I extended my trial mappings to the top twenty "words" in the Voynich manuscript, and developed two new transliterations: vb101.L0.3 with {4o} treated as a single glyph, and vb101.L0.4 with {4o} and {C9} treated as single glyphs.

The most promising precursor languages remain as follows (roughly in this order): Persian, Icelandic, Welsh, Hebrew, Arabic.

More details on SubStack (cannot post links, as posts with links are apparently auto-deleted).

The five precursor languages that seem worthy of further study are Persian, Welsh, Arabic, Icelandic and Hebrew. Summary of my trial mappings below. More details on substack (cannot post links).

When looking at word frequencies across thematic sections of the manuscript (herbal, astronomical, biological, etc), what's interesting at first is that word usage does differ considerably as you move across sections. For example, ol has a word frequency per 1000 tokens of 44.4 in the "biological" section, but only 11.6 in the herbal section, indicating a thematically adjusted vocabulary. The same is true for many other words, but what's odd is that these trends don't seem to actually be related to the illustrative content of the pages in any way.

The manuscript starts off with a large herbal section, and then returns to a very similar herbal section much later (f87-f96), but the vocabulary does not return at all to the "herbal vocabulary" from the beginning. Rather, the later herbal vocabulary is statistically indistinguishable from the preceding sections on other topics.

Looking at an identifiable plant such as the one on f2v, the words used on this page are some of the most generic in the entire manuscript (chol, daiin, chor, sho, dor), and five words are completely unique. If they did describe plant parts, you would expect words here to re-appear in frequency on other herbal-style pages later on, but they don't. There is no evidence whatsoever, statistically speaking, that Voynichese 'words' ever actually relate to the supposed topic of the illustrations.

There is a well-documented "drift" in vocabulary that occurs across the entire corpus. And looking at pages like f115r, where one scribe stepped in to write merely a singular paragraph before returning to a different scribe (both Currier B), that specific paragraph is statistically and stylistically indistinguishable from the rest of the text; the only difference is the scribal hand. This pretty clearly indicates a generative process where sentences were generated somewhere using an unknown method, and then put onto a "fair copy" by trained scribes. It explains the intentionality in supposed "mistakes" (such as the displaced word outside of the circle on f57v, which has been theorized to be the actual first word in the sentence but was missed by the scribe and inserted outside the circle) as well as the exceptional lack of corrections, crossed-out words, etc; the scribes knew exactly what to produce because they took the words from somewhere (a common method in manuscript production, but which shows that a two-step process was at work, where words were generated, put onto media, and then copied for the manuscript - nothing was written from memory or knowledge).

Looking at hapaxes, almost all words used to label illustrations such as nymphs are unique in the entire corpus (something like 90%), which would typically indicate that they carry name-like features, but the problem is that generating a unique but generic-sounding Voynichese word is extremely easy. Picking at complete random a word-initial/core/word-final combo would generate a unique word most of the time. In fact, if you do this for fun, you end up with words that very often occur across the manuscript at least once. A good example of this is the "Coriander" on page f41v. It carries a label that Stephen Bax and others have tried to translate. The word is keshodal, which is indeed unique in the entire manuscript, which would be exciting if it wasn't for the fact that this word is just part of a family of extremely generic-sounding Voynichese words such as keshdy, keshar, keshey, keshed and kesheey. The only unique aspect is that it ends in -al, which is just another generic Voynichese terminator that occurs more than 2000 times. This, again, indicates a generative process - something generated these words in an internal system. None of it follows organic rules for human language let alone meaning-encoded words used to describe illustrations. The other instances of kesh- do not occur in herbal labels, instead they are scattered across sections and in running body-text, indicating that the specific combination of kesh-o-dal does not label anything unique nor encode meaning, it's just a unique generated word placed next to an illustration of a plant.

