
Voynich manuscript: the solution? - noahth
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/
======
nkurz
Other than declaring that the solution is obvious to a self-declared expert
such as himself, the author (Nicholas Gibbs) doesn't appear to give any proof
of his theory.

So far I can can find online, this piece is the only thing he has ever
published about the Voynich manuscript:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich)

Who is Nicholas Gibbs? Does anyone besides Nicholas Gibbs trust his opinion on
these matters? And how did he convince the TLS to publish this drivel?

(to avoid being entirely negative, here's a link to a blog that shows what
some better Voynich research looks like:
[https://stephenbax.net](https://stephenbax.net))

~~~
mcguire
" _As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on
classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I
recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin
format._ "

Oh, my.

Either this is a parody or a tutorial on how to identify "crazy person goes
down rat hole" situations.

~~~
mcguire
" _Systematic study of every single character in the Lexicon identified
further ligatures and abbreviations in the Voynich manuscript and set a
precedent. It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript
represented an abbreviated word and not a letter._ "

And here we go....

~~~
mcguire
" _This was problematic until I realized that not only had the folios of the
manuscript been cropped (the images of flowers and roots have been severed and
the tops of folios hacked) but, more importantly, the indexes that should have
been there were now absent. Indexes are present in many other similar books: a
system of cross-reference for illness, complaints, names of plants and page
numbers. For the sake of brevity, the name of both plant and malaise were
superfluous in the text so long as they could be found in the indexes matched
with a page number._ "

Whee! It's like a slip-n-slide greased with butter.

------
dmbaggett
There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out
there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former
linguist) is this:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ)

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4)

tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac

~~~
sago
As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an
alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a
human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'.

The videos are an impressive phonological reconstruction, but I predict (based
on the assumption that the math isn't lying), that it would be effectively
impossible to get much beyond ad-hoc phonetic correspondences with Romany, to
any predictive morphology or syntax.

The solution in this article is rather plausible. If the writing is in a
highly restricted vocabulary, with highly restricted syntax, and highly
constrained domain, it would be possible to get the observed information
density.

Comparing it to, say, Linear B or Egyptian hieroglyphs is instructive. Both of
those clearly have the information density of regular human language.

In the end, the solution might be a combination. It might use some Roma/Syriac
nouns, but it seems clear it doesn't use them in anything like a normal
linguistic context.

Caveat: IANALinguist

~~~
dotancohen
> As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an
> alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a
> human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'.

That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens
of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital
letters, two glyphs per letter).

Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five
glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it's
letter. Or Korean, where each 'letter' is composed of two or three
interchangable components. Or Han, in which the number of instrument strokes
in the glyph affect it's meaning.

There are so many variations on what constitutes a letter, never mind an
individual glyph or a full word/concept, that one cannot use strictly European
analysis techniques on arbitrary writing systems.

~~~
joe_the_user
_Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five
glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it 's
letter._

But we don't have to imagine a random alphabet which Voynich might have been
written in. We can look at the actual language in the manuscript. It often
shows three or four Latin-like glyphs repeated. Unless you have access to some
special way these symbols are differentiated or otherwise convey information,
a way that all other would-be interpreters have missed, you really don't have
an argument.

And as far as European thinking goes - there's no evidence I know of a non-
European origin to the manuscript.

Edit: and the languages you cite have a larger, not smaller information
content than European languages, see;

[https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6167/most-
su...](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6167/most-succinct-
written-language/6604)

~~~
coroxout
I do agree that the repeated glyphs and almost-repeated "words" are a big red
flag against "can this actually mean anything?", and I'm not sure the idea of
abbreviations really explains that.

However, many medieval documents even in known real languages do contain
almost undifferentiated glyphs one after the other:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_\(palaeography\))

Not quite the same, but something similar might conceivably apply to e.g. the
Voynich's c-like characters.

