Part 1 The cryptographic pitfalls of the VMS – theories

1. Noise injection In 15th-century cryptography, it was common practice to simply repeat letters and even words in order to make decryption more difficult. I assume that most of the repetitions in the VMS represent zero words, some with individual letter changes. These have not been scattered according to a pattern, but purely at random.
Example: I live in the city = I live leve lige in the city. This is encrypted and you have a problem. 
Zero words are adapted to the first glyphs to make them easier to recognise.

2. Null lines: We know that the first lines of many pages have special features. I assume that these are Null lines, some of which are even based on Latin sentences. I myself have managed to squeeze several first lines into a Latin pattern, which then tilted in the second and third lines.  This is a kind of psychological warfare: an attacker ( someone who wants to solve the manuscript) in the 15th century was educated. If he found a Latin clue at the beginning, he was psychologically programmed to interpret the rest of the book in Latin. This impression is further reinforced by Latin ligatures in VMS. The author laid a false trail that makes deciphering the manuscript an endless task, because the reader tries to squeeze what is actually a different language into Latin declensions.

3. Weird Lines: As I have shown here, a striking number of the last two or three lines are ‘weird lines’. I assume that when the writer had finished a text, he simply added blank lines at the end of the text that are complete nonsense (or perhaps they are incantations after all .)

4. I assume that the text was written in Bavarian-Austrian slang, phonetically, as was customary at the time. Furthermore, the sentences are not even grammatically correct. In the 15th century, it would have been easy for a Bavarian to realise that his village dialect could not be understood by many other people (for example, in the larger city where he had been living for decades). A perfect disguise.

5. Then the text was shortened, terms were changed and a cipher was superimposed, which massively destroyed further information in the text. This would be about as difficult to decipher as the Native American languages with their coded terms during the Second World War: 

6.    So I also assume that "qo" is only a marker. It defines how the following Gallow glyph or other glyphs should be read.

7. I assume that the Gallow glyphs stand for consonant clusters: In Bavarian, there are hard consonant clusters (st, sch, cht, pf, gn, br, etc.) often at the beginning of a word. If a single Gallow character stands for an entire cluster or cluster type, then the words shrink together. There are at least 8 Gallow glyphs; with a switch, there would be 16. Realistically, with a switch, perhaps 10 to 12 of these would be used more frequently. This allows you to use most of the consonant clusters.
o    Possible example:
o    Labial (lips): b / p = pf / br / ps
o    Dental (teeth): d / t = zt / ts (z)
o    Velars (palate): g / k = ks (x) / kch
o    Sibilants/fricatives: s / f / h = sch / cht / sp

8.    Vowel reduction: I assume that the vowels reflect the Bavarian sound of the 15th century. "a" and "o" are phonetically almost interchangeable in Bavarian (darkening). The “e” is consistently ‘swallowed’ in Bavarian or replaced by other vowels, which eliminates the typical letter frequency. This leaves primarily "o/a" "i" and "u" as the dominant vowels. This explains why statistical analyses based on standard languages come up empty here.

9. I assume that the y at the end pulls a vowel (probably "i" or "u") backwards – both as a Latin disguise (the "9" as a ligature) and to achieve a vowel disguise. So possibly a zero glyph at the end of a line and otherwise a vowel.

10.    I assume that short words were omitted on one side, if possible (articles), or were added to the other words on the other side. This is typical of Bavarian, for example:

Standard German: Hol die Wurzel
Bavarian: Hoi d'Wurzn
Phonetic/VMS style: hoid wurzn

At the same time, words in Bavarian are very often truncated at the end (endings are omitted).

So the words have mostly 4-7 Letters.

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That's it for now, enjoy. I still need more time for part 2 – it's going to be very exciting, or not. I know part 1 won't stand up to your criticism, but as always, I don't care at all  .

   

A couple months ago, I started a thread about how I was using LLM's to try to perform calculations on the Voynich. One of the problems I ran into was, it became first, a test of my patience every time it "enhanced" the results and second, a it was still a rather slow process. I would have it generate the Python. Then I'd download it, look it over, run it, get more things added, double check that, etc... 

