The Voynich Ninja - Theories & Solutions

Bifolia created using previous as reference

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 05:06:43 +0000

Hello

Using the spatial analysis toolkit i shared recently, I believe I have found very convincing proof that previous bifolio were used in the creation of a new bifolio. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Using my recovered spatial coordinates, i can gather two measurements: margin offset, and text angle. Viewing the bifolia in the correct sequences shows that these values carry over between most bifolia, while slowly drifting over time, and serve as a completely text-independent marker of production sequence.

Below we will see how:

Layfield and Davis singulion hypothesis is correct
Previous bifolio were use to set the margins and text angle of the current bifolio.
Broad Golf Sequencing Holds
This can help to resolve uncertain orderings.

Margin offset can be measured in the following way:

  margin_curve_example.png (Size: 210.47 KB / Downloads: 245)

Plotting these values by page-within-bifolia immediately reveals trends that are related to bifolio face:

  Screenshot 2026-10-31 233327.png (Size: 137.91 KB / Downloads: 242)

This can then be combined with the angle of the text. This is essentially how slanted the text is on a page. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has significant slant. This appears to be far more common on the outer Bv page of a bifolio, which makes sense. To create a singulion, it would be justified in the opposite direction from the other 3 pages.

  Screenshot 2026-10-31 233543.png (Size: 115.2 KB / Downloads: 242)

Bifolio were written in the same singulion order proposed by davis. The first page of this singulion is typically preserves the least offset. The final page frequently accumulates an offset and slant completely independent of the other 3 pages, that will also carry over between pages.

But it can be hard to picture how these graphs may relate to the actual pages.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., allows you to view these in sequence, directly above one another, bifolio to bifolio. You can also drag a bifolio up, to see what it would look like to lay it on top of the previous sheet.

When arranged in my proposed golf ordeering, these horizontal offsets and offset angles form clear sequences. I am not claiming this is the perfect order. But it is clear that it is close, and many pairs likely do capture true production sequence. We can see that the angles and offsets from previous bifolio are frequently copied to the next.

Here is the beginning of the manuscript. This shows the pages in singulion order. Note the extreme angle of the right-most page, which carries over between the bifolia seperately from the offsets of the other 3 pages.

  Screenshot 2026-10-31 231150.png (Size: 377.92 KB / Downloads: 247)

Here is a slightly different ordering

  Screenshot 2026-11-01 013455.png (Size: 676.12 KB / Downloads: 221)

The stars section appears to have had the sheets at least partially obscured by the new one. You can see the margins mostly align if you arrange them at covering around 50% of the previous. After about 50%, the margins diverge, sometimes sharply.

  Screenshot 2026-10-31 232247.png (Size: 762.36 KB / Downloads: 245)

Again, I am not claiming the exact sequence is correct, and encourage others to try swapping the ordering. It is clear that in many cases, previous bifolia were used as a layout reference for the one being produced, as margin offset, and text angle get reproduced on the newer bifolio.

The next step will be to analyze this data more thoroughly to determine the most likely possible parings.

EDIT: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Several small chains are identified. The first several bifolia in the manuscript form the largest sequence.
EDIT2: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. using these new measures than their 1st or the current golf ordering. The uncertainty involves 75|84, which has arguably the most complex typography in the manuscript, and doesn't form a strong connection to any of the other bio sheets on these metrics.

All text has been converted into alphabetic characters.

Sat, 31 Oct 2026 05:48:20 +0000

対比表.jpg (Size: 64.27 KB / Downloads: 239)

VAM (Voynich Alphabet Mapping)
— Converting text into the Latin alphabet to explore its meaning

In previous research, the original text was transcribed into text using a special system so that it could be analyzed by computers.

Unlike this approach, I developed a method of directly mapping the characters in the original manuscript to the Latin alphabet, making the original text suitable for direct computer processing.

The entire text can be represented using just 14 characters.

However, since this is based on only two pages, there may be additional characters yet to be discovered. If you come across any, please let me know the page number, and I will add them.

For example, "a" is equivalent to a combination of "c" and "i."
There are also accent marks, which I have listed separately.