~~~
joe_the_user
Well, I believe what article was saying was the text was shorthand for a
sequence of actions - repeated letters implied repeated actions. In this case,
sequences herbal infusions, bathing, magnets, etc.

IE, there's no text to translate, it's not an abbreviation for any standard
text.

------
dwringer
I see comments suggesting that it wouldn't be worth the effort to translate
this based on the author's hypotheses, but there has been a substantial
community around trying to do just that for a long time. FWIW The NSA appears
to have published a book around 1978, _The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant
Enigma_ [1], and a couple of the things from this article jump out at me after
having read that book that raise red flags about the article's interpretation.
The idea that there were multiple artists is far from being universally
accepted, and experts who have studied this in the past have not been able to
conclusively state that there were more than one or two authors or artists,
although the possibility does remain open. Secondly, the suggestion that each
glyph represents a full word in latin has also been studied - see the link for
more information, but the frequency distributions and vocabulary size do not
seem to make sense if that is the case (someone please correct me if I'm
wrong).

In all I am surprised more progress has not been made since the advent of the
internet and its crowd-sourcing potential. There is definitely no shortage of
interpretations all over the internet, and in headlines from time to time. The
last one I recall from a couple of months ago suggested that there was a
specific Jewish birthing practice being illustrated on one of the pages that
suggested a certain origin of the text. [2]

[1][https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-
fi...](https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-
publications/publications/misc/assets/files/voynich_manuscript.pdf)

[2][https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-
myst...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-mysterious-
voynich-manuscript-was-italian-jew-says-scholar)

------
kitanata
Like, is everyone ignoring the picture at the top of the article? That looks
like a pretty believable direct translation of the ligatures to me. I know its
not the whole thing, but it is plausibly consistent.

That image is titled p16_Gibbs1.jpg. To me that hints that the author is
serious and is planning to release a detailed paper.

His final statement at the end of the article is really bold. "Not only is the
manuscript incomplete, but its folios are in the wrong order – and all for the
want of an index."

Perhaps the author is going to provide the index, and the correct order for
the folios while providing what he believes to be the missing pieces from
other texts from that time period?

This article looks like a teaser to me for something significant. Let's hope
anyway.

~~~
mcguire
[http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html](http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html)

------
lisper
The idea that the Voynich manuscript is a medical text seems plausible, but
the theory that it uses a logographic representation (one symbol per word)
rather than an alphabetic or even a syllabaric (one symbol per syllable) one
seems less likely to me. A cursory examination of the manuscript
([http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html](http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html))
reveals that the lexicography looks much more like an alphabetic encoding than
a logographic one like Chinese. The symbols are collected into word-like
groups separated by white space. Also, it appears that there are too many
repeated symbols and insufficiently many distinct symbols for a logographic
language.

~~~
coldtea
> _The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space._

Couldn't the same (whitespace separation) be done for sentences in a
logographic representation?

~~~
lisper
Of course that's possible, but I don't think so. The lengths of the groups
seem to me to be distributed more like words than sentences.

[UPDATE:] More info here:
[http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html](http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html)

This is particularly interesting:

"The apparent lack of common phrases is one of the main anomalies of the
Voynich MS text."

If that's really true I think that's a big clue. (Exactly what it's a clue
_of_ I'm not sure :-)

------
fusiongyro
Where's the actual solution? I feel like I'm missing something because what I
see is some plausible commentary about it and some interesting discussion of
Latin and ligatures but where's the actual decoding of the writing?

~~~
CommieBobDole
As I read it, the writing is un-decodable because it's not really "writing" in
the conventional sense, it's recipes encoded using single-letter
abbreviations, many of which require an index to decipher. No index is
present, and the author surmises that it was never completed, or lost.

~~~
hcs
I'm reminded of the work that was done to reverse engineer the Intel ME 11
[1], it was compressed with an unknown Huffman code which the team was
nevertheless able to recover somehow. And that was with variable-length words!

[1] [http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-
me.html](http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html)

~~~
unkown-unknowns
From your link:

> In particular, MINIX was chosen as the basis for the operating system
> (previously, ThreadX RTOS had been used). Now ME firmware includes a full-
> fledged operating system [...]

