Let's start with my assumptions:
- Voynichese has been compared with several known languages; while patterns have been perhaps identified, none have allowed for interpreting the text.
- The script was written smoothly, as if by a native speaker, not someone who was encrypting the text in real time.
- The manuscript is believed to originate in NE Italy, roughly in the 15th century.
- If you look at the languages spoken in NE Italy around that time, one of the most common languages was Friulian.
- While many people spoke Friulian, it was primary a spoken linage, not written, unlike the other languages of the region at that time: Latin, Venetian, or Italian.
- The Benandanti and other folk medicinalists in NE Italy around that time primarily spoke Friulian.
And here's my hypothesis: What if Voynichese isn't primarily a written language, but a native speaker who tried to transcribe their primarily oral (not written) language phonetically into the text. If the language had distinct sounds, the transcriber might need to invent new characters to reflect those sounds in the phonetic transcription.
The evidence would be that Voynichese would follow linguistic patterns that would mirror such patterns if a speaker of Friulian invented a phonetic vocabulary to transcribe spoken Friulian. Also, some specific words in the Voynich text, especially those included in or next to images, could be shown to correlate to meaningful words in Friulian.
Here is some evidence that I would like to so share, and admit that I was aided with AI in generating this information. But please, do not reject this simply because it was aided with AI. I hope someone with more experience on these topics could either refute this idea, or further explore it. I'm sharing it here because I saw very few references on this site or elsewhere to the Friulian language's relevance to the manuscript.
Friulian (Furlan) is a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of northeastern Italy. In the early 15th century — when the manuscript's vellum was prepared — it occupied a unique position in the European linguistic landscape. It was a living vernacular spoken by hundreds of thousands of people, yet it possessed no established written standard. Legal documents in the region were written in Latin, then Venetian, then Italian. Friulian was the tongue of the field, the market, and the hearth. It was heard, not read.
THE UNWRITTEN LANGUAGE PROBLEM
If a 15th-century practitioner — a healer, an apothecary, a folk scholar embedded in the Benandanti tradition of Friulian agrarian magic — wished to write down spoken Friulian systematically, there was no orthography to follow. He could not simply write Friulian in standard letters the way a Florentine could write Tuscan, because no standard spelling of Friulian existed. The solution, rational and elegant, would be to invent a phonetic script — one that captured the sounds of the language as heard, consistently applied, without the interference of competing orthographic traditions. Such a script, written by a single disciplined hand applying self-invented phonological rules, would produce exactly the statistical signature we observe in Voynichese: lower-than-natural-language entropy, rigid positional rules for characters (because the script encodes phonological constraints directly), and high word-form consistency (because one or perhaps two individuals are transcribing the spoken language).
FRIULIAN'S DISTINCTIVE PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES
Several of Friulian's phonological characteristics would produce distinctive statistical signatures in a phonetic transcription, and several of these match properties of Voynichese that have long puzzled researchers.
- Preservation of final consonants. Unlike Italian and Venetian, which dropped most Latin final consonants, Friulian keeps them. Words end in -c, -t, -n, -l with a frequency unmatched in neighboring Romance varieties. A phonetic script for Friulian would require dedicated word-final consonant glyphs — and Voynichese has several characters that appear almost exclusively at word-end.
- The palatal /j/ consonant. Friulian preserves the Latin /j/ as a palatal glide, writing it "j" or "i". Italian palatalized this to "gi-"; Venetian affricated it to "z-". Only in the Rhaeto-Romance family does the sound survive as a clean /j/. This has direct consequences for how a Friulian speaker would transcribe certain words — evidence we examine directly in the month names below.
- Pervasive clitic pronouns. Friulian's spoken grammar deploys subject clitics — small unstressed pronouns — before virtually every finite verb. The masculine singular "al" (he) and third-person plural "a" appear so frequently in spoken Friulian that any phonetic transcription would be dominated by these short recurring morphemes. This matches Voynichese's most distinctive property: the dominance of short, highly repetitive word-forms.
The Month Names: Direct Testimony
The astrological section of the manuscript (folios f70v–f73v) contains something unique: ten month names written in readable Latin script, inscribed next to the zodiac signs in what researchers call the "Third Script." These are not in the unknown Voynich alphabet. They can be read directly, and they constitute our firmest linguistic anchor point in the entire manuscript.
- MARC: FINAL CONSONANTS AND RHAETO-ROMANCE IDENTITY
The spelling "Marc" (f70v2, Pisces/March) with its preserved final hard -c is phonologically impossible in standard Italian (Marzo) or Venetian (Marzo). Both have lost the Latin final consonant entirely. The form appears in Catalan and Occitan as "Març," but crucially it also fits Friulian perfectly — and indeed, final consonant preservation is one of the defining characteristics of Rhaeto-Romance languages, the family to which Friulian belongs. The writer who spelled March with a final -c was not writing Italian. They were writing from a phonological system that keeps what Italian discards.
- YUNY: THE PALATAL GLIDE THAT RULES OUT ITALIAN
The month name for June, written on folio f72r2 (Gemini), appears as "Yuny" or "Yony" — using a Y-initial to represent the /j/ sound. This is the single most diagnostic piece of evidence the month names provide. In Italian, June is "Giugno" — the original /j/ has been completely absorbed into the palatal affricate "gi-". In Venetian it is "Zugno" — affricated to "z-". Neither could produce a "Y-" spelling. But in Friulian, the palatal glide /j/ is preserved as a distinct sound, and a writer representing it phonetically would naturally write "y" or "j." The spelling "Yuny" is the phonetic transcription of a Friulian speaker's ear.
