The Voynich Manuscript:Decoded ( theory )

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If we wished to assess Arabic as a possible precursor language of the Voynich manuscript, we could start with Abu Yusuf Al-Kindi's frequency table, which dates from the ninth century; or alternatively the letter frequencies from Abulfida' Ibn Kathir's The Beginning and the End, written in the 14th century. A further alternative would be to use Ibn Kathir's frequencies but to combine the variants of alef (ﺍ ﺃ ﺇ ﺁ), as Al-Kindi evidently did.

The frequencies of the glyphs in the v101 transliteration, in descending order, and the frequencies of the letters in Al-Kindi's frequency table, have a correlation of 97.2 percent. That in itself is not remarkable: with two short sequences in descending order, it's easy to obtain a correlation of over 90 percent. Many European languages yield a similar correlation with the v101 transliteration.

However, it seems to me that the juxtaposition of these frequency tables opens the possibility of a provisional transliteration of any Voynich page to Arabic. Having done so, it would probably be necessary to reverse the order of the letters in each transliterated word (for which there exist online tools such as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

If the resulting text contained any recognisable Arabic words, we might be on the right track. If not, it might be necessary to modify the v101 transliteration, for example by combining visually similar glyphs such as 6, 7, 8 and &; or by disaggregating glyphs that look like strings (e.g. m => iN, n =>iN); or by making distinctions between initial, interior and final glyphs. That would change the v101 frequency table and consequently change the mapping from glyphs to Arabic.