The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most enigmatic artifacts in the history of written language. Dated to the early 15th century, this handwritten codex features an unknown script and illustrations that defy conventional categorization. Despite a century of intense study by linguists, cryptographers, historians, and computer scientists, the manuscript remains undeciphered and its purpose unknown. This thread examines the manuscript’s physical characteristics, proposed linguistic structure, historical context, illustrative content, and major scholarly interpretations. Assessing current theories and technologies applied to its analysis and outline the challenges that continue to obscure its meaning.

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1. Introduction

The Voynich Manuscript, named after the Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich who rediscovered it in 1912, is a 240-page vellum codex written in an unidentified language or code. Now housed at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (MS 408), the manuscript has become a subject of fascination across academic disciplines. Its unique script, often called “Voynichese,” has resisted all attempts at decipherment, leading some to speculate it is a sophisticated hoax, while others believe it encodes lost scientific, alchemical, or linguistic knowledge.

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2. Physical Description

The manuscript consists of:

Medium: Fine-quality vellum (calfskin), carbon-dated to 1404–1438 CE.

Structure: Approximately 240 pages (including missing folios), with sections grouped thematically.

Script: 20–30 unique glyphs, written left to right, with a flowing, consistent handwriting.

Language: Unknown; not similar to any known linguistic family. Often referred to as “Voynichese.”

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3. Illustrative Content

The manuscript is divided into several thematic sections based on illustrations:

Herbal Section: Each page depicts a plant, most of which are unidentifiable or fantastical.

Astronomical Section: Zodiac-like diagrams, celestial motifs, and star charts suggest astronomical or astrological content.

Balneological Section: Illustrations of nude women bathing in green fluid-filled basins connected by elaborate pipework.

Pharmaceutical Section: Depictions of jars and plant parts, possibly medicinal.

Recipes Section: Continuous text interspersed with star-shaped bullets, possibly indicating procedures or ingredients.

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4. Linguistic and Cryptographic Analysis

4.1 Voynichese Structure

Zipf’s Law: Word frequency distribution follows patterns of natural languages.

Word Construction: Words have consistent prefixes and suffixes, suggesting morphological rules.

Lack of Corrections: The manuscript shows an unusual consistency and neatness.

4.2 Statistical Properties

• Text displays internal structure consistent with human language.
  
• Repetitions and distributions suggest a non-random origin.
  

4.3 Decipherment Attempts

Historical cryptographers: William Friedman and others failed to find a key.

Modern methods: Artificial intelligence and pattern recognition have been used without success.

Hypotheses:

• Ciphertext encoding a European language.
  
• An unknown natural or constructed language.
  
• Glossolalia or random pseudo-language.
  
• Hoax
  

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5. Historical Provenance

• 1404–1438: Radiocarbon dating of vellum.
  
• 1600s: Owned by Georg Baresch (alchemist, Prague), then Athanasius Kircher (Jesuit scholar).
  
• 1666: Kircher's correspondence with Emperor Rudolf II suggests belief that the book was authored by Roger Bacon.
  
• Early 20th century: Rediscovered by Wilfrid Voynich in a Jesuit college in Frascati, Italy.
  
• 1969: Donated to Yale University.
  

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6. Theories of Origin

6.1 Authorship Theories

Roger Bacon: Once believed to be the author due to its alchemical nature (now largely discredited).

John Dee or Edward Kelley: Elizabethan occultists possibly linked to its sale to Emperor Rudolf II.

Invented Language: Some theorists suggest it encodes a real but lost language.

6.2 Hoax Hypothesis

The consistency, lack of obvious meaning, and fantastical content led some to believe it is a 15th-century hoax or an early example of “nonsense writing.”

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7. Modern Technological Analyses

Multispectral imaging: Revealed erased characters and ruled out palimpsest hypotheses.

Carbon dating: Confirms early 15th-century parchment.

AI and machine learning: Attempted linguistic alignment with known languages, including Hebrew, Nahuatl, and Turkish.

Handwriting analysis: Suggests multiple scribes.

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8. Cultural and Academic Impact

• A symbol of scholarly obsession, featured in novels, video games, and academic discourse.
  
• Fueled interest in historical cryptography and digital humanities.
  
• Open access to high-resolution scans by Yale University has democratized research efforts.
  

