Rod Kinnison published a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. at Cryptologia: "The Voynich Manuscript’s positional entropy collapse: comparative evidence from languages and ciphers"

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Quote:The Voynich Manuscript exhibits unusually low conditional character entropy and rigid positional constraints that have resisted explanation within linguistic frameworks for more than a century. In this study, I apply a leakage-free, folio-segmented, character-level analysis to the Voynich Manuscript and to a set of natural-language, constructed-language, and cipher control corpora. The analysis measures bigram and trigram bits per character, the marginal gain from higher-order context (ΔBPC), positional cross-entropy within words, and local lexical overlap under minimal edit distance. All experiments employ strict recto–verso train–test separation, transcription-layer isolation, and identical preprocessing across corpora. The results show that Voynichese exhibits a pronounced collapse of medial positional entropy and a consistently small ΔBPC. These properties persist across manuscript sections and transcription layers and are not reproduced by natural or constructed languages under identical conditions. Applying the same analysis to a verbose substitution cipher derived from a Latin source text demonstrates that this cipher reproduces the Voynich statistical profile with high fidelity. Shuffle controls confirm that this profile is destroyed when internal adjacency is randomized, indicating structured generation rather than sampling artifacts.

There is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to the editor by Domingo Delgado: Technical rebuttal: semantic density and the “Naibbe” verbosity constraint"

Quote:Technical rebuttal: semantic density and the “Naibbe” verbosity constraint." Cryptologia, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Quote:I’m pleased to share that my paper, “Technical Rebuttal: Semantic Density and the ‘Naibbe’ Verbosity Constraint,” has been accepted for publication in Cryptologia and is now in production with Taylor & Francis.

The paper examines a focused technical question in Voynich Manuscript research: whether short, compact Voynich-like ciphertext units can, in principle, preserve greater local information density than the Naibbe cipher model appears to permit.

Using a deliberately limited toy model, I illustrate how a cipher architecture incorporating positional behavior, nulls, permutation, and abbreviation could encode more plaintext information while retaining compact ciphertext forms.

The paper does not claim a decipherment of the Voynich Manuscript. Its purpose is narrower: to clarify what conclusions can—and cannot—be drawn from the Naibbe model regarding the possible information density of alternative Voynich-like cipher systems.

There is a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the Voynich manuscript with Lisa Fagin Davis: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:The Voynich Manuscript has been a curiosity and mystery for hundreds of years – what can its strange history teach us about worldbuilding? This week, we’re joined by Lisa Fagin Davis, one of the world’s experts on this enigmatic text. Come along as we discuss the history of the text, its creation and contents, and how the sciences and humanities can come together using tools like latent semantic analysis to discover the nature of untranslatable texts.

Hello everyone,
I'm very much an interested amateur rather than a Voynich researcher, so please forgive me if I'm overlooking an identification that has already been discussed.
I've been looking at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and had a rather strange botanical thought.
The upper structure immediately reads to me as some kind of flower, but I started wondering whether it might instead represent a dried flower or fruit/seed capsule, particularly when the entire plant is considered rather than the reproductive structure in isolation.
I'm South African, and I grew up familiar with vygies (Aizoaceae). Some vygies have thick, spreading/ground-covering foliage and distinctive flowers that, when dried, leave a very different-looking reproductive structure. The visual resemblance between the Voynich drawing and a dried vygie/seed capsule caught my attention.
I am not suggesting that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a vygie. The historical/geographical problem is obvious, and I don't have the botanical expertise to make that claim.
What I'm wondering is something more basic:
Could the apparent “flower” in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. actually be a fruit/seed capsule or post-flowering structure?
And, if so:
Does the structure resemble any known plant family more closely when interpreted as a reproductive structure rather than a flower?
Does the apparently thick/spreading foliage support any particular family or growth habit?
Are there Aizoaceae or unrelated Old World plants with sufficiently similar morphology that the resemblance could be more than superficial?
Has anyone previously compared this particular Voynich illustration with succulent groundcover plants or Aizoaceae?
More generally, how much confidence should we place in the apparent flower/leaf/root morphology when assessing Voynich plants, given the possibility of artistic distortion?
One reason I'm asking is that some Voynich plants seem remarkably convincing while others are, frankly, spectacularly strange. ?
That made me wonder whether we're sometimes judging the botanical accuracy of the whole illustration when perhaps the artist was much more accurate about certain features than others.
So I'm curious what people who have spent far more time with the manuscript see here.
Am I seeing a meaningful botanical resemblance, or have I simply found another excellent example of the human brain being extremely good at finding patterns?
I'd genuinely love to hear the botanists/illustration specialists/long-time Voynich researchers weigh in.
Thank you!

