Deciphering the Voynich manuscript: propositions to unlock research
by François Parmentier

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Abstract:

Quote:The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval book, whose text has continuously resisted decoding efforts for more than a century. First, propositions are made to insure a good overall quality of research about this manuscript. Next, two common assumptions, correspondingly about the manuscript writing system and the presence of labels, are questioned. As a result, a certain number of irregular forms of letters are pointed out and tentatively explained; and labels are found to be sometimes widespread words or refer to different objects (plants, stars…). Theoretical implications of such empirical findings are discussed, and call into question the validity of natural language hypothesis.

Given Prescott Currier's influence on the analysis of the Voynich text there's really very little of his research out there.

Were the few piece that we have everything he produced, or are there other notes out there waiting to be discovered?

Has anybody ever sought out his papers and checked for more writings on the Voynich manuscript?

Is it possible the gallows are coding for symbol sets?  We do have the four repetition sequence on 57v, and I've been trying to match - in context - text glyphs to symbols, but having no luck with the gallows.  Still, often back then they used the same sign for different things, particularly astrological signs.  Some we know, some not.  But we do have five parts to the VMS that correspond somewhat, and I've found the same pattern on the rosettes page.

So, just taking the first 3 glyphs, for instance, you have "o", o with a neck (eva-l), and 8.  I mean, just looking at them re the zodiac, o=Aries, o with neck=Taurus, 8=Gemini.  But these are the same symbols used for body parts. O=head, o with neck=neck, 8 =shoulders.  And with plants: o=flower, o with neck stem, 8=leaves.  I'd argue the fourth part is actually talking about the human soul, so you might have o=god/spiritus, o with neck = matter, 8=man.  Also, probably numbers.

But the writer, if using this as part of his/her system, would need to distinguish between them.  

So o, followed by one type of gallows, might code for Aries and/or simply A.
Followed by another, might code for Head, and/or simply H.
Followed by a different gallows, might code for Flower and/or simply F
Followed by a fourth might code for God/Spiritus, or simply G or S.

And by itself, maybe it's just a 1 or 10.

It seems to me you could get a full alphanumeric system out of something like this, entropy would work better, etc.

C-C would be Pisces, Feet, Roots, etc.  But when referring to the left foot, you might have to stick a gallows in the middle.  Lol.

But I'm not really kidding.  It might be something like this, and the gallows carry essential word info but don't translate to anything, except maybe, when on their own, the full system they number - Herbal, Body, Stars, Soul.  


I just moved this from another thread.  Emma May commented before I did so that this would mean effectively something like 40 glyphs, and that's right, though some would repeat, and a plant only has six parts, so that's why you would get more of one gallows than another.  She wasn't sure where the writer might have got this idea.  I myself got it from a variety of places he or she would have access to:

1) Zodiac man, where body parts are designated with astrology symbols
2) Picatrix, where the author inserts drawings or symbols of the planets without spelling them out
3) Raymond Llull, with his categories.
4) Raymond Llull, who near the end of one text started just using the first letter.
5) Close reading of the symbols, which often are literal "sphinxes", one part Christian, one Muslim, one Greek, for instance, or plants whose roots don't match.
6) The Rosettes page, which in my schema, acts as an index to the whole text, so I am able, sometimes successfully I think, to match symbol to meaning.
7) Aristotle and...Roger Bacon! Lol!

I would so appreciate someone with languages and linguistics to take a look at this.  I don't think it would solve the whole problem, but if it seems to test out, it might open the door a little.

I'm proud to announce that the last two posts on my blog have, more or less, been failures. They prove no hypothesis nor advance our understanding. They even go against some of the things I believed or proposed, or at best leave those questions no nearer to an answer.

But publishing them is still important. Showing what we've done helps others by laying out our lines of reasoning, sharing our statistics and observations, and demonstrating that they don't really fit our hypotheses.

I encourage everybody to post their failures and be open when lines of enquiry run dead (or totally unproven).

Below is a list of plant identifications that are considered "most certain" by members of the forum, also taking into account previous researchers' lists. The discussion thread is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Like every thread in this subforum, this list is meant to be a dynamic reflection of the discussion thread, so any suggestions for additions, alterations... can be made there.

Edited list so far (proposals where there appears to be especially great agreement are in bold):

• Knapweed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Water lily You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Ricinus (castor oil plant) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Viola You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Cannabis You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Calendula / Mountain aster You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Malva You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (JKP)
  
• Knotgrass (Polygonum aviculare) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
• Sedum telephium You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (JKP)
  
• Prunella You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Oak (but the climbing plant remains unclear) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
• Teasel f43v (right)
  
• Cuscuta (JKP) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  

I looked at the count of glyphs that appear between the gallows glyphs, benched and un-benched, on all lines of the text, and ignoring spaces between words. 

One goal was to see whether the counts supported the idea that the benched gallows are just another way of writing their un-benched versions: the evidence I found doesn't strongly support that. 

