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Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
- Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
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RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) > 10-01-2026, 10:42 PM
Below is a link to download a pdf of the entire Voynich text based on Glen Claston's (GC’s) v101 and his font. I find his transcription to be the most reliable visually and, based on other contributions of course, he has done a remarkable job in making sure the Voynich text is rendered visually faithful to the original.
However, I did not find a file including the entire Voynich text rendered in its own font, at least not as prominently as it deserves to be accessible, and it may be my fault since it must be somewhere I assume; so, sorry if I missed it. I hope this can be more accessible and helpful (I am attaching a Word version of the same in case you want to correct any mistakes I have made in preparing it).
Voynich-ALL-Letter-Size.pdf (Size: 1.06 MB / Downloads: 7)
Voynich-ALL-Letter-Size.docx (Size: 146.66 KB / Downloads: 2)
I have the following note also at the beginning of the pdf: The following is the text of the Voynich manuscript based on Glen Claston (GC) v101 transliteration (v. 2a), available at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a blog by René Zandbergen) using the Voynich font typeface created by Glen Claston and available at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (“Voynich Manuscript Font courtesy Glenn Claston, 2005, distributed in the public domain, corrected for UTF-8 by William Porquet”). The extra markings in v101 have been deleted to make this a simple line by line rendition of the Voynich manuscript text, identified by its folio page numbers starting each line or text.
I don’t think the Voynich text can ever be deciphered or read meaningfully without paying intimate and inseparably close attention to its elements’ visual presentations. Transcriptions, if missing the visual correspondence, and any statistical studies of them without the visual features considered, can be very limiting or even misleading in any contributions they can make statistically and they will inevitably result in slop, artificial or human. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) > 10-01-2026, 10:51 PM
Thanks Bluetoes101. You are of course entitled to your opinion. I disagree. In hermeneutics, what is absent but expected to be there can be very important interpretively. In particular cutting pages out after binding should raise at least some red flags, but entire quires?!
And then assume the manuscript when complete would be the same as when incomplete, as far as information given? It does not make good sense to me.
How can anybody claim something was not originally in the manuscript when so many bifolia are missing or some literally cut out? It should not take forensic specialists to raise red flags about it. We are all are studying an INCOMPLETE Voynich manuscript. It should never be forgotten.
I hope you will succeed in your way of going about it. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
Bluetoes101 > 10-01-2026, 11:33 PM
I can guarantee you I will never succeed. I don't see how pages I cant see will help me, but I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
Good luck on your journey also. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) > 12-01-2026, 07:25 PM
(note: I have not learned yet how to render text in Voynich font in posts, so a few tries I have made in this post may not render properly, with apologies. I changed them to the Voynich font using the post menu, but they are not showing as Voynich, yet. If not, I think you will likely know what words in Voynich I am referring to. Perhaps Jorge can kindly help me again with this technical question.)
I wish to devote this post to the study of the Voynich text, but not the text itself, but, rather, to the way Voynich scholars have gone about studying it.
If for decades, if not centuries (presumably after late 1500s, since before then, when the manuscript was complete, there could have been pages explaining its author’s identity, language used in the text, etc., and a century and a half had not passed after the vellum was prepared, a duration that could have rendered some text as foreign to the readers in 1600s and thereafter, not even considering that the original complete CP, complete parchment, had been likely written in 1300s, as I explained in previous posts), we have failed in deciphering, as claimed, even a word of the manuscript, there are different ways of explaining the failure.
One, is to admit the text is difficult or even impossible to decipher. Second, however, is to realize that there has been something wrong in how we have gone about deciphering it (despite even the existing manuscript being incomplete). Third, it could be a combination of the two.
I used to play some tennis when younger. From the beginning I got into a habit of a bad grip, and it stayed on. Serving was ok, because of getting the basics right from the beginning. But one of the things I learned from the pros was this. You never change a winning game, but always change a losing one.
So, being new to the Voynich manuscript and not having acquired a lot of the habits, good or not, (yet) in its research, I have wondered about the ways folks have gone about interpreting the text, and every time I have come up with a question that has resulted in scratching my head, asking myself, why did they do this? This would not take them anywhere, I told myself, and will inevitably lead to slops by even the best statisticians and linguists, let alone novices like me, not a specialist in any of those fields. I don’t think I need to be such a specialist in either of those fields to wonder about these issues.