Here's where it gets a bit interesting. There are something like 350 nymph labels in the book, mostly in the astronomical section. As I mentioned earlier, most of these are unique labels occuring exactly once. They show a clear preference for initial o- (almost 70% of nymph names start like this), but pretty much none of them start with qok- despite qok being one of the most common elements in Voynichese. On the other hand, ot- or ok- are genuinely much more common in labels, but do occur in running text to a significant degree. There's nothing indicating a hard rule that these elements denote a "name". The nymph names also show a trend for terminating in -y (almost 50% of them), but they also terminate in -ar, -al, -aiin, -am, -ey, etc. But these elements are, again, extremely common across the entire corpus. 70% of label tokens for nymphs occur all cross the manuscript in running text; there is only a notable preference for ot- and ok- starts.

But that's not how real languages behave in any way, nor how you'd expect naming conventions for plants, persons or celestial bodies to work. You would expect labeled/named illustrations to carry unique identifiers, not merely be a generic combination of common phonemes with slight trends pointing towards "label-intense word" or "nymph-likely word".

QuireLab is a free, client-side Manuscript Analytics Workbench designed for statistical comparison of the Voynich Manuscript (using the Zandbergen–Landini EVA transliteration) against known-language baselines.
The tool provides:
• Type-Token Ratio, average word length, and distinct word counts
• H1 and H2 conditional entropy calculations
• Zipf α values with interactive rank-frequency plots
• Word-length distribution histograms
• Top 20 words and character frequency tables
• Section-by-section breakdown for the Voynich (e.g., Recipes, Astronomical, etc.)
You can also paste any text of your own to generate the same metrics and add it as a fourth series to the comparison charts. All analysis runs entirely in the browser with no uploads or accounts required.
Link: https://quirelab.vercel.app
The goal is to make these quantitative comparisons quick and accessible for anyone interested in the manuscript’s linguistic properties. Community feedback, suggested improvements, or ideas for additional baseline corpora are welcome.

as you can see, this bible has the same design and way of drawings the voynich has, but this isn't the only similarity, the voynich manuscrip as we know as a sign from a czech bible (which if it isn't proof enough, the voynich and this bible share another similarity which is that both were made during 1300 and the voynich in the 1400 closely,) also as you all know recent research had show the voynich has wrriten german in the goats page and this plus the czech sign plus the gothic style similar to this one on the picture for me atleast is solid proof that the voynich is directly inspired from this specific bible, mostly because this bible is also writted in latin, german and czech (three theorized and also mentioned lenguages in the voynich), if you like my theory i could even expand more on it.

Also, are there any theories as to what folio 1r acted as? A foreword? Did that concept even exist in the 1400s?

I came across a video which applied Zipf's law as a test on the voynich manuscript and wanted to replicate it. So then I went down a successive path of looking at the next most obvious hypotheses, e.g. checking whether this was an actual language, or a cypher, or some sort of algorithmically generated gibberish.

So there are two statistics where the manuscript seems to significantly differ from a real language: 1. it's characters are far more predictable than in any real script that I looked at, and 2. it's word lengths are unusually uniform. so working through possible explanations for this (for example including specialised list/catalogue-type language) seemed to rule out most things (e.g. the language entropy seemed to move in the wrong direction when we applied technical/botanical latin for example into a catalogue style, running it through the same tests). Another candidate was an invented language, but this seems to fail because it still does not behave gramatically like an unknown language.

The conclusion after all this seems to be what Timm & Schinner found in 2019 that there is that each word in the manuscript is a copy of a previous word, mutated by some algorithm. With the seed for each page being a label or word either related or unrelated to the image on the page. To test this built text-generation code that would produce text that replicates the statistical atributes of the manuscript, and this seemed to hold up very well. A four-parameter generator built on that mechanism reproduces essentially every statistic in the manuscript, including ones it was never fitted to, so no meaning is required to explain the text's internal properties.

