16-07-2026, 10:54 AM
Thanks for the food for thought. It took some careful reading, as my exposure to the Voynich comprendum is still rather limited and many of the concepts you mentioned are, for the time being, somewhat obscure to me.
There seem to be at least two plausible ways of looking at this.
One possibility is that the system was designed from the top down. If the creator was working against the clock, the basic character inventory may have been chosen fairly quickly, leaving more time for the harder task of developing the encoding system and making it structurally flexible. Once the set of symbols was fixed, someone could then have refined their practical execution, simplifying them into the stroke model you describe. That would have helped scribes practise efficiently and develop the speed, fluency, and muscle memory required for continuous writing. So, I think there is a possibility that there was a calligraphic optimization phase made by someone else, after the glyphs were decided.
But the process may equally well have worked in the opposite direction. Perhaps it began with a small set of basic strokes. By experimenting with different combinations, the creator could then have built up the complete vocabulary of symbols from those simple elements.
There is a conjecture, I believe, which says that the physical shape of a symbol could be related to its position within the text. It may have some relation to this, but I have not yet read about it enough to understand it well enough, so I won't discuss it further here.
That said, I can certainly agree that the system as a whole does not match any known script. My impression, however, is that some of the individual glyph forms look at least somewhat similar to forms that appear in various known writing traditions. If the creator consciously designed the system, it seems reasonable to assume they were exposed to more than just Latin script and had at least some familiarity with letterforms from other traditions as well, meaning ultimately that he'd absorbed at least one structural idea from a non-Latin system.
I also agree that the glyph inventory is not a letter-for-letter match to any known alphabet. In fact, that is something that I would expect from a constructed system. If someone was creating a new script, we would anticipate a mixture of borrowed inspiration and original design choices, rather than a direct copy of any existing model.
For that reason, I'm not entirely convinced that a purely comparative description of the glyphs is the right tool for addressing the question. A constructed system is precisely the sort of thing that should fail direct comparisons while still making perfect sense on its own terms. If the system was deliberately invented, then the lack of a close match is not evidence against that idea. If anything, it may be one of the expected outcomes.
Put another way, it seems difficult to detect a deliberate invention simply by comparing it against a catalogue of things that already existed. Invention, by its very nature, is the act of creating something that is not already in the catalogue. To my mind, the more interesting question is whether the glyphs exhibit internal logic and design choices that are consistent with someone intentionally constructing a writing system, rather than whether they can be traced back to a single known source.
Where I diverge is that I am not entirely convinced we are looking at a language encoded onto the page. If my admittedly speculative "lossy encoder" idea has any merit, then the system may have been designed for a receiver who already possessed substantial background knowledge. In that situation, many language-like features could be omitted quite deliberately. Function words, much of the inflection, and even parts of the grammatical structure might be treated as redundant and therefore left unstated.
What remains would not necessarily be a reduced language. It might not be a language at all, at least not in the linguistic sense. If grammatical information was never recorded, then no amount of analysis can recover it. The linguistic layer would have existed, if anywhere, only in the minds of the writer and the intended reader. It was never actually transferred onto the vellum.
Under that view, the manuscript would contain only the information that the recipient could not reliably reconstruct from existing knowledge. Everything else could remain implicit.
Of course, all of this is conjecture. I can't prove it, and at present it is little more than a working hypothesis. Still, after reading a great deal of Voynich research over the years, especially the extensive statistical analyses, I find myself increasingly inclined toward the possibility that there may simply be no underlying language to recover.
So my current position is perhaps an unusual middle ground: I do not think the manuscript is a hoax, nor do I think it is meaningless. At the same time, I am not convinced that it is fundamentally linguistic. It may instead be encoding something else entirely, with language serving only as an unrecorded layer shared between the sender and the receiver.
Quote:There are bits of evidence and common-sense arguments saying that the Author who composed the text and conceived the basic design of the diagrams was not the same person as the Scribe who actually put pen to vellum. So we have no information about the scribal abilities of the Author.If we assume the manuscript emerged from a family or guild environment, it makes sense that its production stayed entirely within that closed circle. The rather naive illustrations actually may support the idea of a small group—probably under twenty people—that simply lacked artistic skills. While they could have hired an outside illustrator, the final artwork would make that an impressive choice. As for the text itself, the writing system was necessarily architected for fluidity, suggesting the creator had a solid grasp of scribal processes. However, I have doubts that the system's inventor actually the one or the few holding the pen.
Quote:The glyph shapes may resemble those of Latin letters at first sight, but that impression quickly dissipates when one looks at them more closely. Voynichese glyphs were mostly created by combining a set of half a dozen simple strokes like e, i, ' in pairs in almost all possible ways. One reason for the superficial resemblance with Latin letters is that both were designed to be written with a quill pen, which led to the simplest strokes having similar shapes.
There seem to be at least two plausible ways of looking at this.
One possibility is that the system was designed from the top down. If the creator was working against the clock, the basic character inventory may have been chosen fairly quickly, leaving more time for the harder task of developing the encoding system and making it structurally flexible. Once the set of symbols was fixed, someone could then have refined their practical execution, simplifying them into the stroke model you describe. That would have helped scribes practise efficiently and develop the speed, fluency, and muscle memory required for continuous writing. So, I think there is a possibility that there was a calligraphic optimization phase made by someone else, after the glyphs were decided.
