- Options
- Login
- Desktop Style
Options
Why and how the text could be Bavarian
- Why and how the text could be Bavarian
-
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
Stefan Wirtz_2 > 27-03-2026, 01:53 PM
(27-03-2026, 10:15 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..] the goal isn’t to directly decipher the text,
What else?
There is no other way to proof your idea than doing a full, explainable translation.
Your speculations about some ˋVords´ maybe meaning this-or-that in English („MHD“?…) as in your excel table are just some wild guesses yet.
(27-03-2026, 10:15 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but rather to get closer to a decipherment and to verify whether the hypothesis that VMS might be Bavarian has sufficient statistical evidence.
Just no. Statistic of stork breedings in South Sweden are quite as good as proof for the VMS being a frog as some distribution/repetition counts for the VMS being „German“, or just a „kind of“.
Easy test: where are the masses of doubled consonants in a lot of words, well known from every epoque and version of German? (at this moment usually the „it must be a code!“-phase starts)
So the „why and how“ is not even begun yet.
I am sure that you know as a German speaker already: it is not German. Under no circumstances. -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
JoJo_Jost > 27-03-2026, 02:50 PM
(27-03-2026, 01:53 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am sure that you know as a German speaker already: it is not German. Under no circumstances.
As for the call for a complete translation: This argument comes up time and again, and I understand why - but it's nothing more than a conversation-killer, not a research standard. Even a complete translation would be met with skepticism; we've already seen that with other proposals.
I have made it clear time and again that this is an ongoing project. This is exactly what research looks like before it is completed. If that doesn't seem like a familiar concept to you, I'm not quite sure what to say - if that were the standard, then honestly, nothing else happening in this forum really makes sense, since obviously no one here has a complete solution yet..
Regarding double consonants: The rules for geminate spelling were not standardized in Middle High German - different scribes handled it differently. More importantly: if this is a personal abbreviation cipher, double consonants are exactly what one would drop first. ss = s, nn = n. That's not a weakness of the hypothesis - it's a predicted feature of it.
And no, quite the opposite—as a German speaker, I would argue exactly the opposite: the more I think about it, the more convinced I am of this—simply because so much of it already sounds German even without the code. The strange certainty in your “under no circumstances” makes me wonder—did I hit a nerve somewhere? -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
Stefan Wirtz_2 > 27-03-2026, 03:50 PM
(27-03-2026, 02:50 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
I have made it clear time and again that this is an ongoing project [..]
There are several people with „ongoing projects“ for 20+ years, without any success. This was just a reminder not to set much hopes upon „the time will work for you“, it will be quite the opposite.
(27-03-2026, 02:50 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding double consonants: The rules for geminate spelling were not standardized in Middle High German - different scribes handled it differently. More importantly: if this is a personal abbreviation cipher, double consonants are exactly what one would drop first. ss = s, nn = n. That's not a weakness of the hypothesis - it's a predicted feature of it.
Yes, there were no real standards for spelling German at all until the 19th century; but there was never a time when no doubling occurred: some of them in words we are spelling different today, some the same as now.
But I never heared of a script or scriber where those doubles were „compressed“ to 1 symbol for saving time (what?) with the risk of not getting it apart anymore: Raten ist nicht Ratten.
Did you find something like that in any other (German) script? How is that a predictable feature at all then?
(27-03-2026, 02:50 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And no, quite the opposite—as a German speaker, I would argue exactly the opposite: the more I think about it, the more convinced I am of this—simply because so much of it already sounds German even without the code. The strange certainty in your “under no circumstances” makes me wonder—did I hit a nerve somewhere?
Just a random shot from VMS, here 10v:
With lots of q in it: how is that a German text? Which type of text structures like that, with many repetitions of a starting character, do you know from our language? Maybe a poem, a prayer? But what about those ˋVords´ that vary only in a letter at each second-last position, but in a line of 3, 4, 5 words?
Where ist it „German sounding“ already? If so, simply translate a short sentence with already „sounding-familiar“ words of your table. And then just the following one.
I see you are hitting the nerve of this forum: „it must be German!“ + „in a most clever encryption!“ or „it is Latin!“ (it isn‘t either), all now turning to somewhere in the Alps or with clear sight onto them — but hitting nerves may be only a loss of time… -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
nablator > 27-03-2026, 04:13 PM
(27-03-2026, 03:50 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.With lots of q in it: how is that a German text?
There are more extreme frequencies on some pages. For q more than 30% of word tokens on f82r, f82v, f83v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (35% of f77r). You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Even more striking:
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has dy in 52% of its word tokens
- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has ol in 49% of its word tokens -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
Rafal > 27-03-2026, 05:34 PM
JoJo_Jost, I really appreciate your dedication and perseverance but like others I think you won't get German or Bavarian out of Voynichese through substitution.
I guess many tried it before, starting from the people at the court of emperor Rudolf.
It just doesn't work. Some words may work for you if you assume some substitution but the rest of them won't make sense then and the whole text won't make sense as well. -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
Jorge_Stolfi > 27-03-2026, 07:05 PM
(27-03-2026, 01:53 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Easy test: where are the masses of doubled consonants in a lot of words, well known from every epoque and version of German?
A s you may have noticed, I don't think it is Bavarian. But the above argument is not good.
