I would like to share a new hypothesis based on my own research and a visual analysis of the illustrations found in the manuscript.
My hypothesis is that the Voynich Manuscript may visualize concepts and mechanisms for generating something new.
This may relate to counterpoint, not merely as the combination of independent melodies, but as a process in which motifs are transformed, connected, and developed into new musical material.
The plant illustrations, for example, may represent the combination of different elements to generate new motifs. This is a possibility worth exploring.
I have posted further details and an outline of the underlying theory on my website.
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I would greatly appreciate any constructive feedback, opinions, or even critical perspectives you might have regarding this musical interpretation.
Thank you!
For the last several weeks, I have been working on an attempt to 'translate' Herbal A to Herbal B. This turned up many probable transformations that turn words from Herbal A into Herbal B, preserving frequencies, but many of these transformations only worked between two sections, never collectively across the entire manuscript.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., I laid out a hypothesis and evidence for a Voynich chronology, showing that Voynich word construction shows drift that is equivalent to stepwise evolutions, that sometimes undo previous results. The methods I used are identical to those used to reconstruct the chronology of Egyptian tombs, by modeling changing pot styles.
If i apply this to my rule/transformation work, and instead of modeling rules that must be true across the entire manuscript, model them as stepwise transitions between each stage, everything falls into place. Frequencies all mostly align between sections, and once large gaps become a series of gradual transitions.
Note that the transformations below are not the result of manually linking individual words. I define a series of transformations that must apply to all words. For example, *ol -> *eol , then *eol-> *edy.
A small set of these rules, about 20 or so, can explain most frequency differences between words across the entire manuscript, when applied in sequence, similar to how linguistic reconstruction models phoneme changes between words.
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At any given step, these rules only capture a small amount of volume, with most words retained.
However, if we actually see how many words remain consistent from start to end, we see an obvious gradual turnover of words. Each step changes a small amount, but over several steps these collectively add up, eventually resulting in large turnover across multiple steps. The chart below shows how many words from each step are retained into subsequent steps. Notice the gradual decline each step. By the end of the sequence, very little is directly retained from 1a.
Worked Examples
The chart below shows the evolution of the word 'chol'. Looking at just Currier A/ Currier B, there appears to be a dramatic gap, with chol appearing to mostly vanish from voynich vocabulary. However, in the chart below, we can actually see chol gradually declining and shifting into other words, not a single large jump. Chols transition into chedy is actually gradual, with its roots in the 1.5 'transitional A' section when it first divides into cheol.
Below shows chor. This also appears like a dramatic jump between Currier A/B, but we can now see that its decline is actually gradual, slowly shifting into competing forms at each step, before finally vanishing in Stars.
Shol, another example.
Note these changes are sometimes undone, for example chol appears to be mostly turned into chedy in 3b, before reverting partially back into chol in 3c. This is consistent with what you would expect from random drift, some changes end up 'undoing' themselves.
The missing sections, and Currier A/B
I strongly suspect that some of the most extreme differences between Currier A/B, like the appearance of the 'ed' bigram, would exhibit gradual changes in the missing bifolia. Already in the above charts, we can see that many of the A/B differences appear to be the results of transformations that began in the 1.5a transitional herbal section, and i expect that specifically missing quires P, R, and H, (f91, f92, f97, f98, f59-f65) would all show a more gradual transition, with 1 of either quire P/R occurring before pharma, and H and the other occurring afterwards. F58 and the cosmo/astro prose collectively represent a small amount of text, but we can already begin to see some of this occurring there.
The question of semantic meaning vs self citation
The above rules do not settle the question of semantic meaning vs self citation. If this linear evolution represents a gradual turnover, with scribes mostly copying existing words, i think it would be unusual for some forms to actually have their frequency mass preserved across the entire chain like this.
For example, if words truly lacked semantic meaning, there would be no reason why chol could not just simply gradually vanish with no replacement. That does not seem to be what is occurring here. Instead, words frequencies are mostly preserved downstream. It's possible some form of self-citation could also do this, but it would have to be fairly complex to preserve information in this way, and in my opinion, at least currently I think this actually points more to an evolution of the script or writing system.
In summary, I don't think there is enough evidence to fully resolve this question at present.