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I don't know if this has been discussed before, but I noticed something strange about f89 and f102. There may be other foldouts as well, but I found these two the clearest. In both cases, on the recto and the verso (so four "pages"), the scribe takes into account a fold that's somewhat visible on the parchment. Gaps are left in the text block, or the whole block is confined to one side of the fold line. However, in both cases, the actual folding line that came to be used in the codex is shifted inward, i.e. the fold came to be closer to the spine.

   

   

What this tells us is that the scribe planned for a fold, more or less on the location where a previous fold is still visible. But this fold did not become the preferential one, with both sheets becoming more folded inward.

I wonder what could be deduced from this, if anything, especially with misbinding and singulions in mind. Is the current preferential fold required to fit the foldout into the codex? Maybe someone misfolded the flap before storing the MS for a long time? Although then it would be a coincidence that both foldouts show a similar shift.

I believe the Voynich manuscript has something to do with the court of Borso d'Este. Borso was a wealthy Italian duke of the 15th century, and a parton of the arts. He spent most of his money on helping artists and commissoining pieces.

One of his most famous commissions is the Bible of Borso d'Este. Here is an example of an illustration of that Bible, next to a similar looking nymph from the VMS:

   

Borso kept a huge library of manuscripts. Today, those manuscripts are part of the Biblioteca Estensa. Unfortunately, the website has dissapeared. But you can view it in the archive.org viewer:

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A particularly interesting MS in that collection is the Dante d'Este, an illustrated copy of Dante's works. In it, we see some striking imagery reminiscent of the VMS. Let's begin with swallowtail merlons:

   

Bathing scenes:

   

Notice the naked nymphs bathing together on the right.

There are lots of illustrations of naked people, including women:

   

The proportions seem to be like those of the VMS.

Borso's court placed enormous importance on astrology. Palazzo dei Diamanti's historical account says that Borso reportedly did not undertake important actions without the advice of his astrologers, particularly Michele Savonarola and Pellegrino Prisciani. Note that Savonarola wrote a treatise on thermal baths: De balneis et thermis naturalibus omnibus Italiae.

Note also that Borso d'Este had commissioned a herbal from Cadamosto, which has already been discussed as potentially relevant on this forum:

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Some excerpts:

   

   

According to Italian herbal expert Sergio Toresella, the above mentioned herbal has similarities to the VMS.

So I think therefore that the VMS has something to do with the court of Borso d'Este.

I don’t know if this has already been discussed here, but could it be that the “Stars” are related to something like the “Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum” (also known as “Flos medicinae” or “Flores medicinae Salerni”)?

I came across it in Sir Alexander Croke’s 1830 edition. According to Croke, these are Latin didactic poems associated with the medical school of Salerno that deal primarily with the preservation of health.

Its subject matter is health in the medieval sense: eating and drinking, sleep, air, the properties of individual foods, wine, and herbs; the four bodily humors (blood, bile, phlegm, and melancholy) and their corresponding temperaments; and an extensive section on the practice of bloodletting.

Much of the text is written in rhymed hexameter, often in the tradition of Leonine verse, which presumably contributed to its mnemonic character and popularity.