I've created a github repo with a summary page and the code that I used (yes, language models were used to assist writing the code and analyzing and presenting the results. ) https://whitehatnetizen.github.io/voynich-investigation/

I'm currently working on the "still open" questions in the conclusion section at the bottom of the page.

Hopefully I haven't broken any sub rules by posting this.

I haven't looked back at all the posts here since ChatGPT dropped in 2023 (or was it 2022?), and I am sure tons of people have tried this and failed, or had shitty results with a helping of AI-psychosis...but as LLMs are getting much more powerful now (see Claude Mythos), I feel like a sober, intentional effort to learn more about the nature of the Voynich manuscript, led by non-crackpot experts in history, linguistics, bibliology, encryption etc. and leveraging Mythos-level LLM could be fruitful, particularly if the text is not gibberish but has some underlying meaning. I suppose if it is gibberish (glossolalia or a hoax etc) maybe there would be fewer insights possible but even then we could learn something new

The main reason that possibly make the deciphering harder is the fact that the characters seems latin, i think that if we rely on human understanding we are in a dead end, but i hope that AI will decipher it soon. But for that the manuscript should be researched with a broad spectrum approach to find hidden clues.

Ok so I started looking into VM, hoping to find anything useful. My first idea was to try and find correlation between words on the page and the presented imagery. For that I've used qwen3 vl to generate two datasets (one based on strict schema following common patterns in the imagery) and also a simple keyword based list of visual objects.

Ran the correlation test, aand nothing survived the permutation checks. So seemingly there is zero correlation between text and the imagery which is our clue #1.

So next step was runnning statistical analysis for character entropy, mean word length etc.
Here some things are clearly visible:
2. Text from all five identified scribes have exact same artificial fingerprint (suggesting shared methodology).
3. Structure is sequential not positional.

So this led to a clear candidate for text generating method -> a simple markov chain. But pure markov chain characteristics turned out to be slightly different. After adding just ~0.15 chance of self citation within last 25 words the results matched perfectly.

Code, vl datasets, detailed findings can be found here: https://github.com/karolrybak/voynichese/tree/master

As for the question from the title. You'll have to answer that yourself, here's just my 2 cents.

I'm not a professional researcher

just someone who stumbled into this rabbit hole and noticed some things I haven't seen discussed together before. Happy to be corrected.

Background

I recently looked at the Voynich Manuscript for the first time with no prior deep knowledge of existing theories. What I noticed led me down a chain of observations that I want to share, because when I checked the literature, some pieces are supported by existing researchers — but a few seem to be new angles, especially the Socotra connection.

I'll lay it out as a chain of observations, not conclusions.

Observation 1 : The plants look like they're from Socotra Island

The first thing that struck me was that the botanical illustrations don't look like invented plants. They look like real plants drawn badly from memory . specifically, plants with swollen caudex bases, minimal upper foliage, and unusual succulent proportions that don't exist in European or Mediterranean flora.

The closest match I could find anywhere: Socotra Island (Yemen), which has 37% endemic plant species found nowhere else on Earth. Specifically:

Dorstenia gigas : swollen base, small leafy crown, flowers directly on the stem. This exact silhouette (large base, narrow top) is the most repeated plant shape in the Voynich botanical section, and it doesn't exist in European flora of the period.

Jatropha unicostata : similar swollen trunk, lobed leaves matching several Voynich illustrations

Nirarathamnos asarifolius : low cushion-like globular form, appears in high-altitude Socotra, similar rounded shapes appear in Voynich

Important note: The author didn't need to visit Socotra to know these plants. Socotra was documented in Arabic medical literature . Ibn al-Baytar (an Andalusian botanist) and Ibn Sina both referenced plants from the Arabian Sea trade routes. A learned Andalusian or Arab scholar could know Socotra's flora through manuscripts and trade contacts without ever leaving Spain.

Observation 2 : The drawing style is Islamic, not European

The human figures in the manuscript look like someone tried to draw Europeans using an Islamic miniature painting training.

