An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[Emma May Smith]

So what's unusual in their structure?  I only modelled paragraph breaks and line breaks very approximately as an afterthought. I begin new paragraphs on word-initial [p] or [f] only.   I know that isn't accurate ,and sometimes I shouldn't begin them there, and sometimes I should begin new paragraphs with words beggining with other glyphs.

I only modelled paragraph breaks and line breaks very approximately as an afterthought. I begin new paragraphs on word-initial [p] or [f] only.   I know that isn't accurate ,and sometimes I shouldn't begin them there, and sometimes I should begin new paragraphs with words beggining with other glyphs.

One obvious unusual feature is the presence of two gallows characters in a single word, which is rare throughout the text. Words with two gallows (in any order or combination) occur not more than 500 times. Yet over a fifth of those occurrences are paragraph initial: exactly where Grove words occur. Given that the average paragraph length is in excess of twenty words (often much in excess), this is an occurrence which is far too high to be random

Following your process, we could explain these statistics as a rule which starts a new paragraph when a word contains an initial gallows, especially if it contains a second gallows. Yet the simpler explanation is to explain both features by a different rule: add a gallows to the beginning of a word at the start of a paragraph. I don't actually think this is the exact rule, but I do think that it is a better one: both the initial gallows and the double gallows is explained by the single addition of a character, and paragraph starts are not determined by the arbitrary occurrence of a word structure.

I haven't looked in detail at the occurrence of word final [m] at all, but it's common enough that you can probably choose which [m]s to end the line at, to give the appearance of unbroken text.

I recommend you look at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You can see that on some pages much more than half of all words ending [m] occur at the end of lines. Indeed, throughout the text about 75% of all such words occur in that position. Notably, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has ten words ending [m], all of which are line end; You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has eight; and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has six.

I've attacked the problem by considering the VMS's large-scale properties, rather than homing in on specific weirdness, so there are plenty of specific things I haven't examined.   But I find it hard to believe, for example, that the meaning's hidden in the initial paragraph glyphs, or line-final glyphs, and the rest of the text is just filler.

And no one has been able to convince others that they have extracted any meaning from the text, or even identified the language.

I, too, find it hard to believe that there are only patterns in a few places and meaningless filler in between. I think it more likely that we've not yet found all the patterns which are present. I've only been studying the Voynich text for about three years now, and I am constantly astounded by little twists and quirks which crop up in every batch of statistics I look at. My belief is that there any many layers to the text complicating any easy insight into its patterns.

Also, though I do believe the text is a natural language written plainly (more or less), I do not believe any claim to have discovered meaning or identified the underlying language. Nobody has convinced me that they've done better than guesswork.