The exact rule changes
The rule changes i am using are all You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in the rule manager tab. I do not claim this is the full comprehensive set, just that the current set appears to capture most of the drift under a fairly small set of rules. I have no doubt they could be improved. I suspect applying linguistic reconstruction techniques would be a valuable approach. You can actually create and test your own rules on the site.
Who could have created the Voynich Manuscript?
Whoever created the VM was well educated in art, languages and most likely music.
The creator would most likely have been wealthy to afford the time required to create the VM and able to afford the vellum and inks.
It's my opinion that the creator was not an adult. The art is not particularly good and the script seems unstructured. I think the creator
was an early teen.
It's been pretty well accepted that the VM originated in Italy in the 15th century, there is little doubt about that.
The creator was most likely very wealthy. Where does that lead, Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici.
Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici was a wealthy art and manuscript collector. But he was not a teenager. However in the mid 15th century
his two sons were, Piero (1416) and Giovani (1421).
It is reasonable that 2 wealthy, well educated teenage boys that had access to old manuscripts would themselves be tempted to create their own manuscript.
It would also be reasonable to assume that their father being a collector of manuscripts would have in his collection a manuscript written by Roger Bacon and that the boys would have seen that manuscript and have been influenced by it. I know that the Roger Bacon connection
to the VM has been ruled out. I'm not suggesting that Bacon had anything to do with the VM, only that the Medici boys may have been influenced by it.
It's likely that Medici, being a manuscript collector would have access to vellum and inks and would have encouraged his sons in manuscript creation.
I think the two Medici boys formed a secret society (secret societies were all the rage) with perhaps three other well educated teens, a 15th century dead poets society so to speak. This group of teens decided to write a manuscript that tells a story.
What is the story?
The story is about a star travelling through the heavens. It would seem that the VM s not in order.
The story starts with the introduction of the star families with the astronomical illustrations and the cosmological illustrations.
The next section would be the story of the heavenly bodies giving life, quire 13.
The biological illustrations followed by the history and tales of the main character 8and. 8and is one of the stars named on F68r1 bottom right. F68r1 and F68r2 are clearly star families.
The plants in the biological section are simply fanciful creations that provide art for the manuscript. I doubt that the plants actually have anything to do with the story.
I believe the reason the plants are completely unidentifiable is because the artist(s) were not good enough to draw actual plants accurately.
The script?
The script is not a language. This is a combination letters and words that represent musical sounds.
The text also acts as mnemonic devices that would remind the orator of key words in the story.
Lisa Fagin Davis has identified that there are five scribes in the VM. Those five scribes are the
authors and were the story tellers.
1. The orator
2. Bells/chimes
3. Lute
4. Whistle/flute
5. Percussion
The words and letters would tell musicians what instrument to be played and the sound.
For example every time 8and appears it might be a certain combination of instruments and tones specific to that word. In some cases where additional letters are found with a word such as o8and
then that might represent the instrument combination with the addition of another instrument.
At that same time something about 8and that would need to be added to the narration.
I think Rene Zandbergen got it right, the VM is a musical transcription. Mr. Zandbergen's analysis is genius. However it may not be that complex. I would add to his analysis that the text also represents mnemonics for the narration.
So the story of 8and is told in poems on vignettes through the biological illustrations and shorter poems are found in quire 20, each separated with a star.
These stories would be told and performed for the Medici court, family, friends etc...
What happened?
Why didn't the story of the VM, the script, the secret society get told, why did it disappear?
The members of the society grew up and moved on. I suspect that the manuscript was kept by Piero because he, like his father was a collector of manuscripts. He most likely put this on a shelf as a memory of boyhood fancy and forgotten. Then a hundred years later his manuscript collection was passed on and the rest is VM history.
Conclusion
I think this is a book of stories illustrated, written and performed by five teenagers for amusement.
When they grew older the book was shelved and forgotten. Simply a fanciful book of children's stories.
I would like to share the methodology and empirical findings of a quantitative study conducted on the Zandbergen-Landini transcription corpus (ZL3b-n.txt, 5,316 lines, 33,645 tokens). Rather than attempting an ad-hoc translation of isolated folios or asserting arbitrary linguistic substitutions, this study examines whether the lexical and syntactic layers of MS 408 can be formally modeled as a deterministic positional state machine, evaluates sequential transition entropy, and quantifies section-dependent operational constraints.
All analyses were implemented in Python and are fully reproducible on the raw ZL corpus. The complete script pipeline is attached to this post.