Woah, did I read that correctly? That there is a version of MINIX running
inside of the Intel processors of presumably almost every modern computer with
an Intel CPU that has Intel ME in it? If so then that's insanely cool! I mean
I still dislike Intel ME itself and wish I could disable it easily and without
risking damage/destruction but the idea of there being a version of MINIX
running on my computer right now is quite cool.

~~~
sannee
Would be interesting to estimate if there are more MINIX instances or Linux
instances running at this point.

~~~
TeMPOraL
If you count Android devices as running Linux, then no, since most of them are
ARM-based.

------
eponeponepon
Fascinating, if accurate - and I rather hope it is. If it is, it would make
the whole thing a rather instructive example of how siloing knowledge can hide
truth; the author's domain knowledge has given him the tools to identify the
manuscript, but it's generally been in the domain of conspiracists and 'hidden
knowledge of the ancients' types.

It would be good to see a thorough study of it to test the author's
hypothesis, of course.

------
Havoc
Rather convenient "solution".

The solution is the heading and index...which are missing.

Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and
doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be
solved.

~~~
bsder
> Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and
> doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be
> solved.

Not at all. Someone more motivated than the author can choose to decode it. If
much of it was lifted, then you can trace back the lifted "recipe" to the
earlier work and construct the index.

However, it's going to be very painful, slow work. For no real gain (who
really cares about a sloppily done Medieval health self-help book?).

------
mordae
As Czech myself, I prefer to believe the theory of several clever guys
tricking someone important to buy a nonsense book of secrets, splitting the
spoils, having a good laugh. Resonates well... Heidrich called us the Laughing
beasts for a reason.

------
groby_b
"I have a brilliant proof, but not only is the margin too small to hold it, it
has been hacked off".

------
klunger
This guy started with a hypothesis and then set out to prove it by looking for
evidence. He then said the evidence was missing (hacked off) but his
hypothesis was still true. Really, it is not very persuasive.

------
bshimmin
I don't see a lot of "why" in this supposed solution. If what the author says
is true, it sounds like an incredibly painstaking process to encode all of
this, especially when it was something so tedious (it would make more sense if
the source material were interesting or salacious!). I can sort of understand
abbreviating the long plant names to individual symbols, referenced from an
index, and I can understand ligatures for things like "etiam", but why make
each and every single character represent a whole word? Surely the end result
is that the manuscript, even with the index, becomes very, very hard to read?

And is there a good explanation for why this document apparently stands alone
in history as the only manuscript written in this way? Were there others, and
we just lost them? Was this just a particularly egregious example of this
forgotten art, and others written in this manner were easier to decipher?
Lastly, there's a whole Wikipedia page about "scribal abbreviations" \-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation)
\- if decoding the Voynich manuscript were so easy as the author makes out
("It became obvious...") then why has some other medieval expert not already
figured it out in the near-century people have been studying this manuscript?

------
mntmn
What if it is just Lorem Ipsum by someone who could draw but not actually
write?

~~~
markbnj
Not sure if serious, but on the off chance... seems unlikely. We create "Lorem
Ipsum" gibberish to fill space because modern technology has made it trivially
easy to do so. The same exercise would have taken a medieval writer many
laborious hours.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
But in contrast to Lorem Ipsum might have been sold for a high price, _a la_
The Emperor's New Clothes?

Or, there's something called "spirit writing" isn't there, a sort of written
form of speaking in tongues? Presumably the doing of which is also considered
to be it's own reward.