But the process may equally well have worked in the opposite direction. Perhaps it began with a small set of basic strokes. By experimenting with different combinations, the creator could then have built up the complete vocabulary of symbols from those simple elements.
There is a conjecture, I believe, which says that the physical shape of a symbol could be related to its position within the text. It may have some relation to this, but I have not yet read about it enough to understand it well enough, so I won't discuss it further here.
Quote:Only three letters of Voynichese -- e, a, o -- match letters in the Latin alphabet. Voynichese r is clearly different from Latin "r", especially in the way the latter was written back then. Voynichese i is always dotless and slanted NW-SE, whereas Latin "i" is supposed to be upright and often needs the dot. Voynichese f always has a loop at the top, very unlike Latin "P".I won't go too far into the manuscript-specific details, partly because my own understanding of the manuscript and its historical context is still fairly limited. You have much more experience with the subject than I do, so I read your observations carefully.
Another reason for the superficial resemblance of Voynichese to Latin script is that both have (1) short "minuscule" symbols, some with ascenders and descenders, and (2) tall "majuscule" symbols with no descenders, resting on the same baseline. But feature (1) is shared with other scripts like Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Cyrillic,etc; and several of them have also (2). Anyway, the tall glyphs of Voynichese seem to have very different properties and uses than the majuscules of other languages.
In fact, a notable feature of the Voynichese script is that it has no significant resemblance to any other known script.
That said, I can certainly agree that the system as a whole does not match any known script. My impression, however, is that some of the individual glyph forms look at least somewhat similar to forms that appear in various known writing traditions. If the creator consciously designed the system, it seems reasonable to assume they were exposed to more than just Latin script and had at least some familiarity with letterforms from other traditions as well, meaning ultimately that he'd absorbed at least one structural idea from a non-Latin system.
I also agree that the glyph inventory is not a letter-for-letter match to any known alphabet. In fact, that is something that I would expect from a constructed system. If someone was creating a new script, we would anticipate a mixture of borrowed inspiration and original design choices, rather than a direct copy of any existing model.
For that reason, I'm not entirely convinced that a purely comparative description of the glyphs is the right tool for addressing the question. A constructed system is precisely the sort of thing that should fail direct comparisons while still making perfect sense on its own terms. If the system was deliberately invented, then the lack of a close match is not evidence against that idea. If anything, it may be one of the expected outcomes.
Put another way, it seems difficult to detect a deliberate invention simply by comparing it against a catalogue of things that already existed. Invention, by its very nature, is the act of creating something that is not already in the catalogue. To my mind, the more interesting question is whether the glyphs exhibit internal logic and design choices that are consistent with someone intentionally constructing a writing system, rather than whether they can be traced back to a single known source.
Quote:The words of Voynichese have a rather rigid structure, with multiple slots (10 or more) each of which can be left empty or filed with one of a small number of alternatives.
This structure does not resemble that of words from any "European" language, including Hebrew and Arabic. All attempts made in the last 100+ years to match those words to those of "European" languages, or to deduce the grammar of Voynichese, have completely failed.
Those who still believe that Voynichese is an "European" language are forced to admit that the the whole VMS has been encrypted with a complex cipher that completely obscured its original lexicon and grammar.
Thus, in particular, we have no clue favoring any particular "European" language over any other. The few parts that we can read -- the folio and quire numbers, the month names, and the "marginalia" -- were most likely added after the Author was no longer around; and the last two seem to be in two different languages.
Where I diverge is that I am not entirely convinced we are looking at a language encoded onto the page. If my admittedly speculative "lossy encoder" idea has any merit, then the system may have been designed for a receiver who already possessed substantial background knowledge. In that situation, many language-like features could be omitted quite deliberately. Function words, much of the inflection, and even parts of the grammatical structure might be treated as redundant and therefore left unstated.
What remains would not necessarily be a reduced language. It might not be a language at all, at least not in the linguistic sense. If grammatical information was never recorded, then no amount of analysis can recover it. The linguistic layer would have existed, if anywhere, only in the minds of the writer and the intended reader. It was never actually transferred onto the vellum.
Under that view, the manuscript would contain only the information that the recipient could not reliably reconstruct from existing knowledge. Everything else could remain implicit.
Of course, all of this is conjecture. I can't prove it, and at present it is little more than a working hypothesis. Still, after reading a great deal of Voynich research over the years, especially the extensive statistical analyses, I find myself increasingly inclined toward the possibility that there may simply be no underlying language to recover.
So my current position is perhaps an unusual middle ground: I do not think the manuscript is a hoax, nor do I think it is meaningless. At the same time, I am not convinced that it is fundamentally linguistic. It may instead be encoding something else entirely, with language serving only as an unrecorded layer shared between the sender and the receiver.
Quote:No one has been able to identify any "words" that could be numbers, either. So we don't know anything about the Author's mathematical abilities. (But we can see that the Scribe did not know Euclidean geometry at all.)My reference to his practical knowledge of using numbers was referred his potential process of estimating the content capacity for glyphs and encoding constraints. It definitely did not require mathematics but some good understanding how to use numbers. And also a potential exposure to ledger systems, which may have been a potential inspiration for the positional writing system, if ever.
He possessed some knowledge of an astro-medical practice — herbal, pharmaceutical, calendrical, balneological, and gynecological