I am posting the conversions for the first and 22nd pages below.

p1

Tccc’c, cca8aiii’ oi-oi- Tcccc, ccai) cPcai) ai!
c, Tccc, ccai) oi) occc, 8cco i-To8c, oTo8c, oTo8ai) cco8c,
8o cTcc, cTco cTcc, ccc, 8Tccccc, cTcc, ToTcco8c, 8ai-
8oi- ccoTco 8aii) 8ai! c’occcc, ccoTo8c,

PoToc, ccoi- 8aii) cPcoai- 8ai) cccc, To8c, oToaiii’ ccoccc,
ccoTc, ccoi- cTco i- ccoi- oTai- 8oi-cccc, cco8o i-oi- ccc, cTcc,
4o oi- ccoccc’ cccoi- 8oi- cTccc, c,Toi- 8o i- cco8c,
oToi-ccoi- Toi-Tcccc, ccoi- Tc, ccoi- cTcoi- cco8c, ccoi- 8aiii)
ccoi) oToi- ccoi- 8oi-Tc, 8ai) ccoi- 8ccoi) oTcco 8ai) cco8c,
Taoi) ccoTcccc, 8ai- cco8c, c’cco8c, p-coi- cco8ai)

p22

Pc,c’aiii’oi) oPccai) oTc, Tccc, oT8c, c’oi) ccc,4o8
8aiii’ c,Taiii’ 4oTccc, Tccc, c,Tccc,8 8ccoi) c,ccc,
4oTc, Tccoi)i- oTccc, cTcc, oTccc, Tc, c,Tccoi- oTai!
oTccaiii’ ccoTc, 4oTc, c’aiii’ o8aiii’
8oi) c,Tcccoi) 8aiii’
Pccoi) ccc,Tccoi) oTaiii’
C,ccoi) ccoi) 4oTccoi- ccoi)c,
4oTccc, cTcc, 4oToi- 8aiii’ 8ai!
oTccoi) cco8c, ccoi- Tccoi- oTaiii’ 8aiii’
4oTccc, 8aiii’ c’ oi) c,Tai-
c’oTaiii’ oTc,8c,
c,ccTc, 8aiii’ cTcc,
oTccaii’ ccToi-8c, ccoToi-c,
4oTccc, oi-cci-c, ccoi- 8aiii’
Cco cTcc, ccocTcc, 4oTccc, 8oi)c,
c’aiii’ccc, 8ai-8ai-oi-

22v.jpg (Size: 664 KB / Downloads: 139)

Theories and Solutuions

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:28:19 +0000

Hello All,

I am new to the forum, but have had an interest in the "Voynich Manuscript" for some time. I am not a specialist nor an academic by any stretch, but I have come up with a theoretical framework based on historical context and sociological observation. My approach is to answer "The Why". I do not know if any of my assumptions have already been tested, however I am certain the intellectuals of this forum will advise and share their thoughts.

I believe, The Voynich Manuscript is a holistic medical book written by or co written by non-classically trained women. Communicating in either their own engineered language or a mash-up, blending of several languages that they later encrypted. This would reflect the diversity of their backgrounds and regions, which is actually very common today.

The women would have been from varying medical/health backgrounds such as healers, herbalists, or midwives. Because this is not traditional medicine and is authored by women (theoretically), secrecy is clear. This "cipher" was used to protect the women, clients/recipient and the practice in a patriarchal society. Many restrictions, challenges and roadblocks that are still common today could explain "The Why". Rather than continuing to solve this mystery with the same approach of asking "what is this", we should stand back and start asking "why".

Please share your thoughts on my possible theory and if any of this has already been explored/tested. As far as cracking the language I do believe AI, Linguist and Cryptologist have focused their efforts on decoding based on a single language model. Due to posible language barriers or dialects we would naturally have discrepancies. I do not think we are dealing with a single language. I often say Salut or Buenos Dias but I am only fluent in English. My theory leans on the idea that humans are predictable and have not changed much over time.

Thank you for any and all input.

Old Czech (Bohemian) or Moravian

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:33:54 +0000

Background: Bess and I disagree on many basic interpretations so I probably shouldn't continue to post my ideas in her thread.

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Review: I strongly suspect that the mystery language of the Voynich Manuscript is Old Czech (Bohemian) or Moravian. I am working on updating the EVA alphabet. So far:

EVA → Update

a → ?
d → d
l → r
r → ?
s → s
t → v
v → ?
y → a

The "Rules" so far:

- May need to drop the first "o" character.
- Update the EVA characters.
- Vowels are flexible.

Like many people, I think the words on the top of page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are the Five Classical Greek Elements.

Air: olkchs → lkchs → rkchs → ?? "rauch" (wind)
Water: otedy → tedy → veda → ? "voda" or "vodou" (water)
Aether: otork → tork → vo?k → ?? "vrch" (the upper atmosphere)
Fire: otol → tol → vor / var → ? "var" (fire, heat)
Earth (Land): dchdy → dchda → ?? "deža" (earth, clay)

The only ones I feel really good about are "voda" (water) and "var" (fire) but I think the other three may work out if I can figure out more letters.

I previously talked about the solo "s" character meaning "with" in Czech.

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It looks like the solo "a" character means "and" in Czech.

If I am reading EVA "y" ( y ) as "a", then the solo EVA "y" ( y ) could mean "and". If I counted correctly, it looks like the solo EVA "y" ( y ) appears 50 times in the 20 pages of Quire 13.