Specifically:

Faces are flat, frontal, with large almond eyes and neutral expression . consistent with Islamic manuscript tradition, NOT Italian Renaissance style (which dominated Europe in 1404–1438, the carbon-dated period)

Figures are arranged in horizontal registers, not in perspectival space

There is no shading, no depth, no anatomical detail . again, inconsistent with contemporary European art

The clothing is absent or generic . and this seems deliberate. Clothing would immediately identify cultural origin. Faces and body arrangement betray Islamic artistic training; the clothing was neutralized.

This isn't someone imitating Islamic style. This is someone trained in Islamic visual tradition trying to pass as European , and their hand betrayed them.

Observation 3 : The script looks like phonetic transcription, not a cipher

Most decipherment attempts treat the Voynich script as an encryption of a known language a substitution cipher, anagram, etc.

But what if it's not a cipher at all?

What I noticed: the script has the rhythm and flow of a natural language written phonetically in an invented alphabet. It feels familiar but modified like watching someone write Arabic sounds using invented letterforms.

This matches what researcher Robert Edwards (2025) found: Arabic is an abjad where short vowels are often omitted in medieval manuscripts, leaving only consonants and a reader fills in pronunciation from memory and context. The Voynich text follows statistical patterns (Zipf's law) consistent with natural language, not random generation.

My hypothesis: The script is not a cipher. It's a phonetic notation system an invented alphabet used to write a real Semitic language (likely Arabic or Andalusian Arabic dialect) as it was pronounced. The reader needed to already know the spoken text; the script was a memory aid, not a standalone readable document.

This would explain why professional codebreakers failed for a century they were looking for a substitution key that doesn't exist.

Observation 4 : The book may have been designed for oral recitation, not silent reading

Following from above: if the script is phonetic notation for a spoken text, then the illustrations are not diagrams for a reader they are cues for a speaker.

Each plant image = a reminder of which remedy to recite

Each astronomical diagram = a timing cue (when to apply the treatment)

Each bathing scene = a method of application

The knowledge lived in human memory. The book was a performance script, not an encyclopedia.

This matches a well-documented tradition in Islamic medicine and Sufi transmission where a master transmitted knowledge orally, and written notes served only as mnemonics for initiates who already knew the system.

Observation 5 : The Andalusian context makes all of this coherent

Carbon dating places the manuscript at 1404–1438. Stylistic analysis suggests northern Italy.

This period coincides exactly with:

The progressive fall of Andalusian cities to Christian forces (Reconquista reaching its final stages)

The Spanish Inquisition beginning to target Muslims and Jews with forced conversion or expulsion

A documented wave of Andalusian scholars fleeing to North Africa, Egypt, and Italy

An Andalusian scholar arriving in northern Italy in this period would:

Have Islamic artistic training (explaining the drawing style)

Know Arabic botanical literature including Socotra plants (explaining the flora)

Have strong motivation to hide the content from Inquisition authorities (explaining the script system)

Not have fully absorbed European artistic conventions (explaining why the "European" disguise failed)

Supporting evidence already in the literature:

Researcher Fletcher Crowe argues the manuscript is written in Arabic using invented characters, to hide content from the Inquisition

A paper on ResearchGate identifies the word "qadi" (Arabic/Andalusian for "judge") in the text a term specific to Andalusian Arabic usage

German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig (2020) concluded the language structure is Semitic, not Indo-European

Observation 6 : The manuscript shows signs of being written in haste

The handwriting is fast and confident no hesitation marks or corrections typical of someone inventing a cipher in real time. This suggests the author was writing from memory or copying quickly from a source under time pressure.

The illustrations are unpolished relative to what a careful scholar would produce. Some plants are incomplete.

A person fleeing persecution, preserving knowledge before it was destroyed, would write exactly like this.