To make things easier, rather than dealing with the entire text, I will just take three representative “words” since they involve many of the common, admittedly strange (or not), symbols in its writing.
The first word is the seeming signature of the first paragraph on the first page (f1r), one that using the GC v101 and his fonts, renders as 98ayai29 . (I hope it is rendered in Voynich, which is what I intend to do). The other word is on the first line of the second paragraph on that first page, the word being o98ay.!?s (I have chosen this word intentionally as an illegible word, given the question mark, to represent words in the manuscript we cannot read reliably, which is itself an insurmountable limitation). The third word is just the one following it Foam since it includes one of those gallows.
Thanks to ReneZ’s page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. we can consider how these words have been “transliterated”. I do not wish to make this post any longer than it is necessary, and here I will just be schematic. We can see that the letter that looks like 9 has been rendered as 9 or G or g or y, the letter that looks like 8 has been rendered as 8 or S or d, the letter a as a, the letter o as o, the letter that looks like 2 as 2 or Q or r or y, the letter that looks like an i (without dot) as i or the letter that looks like m as n or m or n. I realize at times the same transliterated letters have been used to denote a different Voynich character, and each transliteration systems has to be considered on its own for representing Voynich characters, and they can be "translated" to one another, if one wishes to do so. I understand that these are just transliteration systems.
But then we have letters that looks like ! or 2 (as distinguished in GC font also), and there are double c’s without the diacritic in Voynich, or with different diacritics. Some scholars have seen these as representing a s (rendered as ‘s’) and a ‘z’ (rendered as ‘h’) or for the non-diacritic version like a c (with longer top) and z (rendered as ‘sh’ if with diacritic and ch if without diacritic), which can be separated as found in the character F which is then rendered as a ‘cfh’. And my head is being scratched now.
Even in the v101, which to me seems to be most faithful to the visual original (when converted using the Voynich font) we have 98ayai29 and o98ay.!?s and Foam for the three samples, when transliterated, which obviously do not look anything like the original, except for the 9, 8, o, and a.
The argument has been that the different transliteration systems are just different ways of coding the text, and even within each system, one can use the existing notations to modify it as one finds more helpful when comparing to the original visuals. Ok, fine, I get that.
It seems obvious that scholars have tried to find a way of mapping the Voynich characters in recognizable characters so as to facilitate research. But in the process, they have created new systems that have divorced the Voynich language from its visual features, in effect, creating languages that do not really exist in the Voynich manuscript as such.
The oddest conversions I see is that of turning the double-c’s into separate characters, and this is compounded by the fact that some double-c’s have different diacritics in the visual originals. I have no idea how the first c with a diacritic that belongs to the double-c has become rendered as if it is a s since even a minor magnification of the original page makes it clear that we have a double-c with this or that (or no) diacritic.
Frankly, the originators of such transliterations should red flag them out of the game, since all they do is mislead their users, resulting in slops, which they then blame them for being sloppish (using AI or not). A gallow between the double-c may itself have been regarded (but its author) as a diacritic for them, just as a guess, but by rendering the double-c’s as a ch or sh, we have basically lost a sense of the visual originals. And then we wonder why the text does or not fully follow natural language patterns!
How can we expect even statistical studies of such transliterations result in anything but slop? In effect scholars have not been studying Voynich text, but the transcriptions of them, at times stripped of any accurate sense of the original visuals.
Although using transcriptions has been paved with good intentions, what it has resulted in studying the letters as if they are not abbreviations, standard or not.
Take 98ayai29 for example. i2 (hope this renders in Voynich) is reduced, even in the best v101 version, to i2. It has nothing to it resembling the original. Yes, you can look it up and after conversion it provides a reliable visual conversion. But when we do any statistical study of the word, we are ignoring that the 2 can itself be a set of words, if the double-c with diacritic stands for something.
In Cappelli, for example “icc” character input (without diacritics) results in Iurisconsultus Collegiatus (Collegiate Jurist). I am not doing that to claim the original in Voynich is that abbreviation, but just to show that had it been used as an abbreviation of the author’s own making, let us say, it could have stood for a set of words, even a whole sentence.
Since no one claims to have deciphered the Voynich text, we do not really know whether it is also using, partially at least, an abbreviation system such as those used in medieval Latin, but not necessarily a standard one. The author may have used abbreviations for even her German, or words borrowed from Turkish or Arabic astrology books, etc., or other languages or local dialects she knew.