1. The 4-Slot Morphotactic FSM Model
Testing positional slot constraints indicates that Voynichese word tokens are predominantly generated by a strict, left-to-right positional finite-state grammar rather than natural inflectional morphology:
Corpus Coverage: The 4-slot automaton successfully parses 84.01% of all lexical tokens across 5,316 lines of text without requiring external dictionary lookups or fuzzy stems.
Information Density: The resulting state distribution yields an empirical word entropy of H = 10.47 bits/token and a combinatorial redundancy of R = 18.64%, confirming that token generation operates under strict positional constraints rather than free phonotactic distribution.
2. The Heading Anomaly (Herbal A)
When extracting the very first word of each folio entry in Herbal A (110 initial tokens preceding plant illustrations):
85.5% (94 out of 110) of these initial tokens fail the standard 4-slot FSM parse.
They behave as structural isolates featuring low-frequency consonants and distinct phonotactic skeletons.
This quantitative asymmetry provides objective evidence for a functional division within the manuscript: an open nominal index (headings) followed by a closed procedural matrix (running text).
3. Sequential Markov Transition Constraints
Evaluating the sequence of word classes across sentence and line units demonstrates that token ordering is not a random permutation:
4. Word-Level Gemination (W W): Evidence Against Dittography
Immediate word repetitions (qokeedy qokeedy, chol chol, shedy shedy) have frequently been interpreted as mechanical scribal errors (dittographies caused by eye-skips). We quantified exact duplicates and root-level geminations across all thematic sections of the manuscript:
Key Observation:
Gemination density peaks sharply in technical and procedural sections (Balneo at 5.32%, Recipes at 4.86%), while dropping significantly in astronomical diagrams (0.57%) and cosmological schemes (0.49%). Because scribal fatigue should correlate with text volume or line density rather than thematic illustration style, this distribution indicates that gemination functions as a deliberate operational iteration modifier (coque et recoque).
5. Sectional Specialization & Negative Control
Operational Predicates (qo-):
The frequency of action-initiating prefixes (qo-) drops to 2.01% in Astro/Zodiac, compared to 16.53% in Recipes and 23.28% in Balneo. This demonstrates that circular astronomical texts operate as catalogical registries, while Balneo and Recipes serve an operational function.
Phase Co-occurrence (ol vs. ee):
The co-occurrence of liquid phase markers (ol and ee) within individual lines is statistically significant:
Code:
Odds Ratio = 2.303, Chi-square = 156.96, p-value = 5.21e-36
Negative Control: Testing Macro-Humoral Polarity:
To test whether whole-page macro-profiles correlate with classical Galenic plant classifications (Circa Instans), we performed a Monte Carlo permutation test (N = 10,000 iterations) matching che- (warm) vs. cho- (cold) against medieval reference catalogs:
Observed Agreement: 52.00%
Null-Hypothesis Mean: 39.13% (+/- 7.67%)
Effect Size: z = +1.677
Empirical p-value: p = 0.1156
Conclusion: The null hypothesis cannot be rejected at the macro-level (p = 0.1156 > 0.05). Whole-page Voynichese text profiles cannot be reliably mapped to binary Galenic plant properties without collapsing into statistical noise. This demonstrates the danger of relying on short 2–3 consonant skeletal matches.
6. Summary and Discussion
The empirical data indicates that MS 408 is structured as an artificial, positional state-machine-driven procedural formulary with clear functional divergence between sections, rather than natural spoken syntax encrypted via substitution cipher.
The complete Python script used to parse the corpus and produce these statistics is attached.
P.S. Research Methodology & AI Assistance Disclosure:
For full transparency regarding the research workflow:
The Chain of Hypotheses: Our investigation originated from the hypothesis that Voynichese behaves not as a natural spoken tongue, but as a modular, artificial recording system (a procedural laboratory or apothecary formulary). We formalized this into a 4-slot deterministic finite state machine (FSM). We subsequently tested whether running text reflects algorithmic recipes (evaluating sequential Markov constraints and procedural word gemination W W), and whether page headings function as an open nominal registry. Finally, we instituted a negative control to test whether folio-level macro-profiles could map directly to classical Galenic humoral classifications (Circa Instans), which our permutation test properly refuted (p = 0.1156).
