There was a thread on this topic from some time ago, but it has long since been closed.

I was reading about the many prizes that there are in Mathematics and my thinking came back again to why there shouldn't be a prize for Voynich decipherment.

Maybe some people believe that prizes should not be awarded in Mathematics or any field and likewise should not be rewarded for Voynich research. But if one thinks that it is right to have them in Mathematics, but not in Voynich research then one has to ask why.

It is often suggested that a prize would attract the wrong kind of people and just lead to more nonsense theories wasting researchers time and distracting from good research. However does this happen with Mathematical or other prizes? I don't doubt they also receive plenty of nonsense theories. Why do they have prizes if prizes are such a bad idea?

From a personal point of view if I manage to decipher the manuscript and there is no financial reward of any kind at the end of it I will feel cheated. I have put a lot of time into it and it has been enjoyable, but that shouldn't preclude some financial benefit. Academics doing research in many areas make a living from it, so it does not seem radical that people researching in this area should be precluded from making any money out of it.

Ultimately any such prize would have to be funded from public donation or by a private individual. But if such finance existed it does not make sense to me for it to be turned down.

I am aware that there is strong opposition to this idea, nevertheless I thought I would reintroduce the question and I daresay I will raise it again in the future.

I have recently read a blog post in which it is assumed that the VMS is a work of women. Addressees of the manuscript are also ( mainly ) women. This thesis raises a number of questions, here are some of them:

Are there coded works which were demonstrably created by women ?

Is it possible to deduce from the pictorial representation in the VMS in any way that the themes are primarily women-specific ?

Can the low number of depictions of male characters be explained by the assumption that mainly "women's issues" are dealt with?

What kind of topics can be addressed concretely ( for example bathing rules / hygiene ) ?

Which female authors would come into question in the period of origin of the VMS ?

To be clear, I think this thesis is rather questionable but at least worth to be discussed. Until now it seems to me to be an unspoken basic assumption that the VMS is a work of male authors.

Coming from Schiffer Books in 2022:
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I have seen people write that the Voynich in terms of its contents is unremarkable for it's time.

Apart from the obvious way in which it is unusual I would question the idea that the manuscript is conventional.

Now admittedly I have not studied all aspects of the manuscript and exhaustively compared the Voynich with contemporaneous texts, however from what I am familiar with it does seem to be quite distinct.

First of all I think it worth stating the obvious point that there seems little reason in enciphering something that can readily be found elsewhere. It makes more sense if there is some original content contained throughout the manuscript.

Looking at the plant illustrations it seems that other contemporary herbals seem broadly more similar to one another than they do to the Voynich. I wonder if the same can be said of the astrological sections.

Is there a contemporary text with all these different kinds of content that we see with the Voynich contained within it?

This may seem like a "how long is a piece of string" kind of question, but I hope there is more to it than that.

If one only includes people from areas of the world that the majority of researchers think the author could have come from. I would think this would exclude China, Americas(I am excluding Nahuatl), India. In truth probably almost just Europe. Population of Europe in the year 1400 was 78 million.

Then ask what percentage of that population would have the financial means to afford to produce such a manuscript. Say 5% ? Which gives one a figure of under 4 million people.

I could see why some might think this a pointless effort, but I am curious what vague figure we could give to this question.

Personally I would be more narrow in my figures say toughly 10 million people in Northern Italy and Central Europe. Maybe 2% of people who had the financial resources to produce such a manuscript. So that gives you a figure of 200,000 people.

However I have plucked those figures out of thin air, so I would be curious what other numbers people might suggest.

I believe there are suffixes for a number of plant names. In first lines of f7r, f11v, f13r, and f95v2, word A starts with sh and word B starts with q (sh..., q...). I have found it with help of meanings and omissions and it is occurring in more than one page. In two folios it is turning to Jak/Jek functioning like a suffix. The others need to be checked. Jek also works in Azerbaijani language. I have no idea if this is a Voynich specific suffix or from an actual dialect.

Some people have started a crowdsource project on the VMS. I'm not familiar with Zooniverse, but it seems to be primarily a platform that uses "swarm intelligence" to evaluate contributions. How this will work in practice with the VMS is not entirely clear to me.

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I've been talking to her via Facebook Messenger. She joined the forum a few days ago.

(My summary) She relies on an original system of abbreviations/brachigraphy to compress Latin plaintext into Voynichese.

What worries me is that the system is complex and ambiguous. Also I am not sure if it is possible to decrease the entropy while compressing text. Maybe there is a way because of omission.

Helmut Winkler may be interested, I would very much like to read his comments.

Today my paper Cracking the Voynich Cipher was released. 

A download can be found at sivbuggevatne.com

The paper proposes a full decoding of the Voynich manuscript´s cipher. The decoding is tested in the plant section of the manuscript. It reveals 104 plant names which are all found as one of the first words in each herbal text. The names found lead to plants with the same characteristics as the Voynich illustrations, and the names are closely related to vernacular plant names used in medieval England.

Best regards, 
Siv

See poll, votes are anonymous (though of course you can comment in the thread). This is not an attempt to find a solution or consensus; I just want to get an idea of which impression is most common.



(Edit: I know some people hold that there are actually seven objects, but this is not about their number).