The search for universal abbreviation standards to read Voynich, and its failure as claimed, assumes that the author developed and implemented a system for the purpose of later public discovery. But that is itself a huge assumption. The very fact that you cannot find similar looking abbreviations in Cappelli itself can be regarded as a demonstration that the Voynich manuscript intentionally did not use standard abbreviations (except for those like 9, or 4, etc., and even those the author could have imbued with her own meaning for privacy reasons). Cappelli missed out on Voynich, because it had not been treated as a publicly circulating text, one can hypothesize, for example.
It could have been easy for the author to come up with her own abbreviation systems, some borrowed (or even modified in meaning, as a way of hiding meanings), others invented for her purpose, and we will not be able to know what it meant to her by standard abbreviation protocols, hence “failing” in that regard. But this does not mean that the author was not using an abbreviation system of her own to hide a multiplicity of natural languages known to her and used in the manuscript for privacy reasons. Even in the marginalia of the last page, perhaps not by the author but by a scribe who could read the text, he is using Latin, German, Voynichese, and unknown others, etc., thanks to elaborations made in Koan G.s video.
So, if there is any hope of understanding what each symbol or abbreviation meant to her by studying the entire Voynich manuscript, the challenge we face may be that of seeing the text as a short-handed, abbreviated system of her own, compounded for any cipher techniques she may have used for the purpose, such as hiding some letters under others according to rules, avoiding pretentions of fully grammatical sentences (hence, a “word salad” cipher strategy that would have been sufficient for her own personal reasons), rendering diacritics as baseline characters, using reduplication as a ciphering technique, and other techniques we have to still find or speculated about.
It may be the case that for her, a letter could stand for one or more words, a word could stand for a sentence or phrase, a sentence for a paragraph, and a paragraph for a page or more. In medieval times, to save parchment space, vellum or not, authors and scribes had become accustomed to writing in abbreviations. That provides a golden opportunity as a way of privatizing a text, by making up one’s own abbreviation system.
For those writing for public consumption, they of course had to abide by publicly standardized abbreviation systems prevalent in their time and regions, even those not being readily accessible for readers a century later and from other regions. But if a text was created and authored for a personal reason and use, for which privacy was essential, the author could have just made up their own short-hand and non-standard system, along with any ciphers used, to make their handbook usable for her personally.
I doubt any cipher used in the Voynich manuscript is of the overly complicated nature. It is a long text, and for daily use as a handbook, she could have easily come up with her own customized system that only she or a loved one (say, a chronically ill sister, or children) could understand.
Even those could have been made readable to others, had she left a key chart in complete original, so even the scribes she may have commissioned by a will to render it to vellum after her passing, let us say, could have understood the text in early 1400s. But a century and a half later, when quires were “lost” and pages “cut” and the identity of the author possibly suppressed, folks found the incomplete manuscript to be an enigmatic text unlike any other. It was unlike any others, because it had been a personal work that had been MADE enigmatic by stripping it of all its identifying and and deciphering information so that it could be marketed to a gullible king for good profit.
So, my suggestion to all is, if for decades we have failed in our tennis game, it is time to change how WE play it. This may result in discovering that the cause of the enigma had also to do with our own grips.
If we ever learn the Voynich text, we should always keep in mind that the good news of finding it will always come with a bad news. We can never ever read it completely, since many quires and pages are no longer existing. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) > 12-01-2026, 07:51 PM
Regarding my last post's technical question, although the Voynich font was rendered, apparently it followed its own system in rendering the v101 transcriptions I was using, so they may not be entirely as I wanted them to appear, but most of you are experts in these matters and can see what I meant to convey. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
Stefan Wirtz_2 > Yesterday, 01:07 PM
(12-01-2026, 07:25 PM)MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
(one that using the GC v101 and his fonts, renders as 98ayai29 . (I hope it is rendered in Voynich, which is what I intend to do). The other word is on the first line of the second paragraph on that first page, the word being o98ay.!?s (I have chosen this word intentionally as an illegible word, given the question mark, to represent words in the manuscript we cannot read reliably, which is itself an insurmountable limitation).
[..]
You mean this here with your 98ayai29 ?
![[Image: 4b616a6c043725e509b976db27fbef67.jpg]](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/4b/61/6a/4b616a6c043725e509b976db27fbef67.jpg)
1. I find there a: y8ar aishy (VMS has "half blanks" and full blanks. See a half blank here)
2. Taking single labels or such an assumed 'signature' as an example for standard VMS words is a bit risky: Names can have deviating writings, completely foreign origins, abbreviations or sequence rules (first name - last name or last name - first name..?), which increases all problems we already have with assigning anything to a VMS word already.