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9. Conclusion

Despite decades of analysis using increasingly sophisticated tools, the Voynich Manuscript remains an undeciphered anomaly. It continues to challenge linguists, cryptologists, and historians alike. Whether it is a cipher, an unknown language, or an elaborate hoax, its mystery is enduring. Future breakthroughs may depend on interdisciplinary collaboration or the chance discovery of a cipher key or companion manuscript.

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References

Bax, S. (2014). A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script. Journal of Voynich Studies.

Reddy, S., & Knight, K. (2011). What we know about the Voynich manuscript. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Zandbergen, R. (Ongoing). The Voynich Manuscript: History and Mysteries. [Online Resource]

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Yale University). MS 408 Digital Archive.

Friedman, W. F. (1944). The Voynich Manuscript: An Analysis. National Security Agency Archives.

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Generated by CAAI Research Assistant.

Voynich Manuscript Full Scan - Yale University

Comments?

(06-04-2025, 04:53 PM)MykeNukem Wrote:

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Generated by CAAI Research Assistant.

Voynich Manuscript Full Scan - Yale University

Comments?

Voynich Manuscript decoded

It was just in the past few years it was decoded and I don't know if they completed it entirely. There may even be some controversy attached to this decode. I didn't give it a much analysis and I don't think I did even back when I first heard about this decode, but they seem to have documented their work pretty well.

In the 15th century alchemists were some of the most knowledgeable people around. It's not uncommon to find medicine, celestial charts, and scientific notes, all mixed in with things we mostly dismiss as woo these days. I would guess this fellow was an alchemist or something similar. There are a number of Sufi texts from that era with content that isn't entirely dissimilar, though my exposure was mostly related to research on specific topics so I didn't consume whole works.

I did a fair amount of digging through old manuscripts while searching for a lost book. There's so much that is just sitting in store rooms, but even with the slow pace at which they're getting scanned there's a lot out there for public consumption. A lot of them probably don't have any translations available and often the books were written in strange languages or had hidden meanings that would only be understood by others from the same "school". The Vatican probably has a considerable collection of unique books just like this. The ones that their minions didn't burn in the village square along with the people that owned them.

(06-04-2025, 07:01 PM)Ksihkehe Wrote: Voynich Manuscript decoded

It was just in the past few years it was decoded and I don't know if they completed it entirely. There may even be some controversy attached to this decode. I didn't give it a much analysis and I don't think I did even back when I first heard about this decode, but they seem to have documented their work pretty well.

In the 15th century alchemists were some of the most knowledgeable people around. It's not uncommon to find medicine, celestial charts, and scientific notes, all mixed in with things we mostly dismiss as woo these days. I would guess this fellow was an alchemist or something similar. There are a number of Sufi texts from that era with content that isn't entirely dissimilar, though my exposure was mostly related to research on specific topics so I didn't consume whole works.

I did a fair amount of digging through old manuscripts while searching for a lost book. There's so much that is just sitting in store rooms, but even with the slow pace at which they're getting scanned there's a lot out there for public consumption. A lot of them probably don't have any translations available and often the books were written in strange languages or had hidden meanings that would only be understood by others from the same "school". The Vatican probably has a considerable collection of unique books just like this. The ones that their minions didn't burn in the village square along with the people that owned them.

Nope, still not decoded. That last one has been debunked, there were some serious errors that slipped through his publishers, like pictures used for proof that weren't even in the manuscript.

There is a good discussion at the site below about how it's debunked:

Quote:This effort led me to quite a number of sobering insights.

1. He is extremely vague precisely about how to match the Voynich writing to Arabic. This should be a critical element of the paper

2. The main tables for this topic: Figures 5 and Figures 7: do not match.

3. His main key is the star name Alrischa. This name appears in the paper in 8 different ways (or even more?). Figure 2 already has one in the box and one in the caption. In the text we have "Al Rescha" and "Al Resha". Caption of Figure 3: "Alresha" pronounced "Arrisha". Figure 4 has two more. It turns out that the one matching Voynichese is the caption of Figure 2, which is completely different from all the other ones. The apostrophe matters.

4. It was very hard to understand from all his writing, that the correspondence between Arabic and Voynichese he is proposing is a phonetic one. This of course contradicts the match in Figure 2, which is not phonetic at all.

5. I have not been able to find a convincining match (at all!) for the vast majority of star names in Figure 4 or Figure 5.

Short summary: this is not working at all.

