wikipedia article about the language he created, the article says:

Wilkins's "Real Character" is a constructed family of symbols, corresponding to a classification scheme developed by Wilkins and his colleagues. It was intended as a pasigraphy, in other words, to provide elementary building blocks from which could be constructed the universe's every possible thing and notion. The Real Character is not an orthography: i.e. it is not a written representation of spoken language. Instead, each symbol represents a concept directly, without (at least in the early parts of the Essay's presentation) there being any way of vocalizing it. Inspiration for this approach came in part from contemporary European accounts of the Chinese writing system, which were somewhat mistaken.

I love it! The VMS is 2 centuries earlier, I guess a philosophical language of some sort is possible, although it’s not a highly likely scenario. Are there any attempts to interpret the VMS thru this lens?

Link to the article on Wilkins’ Essay theorizing his language:

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RE: A semantic encoding system? - nablator - 05-05-2026

See this thread discussing You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

RE: A semantic encoding system? - Rafal - 05-05-2026

Quote:I love it! The VMS is 2 centuries earlier, I guess a philosophical language of some sort is possible, although it’s not a highly likely scenario.

I would agree. We canot exclude it but a lot of stuff doesn't really fit this scenario.

One thing, as it was already said, is that philosophical languages started to appear much later than Voynich Manuscript, in the 1600s, and are generally a product of Enlightenment epoch. Voynich Manuscript appeared in different time and in different culture.

These languages were also "half-baked", if you ask me. All the effort usually went into inventing the words and building hierarchies of words where similar concepts, let's say colours, had the same word root and differed only by a single letter or so. On the other hand the authors usually didn't care much about grammar and just copied it from their native languages. Have a look at Wilkins example - it just copies the exact word order from the English text, keeping all quirks of English language like "the" word:

Such philosophical language would have the same patterns like English. For example the "and" word is the most common one in English texts and so it would be in the language of Wilkins. But Voynich Manuscript doesn't have such patterns. We don't have a good candidate for "and" word.

I guess we could say that if Voynichese is a conlang then it has some really alien grammar. Or maybe not necessarily alen, just not European as some people suggest on these forums Wink

RE: A semantic encoding system? - Jonas Barnun - 05-05-2026

(05-05-2026, 12:13 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Such philosophical language would have the same patterns like English. For example the "and" word is the most common one in English texts and so it would be in the language of Wilkins. But Voynich Manuscript doesn't have such patterns. We don't have a good candidate for "and" word.

I guess we could say that if Voynichese is a conlang then it has some really alien grammar. Or maybe not necessarily alen, just not European as some people suggest on these forums

Oh waw! Thank you Rafal! You went deep and I agree with your point, you are right Wilkins’ language mimics English in its grammar and that seem to be even a more serious problem to be a model for a hypothesis on the VMS than the 2 century gap.

Sorry if my question is too basic, I am still pretty new on this topic, how do we know there are no words like “and” and “the” in the VMS? Statistic analysis can be fully conclusive on that? Is there a paper or presentation you can refer me to on that?

RE: A semantic encoding system? - ReneZ - 05-05-2026

My well-meant suggestion is to first of all start wondering if the character groups separated by spaces in the Voynich MS actually represent words.

This is the most widely assumed thing about the text, and it immediately leads to all these questions.

Reason enough to question this assumption.

RE: A semantic encoding system? - Jonas Barnun - 06-05-2026

(05-05-2026, 02:34 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My well-meant suggestion is to first of all start wondering if the character groups separated by spaces in the Voynich MS actually represent words.

This is the most widely assumed thing about the text, and it immediately leads to all these questions.

Reason enough to question this assumption.

In the sense the space could be either random or denoting something else than the end of a word.
Hmmm that’s opening a whole new area in the field of interpretation.

Anyway, I would think that if it is a conlang of some sort with its own original grammar, there is no way one may decipher it as there is nothing we could use as a reasonable basis to do so. It would be virtually similar with Linear A (although not a conlang) where we do have letters we can actually identify but the language remains obscure… So in the absence of a key to decode it, this hypothesis implies the VMS will remain obscure no matter how much time we spend analyzing it’s structure. Am I wrong? Are there ways to translate a totally unknown and unrelated language without any rosetta stone?