What do you mean with "o98ay"?
There is nothing like this "on the first line of the second paragraph".
If the starting points are already false, the whole rest of your posting is also false, I skipped it.
My channel is named WYSIWYG, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, just for this reason: most people see much different things in VMS, but seldom what is really there... quite an elephant in the room. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
nablator > Yesterday, 01:59 PM
(12-01-2026, 07:25 PM)MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The first word is the seeming signature of the first paragraph on the first page (f1r), one that using the GC v101 and his fonts, renders as 98ayai29. (I hope it is rendered in Voynich, which is what I intend to do). The other word is on the first line of the second paragraph on that first page, the word being o98ay !?s (I have chosen this word intentionally as an illegible word, given the question mark, to represent words in the manuscript we cannot read reliably, which is itself an insurmountable limitation). The third word is just the one following it Foam since it includes one of those gallows.
For V101, you can use font=Voynich instead of font=Eva. -
RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) > 11 hours ago
@ Stefan Wirtz_2, apologies again for the confusion caused by the way what I had in v101 (copied directly from there, not my invention) was rendered in this forum software font differently, so some characters in Voynich I tried to render are not what is found in the original.
I did not mean that the first word example I gave was an actual signature (hence saying “seeming signature”). I said so just because it was easier to note what word I was referring to. On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. some words do stand out in the original as if they are signatures, which is why I said that. Each paragraph is followed by a “word” justified to the right, “as if” it is a signature, not that it is, because we don’t know what the word means.
@ nablator, thanks much for bringing that into my attention. In the “A” font choice on the forum post box, there is only one choice for Voynich (the first choice), so not sure where I can choose the “font=Voynich” (perhaps I need to do it in the code display of the post, not sure). I am inclined not to try again and things go wrong, causing more confusion. So, I am copying below those three paragraphs without using the Voynich font, and just referring to the transliteration versions.
Perhaps the moderator can just replace those three paragraphs in my previous post with these (between the dashed lines) to avoid further confusion. The problem was caused by the fact that this was my first time trying to add Voynich fonts, and I could not actually see the fonts before posting to make sure it is accurate, and we don’t have access to edit the posts ourselves to correct mishaps like this, as far as I know.
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The first word is the seeming signature of the first paragraph on the first page (f1r), one that using the GC v101 and his fonts, renders as 98ayai29 . The other word is on the first line of the second paragraph on that first page, the word being o98ay.!?s (this is how v101 renders it, not mine). I have chosen this word intentionally as an illegible word, given the question mark, to represent words in the manuscript we cannot read reliably, which is itself an insurmountable limitation). The third word is just the one following it rendered in v101 as Foam since it includes one of those gallows.
Thanks to ReneZ’s page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. we can consider how these words have been “transliterated”. I do not wish to make this post any longer than it is necessary, and here I will just be schematic. We can see that the letter that looks like 9 has been rendered as 9 or G or g or y, the letter that looks like 8 has been rendered as 8 or S or d, the letter a as a, the letter o as o, the letter that looks like 2 as 2 or Q or r or y, the letter that looks like an i (without dot) as i or the letter that looks like m as n or m or n. I realize at times the same transliterated letters have been used to denote a different Voynich character, and each transliteration system has to be considered on its own for representing Voynich characters, and they can be "translated" to one another, if one wishes to do so. I understand that these are just transliteration systems.
But then we have letters that looks like ! or 2 (in v101 as distinguished in GC font also), and there are double c’s without the diacritic in Voynich, or with different diacritics. Some scholars have seen these as representing rendered as an ‘s’ and or a ‘z’ looking letter (rendered as ‘h’) or for the non-diacritic version like a c (with longer top) and a ‘z’ looking letter (both rendered as ‘sh’ if with diacritic and ch if without diacritic in transliteration), which can be separated as found in the character F which is then rendered as a ‘cfh’. And my head is being scratched now.
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RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
nablator > 10 hours ago
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RE: Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations
MHTamdgidi_(Behrooz) > 9 hours ago
@nablator. Thanks, so it has to be changed in the code source, as I thought. In the interest of not adding more confusion to the post, I will just leave it at that. Those not interested to read it of course are welcome not to do so.