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Korean Solution
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Korean Solution
rikforto > 13-11-2025, 07:36 PM
Voynich enthusiasts! The VMS has vexed and befuddled scholars for nearly a century, but I believe after 90 minutes of working on the problem that the answer was in front of us all along: It is a phonetic rendering of a Middle Korean alchemical text, written by a mysterious Lee Si-eun. From the introduction, we can see that it deals with the transformation of the spirit and other alchemical concepts.
Note: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but an answer to the frequent question, "How likely is it that I failed to solve the manuscript since I got a translation?" The answer, for those who do not wish to read through the entire "solution" here, is it that is it is very likely, as in about an hour and a half plus write-up time I was able to get an alchemical-sounding translation, complete with poetic language and the author's own signature. The Korean here is mostly nonsense---and I apologize to any Korean speaker reading it for my crimes against your language---but with some very light massaging I was able to get a wonderfully "poetic" English rendering. I am hardly the first person to do this, with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. being probably the most widely discussed example of a good faith version of this genre, but hopefully the notes here in Italics will answer why it seems quite likely that a would-be solver found a translation even if the solution is wrong, and why the mere fact of having a translation is less impressive than it looks. And if you're wondering why I went to all this trouble, besides getting a bee in my bonnet about this argument, it did actually help me see Voynichese in a new light and how very malleable the text is if you're not careful and that was instructive for me.
The key to seeing this is noticing the similarity to Korean linguistic features. Just as Voynich has 3 kinds of vowels, a o and y, Korean has 3 kinds of vowels, light (ㅏ and ㅗ), dark (ㅓ and ㅜ), and neutral (ㅡ and ㅣ).
Note: This is an extraordinary amount of freedom, and even more than it looks. There are several combined vowels for each category, meaning that if I did not like a translation, I could just keep changing vowels until Papago---we'll get there---gave me something semi-coherent. The half explanation, leaving out ㅐ, ㅔ, ㅞ, ㅝ, ㅒ, ㅕ, ㅛ, ㅠ, and probably a few others is extremely typical of this sort of announcement, and you'll save yourself some grief checking for it.
Likewise, just as there are 14 basic Voynich Letters, there are 14 basic Korean consonants.
k ㅈ
f ㅂ
t ㅅ
p ㄷ
ch ㄱ
d ㅇ
e ㅁ
g ㄹ
l ㄴ
m ㅋ
q ㅎ
r ㅌ
s ㅊ
h ㅍ
The bench letters represent the doubling of consonants that are typical in Korean, with sh representing ㅉ.
Note: Typical of this sort of "solution", I have no explanation for why these correspondences are the way they are, which is also a problem with how the vowels match a particular EVA letter as well. But if you can get past that large problem, this does not provide any degrees of freedom, so while I left myself plenty in the vowels, I would like some credit for not overloading the system even further at this point.
The other key to recognizing the Korean nature of the text is to see the various particles and verb endings from the text:
aiin 은/는
ain 을/를
air 하고
aiir 이/가
al 고
ar 서
an 의
or 면
ol 이나/나
oiin 로/으로
os 도
y 습니다/ㅂ니다
Note: Why are these lined up this way? Well, like I say, you just have to see! Joking aside, I did have some strategy with spacing and frequency that I can explain if anyone really wants the details, but mostly I just slapped them down in my notebook while yelling YOLO. There are no degrees of freedom here when rendering the Voynichese into Korean, but two features of Korean probably gave me some wiggle room in the machine translation. The pairs 은/는, etc. are phonetic alternates, so I could choose them based on the rest of the word; in 1400 they were actually written down in Chinese characters without phonetic variation, so I could defend this choice in a sincere proposal, though, obviously, this isn't that. Likewise, several of these can be both noun and verb endings, albeit with different meanings, giving a less clear signal to a machine which part of speech their attached root belongs to. This too is a real feature of Korean that occasionally trips up both human and machine readers, so it is perfectly valid, at least if you accept my table handed down from on high.