Woo-hoo!! Do we have two confirmed Czech words?

I know, two solo character words aren't going to convince anyone but it supports "otedy" ( otedy ) → "voda".

Could it be that this represents a system for generating music?

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:37:10 +0000

Hello, everyone.

I would like to share a new hypothesis based on my own research and a visual analysis of the illustrations found in the manuscript.

My hypothesis is that the Voynich Manuscript may visualize concepts and mechanisms for generating something new.

This may relate to counterpoint, not merely as the combination of independent melodies, but as a process in which motifs are transformed, connected, and developed into new musical material.

The plant illustrations, for example, may represent the combination of different elements to generate new motifs. This is a possibility worth exploring.

I have posted further details and an outline of the underlying theory on my website.

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I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback, opinions, or even critical perspectives you might have regarding this musical interpretation.
Thank you!

Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:35:10 +0000

For the last several weeks, I have been working on an attempt to 'translate' Herbal A to Herbal B. This turned up many probable transformations that turn words from Herbal A into Herbal B, preserving frequencies, but many of these transformations only worked between two sections, never collectively across the entire manuscript.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I laid out a hypothesis and evidence for a Voynich chronology, showing that Voynich word construction shows drift that is equivalent to stepwise evolutions, that sometimes undo previous results. The methods I used are identical to those used to reconstruct the chronology of Egyptian tombs, by modeling changing pot styles.

If i apply this to my rule/transformation work, and instead of modeling rules that must be true across the entire manuscript, model them as stepwise transitions between each stage, everything falls into place. Frequencies all mostly align between sections, and once large gaps become a series of gradual transitions.

Note that the transformations below are not the result of manually linking individual words. I define a series of transformations that must apply to all words. For example, *ol -> *eol , then *eol-> *edy.

A small set of these rules, about 20 or so, can explain most frequency differences between words across the entire manuscript, when applied in sequence, similar to how linguistic reconstruction models phoneme changes between words.

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At any given step, these rules only capture a small amount of volume, with most words retained.

  Screenshot 2026-10-13 114234.png (Size: 123.94 KB / Downloads: 363)

However, if we actually see how many words remain consistent from start to end, we see an obvious gradual turnover of words. Each step changes a small amount, but over several steps these collectively add up, eventually resulting in large turnover across multiple steps. The chart below shows how many words from each step are retained into subsequent steps. Notice the gradual decline each step. By the end of the sequence, very little is directly retained from 1a.

  Screenshot 2026-10-13 114333.png (Size: 162.57 KB / Downloads: 367)

Worked Examples

The chart below shows the evolution of the word 'chol'. Looking at just Currier A/ Currier B, there appears to be a dramatic gap, with chol appearing to mostly vanish from voynich vocabulary. However, in the chart below, we can actually see chol gradually declining and shifting into other words, not a single large jump. Chols transition into chedy is actually gradual, with its roots in the 1.5 'transitional A' section when it first divides into cheol.

  Screenshot 2026-10-13 112427.png (Size: 282.63 KB / Downloads: 364)

Below shows chor. This also appears like a dramatic jump between Currier A/B, but we can now see that its decline is actually gradual, slowly shifting into competing forms at each step, before finally vanishing in Stars.

  Screenshot 2026-10-13 112503.png (Size: 272.75 KB / Downloads: 364)

Shol, another example.

  Screenshot 2026-10-13 112406.png (Size: 272.37 KB / Downloads: 364)

Note these changes are sometimes undone, for example chol appears to be mostly turned into chedy in 3b, before reverting partially back into chol in 3c. This is consistent with what you would expect from random drift, some changes end up 'undoing' themselves.

The missing sections, and Currier A/B

I strongly suspect that some of the most extreme differences between Currier A/B, like the appearance of the 'ed' bigram, would exhibit gradual changes in the missing bifolia. Already in the above charts, we can see that many of the A/B differences appear to be the results of transformations that began in the 1.5a transitional herbal section, and i expect that specifically missing quires P, R, and H, (f91, f92, f97, f98, f59-f65) would all show a more gradual transition, with 1 of either quire P/R occurring before pharma, and H and the other occurring afterwards. F58 and the cosmo/astro prose collectively represent a small amount of text, but we can already begin to see some of this occurring there.

The question of semantic meaning vs self citation
The above rules do not settle the question of semantic meaning vs self citation. If this linear evolution represents a gradual turnover, with scribes mostly copying existing words, i think it would be unusual for some forms to actually have their frequency mass preserved across the entire chain like this.