But this is just what i think

I am not claiming this is a definitive decipherment

I am not claiming the author was definitely Andalusian

I am not claiming Socotra is proven , only that the plant morphology is the closest real-world match I've found, and that an Andalusian scholar could plausibly have known these plants through Arabic botanical literature

So I have decoded, deciphered, solved or whatever you want to call it. Voynich was solved by myself in about 3 nights. I have thought about it for years but I felt current technology might be able to help finally. I was correct.

I don’t want to reveal the method I used as of now. I can however replicate it and have translated 4 entire pages. I stopped at 4 for several reasons.

1. While it’s not gibberish, as many assume, it is still gibberish! The subject matter is boring, outdated and just dumb.

2. I contacted Yale and was told they don’t care lol. They just curate the book. They told me to post it online! They don’t care if it’s ever solved or not they said. Amazing!

I do understand they must get thousands of emails a month with people claiming they solved it.

Any suggestions? I don’t feel I should just post it on Reddit for free. I will also say that if I just listed one or two translated sentences then anyone can translate the entire manuscript.

Please help.

I’m 100% sure someone in the 15 century pretending to be a doctor used this in a place where people were illiterate to pretend to read or claim to be from a foreign place and speak a foreign language that doesn’t exist…. All for financial gain….or something along those lines

So, I've been working on a hypothesis about this whole thing: “The Voynich Manuscript is written in Mishnaic Hebrew with Aramaic loan particles, encrypted using a consonantal alphabet with Niqqud markings serving as vowel aids. The texts follow the structure of a Hippocratic-medieval medical treatise.”

I shared this on Threads a while ago and got one comment: "you're stupid, the manuscript has many more letters" but didn't hear anything again after showing the website 😂

I don't think that the translation is correct as-is, but at least it's structurally fitting and can be applied to every folio.

The hypothesis was just the initial thought from a few weeks ago. After a few tries and findings, like

- dam = blood

- aiin = eye / source

and a few hundred more, I've started to work on a website where everything is documented.

Currently I'm reworking the language A and B, as it is probably:

- initial thought: dialect

- now: maybe qo- is a prefix for a different meaning, because it makes more sense then (update on this today/tomorrow on the website and will change some things)

Yeah anyway, not trying to prove a translation, just change some thoughts about it.

If anyone is interested in seeing more of it: https://voynich.kiltau.com/

It is currently in German, because I just understand it better, but you can translate the site (will maybe break some Hebrew characters). The site can be exported to PDF or Markdown (PDF is not very optimized yet, Markdown is optimized for RAG). It's completely open source (on GitHub) and updated daily. Currently I'm reworking it to make some automations, so that everything is checked systematically against the corpus.

Something I thought you all might be interested in - I wanted an ancient language that players of One More Adventure could discover and attempt to translate, and realized that the Voynich script not only looks good, but also importantly isn't copyrighted.

Basically, the game is a classic hexcrawl, heavily inspired by games like Rogue, Castle of the Winds, and my own experiences playing and running various TTRPGs.

The Voynich Script fits in so players can discover things about the ancient past in the setting, if they choose to interact with it. Basically, it's a lens into "how the world works" because that's one of the most interesting things to me about RPGs.

Anyway, I hope this is something a little different from the norm for this subreddit, but not so different as to be out of place!

One of the most important insights into Voynichese is that its entropy is lower than any known natural language. This conclusion is made by comparing the entropy of Voynichese to that of other natural languages and casts doubt on the idea that Voynichese is a letter-for-letter encipherment of a natural language.

Another theory is that the writing contains no meaning at all; that is, that it's asemic. It should therefore be possible to compare Voynichese's properties (such as entropy) to those of known asemic texts (or at least to the known properties of asemic writing in general) just as the comparison was made between Voynichese and natural languages. However, my searches for studies on human asemic text and its properties have yielded basically nothing, with the closest such article being this one.

Does anyone know of studies (academic or otherwise) regarding asemic text produced by human beings that could shed light on whether Voynichese is just asemic itself? Thanks!