Voynich Discussion

(06-04-2025, 09:38 PM)M.U.D. Wrote: Nope, still not decoded. That last one has been debunked, there were some serious errors that slipped through his publishers, like pictures used for proof that weren't even in the manuscript.

There is a good discussion at the site below about how it's debunked:

Yeah, I offered a disclaimer because I didn't vet it very well. I just remembered seeing it a while back.

I read through the paper and your link a bit.

It looks like some of the folks on the site and most definitely the author of the paper believe it's a transliteration. I'm familiar with it, but far from knowledgeable on it. I have tried to break one transliteration using (I think) Grok3, but I fed it a fair bit of text and got virtually nowhere. They're very slippery for somebody that isn't a linguist -or something else that I am most definitely not.

The trouble is that without a key a transliteration is just a massive maze of dead ends. It's not a cypher so much as a merging of two other things. Linguistic pareidolia, perhaps, is an apt term.

ForgottenLanguages utilizes on old version of a discontinued Microsoft (I think, but would have to look again) transliteration tool to evolve languages. You need both the tool and the key, unless you manage to find the original text they're transliterating to use as a Rosetta Stone. They use existing academic or historic text often, but the VM is unlikely to have a source out there to use as a stone. If they correctly tie it to the Cathars or some other group then it could provide some clues to work with between the depictions and what words might be associated, but it's way beyond me.

ForgottenLanguages has something called Affel's notebook which is sort of similar.
   

They also have a significant list of references to discussions about Voynich if you ctrl-F on this list. At least some of the references are not open except for those invited to view, but there are outside sources listed too.

I do stand by the bits about who may have written it and what it may cover, but that's about all I have really formed an opinion on about it.

I have gone back and forth on doing a thread on ForgottenLanguages, but I don't know if I have the stamina. Another member, K1xaru, has a bit on them and the use of stones to solve transliterations on his site. The use of stones isn't much help with VM specifically, but there may be something interesting for those curious about the process the author may have used.

My, my, forgotten languages . . .

(smile)

Now you've done it, Pandora Ksihkehe.

So putting the word Voynich into the Forgotten Languages' (FL) website search bar brings up mostly undecipherable and strange posts (as usual).

However, there was one paragraph in (old?) English.

Quote:And sum wyrchen inwarde as þay þat haue a maniere of drynesse and softenesse in þaymsilf, as warmoude. But sum þere been mighty openners the whiche auaillen mouche ayenst strong stopping, the whiche remedien and helpen easy stoppingz, as netle is seede.

Source: Franciscan Alashi texts and their Voynich variant: Encoding pharmacological information in the XV century

So we search in Yandex for that particular phrase, which brings us to a PDF file that contains the same phrase on page 137/138:

Quote:A passage containing a list of “openers” can be perceived similarly
in the eyes of a physician: knowledge of the properties of a plant may be
sufficient for the preparation of a medicine based on a list of plants:

(114)And sum wyrchen inwarde as þay þat haue a maniere of drynesse
and softenesse in þaymsilf, as warmoude.
But sum þere been mighty openners the whiche auaillen mouche
ayenst strong stopping, the whiche remedien and helpen easy
stoppingz, as netle is seede

Source: PDF file Between Herbals et alia: Intertextuality in Medieval English Herbals by Martti Mäkinen

Great!  This is JUST what I needed...another unsolvable mystery.  LOL!

These types of things are like train wrecks for me, I don't want to look, but I can't look away.  Sigh.  Just kidding!

This is the first I've heard of this.  I haven't digested much of it...yet, but I do have a question.  One of the first things my mind jumped to was the question of...are there any mistakes?

One of the best ways to understand the meaning of something is to look for errors.  These can be anything from strikeouts to erasures or blot outs.  In the 15th century writing materials were so valuable that they were seldom, if ever, wasted.  Plus, it's almost impossible to assemble a 200+ page document without making some mistakes.  These mistakes might get noticed right away, and attempts made to correct them, or discovered later.  Some may not be discovered at all.  Mistakes go a long, long, way in helping someone understand all manner of different things about the author(s).  Things like intelligence level, isolation from society, and a variety of other attributes.  Even if one cannot understand the language, errors are usually not too difficult to spot.  Frequency of errors, or lack thereof is also very telling.  Often, one author will make the same mistake more than once; it's just how the human brain works.  