For example, if words truly lacked semantic meaning, there would be no reason why chol could not just simply gradually vanish with no replacement. That does not seem to be what is occurring here. Instead, words frequencies are mostly preserved downstream. It's possible some form of self-citation could also do this, but it would have to be fairly complex to preserve information in this way, and in my opinion, at least currently I think this actually points more to an evolution of the script or writing system.

In summary, I don't think there is enough evidence to fully resolve this question at present.

The exact rule changes

The rule changes i am using are all You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in the rule manager tab. I do not claim this is the full comprehensive set, just that the current set appears to capture most of the drift under a fairly small set of rules. I have no doubt they could be improved. I suspect applying linguistic reconstruction techniques would be a valuable approach. You can actually create and test your own rules on the site.

Voynich manuscript created by Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici's sons

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:14:13 +0000

Who could have created the Voynich Manuscript?
Whoever created the VM was well educated in art, languages and most likely music.
The creator would most likely have been wealthy to afford the time required to create the VM and able to afford the vellum and inks.
It's my opinion that the creator was not an adult. The art is not particularly good and the script seems unstructured. I think the creator
was an early teen.
It's been pretty well accepted that the VM originated in Italy in the 15th century, there is little doubt about that.
The creator was most likely very wealthy. Where does that lead, Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici.
Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici was a wealthy art and manuscript collector. But he was not a teenager. However in the mid 15th century
his two sons were, Piero (1416) and Giovani (1421).
It is reasonable that 2 wealthy, well educated teenage boys that had access to old manuscripts would themselves be tempted to create their own manuscript.
It would also be reasonable to assume that their father being a collector of manuscripts would have in his collection a manuscript written by Roger Bacon and that the boys would have seen that manuscript and have been influenced by it. I know that the Roger Bacon connection
to the VM has been ruled out. I'm not suggesting that Bacon had anything to do with the VM, only that the Medici boys may have been influenced by it.
It's likely that Medici, being a manuscript collector would have access to vellum and inks and would have encouraged his sons in manuscript creation.

I think the two Medici boys formed a secret society (secret societies were all the rage) with perhaps three other well educated teens, a 15th century dead poets society so to speak. This group of teens decided to write a manuscript that tells a story.

What is the story?
The story is about a star travelling through the heavens. It would seem that the VM s not in order.
The story starts with the introduction of the star families with the astronomical illustrations and the cosmological illustrations.
The next section would be the story of the heavenly bodies giving life, quire 13.
The biological illustrations followed by the history and tales of the main character 8and. 8and is one of the stars named on F68r1 bottom right. F68r1 and F68r2 are clearly star families.

The plants in the biological section are simply fanciful creations that provide art for the manuscript. I doubt that the plants actually have anything to do with the story.
I believe the reason the plants are completely unidentifiable is because the artist(s) were not good enough to draw actual plants accurately.

The script?
The script is not a language. This is a combination letters and words that represent musical sounds.
The text also acts as mnemonic devices that would remind the orator of key words in the story.
Lisa Fagin Davis has identified that there are five scribes in the VM. Those five scribes are the
authors and were the story tellers.
1. The orator
2. Bells/chimes
3. Lute
4. Whistle/flute
5. Percussion

The words and letters would tell musicians what instrument to be played and the sound.
For example every time 8and appears it might be a certain combination of instruments and tones specific to that word. In some cases where additional letters are found with a word such as o8and
then that might represent the instrument combination with the addition of another instrument.
At that same time something about 8and that would need to be added to the narration.

I think Rene Zandbergen got it right, the VM is a musical transcription. Mr. Zandbergen's analysis is genius. However it may not be that complex. I would add to his analysis that the text also represents mnemonics for the narration.

So the story of 8and is told in poems on vignettes through the biological illustrations and shorter poems are found in quire 20, each separated with a star.

These stories would be told and performed for the Medici court, family, friends etc...

What happened?
Why didn't the story of the VM, the script, the secret society get told, why did it disappear?
The members of the society grew up and moved on. I suspect that the manuscript was kept by Piero because he, like his father was a collector of manuscripts. He most likely put this on a shelf as a memory of boyhood fancy and forgotten. Then a hundred years later his manuscript collection was passed on and the rest is VM history.

Conclusion
I think this is a book of stories illustrated, written and performed by five teenagers for amusement.
When they grew older the book was shelved and forgotten. Simply a fanciful book of children's stories.

4-slot FSM and procedural gemination in the ZL corpus (Python)

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:01:40 +0000

Hello everyone,

I would like to share the methodology and empirical findings of a quantitative study conducted on the Zandbergen-Landini transcription corpus (ZL3b-n.txt, 5,316 lines, 33,645 tokens). Rather than attempting an ad-hoc translation of isolated folios or asserting arbitrary linguistic substitutions, this study examines whether the lexical and syntactic layers of MS 408 can be formally modeled as a deterministic positional state machine, evaluates sequential transition entropy, and quantifies section-dependent operational constraints.