With this in hand, we are able to translate the first paragraph of the manuscript:
Fachys ykal ar ataiin shol shor cthres ykal sholdy
Shory ckhar ory kair chtaiin shar ars cthar cthar dan
Syaiir sheky or ykaiin shol cthoary cthor daraiin sa
Ooiin oteey oreos roloty cthar daiin otaiin or okan
Dairy chear cthaiin cphar cfhaiin ydaraishy
bogiteu ojjigo aeching yaesineun kkina kkeumyon sseuchimit ijjigo kkingneungseumnida kkeungchiseumnida jjiso icheuseumnida jjihago giseun kkeuso achiteu sseuso sseuso ie tiga kkeummijjiseumnida myon ojjeuneun kkeuina ssoachiseumnida sseumyon achineun ta oro onmimeuseumnida ocheumeudo jonosiseumnida sseuso ineun isieun myon ojjeue aichiseumnida gimeuso sineun tteuso ppeuneun euaechoga kkeumnida
보기트 어찌고 애칭 얘시는 끼나 끄면 쓰치밑 이찌고 낑능습니다.
끙치습니다.
찌서 이츠습니다.
찌하고 깃은 끄서 아치트 쓰서 쓰서 이의 티가 끔미찌습니다.
면 어쯔는 끄이나 써아치습니다
쓰면 아치는 타 어로 엇미므습니다.
어츠므도 저너시습니다.
쓰서 이는 이시은 면 어쯔의 아이치습니다.
기므서 시는 뜨서 쁘는 으애초가 끕니다.
Note: I gave it away already, but the main tricks here are that all those vowels are basically arbitrarily chosen and the Korean is gibberish, though I'm going to stick to the bit and call it "poetic". Unlike a lot of these translations, however, the sentence breaks are as principled as the verb endings (though, see above for how principled they really are) because Korean has regular, pronounced finite verb endings and matrix verbs are sentence final, sentence endings are never ambiguous. Most solutions require a better explanation for how the text was broken up, though I should not leave it implied in my explanation here.
The Korean is rather poetic and non-standard, but using Papago, a popular Korean to English translator maintained by Naver in South Korea, and Chat-GPT, I was able to arrive at the following poetic translation:
If you turn off your perception, you'll gain weight under your teeth and whine.
It is moaning.
It is steaming.
When the essence (깃, spirit) cools or is turned off, the body or teeth (symbol of speech/expression) grow distorted or heavy.
Then what? One must either turn it off or use it.
If you use it, the arch doesn't go well with the other word
So it is, so it is.
I'm Lee Si Eun, pen name "Eoohoo", who wrote this.
So the poem is hot and I'm going to end it.
Note: It is certainly steaming! There is no poetic tradition even identified here, even though I was encouraged to see it that way by Chat-GPT, and while my Korean is not good enough to render a final judgement, I know enough about how this was created to say that Chat-GPT is, politely, offering me some bovine fecal matter. (I did rely on it only for the translation, but it volunteered a bunch of analysis that colored some of my choices as I edited Papago's much rougher first pass. I will not argue if this gets thrown in the AI trash pile, not least of all because the solution is not in good faith and I'm not attached to it, but I really did try to stay well on this side of an AI solution.) The machine translators' main goal is to output a text, and so it covered up a bunch of problems in the underlying Korean for me, making this entire exercise alarmingly smooth; I thought I was going to have to push a bit harder to get a translation!
There are several important observations to be gleaned from this. Perhaps most importantly, we have recovered the author's name, as well as a pen name. Hopefully we are able to identify his work from elsewhere, or perhaps we have identified a new scholar of Korean alchemy. The emphasis on teeth is interesting, perhaps symbolizing the way the written word can lead someone to alchemical enlightenment. The importance of heating and cooling, long known to be a key part of alchemy, is also suggestive. Trying to keep the male body hot with Yang energy would be an important goal of any Korean alchemist, and we see here that cooling may lead to the speech and body becoming heavy. However, at the end, we see that the alchemist is also worried about too much heat, which in traditional Korean thinking could lead to a melting of metal (金) energy and must be tempered. This duality between hot and cold reflects yang and yin, and is likely to be the subject of the rest of the text. Further translation and study is needed to unlock the rest of the secrets.
Note: All this speculation is original, and though grounded in actual things I know about traditional Korean medicine, I am just spinning a tale based on an English "poem" extracted from nonsense Korean. It is worth exactly that much.
I am sure I will face a good deal of criticism for this, as Voynich enthusiasts are very harsh towards solvers. But I would ask: How likely is it that I correctly found alchemical ideas about the spirit, heating, and the special significance of teeth? How likely is it that I identified the author? Does the fact that it references a poem seem like a coincidence? And all this in just an hour and a half of work!
