- Options
- Login
- Desktop Style
Options
Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
- Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
-
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
Jorge_Stolfi > 03-10-2026, 01:13 AM
(02-10-2026, 11:11 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is there any list or summation of tries to find "L"?
I was reading the Voynich mailing list regularly for some 5 years, IIRC. Saw lots of posts of the type "I found that it is in a language L, here is a translation of the first N pages". It seems that the rain has not abated in the 20 years I was away from the field.
Have you seen Tavie's list of claimed solutions?
Quote:First block of assumptions is that all speakers of European languages had sufficient access to VMS material, and the interest to experiment with that riddle
Maybe that was the limiting factor until ~1998 or so. But then the punchcard transcription that had been prepared by the NSA group in ~1945 was made available through the Internet by Jim Reeds, and Rene and Gabriel then posted the first of several transcriptions from the poor scans that were available back then. From that point on, any would-be codebreaker with a computer and a connection to the internet was about as well equipped as anyone else at that time, or even today. The mutispectral and hi-res images provided practically no additional information that was relevant to the decipherment.
Quote:I am sure that ~8-9 billion people on this earth right in this moment do not know or care anyhow about the VMS. Percentage of non-interest among Europeans will reach 99%.
Back in the 1990s there were many articles on major popular and scientific magazines about the VMS. I recall WeltWoche in Switzerland, New Scientist in the UK, Scientific American, just citing the ones I subscribed or had some involvement with. My faithful lalalmo says that Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Times, and Der Spiegel (and surely many more) had articles about it. Not only surveys, but also reports on several "solutions", like Rugg's Grille method. Perhaps the media today is no longer interested, but I would bet that at least ~5% of Europeans know about it.
Of course the people who get interested enough to try their hand are nowhere near that percentage. But even 0.1% of the Europeans is 750'000 people...
Quote:don't need the "" [on European]
I use quotes in "European" because I include Arabic and Hebrew in that term.
Quote:The second block of assumptions is that all speakers of European languages do have a clear idea of the ~1420s versions of their languages, are even present at sufficient numbers today (for example the last Livonian speaker, an old lady, died in 2013 and her language is extinct since then),
While some languages have changed a lot since the ~1420s, most of them would still be recognized today by modern speakers. And anyone who decides to try deciphering the VMS assuming language L would quickly learn the most important changes. Even extinct languages like Livonian survive in linguistics books and old books and other documents.
Language change is in fact more a boost than an obstacle for amateur Voynichlogists, because it lets them dismiss any failures of their "decipherment" as being due to unrecorded local dialectal variation in that remote period.
Or even claim that the language is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with extremely different grammars and vocabularies. "The verb is in the wrong place for a Germanic language? No problem, because the subjunctive was inherited from Croatian. The subject seems to be in the wrong case? No, it is just inflected as in Ligurian..."
Quote:So, were to look for all Europeans that tried to crack it?
You can ask your lalamo whether there have been any attempts do decipher the VMS assuming it is in [insert language here]. And of course check the answer for hallucinations.
(Mine says that there were attempts for Georgian and Armenian. But I did not check.)
But indeed interest in the VMS and attempts to decipher it seem to quickly decrease once you leave the sphere of European cultural influence. Surely because of the general conviction, stated as a fact, that it must be in some "European" language. I have not seen any interest from China or Japan.
I even once contacted by mail someone from the Chinese Academy of Sciences asking whether he saw anything that suggested Chinese concepts in the VMS. He answered basically that the illustrations looked European not Chinese, and that was it.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
tavie > 03-10-2026, 01:15 AM
(01-10-2026, 01:50 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hence my claim that, if it was a plain text in any "European" language (including Russian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew) , just in a funky alphabet and orthography, it would have been cracked long ago.
Those quotation marks are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
This is also starting to look like it would be better off in the Chinese thread. -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
pjburkshire > 03-10-2026, 02:52 AM
(03-10-2026, 01:13 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Back in the 1990s there were many articles on major popular and scientific magazines about the VMS.
If I am correct and the language is a West Slavic language, in the 1990's most of them would have been preoccupied with breaking free of the U.S.S.R. -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
Jorge_Stolfi > 03-10-2026, 03:50 AM
(03-10-2026, 01:15 AM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The argument only excludes a simple substitution cipher of an "European" language. It does not imply a "Chinese" language. It leaves open a more complex encryption, gibberish, an invented language, etc.(01-10-2026, 01:50 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hence my claim that, if it was a plain text in any "European" language (including Russian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew) , just in a funky alphabet and orthography, it would have been cracked long ago.
Those quotation marks are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
This is also starting to look like it would be better off in the Chinese thread.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
Stefan Wirtz_2 > 03-10-2026, 11:48 AM
(03-10-2026, 01:13 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Have you seen Tavie's list of claimed solutions?
I know it.
That‘s what I mean when saying this forum is a good example for the problem of non-fieldcovering solving attempts:
this (short) list of failed solutions shows heavy clustering at Latin, English and Hebrew, added with some other languages and a few very exotic ideas.
It does not come even closely to covering all european languages of ~1400AD.
Next you argue with non-speakers researching from books etc. for traces of foreign or extinct languages:
somehow we all do that (it is a feature of many Voynicheros that they handle some foreign language they don‘t even speak), but it is not the same as native-speaking.
I am experiencing that with medieval German as native speaker — it‘s not easy to get the point at many words and lines, and even harsher for non-speakers.
What is lalamo?
Googled it and it looks like several AI initiatives (I don‘t care much for AI). -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
Jorge_Stolfi > 03-10-2026, 10:02 PM
(03-10-2026, 11:48 AM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What is lalamo?
It is my proposed pronunciation for "LLM" ("Large Language Model").
I refuse to use "AI" because it is not real "intelligence". It is only a digest of all the texts that are out there, formatted in a way that makes it seem like the product of intelligence.
Thus LLM, not AI, is the honest name for it.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
nablator > 03-10-2026, 10:26 PM
-
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
Linda > 04-10-2026, 01:17 AM
(03-10-2026, 10:26 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(03-10-2026, 10:02 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thus LLM, not AI, is the honest name for it.
Not anymore. The harness matters a lot these days, an AI agent is not just a LLM with a user interface.
What would you name it? -
RE: Voynichese is a numeric cipher?
ololololo > 04-10-2026, 02:51 PM
It seems very strange to me that Stolfi keeps mentioning the Chinese language everywhere and making hints. It looks like obsession, to be honest. Excuse me
I’ll jump into the conversation and explain why a cipher based on Roman numerals is noteworthy compared to other encryption systems as Naibbe.
Firstly, all the main “laws” of Voynich are self‑evident because they are a consequence of the rules of Roman numerals. LAAFU appears because the largest numbers will be at the beginning, and the smallest numbers at the end. The “slot” system is based on the fact that larger digits appear first in the number, followed by smaller ones. Similar words (such as chol chor) will appear because the numbers follow an order, which brings similar numbers closer together. Repetitions occur due to the presence of identical numbers in the sequence.
Roman numerals cover these rules by default.
Secondly, entropy and statistical indicators. Koen has already shown before me that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (even lower than that of VMS). From this, we can assume that Voynichese could be a more complex system of Roman numerals (where, for example, positional variants for writing numbers are introduced), which increase entropy but still do not reach the levels of a language.