12-06-2026, 06:28 PM
I think this is a very valid question.
What we can say for sure is that whatever 'Voynichese' is, it never gained enough traction to become common knowledge. Neither at the time the VM was created, nor was something even remotely similar re-invented in the following centuries.
To me, this is no proof but a very strong indication that Voynichese is unlikely to be useful in a broader context. Regardless if it is a cipher or transliteration of another language. If this system had a practical application, even if the knowledge was lost, a similar method would have been independently developed by now. This and the fact that we can't 'decipher' it most likely means that it either encodes no useful information, or in a way that is inefficient and/or impractical.
We have no idea if anyone ever 'used' the VM, it may very well be that people did what we did today with digital copies, and just desperately tried to make sense of it. It does become addictive.
What we can say for sure is that whatever 'Voynichese' is, it never gained enough traction to become common knowledge. Neither at the time the VM was created, nor was something even remotely similar re-invented in the following centuries.
To me, this is no proof but a very strong indication that Voynichese is unlikely to be useful in a broader context. Regardless if it is a cipher or transliteration of another language. If this system had a practical application, even if the knowledge was lost, a similar method would have been independently developed by now. This and the fact that we can't 'decipher' it most likely means that it either encodes no useful information, or in a way that is inefficient and/or impractical.
We have no idea if anyone ever 'used' the VM, it may very well be that people did what we did today with digital copies, and just desperately tried to make sense of it. It does become addictive.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)