- AUGST: THE GERMANIC SUBSTRATE
The spelling "Augst" (f72v3, Leo/August) with its compressed consonant cluster "-gst" rather than the smooth Romance "Agosto" points to a speaker at the Italian-Germanic linguistic border. Friuli sits precisely at that interface, where Austrian and Tyrolean German influence on the calendar vocabulary was real and documented. The German form "August" with its Germanic consonant cluster was preserved in early Friulian usage in ways that smooth Italian "Agosto" never would be. The writer who spelled August as "Augst" was hearing the month through a Germanic substratum — an Alpine, border-region ear.
These examples describe, in their spelling choices, a phonological profile that belongs to the Friulian-Alpine borderland of the early 15th century: a Rhaeto-Romance speaker, at the Italian-German interface, whose ear had absorbed Germanic calendar forms but whose vowels and consonants were those of the mountains and the river valleys of Friuli.
The Rosettes Folio: A Map in Friulian
The six-page foldout known as the Rosettes folio (f85v–f86r) contains what most researchers now accept is a map or cosmological diagram featuring nine circular "rosettes" connected by causeways, with illustrations of buildings, towers, and what appears to be volcanic or mountainous terrain. The architectural detail is particularly significant: the castle in the northeastern rosette displays swallowtail or Ghibelline crenellations, a style closely associated with northern Italy and specifically with the Scaliger family of the Verona-Friuli region from the 14th century onward. The map, if it is one, could depict a Friulian landscape.
- The word "otol", appearing directly before a tower marker in the Stolfi transcription, is the most convincing single word match this investigation has produced. Breaking it as "o" (prepositional/article prefix) + "tol" (→ Friulian tôr, tower, with diminutive lateral suffix -ol), we arrive at o tôrol — "at/of the little tower" or "turret." The diminutive suffix -ol/-ul is genuinely productive in Friulian: cjastelul (little castle), furnul (little oven) follow exactly this pattern. A map label meaning "turret" or "small tower" placed directly adjacent to a drawn tower is, if the reading is correct, a nearly perfect crib.
- The word "oal" in the same ring is potentially significant as an encoding of Friulian val (valley) — one of the most common geographic terms in northern Italian place names (Val Camonica, Valpolicella, Val Gardena). The "o/v" correspondence requires an assumption about the sound assigned to that glyph, but it is not arbitrary: in some 15th-century northern Italian handwriting traditions, the letters "o" and "v" shared visual ambiguity.
- The word "sarald" resists simple grammatical analysis and may be a proper name — exactly the kind of place-name label a map would carry. The sequence "-ald" appears in Germanic-influenced northern Italian place names (Reinald, Gerwald, Serravalle compressed), and Friuli's long history under Germanic rule (Lombard, then Frankish, then Patriarchate of Aquileia) left Germanic elements throughout its toponymy.
THE "-AIIN" FAMILY: A VERB PARADIGM
One of the most statistically prominent features of Voynichese is the family of words sharing the ending "-aiin": daiin, aiin, saiin, otaiin, qokaiin, okaiin. These six forms together account for thousands of tokens. Under the Friulian hypothesis, this family represents a single verb ending — the 3rd person plural present tense "-an/-in" combined with various Friulian clitic prefixes and verb stems.
- In a text recording oral Friulian medical and botanical knowledge, the construction "they take... they add... they boil... they gather..." would appear constantly. The formulaic register of folk medicine — highly repetitive, structurally invariant — naturally produces exactly the low-entropy, high-repetition statistical profile that has puzzled Voynich researchers for decades. The low entropy is not a cipher artifact. It is the statistical signature of formulaic spoken language.
- Medieval star catalogues, following the tradition of Al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars (transmitted to Europe through Latin translations in the 12th–13th centuries), named individual stars by their position on the constellation figure: "the eye of the bull" (Aldebaran), "the tail of the lion" (Denebola), "the foot of Orion" (Rigel). The Voynich star labels, under our reading, follow this same convention — each label encoding "al-[position on figure]" in a Friulian phonetic rendering of the Arabic astronomical tradition. The suffixes "-ar" (arm/wing), "-am" (hand), "-al" (another positional term) would then be the Friulian or Venetian equivalents of these positional descriptors.
The Entropy Problem — Resolved?- The most persistent objection to any natural-language hypothesis for the Voynich Manuscript is its anomalously low entropy. Voynichese is more predictable, more constrained, more repetitive than any known natural language written in a conventional orthography. This has led many researchers to suspect the text is either a cipher, a constructed language, or deliberate nonsense. The Friulian phonetic hypothesis offers a genuinely novel account of this anomaly — one that does not require any of those explanations.
- When a language is written phonetically for the first time, by a single inventor applying self-consistent rules, the result is orthographically more regular than naturally evolved writing systems, not less. There are no inherited irregular spellings from Latin roots. There are no learned Latinate forms intruding on vernacular words. There are no competing dialect spellings. The inventor hears a sound, assigns a glyph, and applies that rule every time. The resulting text has lower orthographic entropy than, say, medieval Latin or Italian, precisely because it lacks all the historical noise that those traditions accumulated.
- Furthermore, the content of the manuscript — if our hypothesis is correct — would itself be low-entropy by nature. Oral folk medicine recipes are formulaic in every language and culture. "Take the root... add water... boil for... apply to..." repeated with botanical variation across hundreds of pages would produce a text whose statistical profile is not that of a narrative or a letter, but of a formulaic instructional corpus. The low entropy is not an artifact of encoding. It is the signature of formulaic oral genre, faithfully transcribed.