
Latin in the Voynich Manuscript - diodorus
https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2020/03/latin-in-the-voynich-manuscript.html
======
mci
If you look closer at "michiton oladabas"[0], you will notice a smudge above
the first "i" and a spot above the middle "a". So let us read it as "míchiton
oladábas". Now reverse it, treating "ch" as one letter, like in Czech
spelling. You get "sabádalo notichím" or "notichím sabádalo". Both mean "was
investigated by 'no' Tichý" in Early Modern Czech. In 2003, I posited that a
Mr Tichý, an early researcher of the Voynich Manuscript scribbled this Czech
"cipher" on its last page.

Pros:

* The manuscript has been traced back to the library of Georg Baresch (1590–1622) from Prague. It may have belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) or to his physician Jakub Horčický (1575–1622), both living in Prague.

* The accents are exactly where they are supposed to be in Czech.

* Tichý is a popular Czech surname. "Tichím" is now spelled "Tichým". AFAIK, "sa" is a dialectal variation of "se".

* What would _you_ write on a book you have investigated?

Con:

* What the heck is 'no'?

The hypothesis was met with cold reception on the VMs mailing list and I never
cared about it too much but I still find it more credible than the reading in
this article.

[0]
[http://inamidst.com/voynich/michitonese](http://inamidst.com/voynich/michitonese)

~~~
dane-pgp
> Tichý is a popular Czech surname.

Could "No" be an abbreviated first name, like "Tho" for "Thomas" or "Gn" for
"Gnaius"?

[http://www.drshirley.org/latin/names02.html](http://www.drshirley.org/latin/names02.html)

~~~
mci
I was thinking about it (my guess was Norbert) but why would you abbreviate
your first name and merge it with the surname?

Another option is a corruption of "netichým" (by the unquiet one; there is no
surname Netichý), "nad tichým" (over quiet), or "na tichém" (on quiet). Both
"nad" and "na" are unaccented like "sa", which nicely explains merging them
with "tichím". As for the last option, I know nothing about the probability of
confusing the instrumental "tichým" with the locative "tichém" in Czech. Most
importantly, though, these expressions (unless they are some obscure,
antiquated idioms) really need a following noun, just like in English. Neither
"multos" nor "sotlum" is a noun.

~~~
dane-pgp
> why would you abbreviate your first name and merge it with the surname?

One might also ask "why would you write your name backwards in a book that's
written in a language no one can read?". Perhaps the same thought process that
lead the writer to reverse the order of the letters also encouraged them to
remove punctuation and superscripting (which were often used when abbreviating
names), as well as remove the space between first and last name.

Abbreviation of the first name (and not the surname) doesn't seem that odd, as
evidenced by this 1640 collection of poems by "WIL. SHAKESPEARE":

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1640ShPoems.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1640ShPoems.jpg)

------
MFogleman
Readers may also find the Copiale cipher[1] interesting. It has been around
since the 1700s, unsolved, until 2011 when a team figured out (with the help
of a computer or 2) it was a homophonic german cipher, and decoded the whole
thing.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher)
[2][https://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-
manuscript/](https://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/)

~~~
Igelau
> an initiation ritual in which the candidate is asked to read a blank piece
> of paper and, on confessing inability to do so, is given eyeglasses and
> asked to try again, and then again after washing the eyes with a cloth,
> followed by an "operation" in which a single eyebrow hair is plucked.

