Historically, attempts to intepret Voynich have been aimed at discovering the procedure with which one could map Voynichese glyph sequences to meaningful letter sequences in one of existing languages. This approach still prevails up to date. Simple substitution (with slight variations) attempts constitute the vast majority of the proposed solutions, and we are accustomed to hear of new solutions on a more or less regular basis.
Considering Voynich a more complex cipher basically falls into the same broad vein of investigation, - alas, with no success so far.
Of lately, I've been thinking if such approach is efficient after all. The issue is that there are some indications that the Voynichese text, while conveying pretty meaningful message, may not be what we are believing it to be.
One such indication follows from the work by Wladimir which suggests that no plant names are contained within botanical folios. The imagery which is manifesting its mnemonics supports this thesis. In a (supposedly enciphered) text, what reason would there be to exclude plant names? Nothing. The situation is quite different for the representation that relies on a nomenclator. If your nomenclator does not contain plant names, you won't be able to include them.
Another strange thing is the high degree of morphological similarity between vords being members of homogenous sets - such as my favourite "Voynich stars" (f68r1, r2). Of 53 Voynich star labels in total, 39 (or 74%) start with "o". Of those 39, 15 (or 28% of the total) start with "ot", and 9 (or 17% of the total) start with "ok". Those two subsets constitute 45% of all Voynich stars. In other words, notions homogenous in nature are designated by vords similar in morphology. This does not very much look like what we find in natural languages. This could be explained, however, by vords encoding positions in a nomenclator. Homogenous notions may have been grouped in a nomenclator. Encodings of their positions (close to each other) would then appear morphologically similar.
If there is no mapping between Voynichese and plain text on the glyph level but, instead, mapping exists only on the vord-to-word level, then all attempts at "deciphering" would be vain. What one should do instead is to shift from "decrypting" to "translating". Suppose extraterrestrials land and we are presented wtih their writings. We would not try to invent a procedure to decrypt their writings into English or Russian, that would be waste of time. We would seek a way to translate those instead, based on our understanding of what words of theirs map to what notions known to us. This is the direction that might prove fruitful for Voynichese. The problem is with the methodology, as always...
Considering Voynich a more complex cipher basically falls into the same broad vein of investigation, - alas, with no success so far.
Of lately, I've been thinking if such approach is efficient after all. The issue is that there are some indications that the Voynichese text, while conveying pretty meaningful message, may not be what we are believing it to be.
One such indication follows from the work by Wladimir which suggests that no plant names are contained within botanical folios. The imagery which is manifesting its mnemonics supports this thesis. In a (supposedly enciphered) text, what reason would there be to exclude plant names? Nothing. The situation is quite different for the representation that relies on a nomenclator. If your nomenclator does not contain plant names, you won't be able to include them.
Another strange thing is the high degree of morphological similarity between vords being members of homogenous sets - such as my favourite "Voynich stars" (f68r1, r2). Of 53 Voynich star labels in total, 39 (or 74%) start with "o". Of those 39, 15 (or 28% of the total) start with "ot", and 9 (or 17% of the total) start with "ok". Those two subsets constitute 45% of all Voynich stars. In other words, notions homogenous in nature are designated by vords similar in morphology. This does not very much look like what we find in natural languages. This could be explained, however, by vords encoding positions in a nomenclator. Homogenous notions may have been grouped in a nomenclator. Encodings of their positions (close to each other) would then appear morphologically similar.
If there is no mapping between Voynichese and plain text on the glyph level but, instead, mapping exists only on the vord-to-word level, then all attempts at "deciphering" would be vain. What one should do instead is to shift from "decrypting" to "translating". Suppose extraterrestrials land and we are presented wtih their writings. We would not try to invent a procedure to decrypt their writings into English or Russian, that would be waste of time. We would seek a way to translate those instead, based on our understanding of what words of theirs map to what notions known to us. This is the direction that might prove fruitful for Voynichese. The problem is with the methodology, as always...
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)