Use of AI / LLM Tools: An AI assistant (Large Language Model) was utilized as an interactive computational co-pilot throughout this project. It was employed to rapidly generate, refactor, and debug the Python data-processing pipelines in Google Colab, compute statistical tests (chi-square contingency, information-theoretic entropy, Monte Carlo permutations), and structure the mathematical formulation of our findings into this presentation. All data, counts, and statistical outputs presented here were generated deterministically by the attached Python script running on the raw ZL transcription.
Hello everyone, my undergraduate concentration in history was on late medieval and early modern Northern Italy, so my first thought when I learned about the suspected provenance of the Voynich manuscript to Tyrol or a similar Alpine region was that it could've been written in some form of Rhaeto-Romance language, such as Ladin, Romansch, or Friulian. I tried looking on this forum for anyone that's gone on a deep dive into this theory, but I wasn't able to find anything. I will be the first to admit that I am far from capable of engineering such a theory to begin with (even my standard Italian and classical Latin skills are pretty bad at this point), and I suspect that any Romance language is probably out of the question, but was just interested if anyone had actually gone down this rabbit hole before, and what their conclusions might've been?
I would like to present my own hypothesis concerning folio You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the Voynich Manuscript.
Could the cylindrical illustrations on the left side of the page represent plant stems, cross-sections of stems, or their internal structures?
To the right of these cylinders, there are illustrations of various root systems, tubers, and shoots, some of which may depict germination or early stages of plant growth.
I wonder whether each cylinder could represent a stem structure shared by a particular group of plants. The different plant parts illustrated beside it might then belong to plants that share a similar stem structure.
Has anyone investigated this possibility before? I would be interested to hear other researchers' thoughts and interpretations.
Kimmo Lammi
AI assistance disclosure: I used ChatGPT to translate my original Finnish text into English. The observations and hypothesis are my own.
Im completely new at this, just a regular person who stumbled upon the Voynich manuscript scans a little while ago, but looking at the pages, I cant help but feel that brilliant people are overthinking it.
To me, it looks like a practical notebook shared by few medieval guys who used a clever visual shorthand to save expensive things and keep their recipes private.
By just looking at the different handwritings I came up with 4 simple rules that make sense TO ME:
1: The Loop Rule (Herbal): In the plat pages, closed-look letters like "O" "a" "d" arent single letters. They look like symbols for whole lab actions, like writting in circle every time you mean "mix". The open letters with long lines are just the normal letters completing the word.
2: The Mirror Trick (Astrology): The artist who drew the stars (ye, an artist for me) changed the rules to hide his notes. In this section its the exact opposite: the long vertical lines are the main syllables, and the loops are just a single connecting letters. its like flipping a mirror to confuse outsiders. Make sense to me.
3: The Quantity Rule (Recipes): A word repeat three times in a row? For me, this is a medical recipe book (or something like that). If a tired clerk writes a word three times, he isnt crazy, he is just writting quantities without numbers.
4: Ignore Decorations Rule: The one who drew the stars was clearly a showoff. He added extra loops and flares to the letters just to make them look pretty around the diagrams. If you visually erase those fancy adds, the real words become way clearer.
If anyone runs this rules though a script to try and decode it, I bet theyll get a huge surprise
I dont think its a complex mathematical cipher. Its just a 15th century dynamic shorthand that changes depending on wich one was holding the pen that day.
I belive the psychology of the scripters directly influences their encryption style.
Iam zero expert, zero researcher, but this simple logic clicked on my head and want to share it.
The mansucript: Wien, Österr. Nationalbibl., Cod. 13647, could be interesting for the study of the VMS. It features the rare depiction of Cancer as a lobster with incorrectly placed legs on its tail:
I just shared an updated version of some page classifications I have been working on. You can read You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or view You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for more information on how these are generated. You can explore the data for this sequence specifcally on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Briefly:
I create a glyph level transition matrix for each page, both for individual words, and the entire line (removing spaces). I then combine these together.
I then calculate the pairwise Jensen-Shannon Divergence between each page.
This matrix is viewable on the web app, as a cluster-map.
For this theory, the actual clusters themselves are irrelevant. Instead, we just look at the MDS ( MDS is essentially PCA over this pairwise distance matrix). The graph of the 2 most significant dimensions produces a similar shape to the PCA bigram charts that have been shared on this forum before.
