In 2004 Gordon Rugg published a paper in which he proposed that the Voynich MS text is likely to be meaningless, and could have been composed by an alternative application of a so-called Cardan Grille, namely by moving a piece of cardboard with holes over a large table of word fragments, and writing down the words that thus appear.

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I would like to know about the ideas that have ever existed for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

In my experience, there is a difference in availability when it comes to digitized manuscripts, and indeed online resources in general. There are too many German, English, French and Italian manuscripts to view in a lifetime. But outside of the central/western European region, things get a bit more hazy. I could easily name a dozen Italian or French manuscript traditions, among which those that appear the most relevant for the VM. Off the top of my head, I can recall some Czech manuscripts I've seen, and even mailed some Czech libraries to request images, but that's about it.

Now on the other hand, the VM first shows up on history's radar in Prague. So I wonder..
Did I simply not study Eastern and/or Central European regions enough?
Are the most "comparable" manuscripts, like herbals, simply mostly from countries like Italy?
Are there simply fewer manuscripts that were produced east of Germany?
Is it a matter of accessibility? (digitization, literature not in English...)

Do we need to look more towards Eastern and/or Central Europe as a possible context of creation for the VM, or are we best off with the current focus?

I have collected a large number of copies of diplomatic ciphers for the early 15th century. So far I have a gap that I am very keen to fill. I have an example of a Milanese diplomatic cipher from 1424 and another one from 1445, however I have no example between these 2 dates. I am endeavouring to find such an example by my own means, but this is another avenue as someone else might know something that I don't.

I will clarify what I mean by a Milanese cipher. Essentially what I am interested in is ciphers designed by the chancellery of the Duchy of Milan, i.e. ciphers designed by employees of government of Milan on behalf of that government. So what I am looking for is an enciphered letter or cipher key for communication  with the Milanese State. So this could be an enciphered letter to or from a representative of the government of Milan. It could be a cipher key used for communication by or with an employee of the government of Milan. This would be incredibly valuable for my research hence the sum of money.

I am happy to give this to someone who can give me a lead which will take me to such a cipher, though I would be interested in something much more specific than "try the internet" or "try the BNF"(without a more specific reference).

I have a couple of specific references to ciphers from that period, but I think none of those survive, although I will do my best to follow them up.

Any early 15th ciphers may on inspection turn out to be Milanese even if at first they don't obviously appear so.

I know it is unorthodox to offer such rewards and anyway I doubt that anyone would be able to find such a cipher even if I offered 10 times what I have said, which I have no intention of doing so. Frankly given the amount of effort involved by me in hunting for such things €200 is really good value for me.

I hope offering an amount of money will at least attract some attention which otherwise I fear this thread would not get.

Hello
Did anyone seen this:

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I read a lot of the translations so far; none of them made me believe, they did it right. But this one could make the break-point.
Anyone here familiar with the described language? Unfortunately, the author in the video did not translate so much.

Hi. I checked up to ten pages and the mentioned rules You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. include every paragraph.
This is a detailed sample of folio 68r

This is simply a question, since I am sure that many people have studied it, researched it, and know much more about this topic than I do:

Can anyone tell me if we can clearly identify any white or red roses in any of the imagery anywhere in the Voynich manuscript?

My reason for asking is probably already obvious to many of you: the white rose and the red rose were the famous symbols of the English House of York and House of Lancaster, respectively, in their feud throughout the 15th century, culminating in the Wars of the Roses. Although the latter wars themselves postdate the apparent age of the Voynich ms parchment, their rivalry and their central place in English (and French!) history in the early 15th century are entirely contemporary with the 1406-1438 range for the dating of the ms parchment. The third and final phase of the Hundred Years' War between England and France, the Lancastrian War, lasted from 1415 to 1453. England controlled much of the territory of northern France in the period 1415-1429 in particular. (I recall one analysis concluded that the month names in Latin letters written on the Zodiac chart pages of the ms were characteristic of a northern French dialect.)

