The secret of “aiin” and “aiir” revealed…

Here’s a novel explanation for the curious “aiin” and “aiir” pattern found throughout the Voynich Manuscript’s curious text (AKA Voynichese) that I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else.

In my 2006 book, I pointed out that the Voynichese stroke conventionally transcribed as “n” (in EVA) is actually far closer to a “v” with an embellished right stroke: I then went on to suggest that these lettergroups might well be pretending to be page numbers: “iiiv” for “2v” (i.e. folio 3 verso), “iir” for “2r” (i.e. folio 2 recto), etc. Yet however appealing an idea this might be, it fails to explain the preceding “a” sign (“i”-groups are almost always preceded by “a”). And so the follow-on question is this: why do “iiv” and “iir” appear as “aiiv” and “aiir” in the text?

The answer I now propose is brutally simple, and (dare I say it) possibly even obvious to anyone who has seen my recently posted page on the Voynich Manuscript’s own unusual quire numbers. Though quires were usually “signed” (i.e. they had signs added to them to allow a binder to be able to bind them together in the correct order) with quire numbers in the late Middle Ages, these quire signatures normally used quire letters in the early Middle Ages – a, b, c, etc. And so what “aiiv” would have most strongly resembled to a would-be reader circa 1450 is simply a rather old-fashioned reference to “quire a, folio ii verso“.

Having said that, not for a minute do I think that this kind of page reference is what the lettergroup actually represents – instead, I strongly believe that this is all part of the slightly convoluted rationale for the VMs’ cover cipher (i.e. what the cipher is pretending to be, rather than what it actually is), a deceptive surface arrangement of faux-historical letter shapes that attempts to tell/sell a misleading story to the casual observer.

All the same, I should mention that I did briefly wonder whether lettergroups such as “aiiv” apparently highlighting a page might simply be standing in for a letter hidden in plain sight on that very page, encoded (for example) as the shape of the plant or root there. In this manner, f1v could just about be read as “t” or “f” or “v”; f2r might conceivably be “m” or “e” (in the roots); f2v  “p” or “o” or “q”; f3r “v”; and so on. What is so intellectually appealing about this is that it would make the first quire nothing more than a huge one-page-per-letter steganographic cipher dictionary. Though this isn’t something I could myself accept, I thought I ought to flag it as a novel idea: errrm… neat, but rubbish. 🙂