I am in the (long) process of writing a book, and the subject of the book is about pencils and their impact on history.  Now, this may seem completely unrelated to the OP, but in actuality it's more closely related than what may meet the eye.  The common pencil, as we know it today, was invented around this time.  And, one of the principle reasons for its invention was for exactly the reasons stated above; writing mediums such as paper (or vellum in this case) were very difficult to make and even more difficult (not to mention expensive) to obtain.  Pencils could be 'erased' (or more period correctly, rubbed out).  

Anyway, I just thought I'd throw out the question about mistakes/errors as one tool (not the only tool) in deciphering an unusual work like this.

One of the other points kind of related here is, while 'nonsense writing' is in fact a thing, it is pretty uncommon to see nonsense writing in this volume of a work.  Most examples of nonsense writing are usually only a few short pages, not an entire 240 page work.  This would require a pretty highly motivated nonsense writer which is kind of a dichotomy.  If they've already run some statistics calculations on this book, then there is no point in my doing any more really.  I'd be interested in seeing some of these statistical analysis' though.  Things I'd be looking or are things like word repetition frequency, and analysis of where these words repeat (i.e. in the middle of a sentence, beginning, or end?).  Word length variability would also be something to look for, and then back-comparisons to overall word count.  If the character count of words averages as say 4 letters, then how many words of longer or shorter lengths are there than the average?  Or, longer words are generally indicative of more complex words and generally refer to specific things, whereas shorter words are more generic in reference.  What are the longest words, how many different ones are there, and how often if ever do these longer words repeat?  Stuff like that.  

But again, I haven't really dug into this.  It could be radically different.  Military codes and cyphers for example are often composed of 4 character strings, regardless of the length of the word they represent.  Part of the cypher solution is knowing how to translate and then reassemble these words into a coherent message.  The more variability there is in word length, then the more complex the cypher solution becomes.

Lastly, one final question...why would someone spend the time and effort to write a 240 page compilation that no one could read?  Answer - They wouldn't.  So, it was written for someone, the question then becomes...who?  Find out who it was written for and this will likely provide some big clues on how to decypher it.

---------------------------------------

Other generic thoughts...(more generic)

Again, I have no idea how much time or effort has been spent on trying to decode this...this...whatever it is, 'book' I guess. So, I may be talking about stuff people have done long ago and just not know it. However, one of the leading ways to unscramble something like this is to chunk it down into various sized pieces and then compare the pieces for similarities and/or differences. This is an iterative process, and has to be done more than one time. So, for example, break a section up into 100 word groups and then compare to other 100 word groups. Then do the same thing, but with groups of 50 words, and 10 words, and then 200 words groups.

I wonder if anyone has tried delimiting this text and loading it into a spreadsheet and then running pivot table analysis on it, word by word. A 240 page book will generally contain somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 words. There's obviously some variation in this depending on how the book is formatted, but that is just a general picture of what the book likely contains. There are a number of different analysis which can be run using these numbers as well, but comparing them to similar known works of the time (when adjusted to similar font and pagination). This can help determine the technical prowess of the writer as well as the education level of the intended reader, among other things.

(06-05-2025, 08:13 AM)FCD Wrote: Lastly, one final question...why would someone spend the time and effort to write a 240 page compilation that no one could read?  Answer - They wouldn't.  So, it was written for someone, the question then becomes...who?  Find out who it was written for and this will likely provide some big clues on how to decypher it.

Umm, maybe because the Christian church would probably have burned the author on a bonfire?

ETA: The clergy has a history of destroying knowledge in order to replace it with their own. Book burnings . . .

The value in the Voynich book is not many examples of fifteenth century works like this survive today.

In the FL old English paragraph the word warmoude does not have many search results, especially when surrounded thus: "warmoude".

However, if we go to google translate warmoude translates into the Russian теплая атмосфера which in English means warm atmosphere. That would work with medicine because the alchemist would probably take into account the warm, and the chill.

(06-05-2025, 08:29 AM)NobodySpecial268 Wrote: Umm, maybe because the Christian church would probably have  burned the author on a bonfire?

That's all fine and good, but the author(s) wrote the book for someone.  Not questioning why it would be encrypted, only who was it intended for.

(06-05-2025, 09:50 AM)FCD Wrote: That's all fine and good, but the author(s) wrote the book for someone.  Not questioning why it would be encrypted, only who was it intended for.

From the OP:

Quote:Handwriting analysis: Suggests multiple scribes.

Multiple authors suggest a group who knew the language, and that they wrote it for themselves.