Geoffrey

Through imagery comparisons it is sometimes possible to identify the source of illustrations used in the Voynich. This is of course done all the time. The interesting thing is that many times images are "grouped" in one source... that is, several images seem to be copied from one book or manuscript, when none can be found in many other sources. For instance, only three books on microscopy each contain several close comparisons to specific Voynich illustrations; while no good or exact comparisons like these can be found in the vast corpus of other books on microscopes and microscopy.

This of course defies coincidence, especially when those sources... whether contemporaneous to the creation of the Voynich calfskin, or predating it, or post-dating it... are so varied. I mean, even if one discards (as is often done) those sources that defy one's choice of era for the Voynich, and keeps only those acceptable to the observer, it is still difficult to explain how the scribe had access to a wide range of sources, from geographically distant places, created over a large span of time. But if one includes all good comparisons, without prejudice to the time of creation of that source, the problem goes from difficult to impossible, leaving really only one reasonable conclusion.

https://proto57.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/the-sources-for-the-voynich-forgery

On top of that, there is context to the observations. They are not floating around in limbo, disconnected. For each of these comparisons, they have context in the Primer. From the post:

"The list below includes the Primer [1904 Follies of Science in the Court of Rudolf II, by Bolton], and then a selection of other sources for the imagery found in the Voynich. They all have one or more of the below characteristics. Some are direct, specific, and identifiable sources, and others are not specifically identifiable but probable works used as models and influences for the content of the Voynich.

• The item, person, activity can be directly traced back to Follies, the “Primer”, and or:
  
• The item is in some work, or in a work by some person, mentioned in Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolf II, and or:
  
• The item in the Voynich is related to the disciplines, activities, and items which would would reasonably expect to be found in the Court of Rudolph II, as imaginatively conveyed by Bolton in his faulty work.
  
• The item would, by being in the Voynich, fulfill the goal of the forgery, i.e., to look as though the book came from the Court of Rudolf II. That is, there is a reason behind these comparisons, that supports them being correct.
  
• Multiple comparisons sometimes come from single books as sources, further supporting the correctness of the hypothesis.
  

A lipogram or a lipogrammatic text is a piece of writing in which the author deliberately avoids the use of a certain letter (or possibly letters, although this is not typical), using only words that do not contain that particular letter (or letters).

The concept goes all the way back to the Ancient Greek author Lasus of Hermione in the 6th century B.C., who wrote poems using only words that did not contain the letter sigma. This concept has reappeared in literature from time to time over the course of the three millennia since then. It would not be an unknown or unfamiliar concept to an early 15th century European author or student.

If taken to the extreme, lipogrammatic text could possibly explain some of the extremely unusual statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text. Naturally it would likely require the avoidance of more than just one letter to achieve anything close to the extremely low entropy and conditional entropy values found in the Voynich ms text. The purpose of most historical literary lipograms was not to lower the entropy values of their texts, and I doubt the statistical analysis of actual historical literary examples of lipogrammatic text would find extremely low entropy values. But if the author of the Voynich ms carried this process to a certain extreme, it could be one part of the explanation for the statistical properties of the text that we observe.

For example, if an English writer wrote a lipogrammatic text using only words that do not contain the letter "a", very common words such as "and", "a", "that", "are", "was", "as", etc., would have to be absent from the text. (Full disclosure: This idea occurred to me while considering this very possibility for a Middle English text.) If the Voynich ms text is indeed lipogrammatic in this way, then we would have to consider not only the effect of the lack of a particular letter or letters on statistical properties of the text, but also the effect on the grammatical structure imposed by the necessity of avoiding, for example, such normally essential function words as "and", "a", "are", "was", etc., throughout an entire text.

Geoffrey C.

I was just thinking that it would require a great amount of creativity to convert any paragraph of Voynichese into something (anything) that makes sense using any repeatable method. This alone would be quite the feat, and I don't think it is possible.

For the method to be repeatable, it should be possible to express it as a set of rules for someone else to reach the same results. This means, and this is the most important condition, that the method may not include an "interpretative step" which basically turns it into a one-way cipher. 

All "solutions" I've seen so far are either unextendable (only keywords, no paragraphs) or unrepeatable (one-way cipher with too much freedom). Therefore I believe it is impossible to translate a paragraph in a viable way. At least using the many methods that have been revealed to us so far