Another goal was to see whether there are differences in the distributions of number of glyphs following EVA p, k, f and t. It turns out that statistically there is a difference: EVA t , k tend to be followed by 5 glyphs before the next gallows is written, and EVA f, p tend to be followed by 6 or 7 glyphs. For the benched gallows, the statistics are poorer and less compelling.

Is this difference between counts for EVA t, k  and EVA f, p somehow related to the extra flourish that EVA f, p have - I call it the "curlicrossbar" (what is the correct terminology?)? 

Another feature that is revealed is the perhaps well known paucity of occurrences of two gallows next to one another.

Here's the post about it: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

Your thoughts on this and suggestions for further investigations along these lines would be most welcome!

The recent exchange in the pinned thread of "A brief summary..." where it's stated that no label uses the "qo-" prefix (which is not true in fact) led me (via the Rene's website) to the fact that the root in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is labeled with "qo" inside of it.

I checked, and this does not seem to be a prefix, rather a standalone vord "qo". The "qo" is a valid vord with 29 occurrences beside f99v, as early as in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and as late as in f116r. Sometimes it has an "apostrophe" (I always forget what's the appropriate English word for that, is it "macron"?), in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it has a ligature. It is not clear whether all three versions bear the same meaning. Quite often (seven times) "qo" is the first vord in the line.

Why would the inside of a root be labeled "qo" (read: why would a root be labeled inside at all)? Is that a colour annotation or some other remark? Can this give us any clue?

While describing how the large number of rules the text obeys should preclude, in the event of a hoax or gibberish text, a generation without external aids, I had to stop for a second, because usually human brains decide on "can't" before physics actually forces it.

In the event that the text is (at least mostly) meaningless, could it still have been generated without (or mostly without) external aids, in spite of being incredibly regular?

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With these capabilities in mind, it doesn't seem of the question that a human brain could do something on the order of complexity of generating the ms text.

Savants have been mentioned before, but as far as I'm aware this is always in the context of the savant directing (for whatever reasons) his execution of the work. I think this is very unlikely because the kind of abilities like this tend (as far as I'm aware) to exist in people with very low general intelligence. Such a person would likely be directed by others, if at all.

Although Steve Wozniak is not exactly a savant, he is an example of someone with incredible powers whom another human used as a tool to accomplish their own goals. And maybe you are using the product of that venture to access this forum. It is not hard (other things equal) to imagine an enterprising person in the early 1400s who knew a savant who has an ability to produce real-looking nonsense text. This would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create (for whatever purpose) a work of art that other humans would go nuts not understanding.

First point against this hypothesis is that it might be a stretch to imagine a savant who has the circumstances where he is able to access writing materials and show / develop this talent, and then meet the right person to take it to the next level.

Second point is that it's hard to imagine such an oddly idiosyncratic rulebase coming out someone's intuition, although that should be a predictable consequence of savants having very different capabilities and possibly architecture. 

Third point is the odd illustrations are still hard to explain. *edit* Actually, I no longer think this is the case, because anyone capable of organizing the creation of this thing would predictably want weird drawings and that should be within the capabilities of some available artists. 

Fourth point, separate hands. But, maybe the savant dictated, maybe his writing was absolute crap and others actually copied it to the ms, etc. 

I'm not sure how anyone would ever prove this without additional historical information coming to light, but a very good start would be to find present-day humans who can intuitively generate large amounts of valid looking (or at least intriguing) but completely nonsense text. Luigi Serafini comes to mind, but as far as I'm aware he's neither a savant nor of low intelligence. I also don't know anything about the properties of the text and it's not clear from what I can find whether or to what degree it was actually generated intuitively. But, as far as I know, the CS text is only superficially similar to the VMS text in the sense that they are both unintelligible and does not have anywhere near the same regularity.

The concept of Currier languages - that the statistics of the text vary in different parts of the manuscript - has been very useful for research. It has allowed us to compare the text with itself and understand more about the structure and variety of words.

But for several years it has been apparent that the difference between Currier A and B were not binary but a spectrum, with features growing or diminishing in strength across the manuscript. The two Currier languages only represent broad categories which themselves contain diversity.

We've always been able to analyse the text of the manuscript in sections, but the more recent work by Lisa Fagin Davis on scribal hands provides another way to divide the text. (Acknowledgement that, like for many things Currier was here first. But the recent work is much more secure than Currier's.)

Given this, is it time for researchers to retire speaking about Currier languages and instead talk exclusively - or mostly - about Scribes?

Is there any benefit from continuing with the distinction of Currier languages?

Hi all, a quick, maybe stupid, remark re the spaces.  I've run into a few quotes in my research talking about spaces or space in the world, but the medieval philisophers say not to think of it as empty because it is always filled with aether or air. And I've seen a few small symbols in the images where elements occur that have a iii___iii___iii pattern.  Air appears to be characterized by blank white space, not a 4th mark. 

I noticed because of the aiii sequences, but also mention this because there seems to be a distinct lack of variety in Voychinese word endings so cases cannot possibly be included.  But I consider the author quite tricky and Latin if it's Latin has quite a few words for air.  One of them is aeris.  It occurred to me if you threw those letters into the spaces you could account for the majority of case endings.  9 might just mean pick your poison.