All analyses were implemented in Python and are fully reproducible on the raw ZL corpus. The complete script pipeline is attached to this post.

1. The 4-Slot Morphotactic FSM Model

Testing positional slot constraints indicates that Voynichese word tokens are predominantly generated by a strict, left-to-right positional finite-state grammar rather than natural inflectional morphology:

Token = [S0: Prefix] + [S1: Gallows Selector] + [S2: Kernel/Core] + [S3: Terminal/Minims]

Slot Inventory:

S0 (34 Prefixes): qok-, qot-, qop-, qo-, che-, cho-, she-, sho-, da-, d-, sa-, ol-, ok-, ot-, etc.
S1 (9 Gallows / Ligatures): k, t, p, f, cth, ckh, cph, cfh, d.
S2 (35 Kernels): chol, chor, ee, al, ar, eol, ai, od, etc.
S3 (23 Terminals / Minims): -in, -iin, -iiin, -iiiin, -edy, -eedy, -y, -ey, -al, -ar, etc.

Quantitative Parameters:

Corpus Coverage: The 4-slot automaton successfully parses 84.01% of all lexical tokens across 5,316 lines of text without requiring external dictionary lookups or fuzzy stems.
Information Density: The resulting state distribution yields an empirical word entropy of H = 10.47 bits/token and a combinatorial redundancy of R = 18.64%, confirming that token generation operates under strict positional constraints rather than free phonotactic distribution.

2. The Heading Anomaly (Herbal A)

When extracting the very first word of each folio entry in Herbal A (110 initial tokens preceding plant illustrations):

85.5% (94 out of 110) of these initial tokens fail the standard 4-slot FSM parse.
They behave as structural isolates featuring low-frequency consonants and distinct phonotactic skeletons.
This quantitative asymmetry provides objective evidence for a functional division within the manuscript: an open nominal index (headings) followed by a closed procedural matrix (running text).

3. Sequential Markov Transition Constraints

Evaluating the sequence of word classes across sentence and line units demonstrates that token ordering is not a random permutation:

Chi-Square Contingency Test of Class Transitions:

Code:
Chi-square = 335.30,  df = 9,  p-value = 8.29e-67

Transition Matrix (%):

Code:
To            C0_Substance  C1_Quality  C2_Operation  C3_Other
From                                                          
C0_Substance        11.22      20.70        18.40    49.68
C1_Quality            9.14      14.57        30.96    45.33
C2_Operation          8.24      17.43        30.16    44.17
C3_Other              7.87      15.92        23.69    52.53

4. Word-Level Gemination (W W): Evidence Against Dittography

Immediate word repetitions (qokeedy qokeedy, chol chol, shedy shedy) have frequently been interpreted as mechanical scribal errors (dittographies caused by eye-skips). We quantified exact duplicates and root-level geminations across all thematic sections of the manuscript:

Code:
+--------------+-------------+------------------+-----------------+-------------------+
| Section      | Total Pairs | Exact Dups (W W) | Root Gemination | Combined Index    |
+--------------+-------------+------------------+-----------------+-------------------+
| Balneo      |    5,128    |      1.27%      |      4.06%      |      5.32%        |
| Recipes      |    8,272    |      0.91%      |      3.95%      |      4.86%        |
| Herbal B    |    1,110    |      0.63%      |      3.87%      |      4.50%        |
| Herbal A    |    7,335    |      1.05%      |      3.22%      |      4.27%        |
| Astro/Zodiac |    1,933    |      0.57%      |      3.67%      |      4.24%        |
| Pharma      |    2,834    |      0.85%      |      2.96%      |      3.81%        |
| Cosmo        |    1,428    |      0.49%      |      2.94%      |      3.43%        |
+--------------+-------------+------------------+-----------------+-------------------+

Key Observation:
Gemination density peaks sharply in technical and procedural sections (Balneo at 5.32%, Recipes at 4.86%), while dropping significantly in astronomical diagrams (0.57%) and cosmological schemes (0.49%). Because scribal fatigue should correlate with text volume or line density rather than thematic illustration style, this distribution indicates that gemination functions as a deliberate operational iteration modifier (coque et recoque).

5. Sectional Specialization & Negative Control

Operational Predicates (qo-):
The frequency of action-initiating prefixes (qo-) drops to 2.01% in Astro/Zodiac, compared to 16.53% in Recipes and 23.28% in Balneo. This demonstrates that circular astronomical texts operate as catalogical registries, while Balneo and Recipes serve an operational function.

