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Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
- Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
-
Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
Bluetoes101 > 10-06-2026, 11:39 PM
I'm interested in peoples ideas.
Why, in writing which we can't even decipher the "plain text" are "voynichese words" added? -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
Zauriek > 11-06-2026, 03:00 AM
That is a good question. I have no idea.
So ,adding to that: Why some marginalia have mixed voynichese and others don't? can we track the difference as a time frame of owerships?
The month names have none of it (i think.)
Inside the plants we can find a lot of text with and without vounichese too; why the color indications could not all be just latin? are all the color indications actually latin?
So weird. Maybe just one or two of the scribes actually knew voynichese. And, by the time the names of the Month were writen by a later owner the text was already a mistery. No idea. -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2026, 05:00 AM
(10-06-2026, 11:39 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm interested in peoples ideas.
Why, in writing which we can't even decipher the "plain text" are "voynichese words" added?
Page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. once suffered a water spill that covered most of the page, including most of the written text at the top. This spill is practically invisible in visible-light images, but its edges are quite evident (A) in the UV image from the 2010(?) multi-spectral scan:
So my theory is that the text on that page was all in Voynichese originally, but most of it was erased by the spill, and probably by the water being wiped off (instead of gently blotted up). I believe that only those two words in the last line survived that incident; of the rest, only scattered and very faint traces remained.
Then someone -- the Clumsy Cleaner himself, or a later owner -- tried to restore the lost writing. But he did not know the Voynichese alphabet, thus he would in most cases "restore" a Voynichese glyph as a Latin letter in "Germanic" writing. That must be why we can recognize many of the letters, and maybe some isolated words, but we cannot identify the language of infer the meaning: because there is neither.
The "Latin script" on f17r (and the partly erased Voynichese words in it) may have a similar origin. There is a water stain right over that writing, that also affected many pages before and after that one. The spill happened after the painting, and it visibly softened any original brown writing/drawing ink it came in contact with (see the flowers on f17v, for example). If someone wiped off the water from f17r, the writing would have come off with it.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
oshfdk > 11-06-2026, 08:55 AM
The below is a speculation, but if the Voynich manuscript is a ciphered codex, it seems to make sense.
The marginalia are mnemonics for the key that would allow a person who knows the principles upon which the cipher is built to read the text.
Let's assume Voynichese is a cipher. Given then the Voynichese is not fully made of characters of any known alphabet, the cipher almost certainly has a substitution step, where after some preprocessing (whatever it be: chunking, permutations, transpositions, numeric coding, etc) resulting Voynichese sequences are substituted with plaintext (let's suppose Latin) characters. This mapping of the preprocessed result to Latin is likely arbitrary, in the sense that you still need to remember the actual mapping tables, even if you knew exactly how the preprocessing step worked. This creates a problem for the author of the encoding system, if the substitution tables are lost or forgotten, recovering them may be a very hard process, and even knowing how the cipher works won't easily yield the plaintext. Basically, we have just had You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (good example, bad puzzle), where the basic principle was identified very quickly, but the actual mapping took years to uncover with complex modern computational techniques.
The solution to this problem is too keep the substitution table in the manuscript as a quick mnemonic that would be self evident for a person who knows how the cipher works, but won't make any sense for anybody else. Maybe there is some interplay between the list of Voynichese characters from 1r or 57v with the Latin phrase from 116v, maybe they are unrelated and the whole mnemonic is contained in 116v, or maybe parts of the mnemonic are hidden on different pages (116v and 17r).
Including Voynichese in the mnemonic may let the reader quickly verify that they understood the mnemonic correctly, in which case Voynichese probably just encodes the plaintext sequence that comes immediately before or after it. The table is structured in a way that makes it similar to some phrase, to hide its purpose.
A quick practical example of how a mnemonic may work, that certainly has nothing to do with the actual Voynichese. Imagine a cipher that is made of glyphs @#%^*+$ (this exact sequence of seven glyphs is written at the beginning of the book), and you know that 2 glyphs should encode a single Latin character.
On the last page of the book there is the following:
MICHITON ODALABAS MULTAS PORTAS ZYWEG FOX VHEK JUSQ MARIA (49 Latin characters with some spaces thrown in to make it look like a phrase, which it is not)
Then there is the following line
#@@##@++#^ NINJA SEARV WHIL IT'S STIL COLDE
Can you use this mnemonic to recreate the cipher table and decode the following:
#%@$ *%*^ +*#@^%*% @#*+ @+@^+^ $%#^#@%^%#@%$*@*^#%+ $+^@ #+ +%*$%@+@
How this works exactly:
This way you only have to remember the basic idea that you map two glyphs to a single character and that by combining the sequence of glyphs @#%^*+$ from the first page with the strange phrase from the end of the book you can always recreate the mapping.