The "double consonants" of German and Italian are just a spelling convention, to indicate sounds that are not "double consonants" at all. There is only one "t" sound in Italian "note" (as in musical notes) and in "notte" (night). The difference is that there is a short stop before that "t" in the second case.
Writing the consonant twice seems natural to us only because we are used to that convention since grammar school. But it is an arbitrary convention, and a rather illogical one.
A more logical spelling for the second word would be "no•te" or "nohte" or something like that. If Voynichese were Bavarian, the Author could have chosen a spelling like these two for the "double consonants".
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
JoJo_Jost > 27-03-2026, 07:34 PM
Just to clarify something that keeps getting lost in this discussion: I am not proposing a substitution cipher! That has been repeatedly ruled out, and I agree with that conclusion. What I am proposing is something fundamentally different—an absorption cipher, in which function words, articles, and prefixes are integrated into adjacent words rather than being encoded separately. This changes everything about how one would statistically expect the text to behave.
The second point worth mentioning: The cipher appears to be poorly designed. Not because the author was unintelligent, but because this looks like a personal shorthand—something someone develops for their own use without the intention of creating a robust cryptographic system. Personal shorthands lose information. They are inherently ambiguous. It’s a point that many overlook, and one that can explain some statistical properties. Including repetitions, because the text is probably not a well-written recipe book.
A poor cipher is actually harder to decrypt than a good one, precisely because the ambiguity is unintentional and throws off any normal attempt at decryption. It wasn't designed so that someone else could decrypt it
As for earlier attempts related to the German language: Most of them focused on Standard High German and assumed a clean substitution. Very few specifically sought a phonetic-based spelling system for a abbreviated Bavarian dialect (but only that is consistent with the observed word lengths), and even fewer considered the possibility that the coding might be imprecise rather than systematic. These are different approaches to the search. I am not claiming that this has been proven. I am presenting a method and building my argument step by step. -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
Stefan Wirtz_2 > 27-03-2026, 08:17 PM
(27-03-2026, 07:05 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..] But the above argument is not good.
The "double consonants" of German and Italian are just a spelling convention, to indicate sounds that are not "double consonants" at all. [..]
This "spelling conventions" did not come suddenly after 1438 or whenever VMS was finished. You will find lots of German writing of 15th, 14th or 13th century showing masses of double consonants without any conventions, sometimes even changing whitin the text from one and the same author.
German has many roots in Latin where geminized consonants were a standard and standardized by finalisation of Latin at least 1,000 years before VMS.
I don't have to point out the meaning of Latin for Italian and all it's subforms.
There was never a time until ~1450AD showing central european texts without any doubled characters -- there are a few doubled also in VMS, but almost all in a kind of fixed comibinations. By numbers, not even coming close to those Latin, German or whatever in western europe.
We had the double-consonants-discussion already about Venetian: it leaded to a moment when I just posted random screenshots of Venetian texts showing dense appearances of Geminis, while you insisted that there are no doublings at all in this language.
Ended with "there are a few doubled consonants in Venetian" at last.
But in Voynichese, there are such double appearances nearly next to zero.
About "Bavarian":
yes, that's very convenient to locate VMS at our southern not-quite-german-anymore-but-still-not-austrian neighbors; they are notorious for their guttural grunting, but I never heared about a try to write that down (encpihered! In a personal shorthand!) until Karl Valentin and Fredl Fesl...
Yes, it is convenient to enhance the unconventional spelling of beginning of 15th Ct to a local dialect with nearly random pronounciation and spelling, that leaves enough room for "interpretations" of those harmless-looking Voynichese characters -- but that's already where the tar pit begins. -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
JoJo_Jost > 27-03-2026, 10:12 PM
Well, and what if the tar pit is exactly what nobody wants to see? -
RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
JoJo_Jost > 27-03-2026, 11:00 PM
A demand was made to name sentences. In my opinion it is still too early for that, and there is too much eisegesis involved. But I am of course using this to find more words, which is not easy without such tries - and only this way can I then run them against other recipe books.
Here is a second example I am currently working on - find the word: mios (moss)
EVA (f66v.4-5):
shokeshy daiin cheos chety dol chckhy dal ko dal chekal dal
shdy shedefam qokedy chokal dal
Bavarian (raw reconstruction):
so wasche sein mios mit, sol menge salbe, wo salbe miwol salbt -
sechs, siede davon, wize nuwer salbe
Modern German (adjusted):
So wasche es mit Moos, man soll Salbe mengen, wo Salbe gut wirkt -
sechs [Teile] siede davon zu weisser neuer Salbe.
English:
Wash it with moss, one shall mix the salve where the salve works well -
six [parts] boil thereof into a fresh white salve.
The word mios (moss) is attested in the Old High German dictionary as a Bavarian form, with variants -eo-, -ie-, and mis, meaning muscus (moss) as well as soft plant material used as a filler or applicator. The word survived into Early New High German and is still present in the modern Bavarian dialect as mies.
(Source: Wörterbuchnetz.de)
As I said, the cipher isn't complete yet and probably isn't entirely correct either. But interestingly, recipe-like sentences are already emerging. That's crazy enough. But even crazier is that sentences are forming at all! And here's one where “dal” is repeated three times and preceded by a “dol”—the typical repetition problem—and yet it makes sense - a bit...