Didn't want to litter other threads up, so here goes.
I'm fairly new to the forum, I've been a lurker for a few months at this point. I am a researcher and an assistant professor with a PhD in Computer Science.
One beautiful day I stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for the Voynich Manuscript and what attracted me the most was the peculiar way the apparent words were written - their repetition and similarity to each other. Yes, I have indeed been mesmerized by You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view., and I vividly remember that particularly the line
qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy ldy seemed otherworldly to me.
I eventually became quite invested in getting to know the manuscript and started studying various theories regarding its creation and the interpretation of its contents. Throughout the weeks, I went from being convinced that it's an old written language of some sort, to believing that Stephen Bax and Derek Vogt were right about the Voynich phonetic system, to getting frustrated and beginning to think it's a giant troll or hoax, to becoming a believer that it is, as Beinecke named it, a Cipher Manuscript.
So, for some time now I've been closely studying the VMS, not only consulting the useful popular transliterations but also trying to read the MS raw. Nowadays I find the Curve-Line system proposed by Brian Cham to be the most compelling. I have been working on an extension of that theory, which tries to account for, among other stuff, the horizontal and vertical bars in the script. The horizontal bars, which can span multiple glyphs, appear to me as if they are modifiers of the glyph "values" encased within. I also suspect that the tails appended to the
e and
i glyphs are some sort of modifiers that, along with their location within the word, might affect a word's "weight" or numerical value. The gallows seem to be either composed of a vertical bar and a tail, or the
q character and a tail. I based this finding on the fact that I have seen the vertical bar standing on its own as an apparent glyph. If I muster up enough courage I might elaborate on my findings somewhere one day.
I also must confess that I have a feeling of dread that Voynichese was constructed with the use of a large, proprietary dictionary that hasn't surfaced yet.
I enjoy spending hours just scanning the details of the VMS with my eyes. The peculiar nature of the glyphs. The fascinating marginalia, which mix a familiar script with Voynichese. Some time ago I even ordered a Zieler calligraphy set to try and write some Voynichese myself (and to try to improve my handwriting, which is just terrible!). Here are some results:
Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself, and express my sincere thanks to everyone who is working on solving our favorite mysterious MS. I hope it will be solved within our lifetime.