New Romanian Voynich theory…

Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript’s plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian?

Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there’s a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief Wikipedia page), which is not terrifically far from the VMs’ timeline. And others have fleetingly suggested Romanian before: Kevin Knight’s well-known slides showed a machine-generated match for “VAS92 9FAE AR APAM ZOE ZOR9 QOR92 9 FOR ZOE89” [the first few words of f1r in Prescott Currier’s transcription] as Romanian (though admittedly Knight qualifies the auto-generated Romanian plaintext as “nonsense”). After all, Romanian is merely one of the many Romance languages, and we’ve had no shortage of those proposed.

So boldly step forward “Secret Sauce”, a member of the Ssssshh (“Super Secret History”) group of “less motivated and (less) enlightened Illuminati”, who all hail from Arizona somewhere utterly secret indeed. Except that their town “starts with a T and has an ASU in it“. Their image gallery shows clearly that the group has between four and five members, presumably depending on whether or not the waiter is taking the photo.

So far, so non-Romanian: but step through their “‎Doorway to the Origin of Never Told Ancient Secret Knowledge” (i.e. “DONTASK”)‎ and you’ll see that they take the radial labels on f67r1 (the famous APOD page) to be month names (ticking clockwise around from the double line in the outer rings) and use them as cribs into the underlying language. After looking at lots of month names in different languages, Secret Sauce noted that “traditional Romanian (or a closely related language) used terms for October and November which started with the same sound (B)“, and so concluded that enciphered Romanian would be a “likely candidate” for Voynichese’s plaintext. Follow this through and you get (if you squint a bit) a verbose-cipher-like set of correspondences between Voynichese and Romanian. Though it has to be said that quite a few Voynichese letters are marked up as corresponding to multiple plaintext Romanian letters. Nonetheless, here’s the start of Voynich Manuscript page f1r as deciphered into Romanian:-

…(etc) which Special Sauce somewhat hopefully renders as…

There are many gifts (which have been) set aside to bestow upon (us) in return (for our) humility.

We journey through (life) in passionate servitude (to God).

(Our) Heavenly Mother has chosen to reward (us).

Forgiveness (is) the gateway (to) a wondrous celestial land.

(There is) a grand home in paradise (in which) to live.

(etc etc)

Even if I am somewhat impressed at seeing “yt” and “yp” translate to “h” and “p/pa” (respectively), I have to say I’m getting more than a hint of a Stojko / Levitov buzz off this. Which is to say that more or less any transliteration could be rendered into a stream of nearest-match word fragments, corrected into nearby target language words, the grammar fixed, lacunae filled, organized into short punchy sentence-like blocks, and then all translated and resequenced into something almost resembling language. This is broadly parallel to the the way that the liquid substance dished out by the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser to Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

Even if you do manage to overlook this kind of non-workingness, the problem then becomes that this kind of approach inevitably doesn’t scale up to a full-length document the size of the VMs: John Stojko couldn’t really explain why anyone would write such repetitive historico-religious “Old Ukrainian” nonsense on such a large scale, and the same would seem to be true here.

So… sorry, Special Sauce, but I don’t think you’ve cracked the secrets of the VMs yet. But here’s a modern-day secret that you might like!