Phase Co-occurrence (ol vs. ee):
The co-occurrence of liquid phase markers (ol and ee) within individual lines is statistically significant:

Code:
Odds Ratio = 2.303,  Chi-square = 156.96,  p-value = 5.21e-36

Negative Control: Testing Macro-Humoral Polarity:
To test whether whole-page macro-profiles correlate with classical Galenic plant classifications (Circa Instans), we performed a Monte Carlo permutation test (N = 10,000 iterations) matching che- (warm) vs. cho- (cold) against medieval reference catalogs:

Observed Agreement: 52.00%
Null-Hypothesis Mean: 39.13% (+/- 7.67%)
Effect Size: z = +1.677
Empirical p-value: p = 0.1156

Conclusion: The null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the macro-level (p = 0.1156 > 0.05). Whole-page Voynichese text profiles cannot be reliably mapped to binary Galenic plant properties without collapsing into statistical noise. This demonstrates the danger of relying on short 2–3 consonant skeletal matches.

6. Summary and Discussion

The empirical data indicates that MS 408 is structured as an artificial, positional state-machine-driven procedural formulary with clear functional divergence between sections, rather than natural spoken syntax encrypted via substitution cipher.
The complete Python script used to parse the corpus and produce these statistics is attached.

P.S. Research Methodology & AI Assistance Disclosure:

For full transparency regarding the research workflow:

The Chain of Hypotheses: Our investigation originated from the hypothesis that Voynichese behaves not as a natural spoken tongue, but as a modular, artificial recording system (a procedural laboratory or apothecary formulary). We formalized this into a 4-slot deterministic finite state machine (FSM). We subsequently tested whether running text reflects algorithmic recipes (evaluating sequential Markov constraints and procedural word gemination W W), and whether page headings function as an open nominal registry. Finally, we instituted a negative control to test whether folio-level macro-profiles could map directly to classical Galenic humoral classifications (Circa Instans), which our permutation test properly refuted (p = 0.1156).
Use of AI / LLM Tools: An AI assistant (Large Language Model) was utilized as an interactive computational co-pilot throughout this project. It was employed to rapidly generate, refactor, and debug the Python data-processing pipelines in Google Colab, compute statistical tests (chi-square contingency, information-theoretic entropy, Monte Carlo permutations), and structure the mathematical formulation of our findings into this presentation. All data, counts, and statistical outputs presented here were generated deterministically by the attached Python script running on the raw ZL transcription.

voynich_fsm_pipeline.txt (Size: 13.62 KB / Downloads: 2)

Actual theories on Voynichese being Rhaetian?

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:34:18 +0000

Hello everyone, my undergraduate concentration in history was on late medieval and early modern Northern Italy, so my first thought when I learned about the suspected provenance of the Voynich manuscript to Tyrol or a similar Alpine region was that it could've been written in some form of Rhaeto-Romance language, such as Ladin, Romansch, or Friulian. I tried looking on this forum for anyone that's gone on a deep dive into this theory, but I wasn't able to find anything. I will be the first to admit that I am far from capable of engineering such a theory to begin with (even my standard Italian and classical Latin skills are pretty bad at this point), and I suspect that any Romance language is probably out of the question, but was just interested if anyone had actually gone down this rabbit hole before, and what their conclusions might've been?

Could the cylindrical illustrations in f99v represent plant stem structures?

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 06:37:26 +0000

Hello everyone,

I would like to present my own hypothesis concerning folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the Voynich Manuscript.
Could the cylindrical illustrations on the left side of the page represent plant stems, cross-sections of stems, or their internal structures?
To the right of these cylinders, there are illustrations of various root systems, tubers, and shoots, some of which may depict germination or early stages of plant growth.
I wonder whether each cylinder could represent a stem structure shared by a particular group of plants. The different plant parts illustrated beside it might then belong to plants that share a similar stem structure.
Has anyone investigated this possibility before? I would be interested to hear other researchers' thoughts and interpretations.

Kimmo Lammi

AI assistance disclosure: I used ChatGPT to translate my original Finnish text into English. The observations and hypothesis are my own.

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Proposed Manuscript Chronology

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:53:53 +0000

I just shared an updated version of some page classifications I have been working on. You can read You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or view You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for more information on how these are generated. You can explore the data for this sequence specifcally on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Briefly:

I create a glyph level transition matrix for each page, both for individual words, and the entire line (removing spaces). I then combine these together.
I then calculate the pairwise Jensen-Shannon Divergence between each page.
This matrix is viewable on the web app, as a cluster-map.

For this theory, the actual clusters themselves are irrelevant. Instead, we just look at the MDS ( MDS is essentially PCA over this pairwise distance matrix). The graph of the 2 most significant dimensions produces a similar shape to the PCA bigram charts that have been shared on this forum before.

