[Article] Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript

[Emma May Smith]

It's almost as if we can definitely say a) that the whole text used the same script, and b) that the same general structure of words is the same, but nothing beyond that. You could suggest that the Voynich is built from text in different languages but enciphered in the same way.

Thanks Emma May, I was wondering about this too, as I'm sure many have done: has someone (s) enciphered original source material possibly in different languages.  I would actually find this promising, particularly for those of us working on the images.  For instance I have tentatively identified one image that originally would have been accompanied by text in Old French. Others have made compelling cases for images that would have originally been accompanied by Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and even Middle English text.  I'm not suggesting all of these were used, of course, but there were some educated polyglots in those days who knew many languages.  

So my question would be would that person have translated into one common language before enciphering?  And the answer given what you've said is likely not!  

But do correct me if I'm wrong, or if what I've said here seems highly unlikely to you.

I couldn't guess as to whether the "multiple languages but same encoding" hypothesis is correct. Other hypotheses, such as dialectal changes or encoding changes, could be equally valid. It's just that we might struggle to move beyond the whole question of what's causing the difference between scribes and sections, and how qualitatively different they are. We can say that [daiin] is common in one section but uncommon in another, but what does that ultimately mean?

I think that the best route into the question is to look for those words which sit outside the general structure. Even though [daiin] is less common in Currier B than A, the actual [aiin] construction appears to be equally valid in both. But some words are simply unusual: they have bigrams or structures which aren't found in more than a handful of words. They could represent: a) mistakes, b) words which couldn't be encoded properly, or c) words which are unusual in the underlying language. If they're in groups b) or c), then we have a lot to learn from them. A good example would be words with two gallows (in any configuration): they're not that rare (several hundred exist), but they definitely unusual.

Anyway, we're quite off topic, so I'll stop here.