Heck, perhaps a scribe went psychotic.

~~~
coroxout
It might have been sold for a high price, but vellum and coloured inks were
expensive at the time, and it is a very long document when a much shorter one
would still seem to fit the bill.

Seems a bit of a gamble if that was the plan, and the scribes were presumably
either well-to-do or trusted by someone well-to-do if they could get their
hands on the raw materials. That makes the prank/con/crazy spirit writing
theory seem less likely to me but certainly doesn't rule either out.

------
computator
A sample translation is the _key_ thing I wanted to read in this article, and
all they gave was an illegible low-resolution snippet without an English
translation -- very annoying.

As best as I can read, the purported Latin translation in the image at the top
of the article says:

 _Folia de oz et en de aqua et de radicts de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 2
et de radicis semenis ana 1 etium abonenticus confundo. Folia et cum folia et
confundo etiam de eius decocole adigo aromaticus decocque de decoctio adigo
aromaticus et confundo et de radicis seminis ana 3._

Feeding the above to Google Translate gives:

 _The leaves of Oz and added to the water and the aromatic radicts semen Ana
ana 3 2 seed and the roots ana 1 etium abonenticus the mix. The leaves, when
the leaves are decocole adigo and the mix of the aromatic decocque of the
cooking adigo an aromatic mix of roots and seeds Ana 3._

Yes, I realize that the author's translation might be completely mistaken, but
I'm curious to read what he thinks it says. If someone can make out the words
better, please do so.

~~~
tigershark
Ana is the equivalent quantity of different ingredients used in the
pharmaceutical preparation in Italy. To me that translation makes sense.
Google translate is messing up badly it should be something like this for my
remote knowledge of Latin: 1 leaf of oz in water, 3 ana (equivalent quantity)
of aromatic roots, 2 ana of seeds, mix very well together. Infuse the leaves
mixed together with the aromatic (roots) and with the roots infusion and mix
all together with 3 ana of root seeds.

------
emeraldd
So the whole thing is written in a form of shorthand and the core index/naming
that define what the individual pieces are is missing. I wonder if this wasn't
meant as a "production" manuscript but as a reference document for the
replication of a larger work?

~~~
abakker
was thinking the same thing. Kind of like a compression algorithm. Keep this
low-paper version with an index if a scribe needed to write out another copy.
Of course, if that were the cases, then it would probably be for a higher
volume book and some copies of the real thing might be lying around somewhere.

------
Nursie
I see a theory, not a translation, am I alone in this?

~~~
netule
Nope, hardly a "solution."

------
bjackman
Don't have time to read this properly but have been reading about the VM
lately, most interesting researchers I've found are Stephen Bax[1] and this
YouTuber[2]

[1] [https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5](https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-
sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-
sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ)

Some really interesting analyses in there.

------
tarboreus
He doesn't address any of the central mysteries of the manuscript, including
that none of the plants in the herbarium don't actually exist in nature and
the "tubes" that the women in the bath section travel through, not to mention
their odd skin coloration. Plus his exploration is convenient in that he
doesn't have to actually decipher anything.

------
questerzen
Other people have also suggested Latin as the most likely base language. A
better discussion is provided here:
[http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_...](http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_in_the_voynich_manuscript-225418)

------
MikeGale
A fascinating analysis, half done. If the whole text were decoded and the
indices rebuilt, would be more convincing.

------
jv22222
There is a good general synopsis of the Voynich manuscript on wikipedia:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript)

Interesting stuff!

------
jumpkickhit
Interesting. Noticed youtube pushing Voynich in suggestions out of the blue
last week, now there's an article posted up here days later.

------
sabujp
tldr;

    
    
        By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich 
        manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies 
        lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval 
        period, an instruction manual for the health and 
        well being of the more well to do women in society, 
        which was quite possibly tailored to a single 
        individual.

------
abakker
My theory: it is music, not writing. I wonder if that is even possible?

~~~
jes5199
any data can be interpreted as sound, but it might not be perceived as
musically coherent

------
chx
Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any
headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

------
forgotmypw
Site no worky without javascript, could someone paste a copy, please?