The work has not been preserved as a single, fixed text. Various manuscripts contain very different numbers of verses, as well as different additions and arrangements. Croke’s base text comprises 363 lines of verse (That's why I thought of the stars first), but then he mentions manuscripts with 183, 664, 1,073, 1,096, and 1,239 verse.

Modern scholarship generally regards the “Regimen” as a composite and evolving text rather than the work of a clearly identified author. Its exact date of origin and early development are disputed; the core tradition dates to the Middle Ages—roughly the 12th century—and was already widely disseminated long before the 15th century.

Sources:
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  regimen_salernitanum_thematic_latin_english.txt (Size: 55.25 KB / Downloads: 10)

Note: It was too time-consuming for me to extract them all, so I had an AI do it, double-checked the results, found some errors, ran it again, and again. I hope it’s at least somewhat correct now—the English translations were also done by the AI. I  include the URL of the original, after all...

This experiment was inspired by Chinese theory, and in particular by Stolfi’s theses about the scribe’s mistake and writing by ear.

I'm very skeptical about linguistic theories, particularly about attempts to map VMS symbols onto other writing systems, and even more so, onto sounds.

However, I became interested in the thesis that the author might have recorded the language by ear, as he either did not know or underestimated the existence of any writing system among the people (if there was one at all).

I tried to create such a “phonetic” script for the Ingush language. I used not only letters (but not all of them) as symbols, but also very common syllables in words in the text. At some points, I left out problems because I didn’t want to create too many syllables. So, one of the syllables is written the same as another, but it differs from it by one sound (specifically, in that it lacks that sound).

I asked the AI (sorry, I don’t know how to speak Ingush ) to write a short text, and I recorded it using this letter. Here’s what I got:
   
AI text:
Хьянна саак хьятмад талх лоаат-таш да
Цэннабоа баш сабаара хьякха кхораш ба
Бэрда гтя гъуйра хьявса хьялха лъогlаш яц
Шура тlъянна цаlохк тхоа тэхка мара баккха дац
Къант човнаш тэхьа латт, цунгъала ра морх хьяшар да
Сак лъусташ ваа, амма цунзи ларглац

Will someone be able to match the symbols with letters/syllables from the text and reconstruct the writing? How difficult will this be?

I hope you won’t have any difficulties with Cyrillic characters . The text itself looks different, but it reads as it’s written here.

Part 1 can be found here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I know there's a lot of data in this post and I tried to summarize as best as I could. I tried to break it down into sections to make it more readable.

I'll start with the full Voynich ledger which shows the legal letter transitions for the entire corpus, including gallows.

All scribes: non-stripped gallows + hapax

• 9,907, or 56.79%, were exact copies of a word already occurring earlier in manuscript order.
  
• 6,784, or 38.89%, were ED1, specifically Damerau-Levenshtein distance 1, from an earlier word.
  
• Only 754, or 4.32%, were neither.
  

I've been manually re-tokenizing selected VMS passages using a compositional glyph model, and in doing so I've found myself questioning some of the conventional assumptions underlying EVA and other attempts to tokenize the manuscript. I don't mean that as a blanket criticism of those systems—they were designed for useful transcription—but I think some of their assumptions about what constitutes an individual glyph may need to be re-evaluated. For that reason, I am not going to use the standard EVA “lettering” here and will instead rely on descriptors.

The main difference I've noticed is what I'm calling the c-shaped joining crossbars. Other researchers have generally treated the four tall, looped glyphs, with or without crossbars, as a collection of eight distinct glyphs. But when I look closely at the manuscript, there are many examples where the left- and right-hand crossbar elements do not fully connect or continue through the upright. Those left- and right-hand c-and-bar-shaped crossbar elements can precede and follow one of the four upright characters, or, less commonly, only precede or only follow one. The point is that these combinations should not necessarily be thought of as atomic characters, but rather as compound structures.

They also appear to combine with one another, forming a separate double-c with a top bar that is often treated as a unique glyph, and they may or may not carry the small diacritical hook. This makes me wonder whether we're looking at independent components rather than eight atomic glyphs.