For the amount of time and effort it took to extract this secret, that's a
hilarious letdown.

~~~
082349872349872
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC_cipher)

> "Although certainly not as complex or secure as modern computer operated
> stream ciphers or block ciphers, in practice messages protected by it
> resisted all attempts at cryptanalysis by at least the NSA from its
> discovery in 1953 until Häyhänen's defection in 1957."

Wonder how it compares to:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_\(cipher\))

====

    
    
        On the mountain was a treasure
        Buried deep beneath a stone
        And the valley people swore
        They'd have it for their very own
    

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUtaMbQmpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sUtaMbQmpk)

------
ilzmastr
It's not so easy to find a unicode transcription, but I would think that would
be the first step in 2020. There is some info here [1] about such a
transcription but it does not feel "definitive". Does anyone know if there is
a copy paste-able transcription of the manuscript anywhere?

When linear B was decoded the first thing many researchers did was to
transcribe every word they could get their hands on, then sort by beginnings
and endings of words [2]. I suppose that is what the poster has done since
they say there are no inflected word endings, but perhaps a cipher hides
these, or they do not have enough data?

[1]: [http://www.turkicresearch.com](http://www.turkicresearch.com) [2]:
[https://medium.com/@ilyakavalerov/greek-before-homer-how-
lin...](https://medium.com/@ilyakavalerov/greek-before-homer-how-linear-b-was-
cracked-8c6fc2e7b193?source=friends_link&sk=e8441a3a0b1f6eb262ec2ca3014b1e61)

~~~
andyjohnson0
There is a transliteration of the Voynich text at [1]. I have no way to judge
how complete or accurate it is, but it appears to be a useful piece of work.

[1] [http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html](http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html)

~~~
DonaldFisk
The most widely used transliteration, by Takahashi into EVA, is mentioned on
that page, which is on Rene Zandbergen's web site. There was no intention of
making EVA phonetically accurate, as we don't know how, if at all, the Voynich
Manuscript text was supposed to be pronounced. However, it is reasonably
pronounceable. You can find Takahashi's EVA transliteration at
[http://www.voynich.com/pages/PagesH.txt](http://www.voynich.com/pages/PagesH.txt)

~~~
dane-pgp
For what it's worth, there has been some work on parsing Voynich words into
syllables, which might be a more helpful level to work at.

"Taking into account words which couldn’t be syllabified (2.6%), words with
more than three syllables (0.4%) and words with rank errors (1%) we can see
that the Body Rank Order theory accounts for 96% of all word types with more
than four tokens."

[https://agnosticvoynich.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/a-new-
word-...](https://agnosticvoynich.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/a-new-word-
structure/)

~~~
DonaldFisk
It's well-known that there's a grammar of glyphs _within_ "words" (i.e. groups
of glyphs separated by spaces), but it's premature to identify syllables. Most
words seem to have prefixes and suffixes, without anything in between.

------
twic
> the illustrations of women bathing strongly suggest that the work is
> concerned with distinctly European traditions of balearic treatment of
> illnesses

I assume the author means "balnearic", but i certainly prefer to imagine that
he is referring to the foam party at Amnesia.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Why not both?
[https://soundcloud.com/dimkelly_music/sets/balnearic](https://soundcloud.com/dimkelly_music/sets/balnearic)

------
nemo
>I've been reading the so-called secondary literature for about a year. What
compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for the most
part commentators really do not know what they are doing.

Bright red flag.

~~~
__void
...few things are certain but that voynich's manuscript is NOT in Latin is
sure: they would have already translated it centuries ago (i.e. when it was
written). This person by his admission has only been studying the problem
"online" for a year on "so-called secondary literature" and "hi-res scans", so
writing things like:

> What compels me to come out is the discovery over this past year that for
> the most part commentators really do not know what they are doing.

is simply ridiculous.

This man is arrogant and full of himself and like all arrogant people he
ignores hundreds of papers on the topic written by hundreds of people before
him.

This is not how research is done.

------
saberdancer
It's quite possible it is a hoax intended to get a interested buyer to buy the
book. If Rudolf II owned it, it's likely he payed a lot to get it. It wouldn't
be a first forgery/hoax.

------
anotheryou
I can't recommend Volder Z's youtube serien on it enough.

Sadly he has taken them down since promising an update for a looong time...