Note: As is hopefully apparent at this point, a few degrees of freedom of some elbow grease on the translation and you will end up with some writing on alchemy. This doesn't disprove your solution, of course, but the fact of having a translation is much less impressive than it might seem if you have not been around the manuscript very long. The fact that I was able to add to that crowded field so quickly---you'll have to take my word that it was about 90 minutes to get this system---and could probably plug a few holes with a bit more work shows how easy it is to get the manuscript to give up some alchemy if you want it too. The biggest thing I've not addressed with this example is volume of translation, but I think it's clear I could scale this if I was willing to spend the time, which I'm not; the relative ease of getting the first paragraph is very much repeatable because it relies on the feature of machine translation that it always outputs meaningful text by design. Manipulating the vowels is a little tedious, but I could continue to torture Korean until Papago screams in something resembling alchemical English. All in all, it is almost a given that someone proposing a solution has found something in their translation that hints to it being correct, as it happens quite frequently.
A final observation for people who have been directed here because they think it is unlikely they got a translation by chance: People usually fall back on this when their arguments about their translations are not going over well. Hopefully I've shown that it is a dead end to rely on the existence of an English translation to carry you through and would ask if you see your work in my example here: Do the correspondences come out of nowhere (at least as you've explained them)? Are they a simple substitution, which will not allow a translation of any text because of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.? Are there choices being made creating degrees of freedom that you have not justified? Is the underlying language poetic at best, and garbled at worst? Are you overly relying on translation and English gloss, either human or machine, to smooth that out? Nearly 100% of translations to date have been from some combination of arbitrary sound assignment giving degrees of freedom and further massaging when rendering the final interpretation of the text---and so that likelihood is that statistical prior that your arguments must overcome.
To everyone else: I will answer inquiries about my method here provided they are in the spirit that I think this approach is a wretched failure. If you want the full experience of discussing a novel solution in 2025, I can direct you to a scattered and incomplete accounting on a website ill-suited to actually making an argument for my methodology and a bunch of forthcoming TikTok and YouTube videos, but unfortunately I am not so committed to the bit to have actually created them so you'll have to play along. But in all seriousness, if you're curious about the inner-workings of how I made this pastiche, ask away! -
RE: Korean Solution
oshfdk > 13-11-2025, 08:54 PM
(13-11-2025, 07:36 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Voynich enthusiasts! The VMS has vexed and befuddled scholars for nearly a century, but I believe after 90 minutes of working on the problem that the answer was in front of us all along: It is a phonetic rendering of a Middle Korean alchemical text, written by a mysterious Lee Si-eun. From the introduction, we can see that it deals with the transformation of the spirit and other alchemical concepts.
Aha! Now you are going to THE LIST! -
RE: Korean Solution
rikforto > 13-11-2025, 09:19 PM
(13-11-2025, 08:54 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Aha! Now you are going to THE LIST!
I literally paused before hitting "post" because going on the Dishonor Roll seemed...well, there will at least be something delightfully meta about the post linking to it and being on it, should Tavie decide that is my fate
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RE: Korean Solution
Doireannjane > 13-11-2025, 09:23 PM
I say leave it for funsies. -
RE: Korean Solution
Koen G > 13-11-2025, 10:59 PM
You can't get on the list if you do so on purpose. -
RE: Korean Solution
Bluetoes101 > 13-11-2025, 11:11 PM
(13-11-2025, 07:36 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.With this in hand, we are able to translate the first paragraph of the manuscript:
Fachys ykal ar ataiin shol shor cthres ykal sholdy
Shory ckhar ory kair chtaiin shar ars cthar cthar dan
Syaiir sheky or ykaiin shol cthoary cthor daraiin sa
Ooiin oteey oreos roloty cthar daiin otaiin or okan
Dairy chear cthaiin cphar cfhaiin ydaraishy
Everything else to one side... you deserve putting on a list for whatever this is
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RE: Korean Solution
tavie > 13-11-2025, 11:42 PM
Yes, I'm afraid I will not be adding this to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
It's got to be a solution that the owner genuinely believes in. So that means no obvious mock-solutions, no matter how well they resemble almost all of the 65 ones we already have on the list. -
RE: Korean Solution
Koen G > 14-11-2025, 10:08 AM
(13-11-2025, 11:14 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I must say that the rules get curiosier and curiosier.
The only acceptable emotions upon being added to the list are either outrage ("those 15893 other solutions are nothing like mine!") or misguided pride