No other document written in Voynichese script has been found up to date

[-JKP-]

I agree "has not been found" is fair.  I wonder if anyone has ever tried to do a comprehensive survey of known scripts.

Perhaps someone on the old mailing list did - but I've seen no mention of it.

I expect Stolfi looked at some Asian scripts, and recently Thomas Spande introduced the question of Armenian script and language.  The Friedmans invited a couple of Egyptologists, I gather.  I've mentioned Sabaic minuscule and Greco-Bactrian..

It would be an interesting research project.  And in this, I keep thinking of a manuscript which was mentioned by Okasha el Daly.  It is said to have a large number of scripts recorded in it, each with their equivalent sound in Arabic. It is said to be in the Topkapi serai, so if anyone feels like visiting during their hols...

I've looked at at least 300 alphabets, probably more (I lost count years ago), and at least 300 cipher systems that use oddball shapes.

I learned a small amount of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese some years ago, enough to be able to read simple phrases, so Asian scripts were already familiar to me, so I also checked out the east Asian and Malaysian and Indian scripts (dozens of them). I was already familiar with Cyrillic, Runic, and some of the ancient Mediterranean alphabets before I encountered the VMS so I checked those, as well. I'm an avid book collector and a few of my books are from the east, including a couple that are centuries-old from Tibet.


Many alphabets have VMS-similar glyphs, including Armenian (the P shapes), Syrian, Nabatean (the gallows characters), Arabic (the 9 characters) and many others if you pick through the shapes piecemeal.

But, you really don't have to look beyond Greek and Latin to find almost all of them. Almost the entire VMS glyph set exists within Latin and Greek letters, abbreviations, and numbers—there really isn't much missing. The main reason people don't recognize the shapes is because they are not familiar with 13th-to15th-century Latin and Greek and are not familiar with the abbreviations. Even the one-loop gallows shape is found in Latin and the line-across-the-gallows shape is found in Greek (I haven't mentioned this before because I was going to blog about it). Only a couple of the rare dotted letters are not found in Latin or Greek, but you can find one of those rare dotted glyphs in old Hebrew texts as an abbreviation.


On the cipher side of things...

Some of the old Arabic texts document hundreds of simple transposition systems, but what's interesting about them is that they drew page after page of original un-Arabic-like shapes to create the codes, and I've been able to find almost every VMS glyph in a single volume but... not together, not in any cohesive or deliberate way, and not the most ornate of the gallows characters because SOME of the gallows shapes in the VMS appear to have been embellished, as in illuminated texts, rather than intended as separate entities.

As for the cipher shapes, one thing you learn when going through these texts is that certain shapes just naturally come about when you start drawing every letter-like shape you can think of to create a new set of glyphs for a code, and straight lines with loops attached is one of the more common combinations.