I would therefore remove the four crossed looped tall characters, the crossbar double-c, and the crossbar-double c with the overhead hook from the atomic character list, and instead introduce left- and right-hand crossbar modifiers with the constrained rules discussed above.

I also question some of the other positionality constraints others have raised and have noted some things of interest.
I've visually checked the manuscript quite extensively with regard to the figure-4-looking character that is often said to occur independently of the following o-like character. I haven't been able to find many convincing examples. The cases I can identify reliably seem to be degraded, overwritten, or partially formed text. That isn't proof that genuine exceptions don't exist, but so far the ambiguous examples aren't convincing to me. There are some standalone occurrences in the marginalia, where the figure-4 form appears by itself, but I'm not sure those should be treated the same way as the running text.

So far, the figure-4 seems to combine with and modify the o-shape to create an initiator complex. I have not found a convincing instance of that character appearing inside a word. Except for some standalone marginalia, I have found the figure-4 shape to be consistently followed by the o-shape in the running text. This appears to be a hard positional rule. I have examined claims of an “i,” “e,” or “c” following the figure-4, but the regions are smudgy and unclear, so I am not convinced. If someone can clearly point out exceptions, I would certainly like to know, so that this can accurately be classified as “almost always” instead of “always.”

The same goes for what I now consider to be the d-shaped terminator mark. It only appears at the end of a word and never inside. Many researchers have already noted it to be positionally restricted. I find it consistently word-final. However, it can be combined with the c-shaped forms and with the undotted-i-like minima in short clusters. From a reasonably large catalog, I can say with some confidence that the c-shaped form occurs once, twice, or three times before the terminator.

Likewise, and here is the interesting part, the minima commonly appears before the terminator once or twice, with three occurrences being rarer; I haven't found convincing examples of longer runs. The minima, however, combines in pen stroke with the d-shaped terminator so closely together that the resulting shape can resemble an “n,” an “m,” or even two “u” or “w” forms. I suspect these should be treated as a carefully constrained terminal-sequence rule.

I therefore propose that the m- and n-like shapes be removed from the token list rather than automatically treated as separate complex glyphs. Similar to the figure-4 being reclassified as a special-case initiator, the d-shaped terminator should instead be treated as a positionally restricted component.

There are softer rules, such as the figure-9-shaped character. It is heavily positionally biased toward the end of words, but can appear much less often at the beginning of words and even less often in the middle. There are others too, but they do not seem to fundamentally affect the core symbol model I am proposing here.

For example, I also find that the small diacritical hook frequently appears above the left and right crossbar components when they are conjoined. It can occur in other positions as well, although much less frequently, and there seems to be some positional structure to its distribution that I haven't worked out yet. For now, I would still classify it as a distinct modifier/component rather than simply part of a particular glyph.

The oft-referred-to “picnic table” character appears, in my examination, to be a standalone character that does not occur inside running words. I would consider it something like a rare pictogram that sits outside the coded text.
My aim isn't to claim that these observations establish a particular interpretation of the manuscript. Rather, I'm wondering whether a more explicitly compositional tokenization might produce a cleaner representation of the underlying system, and whether that could affect subsequent cryptanalytic analysis.

Final note: I have also begun cataloguing the distribution of the four upright forms at paragraph openings and other paragraph breaks. Their distribution is strikingly non-uniform, even apart from the occasional illuminated flourishes at these locations. For example, in the plant section from f1r–f57r, 206 of 219 identifiable paragraphs (94%) begin with a gallows; among those, the double-looped P accounts for 85, T for 66, K for 40, and F for 15. In Q20/Stars, the distribution among distinct paragraph-initial gallows words is similarly skewed: P 58%, T 26%, K 9%, F 7%. I don't yet know what this distribution means, but I think it is important structural information that should be preserved rather than collapsed into a single “gallows” category. I could not find any other clear character-level exceptions, aside from some difficult-to-interpret elaborate crossbar looping.

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