There is also a not very encouraging alternative that the manuscript is meaningless and the inscription on the last page is just made to look like a mnemonic for the key to give prospective buyers some hope of decoding the manuscript, but actually means nothing. In this case including the pieces of the ciphertext is just a way of showing that this inscription was made by the original author and not by a later clueless owner. -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
Stefan Wirtz_2 > 11-06-2026, 11:05 AM
I think it was right the opposite:
those (much) later added words from „poxleber“ (it isn‘t) to „mich“ (it isn‘t) are surrounding the 2 Voynichese words „aror Shey“, but do not build a complete sentence with them — maybe the „poxleber“ scribe did not even knew the meaning of both VMS things and was not able to include them.
How to get there?
- the „spell“ with +‘s ends just above those Vords, the last sequence follows with a slight offset downwards
- at this point (and overall), used ink for add-ons looks different from VMS ink
- this last page seems to have served for some VMS scribble drawings and Vords, more like a test field
- writer changed to partially cursive/kurrent scribing, which is not appearing in VMS main text and -time period. (this is also regarding the „months‘ names“) -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
Jorge_Stolfi > 11-06-2026, 11:36 AM
(11-06-2026, 09:08 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(11-06-2026, 05:00 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a water stain right over that writing
Not over the 3 first words.
Indeed, not that water stain. But the history of that page is probably more complicated, and includes the almost-but-not-quite erased flower on the NE corner. I could speculate more, but I know you would not like it at all...
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
ololololo > 11-06-2026, 10:42 PM
(11-06-2026, 05:00 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Wow, that's quite interesting! This is the first I've heard of there being any text on the f116v. But at the bottom (especially near the bottom-left A, for example, I can clearly see a T there), you can make out the remnants of the text in Voynichese. It seems strange that the "cleaner" tried to restore the inscriptions by stylizing them as a German font.(10-06-2026, 11:39 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm interested in peoples ideas.
Why, in writing which we can't even decipher the "plain text" are "voynichese words" added?
Page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. once suffered a water spill that covered most of the page, including most of the written text at the top. This spill is practically invisible in visible-light images, but its edges are quite evident (A) in the UV image from the 2010(?) multi-spectral scan:
So my theory is that the text on that page was all in Voynichese originally, but most of it was erased by the spill, and probably by the water being wiped off (instead of gently blotted up). I believe that only those two words in the last line survived that incident; of the rest, only scattered and very faint traces remained.
Then someone -- the Clumsy Cleaner himself, or a later owner -- tried to restore the lost writing. But he did not know the Voynichese alphabet, thus he would in most cases "restore" a Voynichese glyph as a Latin letter in "Germanic" writing. That must be why we can recognize many of the letters, and maybe some isolated words, but we cannot identify the language of infer the meaning: because there is neither.
The "Latin script" on f17r (and the partly erased Voynichese words in it) may have a similar origin. There is a water stain right over that writing, that also affected many pages before and after that one. The spill happened after the painting, and it visibly softened any original brown writing/drawing ink it came in contact with (see the flowers on f17v, for example). If someone wiped off the water from f17r, the writing would have come off with it.
All the best, --stolfi
The page may have contained a mixture of German and Voynichese words, but the cleaner was only able to recover the upper ones (and not entirely accurately).
Or perhaps someone has created an unsolvable mystery by spilling water... -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
Jorge_Stolfi > 12-06-2026, 10:37 AM
(11-06-2026, 10:42 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But at the bottom (especially near the bottom-left A, for example, I can clearly see a T there), you can make out the remnants of the text in Voynichese.
That is probably see-through of the text on page f116r. No?
Quote:It seems strange that the "cleaner" tried to restore the inscriptions by stylizing them as a German font. The page may have contained a mixture of German and Voynichese words, but the cleaner was only able to recover the upper ones (and not entirely accurately).
I believe that the page had only 3-4 lines of pure Voynichese at the top. The person who tried to recover the written text apparently did not know the Voynichese alphabet. Either he was an Owner who had not spent any time studying the text, or the clumsy visitor who spilled the water and tried to fix the damage before the Owner saw it, or some librarian who had to recover a bunch of books that were damaged by a roof leak...
All the best, --stolfi
PS. When replying to a long post, please try to trim the quoted text to the specific points you are replying to. -
RE: Why are there "Voynichese" words mixed in?
eggyk > 12-06-2026, 10:58 AM
(12-06-2026, 10:37 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(11-06-2026, 10:42 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But at the bottom (especially near the bottom-left A, for example, I can clearly see a T there), you can make out the remnants of the text in Voynichese.
That is probably see-through of the text on page f116r. No?
Yes, the "t" is just an result of pareidolia from the low resolution image. It's just text from f116r.