For the super interested, I have downloads :)

All I can link you is a (still great) video on alphabet evolution
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul8NVfWKXZg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul8NVfWKXZg)

~~~
Randor
Hi,

Volder Z (Derek Vogt) came to the conclusion that it was a Romani language
written by nomadic peoples and written in a Syriac derived script.

The Enochian project has attempted to phonologically translate the Voynich
manuscript:

[https://kulibali.github.io/enochian/](https://kulibali.github.io/enochian/)

~~~
anotheryou
cool, first word I hovered over translated to penis XD

~~~
anotheryou
haha, downvotes. Don't be so prude, have a laugh with me.

(or enjoy the chance to double downvote if that does something for you)

------
scandox
I always found the style and imagery strongly reminiscent of some of the works
of Artists included in the Prinzhorn collection (Artistry of the Mentally Ill
was his major work).

It has that atmosphere of a self contained mental world.

------
edgarvaldes
I can't explain why, but I would be sad the day the Voynich gets solved.

~~~
michrassena
I have a similar feeling with no rational basis. The fact that something so
accessible exists and which no one can decode is a bit inspiring. I've
certainly enjoyed exploring the world's languages trying to find a match for
what I see in the manuscript, however unlikely it is that a non-expert could
decode it. It does feel like a treasure hunt anyone can join.

Once we can read the text, it will most likely describe something mundane.
Perhaps it is a text on herbology, like it appears. For me the mystery is
worth more than whatever the manuscript contains. I don't think it will open
the door to understanding history and a culture like the Rosetta stone did.

------
isoprophlex
Are there transcriptions available of voynich script into ascii?

Someone with access to GPT3 should try having it translate some bits into
English. Would be the most shocking 'look what GPT can do' moment, to me!

~~~
dane-pgp
Alternatively, there is an AI technique for translating between languages
without needing a bilingual dictionary or parallel texts[0].

There may not be enough data in the Voynich manuscript to generate an accurate
translation of any word in it, but the model generated by the AI might be
enough to decide which language is closest to Voynichese, or which
transcriptions of the manuscript are the least "noisy".

[0]
[https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/11/29/241639/artificia...](https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/11/29/241639/artificial-
intelligence-can-translate-languages-without-a-dictionary/)

~~~
DonaldFisk
For this to succeed, the text would have to be meaningful in _some_ language,
which is by no means certain. All languages have grammars, but nobody has yet
discovered any grammar for the Voynich Manuscript operating outside of words.

~~~
dane-pgp
If it is not meaningful in any language, then we would not expect it to obey
Zipf's Law, however it has been shown that it does (as mentioned by an earlier
commenter).

[https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6085/has-it-
bee...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6085/has-it-been-
mathematicaly-determined-that-the-voynich-manuscript-is-not-
gibberis/16748#16748)

~~~
DonaldFisk
If it didn't obey Zipf's Law, we could safely conclude it wasn't in an
unencrypted language, but you can't make the reverse inference, as lots of
phenomena obey Zipf's Law which are nothing to do with language. I've
generated a fake Voynich Manuscript which I can assure you is entirely
meaningless, but it obey's Zipf's Law. Here it is:
[http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/generated-voynich-
manuscrip...](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/generated-voynich-
manuscript.html)

And here's the proof it obey's Zipf's Law:
[http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/VoynichZipf.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/VoynichZipf.html)

Two other researchers (Gordon Rugg and Torsten Timm) have also generated fake
Voynich Manuscripts, and theirs obey Zipf's Law too.

~~~
Daniel_sk
“ Zipf’s law was discovered centuries after the accepted date of creation of
the Voynich text. Thus, proposed solutions like the use of sixteenth-century
cipher methods, although not impossible, can hardly account for the presence
of Zipf’s law in the Voynich text.”

~~~
DonaldFisk
The constraint the author of the Voynich Manuscript would have been working to
is that it had to look at least superficially like a natural language. The
bare minimum for that is that the choice of current glyphs depends on the
previous glyph, and I think that would have been obvious even at the time the
Voynich Manuscript was written. I think that's a necessary (but not a
sufficient) property of all alphabetic languages, and suspect it's enough to
make the distribution Zipfian. It would be nice to have a mathematical proof
or an experimental verification that it's always or nearly always Zipfian.