  Screenshot 2026-10-10 204336.png (Size: 66.17 KB / Downloads: 421)

The Guttman Effect

Note, the distinct 'horseshoe' shape. In the above chart

This is what is known as a Guttman horseshoe. It is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.that can happen with both PCA and MDS. This occurs in very specific conditions, when a sequential trend moves across some type of environmental gradient. An example is like this: if you walk two blocks north, then turn and walk 2 blocks east, you have walked 4 blocks. Yet the actual distance will be 2.83. PCA cannot recover the full distance because it attempts to fit a straight line, and one straight line cannot capture the full 4 block distance.

The most common way to check is to look at the 3rd dimension compared to the first. This 3rd dimension will normally have an S shape, but it can manifest more complex shapes depending on the dimensionality of the underlying curve. Notably, it can have a 4 factor polynomial curve, which resembles a W or M.

Lets look at this for our data:

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The Bifolio Agreement

So how does this relate to manuscript chronology? Well, once you have identified a guttman horeshoe, you can correct it by applying a polynomial curve to reproduce the full nonlinear gradient. This is what that looks like:

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Its immediately apparent this achieves very strong split by sections across the manuscript. The curve also splits currier A and B cleanly.

However, where this gets really interesting is when we compare the average variation of pages in the same bifolio along this curve. The 1st MDS dimension already almost perfectly orders pages by bifolio. Pages on the same bifolio's average variation on the first MDS dimension is just 2.5%, and this drops to an even lower 1.5% when applying the curve. Compare that to an average of 15-50% difference across the other MDS dimensions.

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How does this connect to chronology?

Think for a second about what this is saying.

The fact that pages within a bifolio have < 2% divergence across this entire sequence, shows this is measuring some production level feature
It also forms a smooth continuous gradient across all bifolio in the manuscript.
It is not correlated to LFD hand.
What feature could possibly be represented by a smooth continuous gradient between production units?

The most obvious answer is time, and in fact, time is one of the classic known drivers of a Guttman Horseshoe. For example, Flinders Petrie ordered Egyptian graves in time by their pottery styles around 1900, and in the 1970s David Kendall showed that MDS on such data produces a horseshoe whose order along the curve is the chronological order.

Therefore this pattern is not only consistent with chronology, chronology is one of the known major drivers. This, combined with the fact that the sequence has < 2% divergence along known production units, strongly suggests this is the actual chronology of the manuscript.

What is the chronology?

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Note the ordering of some points can be sensitive to the exact curve being drawn. The relative ordering in between sequences is fairly reliable, but groups should be interpreted as production batches, not as an exact ordering sequence.

D25-32 is a strong candidate for the first created bifolio. It is the first in both the word level and word+line level reconstruction, and it appears 1st in 49 attempted leave-one-pool out refits.
2 distinct but separate production batches then produced 2 sections of early Herbal A. The exact ordering depends on the polynomial degree used, as either work, but 1a is a slightly better fit.
A transition Herbal A section bridges the 2nd Herbal A batch with Pharma
Several Cosmo, along with f58 came next
Herbal B came after this, followed immediately by half of stars
Bio follows The first stars half. The final page varies in different curves.
T08-111 is a strong candidate for the final page of the MS. Layfield and Davis order this 2nd to last. It appears last in 46/50 leave one pool out refits.

This shows that Herbal B was likely created after both pharma and cosmo, yet was re-ordered and interspersed within Herbal A sometime before quire numbers were added. It also implies that Stars was created in two distinct productions, before and after bio.

What else can be derived from this?

It strongly suggests that several features known to be associated with Currier A vs B splits are actually shifts in the way voynich was written, and that the entire sequence contains several such significant shifts. It is exactly this type of stepwise process that would result in a Guttman horseshoe. The next step would be to incorporate these known statistical properties alongside this chronology, to show how the voynich language appeared over time.

Links:

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Tolkien Analogy Theory

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 23:09:40 +0000

A thought experiment: What if the Voynich Manuscript were something like Tolkiens Works, but without any surviving context?

Imagine discovering a book written entirely in an invented language, accompanied by illustrations of unfamiliar but similar plants, rituals and cosmological systems. With no translations, explanations or other writings to provide context. Like the silmarillion written in one of tolkiens invented languages and artwork for said book found houndreds of years from now.
Would we necessarily recognise it as a fictional world or would we assume it was an encoded account of our own world/hostory?

Could the Voynich Manuscript be a constructed symbolic or fictional knowledge system blending real medieval knowledge with imagined elements?

I’m curious wether this possibility has been seriously explored in Voynich research ?

VM as a medieval design guide

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 23:52:52 +0000

Hello, everyone. i’ve registered to share my idea, because I didn’t find anything exactly similar on the site.