It generated the Python code rather quickly.  And once you accepted the fact that it would sometimes cheat by running it's own regex which invariably screwed up the parsing of the transcription, or it would chop functions out of the code and run them without using the proper preceding function, you could eventually get some code written.  It was usually 5 steps forward, 4 back.  Then, I went a tad overboard one day and went back to the language I know, PHP, and generated a web page to do more than one calculation. Next thing I know, I've created this:

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First thing:  THIS WILL NOT RUN ON MOBILE at the moment.  I have a lot of CSS tweaking to do before it does so for now, Desktop only.
Second thing: While I have visually looked over the code, I'm not positive of the calculations behind them.  I have double checked most, but not all. I'm still finding minor miscalculations so do not treat this as Voynich gospel.

For the moment, consider it a rough draught and you are welcome to be pre-alpha testers.

Let me know if you see any bugs, errors, situations where I had moments of utter stoopidity, things you'd like to see it do, or just general comments.  

Edit: The contact form on the site is not working at the moment. If you use it, I likely didn't get the email.  You can either reply to this forum post or email me at admin@voynich.science.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

   

Some of them are too small to be letters, normal retraces and others may be just pareidolias. But there are very good cases.
My collection of Hidden text in Plants:

   

   

   

   

   
Couldn't post them individually their original res, they were too many.
Hope it is useful. Have a nice day.)

So apparently a pretty common thing in medieval times was to make lines very cleanly justified by any means necessary, including abbreviation.

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I hypothesized that this would mess with statistics around drawings and line breaks. I filtered by lines not at the top or bottom of a paragraph, looked at a bunch of statistics, and made some observations.

Observation 1: The letter "e" is significantly less common in words around breaks, except for at the start of lines. It's about 40% as common as expected, before both line breaks and text intrusions, and 60% as common after text intrusions. Similarly, the letter q is around 60% as common both before line breaks and text intrusions, but 19% as common after text intrusions. I believe that all of this is due to omitting those characters when needed to properly align the text. The letter k at 70% may also commonly be removed for abbreviation.

Observation 2: The letter "s" is about 3 times as common in words at the start of lines and both before and after drawings, and 63% more common at the end of lines. For words sandwiched between two drawings, it's 6 times more common. My guesses as to the meaning of this:

• Based on varying decreases in the counts of words like "al", "ar", "ol", "or", and "aiin", with increases to words starting with "s", it could be a padding character.
  
• "sh" is 38% as common as expected at the end of lines and 61% as common before text intrusions, so part of it could be abbreviation.
  
• One of the s-words may serve to mark the start of a sentence.
  

Hello,
I am new here. I recently published a preprint on Zenodo proposing a structural and procedural grammar model for the Voynich Manuscript, based on cross-sectional analysis (botanical, pharmaceutical, and astronomical sections).
The approach is deliberately non-semantic and focuses on recurrent operator families, phase markers, and functional layers (labels vs procedural text).
Zenodo link:
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I will present the model in more detail in a follow-up post.
Thank you for your time and feedback.

I have a theory that the VMS was once in the possession of Hartmann Schedel, a 15th century humanist (and avid book collector), who is famous today because he wrote the Nuremberg Chronicle.

The reason I think this is because of a specific manuscript that he possessed in his collection, a Biblia Pauperum (also called Armenbibel, a so-called "poor man's Bible"), housed today in the Bavarian State Library under the denomination You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Before going any further I'd like to note that such "Bibla Pauperum"s were widely circulated at the time (14th, 15th centuries), and their purpose was to tell the chapters of the Bible with many small illustrations within the text. There exist hundreds of Biblia Pauperum, each one is copied from a previous source. What is different about the specific copy in Hartmann Schedel's collection, i.e., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., is the style of the illustrations, which appear to be drawn by a very similar set of hands as those of the VMS.

There are several examples of this, perhaps the most striking are the drawings of women. Here is a drawing of a naked woman:

   

In general, the faces of the woman (and men) in the manuscript are a close match to the VMS's illustrator's style:

   

Notice the red cheeks and red lips, that are characteristic of the faces in the VMS. Note also that no other Biblia Pauperum draws human faces like this.

Here's an enlarged example from another folio:

   

Again, red facial features. Here's an example of soldier's chainmail that has the same motifs as the VMS "architecture":

   

And then there's more depictions of women:

   

And more:

   

Notice the hairstyles, that are a good match for the hairstyles in the VMS, along with the identical red cheeks and red mouth. But wait, there's more. What about these Voynich-y animals?

   

Note the hooves, and the horns, which are similar to the VMS zodiac animals' details. There are many other fantastical animals in the manuscript, some donkeys and snakes, it's well worth a look if you're interested.