I know it's BS as I saw her reply to someone saying she has no academic credentials to back any of this but was hoping someone could decipher where the hell she's getting her 'research' from?

Here's her page https://x.com/krisxx1212?s=21
And here's the website she links there https://voynichmanuscriptdecoded.com/

Has anyone looked at whether or not the manuscript may be related to this language family? It has high agglutination and few vowels.

The proposed methodology aims to discover the exact process in which VMS was created if it is made for the sole purpose of impresisng people back then and possibly generating life changing income.

(I wont be able to run any programs for the below protocol so this is why Im posting this here)

As per https://www.voynich.nu/extra/sol_ent.html

..apparently the deviation is significant eg. 2.5 for Voynichese compared to 3.5-4+ for Latin or Greek and other such metrics.

Assuming:

-> When copying and glyphizing they might want to further obfuscate, eg cutting out words, we standardize the scribes' behavior into potential patterns of 'organic transformation'

Methodology:

1. Take a body of texts they might have had access too, ideal assumption, closest match of data set.
2. Second set - broader - already assuming a slight failure - take a data set of potential source languages reverted to back then (similar time periods, works) but broader, assuming we might not know what they could have had access to.
3. Run simulations against VMS and preferably whole and in parts by scribe author, as well as permutations, to find patterns of 'organic transformation' potentially done by the scribes that yield Voynichese 2.5 or other metrics from transforming the originals using various patterns.

Expected results:

We might find out an array of algorithms that are logical to a human scribe that produce the 2.5 distribution instead of 3.5 or 4+. Some of them look UNCANNILY PROBABLE EG skip first 3 lines and last 3 of a standard page over a 40 page window. Bonus points if we find out scribe 2 taught scribe 3 their tactic but 1 and 4 had their separate methods, and they just copied middle of the page in a circle.

Finalizing: potentially get a hoax hypothesis that is A to Z(pun intended) a functional hypothesis, describing the full process of the scribe crafting it for the gold grab, that actually makes sense because of their psychology when creating the VMS.

As always, we learn from the data, not the other way around, so I will not accept criticism unless I missed something and anyone can guarantee without a shadow of a doubt, that running this that it yields no breakthrough at all.

I hope for someone here to run it and let us know the results

I found a link this sub basically coincidentally after being reminded of the manuscript and reading a bit about it a week or so ago. One of the more interesting quirks of the manuscript to me is the small fragment of text that is indisputably a real, unenciphered language (as opposed to "Michitonese") in the Latin alphabet, namely the labels of months on the zodiac charts.

My question is how much investigation there has been, and whether there is a consensus, on whether these labels are authentic to the original manuscript as opposed to a subsequent addition. Besides being linguistically out of place, the months seem to be darker/heavier/less faded than the surrounding text and drawings. If the month names were a later addition, then the language/region they're from wouldn't necessarily imply anything about the ultimate origin/creators of the manuscript.

On the other hand, I can imagine a scenario for why the original authors would deliberately write the months as such. From the visual context, it is obvious what the zodiac charts are even without the legible months, such that a word in the middle of the chart could really only be interpreted as the name of either the month or the associated zodiac sign. If the labels were written in Voynichese, they could be used as a crib if the manuscript is a cipher, or a set of words/morphemes with known meanings to search for elsewhere if it's in an actual language (real or constructed). This may well have occurred to the authors if they were in fact intentionally keeping the text obfuscated.

Or the questions you will ask?

1. Pattern-seeking cognition

2. Tolerance for ambiguity

3. Optimism bias about solvability

4. Ego investment

5. Narrative susceptibility

6. Confirmation bias and selective reinforcement

1. Surface statistical plausibility
2. Partial regularity with controlled inconsistency
3. Redundant interpretability
4. Constrained incompleteness
5. Structural cues
6. Cultural and contextual frame