What if the VM is actually a medieval design guide on how to draw plausible illustrations for fantasy manuscripts?
As such, it could explain the content of botanical and astronomy sections.
Also it could explain its language, because it’s not a plain text but mostly a set of instructions how to produce illustrations from the same page.
I’ve asked ChatGPT and it found me the similar example of the same age: Göttingen Model Book (c. 1440). It is a book about generative drawing of ornaments.

Then, there is more elaborated, but more speculative idea, that explains why it’s encrypted. So the idea is, that it’s an internal handbook of highly skilled individual, who has created the fake manuscripts with ancient mysteries. As far as i know the 15th century saw a great interest in ancient books and also there are examples of such manuscripts. And to produce consistent mysteries over time someone had to record his ideas somewhere, but he obviously didn’t want for someone to uncover him, therefore the text is encrypted. This also explains why it is so hard to decipher, because private notes would contain some abbreviations, missing words, private terminology etc.

This idea could be tested, i guess, as similar plant illustrations should have similar text nearby, but i’m not technically skilled for that.

I hope I didn’t come with something that was discussed long ago and then discarded.

[split] Arguments for the text being generated

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 06:29:07 +0000

I'm 95% convinced it's generated, but that might only be the top layer.. I have a feeling that there's plain text underneath that was encoded and that was then normalised through a generative layer, and all the tests that are run on the stats are only reflective of that layer which is why no one can quite get all the way to the bottom.. but given that doesn't reflect a single working practice I can find in 15th Century Germany, it may also be wrong...

folio 85r2 possibly representing the 4 academic faculties

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:25:48 +0000

Before i begin my claim, i must say that i'm a mere layman, and so if a lot of stuff here doesn't fit findings i didn't know about, i would love to hear about that.

Now that i got that out of the way, let's look at how the folio might represent the four faculties:

Medieval academia tended to have 4 faculties: Theology, Medicine, Law and The Arts. Here i will go through (what i think) each character might represent, from most to least likely (in my opinion atleast), as well as some of my (personal and unsubstantiated) speculations regarding the nature of the folio in general.

First, for the most obvious one (imo atleast) we have medicine, represented by the guy on the right. the urine flask clearly represents a medieval doctor so i won't go deep here.

Now, the man on the bottom based on this theory would represent theology: the similarities to St. anthony are already fairly established, and i believe it could be reasonable for a saint (though not anthony himself, asthe painting here could be a generic priest or saint) to represent theology.

for the man on the left holding a flower however, i suggest this: the man here represents the art of Rhetoric, which acts as a "representative" for the entire faculty of Arts and philosophy: i found a depiction in Cod. 2975, of rhetoric represented as a man holding a flower, with it being a pun on an older medieval book (from the 11th century) called "Flores rhetorici"
  10.0.3._Abb._171.jpg (Size: 72.68 KB / Downloads: 144) . (however one thing to note here, is that a man gesturing here in the manner similar to the guy in the top of the folio is a representative of philosophy - this will be relevant later, and theology is represented here as the trinity, not as a saint. the manuscript given here was made in the 1460's, but it is assumed to be a copy of an older one, and the copy we have is from austria - fairly close to the theorized creation place of the voynich manuscript). I will admit that while i didn't manage to find other examples of "rhetoric directly holding a flower", i found another example of rhetoric pointing at a ring of flowers in the Regia Carmina fol. 29.
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  Unibibliotek_Salzburg_Artes_liberales_Retorica.jpg (Size: 192.06 KB / Downloads: 145) , so a rhetoric~flowers connection does exist.

lastly, we can look at the man at the top, and finally i here suggest that this man is a representative of the faculty of Law. while i would admit this acts as a descent stretch, the finger here isn't simply pointed, but pointed upwards. as can be seen from the Heidelberg Sachsenspiegel, Cod. Pal. germ 164 from the early 14th century:

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a raised right hand index finger demonstrates a verdict done by the judge. thus the only "big" feature from that side of the circle coincides with Law. Here we can also look at Cod. 2975 in that manner: philosophy is depicted as the "king of the Arts" in that manuscript, and what does a king do? (especially one whose entire being is deciding right from wrong ) , that's right- he judges.

now that i explained my chain of thought regarding that association, now it's time for a bit of speculation! what could this possibly tell us about the manuscript as a whole?
i mainly have 2 theories: 1. that the voynich manuscript doesn't discuss only medicine (as can be easily seen by the botanic paintings of unknown plants) but also theology, the arts and law. Or 2. to act as a sort of proof, either by claiming that men of different fields all support the contents of the manuscript, or that the contents of the manuscript can be applied to all sciences.

all in all, i hope that the smell of "rhetorical flowers" here was pretty good (but not good enough to get you guys hooked completely in) and would love to hear what you guys think about this.