Now on to the theory at hand: if Hartmann Schedel got this book from somewhere, and assuming this illustrator is somehow related ot the VMS, that it stands to reason that Schedel might have possessed the VMS at some point in its early history. An interesting sidenote to make is that a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by computing experts who implemetd a graph theoretical algorithm to search for possible early possessors of the VMS concluded that the most likely candidate to have it in their collection is... Hartmann Schedel.

I will end this discussion with a bit of a cheeky easter egg, if you can call it that:

   

I wasn't sure which forum to post this in, so I guess this one will do. Basically I found another instance of "pox" describing a billygoat/male buck, from a 15th century Tyrolian manuscript. It's "interesting" in the sense that we have "poxleber" written on the folio f116v, and up to now we found only 2 instances of this word in contemporary written literature with this exact grammar (a play from Hans Sachs and a local Tyrolian farmer's market description).

I intend to add to this list, albeit only with the word "pox", describing the animal in question.

The manuscript is Der Renner from Hugo von Trimberg. This manuscript is peculiar because it contains 91 pen sketches, and instructions for the execution of these sketches can be found in the lower margins of the pages on which they appear. Here is the folio in question, f167r:

   

On the bottom it says:

   

So yeah, there it is. Another mention of "pox". 

EDIT: here is the manuscript: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The basic meaning of the word "crib" is a child's bed. But in cryptology it has another meaning.

A crib is an encoding word where we suspect it's meaning or some plain word or expression that we suspect to appear in the ciphered text.
See for example: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Cribs can help a lot in decoding of ciphers and unknown scripts. For example:

- many WWII German messages were cracked because they contained predictable phrases like "Heil Hitler" or "wetter" (weather)
- ancient texts like hieroglyphs contained cartouches ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) , names of kings taken in a border which helped a lot
- Linear B was cracked by Michael Ventris because he correctly assumed that it will contain names of some towns like Knossos
and so on

Cribs are the weakest parts of the ciphers. Unfortunately they aren't fully avoidable because of the nature of human language. You can fight with them but you
won't eradicate them all.

The weird thing about Voynichese it that it doesn't have any obvious cribs and is different in this from other manuscripts.
Would you agree?

For example in herbals it was often very easy to identify the name of the plant. Have a look at the example:
   

I don't speak medieval Italian. Without googling I don't know what "oriola" means. But I can guess from the text layout it is the name of the plant. If the layout was the same and instead of "oriola" we had "47XAS3D45" then I would suspect that "47XAS3D45" is the name of the plant.

By the way googling doesn't help that much in that case. "Oriola" word isn't used anymore, it means simply "the golden one" and was used for several plants. But it is a problem of historical botany and not cryptology.

Voynich Manuscript doesn't have good candidates for plants names. First words don't really work. See: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

In the same way astronomy part should be full of Zodiac sign names. We should have the words for Sun and Moon. But again we don't have good candidates.

Was the scribe consciously avoiding cribs? He gave labels to some nymphs but never gave an label to any obvious thing like the Sun or the Moon. And in other manuscripts scribes often gave labels to obvious things. When they draw a dog they often signed it "dog"   But the scribe never does it in Voynich Manuscript.

So why it doesn't have cribs?

In a different thread Lisa Fagin Davis says: "I think it is extremely unlikely that we will ever have a name to attach to the origins of the manuscript. We may be able, someday, to narrow down a more specific place of origin, and perhaps a community, but a name? I doubt it."

I wonder though how one can say that with such confidence.

It seems unlikely to me that the author of the Voynich was an average European peasant. 90% of people then were illiterate. The author(s) of the Voynich seem to be someone who was very educated given the content of the manuscript and it is often argued must have been quite wealthy to have afforded the vellum and inks needed for the manuscript as well as available time to work on it. If the manuscript is written in cipher as most Voynich researchers have said they believe in a survey then the author could well have been particularly well educated and able to produce such a difficult cipher to crack. So, as with the works of Giovanni Fontana or Trithemius why should we assume the author was an ordinary unknown peasant?

There are many records of named individuals from 15th century Italy and other parts of Europe, so to assume that there would no records of the author(s) seems unwise.

I just made a new thread in the curated section, not sure yet what the scope should be. Let me know if you can think of anything that should be added.
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One example that just came to mind is the collection of crossbowmen Sagittarii  - Marco, were you hosting that somewhere?