The incredible unravelling of the Voynich Manuscript

[PaulW]

Hello from Paul Weiler.

 

It is true, I have withdrawn the book from publication because obviously too many erroneous claims were made. At the moment I am in the process of having the book expertly checked by an institute for medieval Latin philology. I should rather have done this before publication, it was an idiotic mistake. I apologize for that.

 

How and whether the book is then continued depends on the result of the check. Also a check regarding the general statements about the Voynich manuscript seems to me to be appropriate again.

 

Nevertheless, I am still convinced that I have found some interesting traces. Some of them I have already published on Reddit (despite all possible errors). By the way, there is a fourth post (4/9), which obviously got lost in the excitement. But there won't be any more there.

 

Detached from the still to be reviewed claim, that it is indeed possible (at least within the framework of many remaining ambiguities) to decipher the text to some extent, I would like to present here four findings which, in my opinion, could be useful as further research approaches, even if the path to these findings will prove to be purely imaginative. However, I am not sure whether these theories are really completely new.

 

Theory 1:

 

Some deciphered text passages from folio 71r (zodiacal sign of Aries) indicate (in contrast to the strange world of images), that terms appear here which indicate activities within the scope of agriculture. After doing some research an interesting conclusion could be drawn from this.

 

Perhaps this zodiacal drawing is intended as an instruction for which tasks have to be executed in the time of the zodiacal sign of Aries within the framework of annual field work. Such a calendar with individual month images was very widespread in the Middle Ages. They existed not only for agriculture, rather more, for example, also for viticulture.

 

If all twelve drawings of the zodiac in the Voynich Manuscript are supposed to represent such agricultural month images, then a plausible hypothesis about the absence of the drawing for Aquarius and Capricorn could be deduced from this. These signs of the zodiac stand for the time period from the end of December to the end of February, when field work is normally suspended. Reporting about the care and treatment of plants and soil for this time period is therefore simply superfluous.

But the situation in Spring is however completely different. From the end of March to the end of May, most of the work in agriculture has to be done, where the soil has to be loosened, ploughed, cleared of weeds, fenced in and fertilised, the seeds have to be sown and many other things have to be completed. Therefore, when Aries and Taurus which both represent this time each occur twice, then this could simply be due to the large number of activities which have to be listed and which then required two zodiacal drawings.

 

Theory 2:

 

Almost all paragraphs of the Voynich manuscript begin with one of the four characters with ascenders. Some deciphered text passages indicate that this initial letter often does not belong to the first word at all.

 

This finding leads to the conclusion that the character with ascender at the beginning of a paragraph must have an independent, special meaning (and also because otherwise every paragraph would have to be "bent" linguistically to a beginning with these four initial characters). One possibility would be that these characters are used here as abbreviations for classification comments such as topic, thesis, paragraph or comment.

 

Another assumption, however, is that the consistent utilisation of characters with ascenders as initial letters for page and paragraph beginnings is basically just an element of design and/or deception within the context of the cipher which was utilised. Unless the word in question still commences in any event with a character with ascender, it was simply preceded by such a written character without any semantic content.

 

An additional indication for this theory can be found on the first page of the Voynich Manuscript (Folio 1r). In this position, at the beginning of the first paragraph, there is a character located with ascender which presumably belongs to the corresponding initial word. The second and third paragraphs, however, commence with a character without an ascender. These words are respectively preceded by an initial character written in red ink, which (at least for my taste) cannot exactly be designated as an artistic masterpiece.

This presumably was an attempt, which was subsequently dropped again afterwards, to place a special graphic element in front of each paragraph of the manuscript. The author obviously also disliked the result created and, with the exception of the first page, these characters never appear anywhere else in the manuscript again. A character with an ascender was alternatively utilised, in each case, as a paragraph starting character.

 

Theory 3:

 

According to some (ambiguous) results, the word sequence 8ain, which occurs so frequently, could stand (apart from one other meaning) for the Latin word “deinde” (then, next, thereon…).

 

But completely detached from any concrete solution: It is at least probable that in a text without any punctuation there must be some kind of instrument to structure individual trains of thought. The recognizable paragraphs in the manuscript are far too long to do without a structuring instrument. I don't mean a full stop, since sentence ends are usually clear, but rather an element as a substitute for the funciton of a comma, semicolon or colon.

 

In this respect it is likely that at least one of the frequently occurring character strings stands for such a function.

 

Theory 4:

 

Nobody likes ambiguity (perhaps apart from politicians and lawyers  ). 

But when it comes to a writing

 

a) that often has the same character sequences one after the other, as it does not occur in any real language

b) that probably comes from a time, when an ambiguous system of abbreviations with regard to individual signs that can only be resolved in context was the order of the day

c) where it was probably the intention of the author to invent a secret code as complex as possible,

 

shouldn't then not every solution that claims a 1:1 solution for the individual characters be viewed critically. Please do not misunderstand this theory as a defense of my work. I mean it basically: The resolution of the individual Voynich characters must be ambiguous for the reasons mentioned above (in particular, argument (a)). In my eyes this is not a weakness, it is a basic requirement of any solution system. Otherwise it cannot work consistently throughout the hole Voynich manuscript (as long as I assume a meaningful content).

 

 

I hope that these four theories represent constructive contributions.