Generating text in that way doesn't require a prior knowledge of Zipf's Law,
and I don't think it was unthinkable in the 15th Century.

~~~
dane-pgp
It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that
there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I
still think that an Occam's Razor approach would rule out a hoax.

How likely is it that someone (or even some group) trying to perpetrate a hoax
would come up with a method which was not only undetectable by analytical
tools available at the time but also by tools that wouldn't be invented even
centuries later? I suppose we should compare it to the invention of the
Vigenère cipher, in the 16th century, which was only broken in the 19th
century.

Conversely, we have examples of texts written in forgotten languages which
were later translated / remain untranslated, and we don't / didn't assume them
to be hoaxes (assuming they obey Zipf's Law). We also have examples of people
inventing new written languages for spoken languages that didn't have a
(known) written form, so I think Occam's Razor would support the hypothesis
that this is what happened with the VM.

~~~
DonaldFisk
The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. Nothing else is written in the
same script. A few others from the period are encrypted, notably Bellicorum
Instrumentorum Liber by Giovanni Fontana, but they're trivial to decipher.
Only one other I'm aware of has any naked women in baths.

For other scripts, there either are numerous texts for each (e.g. Egyptian,
Sumerian, Mycaenean Greek, Khitan, Etruscan, Rongorongo), or very few short
texts (e.g. Pictish). Not a stand-alone 240 page book.

But there are examples of forged documents from the middle ages, e.g. the
Gospel of Barnabas and the Donation of Constantine.

I tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, before discovering that there were
other, simpler explanations for its apparent meaningfulness (e.g. the
observations described in the Montemurro & Zanette paper):
[http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html)
. It's possible it's some kind of verbose cipher devised by someone ahead of
his time. It's even possible, though very unlikely, that it's written in a
Northwest Caucasian language. I've ruled out other language groups.

The approximate adherence to Zipf's Law is telling us something about how the
text was produced. When I have time, I might look into whether state machine
generated output follows Zipf's Law. I suspect it does generally, and know it
does for the text I generated, but I'd like solid proof and it would be
another nail in the coffin of the idea it's unencrypted or lightly encrypted
text. Or it might not.

~~~
dane-pgp
Thank you for that excellent overview. It's interesting that your Principal
Component Analysis[0] pointed to a Caucasian language, as did a more recent
Hypervector Analysis[1]. How likely is it that a 15th century process for
generating meaningless text would not only follow Zipf's Law but also give
consistent and plausible results under those analyses?

[0]
[http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html)

[1]
[https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid395...](https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid39598)

------
andreareina
There's the xkcd interpretation:
[https://m.xkcd.com/593/](https://m.xkcd.com/593/)

------
Igelau
I'm of the opinion that it's not supposed to make sense. I think it's a
sample: a demo herbal void of any valuable content. Its purpose is to showcase
the abilities of the author/illustrator and nothing more.

~~~
moftz
Why not just copy sections of the Bible if it's just a sample of work? Why go
through the extra effort of creating a new script and possibly a new language
just to show how well you can write? Latin would have been the predominate
language for manuscripts at this time so writing in Latin would have been a
better example of the writer's skills. These kinds of manuscripts took a lot
of effort and resources to put together so if someone was just trying to make
a portfolio of their work, do you think they would need to produce such a
large volume when several pages would have sufficed?

~~~
Karawebnetwork
We use Latin in "Lorem Ipsum" because most people are unable to read it today.
This makes sure that the viewer focus on the page layout and images and not
the text itself.

If it was written in Latin during an era where everyone could read Latin, it
wouldn't be the same concept.

~~~
Fargren
You are not wrong, but bear in mind that Lorem Ipsum is not latin, is latin-
looking gibberish.

~~~
AquinasCoder
It's ultimately a corrupted version of Cicero's "de Finibus Bonorum et
Malorum".