The Guttman Effect
Note, the distinct 'horseshoe' shape. In the above chart
This is what is known as a Guttman horseshoe. It is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.that can happen with both PCA and MDS. This occurs in very specific conditions, when a sequential trend moves across some type of environmental gradient. An example is like this: if you walk two blocks north, then turn and walk 2 blocks east, you have walked 4 blocks. Yet the actual distance will be 2.83. PCA cannot recover the full distance because it attempts to fit a straight line, and one straight line cannot capture the full 4 block distance.
The most common way to check is to look at the 3rd dimension compared to the first. This 3rd dimension will normally have an S shape, but it can manifest more complex shapes depending on the dimensionality of the underlying curve. Notably, it can have a 4 factor polynomial curve, which resembles a W or M.
Lets look at this for our data:
The Bifolio Agreement
So how does this relate to manuscript chronology? Well, once you have identified a guttman horeshoe, you can correct it by applying a polynomial curve to reproduce the full nonlinear gradient. This is what that looks like:
Its immediately apparent this achieves very strong split by sections across the manuscript. The curve also splits currier A and B cleanly.
However, where this gets really interesting is when we compare the average variation of pages in the same bifolio along this curve. The 1st MDS dimension already almost perfectly orders pages by bifolio. Pages on the same bifolio's average variation on the first MDS dimension is just 2.5%, and this drops to an even lower 1.5% when applying the curve. Compare that to an average of 15-50% difference across the other MDS dimensions.
How does this connect to chronology?
Think for a second about what this is saying.
The fact that pages within a bifolio have < 2% divergence across this entire sequence, shows this is measuring some production level feature
It also forms a smooth continuous gradient across all bifolio in the manuscript.
It is not correlated to LFD hand.
What feature could possibly be represented by a smooth continuous gradient between production units?
The most obvious answer is time, and in fact, time is one of the classic known drivers of a Guttman Horseshoe. For example, Flinders Petrie ordered Egyptian graves in time by their pottery styles around 1900, and in the 1970s David Kendall showed that MDS on such data produces a horseshoe whose order along the curve is the chronological order.
Therefore this pattern is not only consistent with chronology, chronology is one of the known major drivers. This, combined with the fact that the sequence has < 2% divergence along known production units, strongly suggests this is the actual chronology of the manuscript.
What is the chronology?
Note the ordering of some points can be sensitive to the exact curve being drawn. The relative ordering in between sequences is fairly reliable, but groups should be interpreted as production batches, not as an exact ordering sequence.
D25-32 is a strong candidate for the first created bifolio. It is the first in both the word level and word+line level reconstruction, and it appears 1st in 49 attempted leave-one-pool out refits.
2 distinct but separate production batches then produced 2 sections of early Herbal A. The exact ordering depends on the polynomial degree used, as either work, but 1a is a slightly better fit.
A transition Herbal A section bridges the 2nd Herbal A batch with Pharma
Several Cosmo, along with f58 came next
Herbal B came after this, followed immediately by half of stars
Bio follows The first stars half. The final page varies in different curves.
T08-111 is a strong candidate for the final page of the MS. Layfield and Davis order this 2nd to last. It appears last in 46/50 leave one pool out refits.
This shows that Herbal B was likely created after both pharma and cosmo, yet was re-ordered and interspersed within Herbal A sometime before quire numbers were added. It also implies that Stars was created in two distinct productions, before and after bio.
What else can be derived from this?
It strongly suggests that several features known to be associated with Currier A vs B splits are actually shifts in the way voynich was written, and that the entire sequence contains several such significant shifts. It is exactly this type of stepwise process that would result in a Guttman horseshoe. The next step would be to incorporate these known statistical properties alongside this chronology, to show how the voynich language appeared over time.
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A thought experiment: What if the Voynich Manuscript were something like Tolkiens Works, but without any surviving context?
Imagine discovering a book written entirely in an invented language, accompanied by illustrations of unfamiliar but similar plants, rituals and cosmological systems. With no translations, explanations or other writings to provide context. Like the silmarillion written in one of tolkiens invented languages and artwork for said book found houndreds of years from now.
Would we necessarily recognise it as a fictional world or would we assume it was an encoded account of our own world/hostory?
Could the Voynich Manuscript be a constructed symbolic or fictional knowledge system blending real medieval knowledge with imagined elements?
I’m curious wether this possibility has been seriously explored in Voynich research ?
