This coming Friday, well-known Voynich Manuscript researcher Rene Zandbergen will (briefly) be in London, hence this impromptu Voynich pub meet announcement. 🙂

ReneZandbergen

If you’d like to come along, Rene, Philip Neal and I will be – from 5.30pm to 6pm onwards – at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, an historic London pub with its own riverside gallows especially for pirates. So if you do happen to have a wooden leg, an eye-patch and a bag bulging with pieces of eight, be aware of the potential for mishap. 🙂

If it’s a nice-ish day (i.e. not raining torrentially), the chances are that we’ll be in the beer garden / patio area – go through the pub, turn left after the main bar, and continue forward to an outside area. Good for dogs, too (particularly if you’re John Kozak, *hint*).

But if it’s a wet day (and let’s face it, that’s the English summer to a ‘T’), be aware that we could end up anywhere in the pub’s two floors. If so, mooch around looking for a table with a slightly tattered copy of “Le Code Voynich” on, and you’re almost certainly in the right place. Hope to see some of you there!

Every once in a while, I get accosted by something delightfully tangential to the while cipher mysteries arena. A nice example of this recently popped up as part of the University of Western Australia’s Second Life (a well-known online virtual world) presence, where a certain ‘Hypatia Pickens’ built herself a Voynich-themed area, with odd-looking plants and nymphs sliding down a curious slide into the cool water.

Naturally, that’s not the real story here, not when the question I immediately wanted answered was “who is Hypatia Pickens, exactly?

It turns out Hypatia’s real name is Sarah Higley; she teaches medieval literature at the University of Rochester; she wrote a 2007 book on Hildegard of Bingen’s Lingua Ignota (which I wonder whether my friend Philip Neal has yet seen); she has created a conlang (constructed language) called Teonaht; and she created the (largely satirical) Star Trek character Reginald Barclay.

All of which probably serves to explain her interest in the Voynich Manuscript, which is surely – if you believe all you read on the Internet – nothing less than a medieval constructed lingua ignota invented by aliens… specifically Ferengi (simply because the world is itself a lovable medieval Arabic term meaning Franks). 🙂

For years, numerous Voynich researchers have pored over the VMs’ confusing images, hunting for any tiny clues that might possibly be hidden beneath the clumsily-applied paint. And yes, I admit that I’ve done probably more than my fair share of this kind of thing (Curse pp.96-102 stands as testament to this endeavour): so it’s now interesting to hear that René Zandbergen believes that there is “rather strong” evidence (a) that some of the plant parts in the VMs have letters to direct the colouring of that page (let’s follow Vera Segre Rutz and call them “colour annotations), and (b) that those colour annotations are written in German. Here’s what René says:-

If we go back to the [alchemical herbal] web page of Philip Neal, one of the herbals mentioned there is “Vicenza, Biblioteca Bertoliana MS G.23.2.3 (362) s. 15, Italy and Germany“.

Actually, “G.23.2.3” is the old shelf mark and now it is usually referred to as “Vicenza MS 362“. It’s a 15th century Italian herbal, with illustrations from the alchemical herbal tradition. It also says ‘Germany’ because Segre Rutz in her book quoted by Philip describes that it has ‘colour annotations’ in German. Indeed, in the few illustrations I have from this herbal, you can easily see many occurrences of ‘rot’, ‘gr(ue)n’, ‘gelb’ (red, green, blue) and also ‘erd’ (earth) or ‘weiss’. Additionally it has one illustration with alternating red and green leaves, with alternating single ‘r’ and ‘g’ characters written inside.

These all look extremely similar to the few colour markings in the early quires of the Voynich MS. There’s a clear ‘rot’ in the root of f9v (already seen by many), there’s the ‘g’ in f1v, and then there’s another ‘rot’ with some individual ‘r’s under the paint of the viola tricolor mentioned above, and another ‘g’ to the side of the flower on the right.

Here’s one page of Vicenza MS 362 with ‘rot’ in the root (barely visible in this resolution), while this page has alternating ‘r’ and ‘g’ characters (and the same problem).

Well… the first thing to note is that if Vicenza MS 362 is an Italian herbal with German colour hints, then the same could well be true of the Voynich Manuscript – if we’re talking about a manuscript with depictions of Italian castles (there are actually two sets of swallowtail merlons on the nine rosette page), a provenance that (currently) starts in Prague, and Stolfi’s putative “heavy painter” adding organic-looking paints later in the VMs’ life, then there’s no obvious conflict between the two narratives. All of which begs a whole constellation of questions, such as:-

  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to be colour annotations?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to be written in German?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to have been written by the author?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven not to have been written by the author?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be dated independently of the VMs itself?
  • Can the letters hidden in the Voynich’s plants be proven to have been written by the author of one of the marginalia?

You already know what I’m going to say: let’s look at the primary evidence for ourselves. With the help of Jon Grove’s clever colour remover plugin (which I recently discovered can work inside IrfanView, a highly recommended hack!), you can make a pretty good stab at seeing past the paint to the letters beneath. Here is an image of what I found when I tried this on the top left flower on f9v (the viola tricolor page I mentioned recently):-

top-left-blue-flower-noblue

Note that even though I tried really quite hard to image process this to a satisfactory state, I didn’t really succeed to the degree that I’d hoped: but still, I think it’s good enough to see that (a) the claim that the top left petal clearly says “rot” doesn’t really hold up; (b) that there are colour annotations in at least three of the five petals in the same hand; and (c) that the colour annotations are even smaller than the Voynichese text.

Let’s move on to the claimed colour annotation in f4r’s root. In “The Curse”, I built a whole cryptogrammatic superstructure on top of my reading of this (rotated) as “TOA”, which is one possibility (though in retrospect, I do see how it seems a little hopeful). However, I also think that reading “rot” here (as a column of letters) is just as hopeful but in a completely different way.

f4r-rot-cropped

However, if you assemble these two (claimed) colour annotations onto the same page and add in the f66r and the f116v marginalia, I think you find something really very surprising indeed:-

voynich-marginalia-link

What I’m claiming is that they all seem to share the same unusual-looking “topless p with a preceding upstroke” first letter (even the supposed “portas” word, which I’ve never believed was the right reading at all). What does it mean? Was all this added by the author or by a later owner?

Update: here’s the leaf Voynichese painted over in f2r René mentions in his comment #1 below (but with the green paint removed), with the rather puzzling EVA “ios.an.on“:-

f2r-leaf-closeup-nogreen

As promised (though a little later than planned), here’s the transcript of the second IM session I ran at the 2009 Voynich Summer Camp in Budapest. Not quite as meaty as the first IM session, but some OK stuff in there all the same. Enjoy!

[11:56:09] NP: Okeydokey, ready when you are
[11:56:18] vc: Okedykokedy
[11:56:27] NP: 🙂
[11:56:35] vc: We are.
[11:56:35] NP: I think that’s on f113r
[11:56:40] vc: …
[11:56:45] NP: 🙂
[11:56:55] NP: So… how has it all gone?
[11:57:12] NP: Tell me what you now think about the VMs that you didn’t before?
[11:57:27] vc: It should be simple.
[11:57:36] vc: The solution should be simple.
[11:57:41] NP: but…
[11:58:07] vc: But …
[11:58:33] vc: The verbose cipher still permits us a lot of possibilities.
[11:58:52] NP: Verbose cipher only gets you halfway there
[11:59:03] NP: But that’s still halfway more than anything else
[11:59:28] vc: We could synthesize a coding which is capable to produce the same statistical properties as the MS
[11:59:48] NP: Yup, that was (basically) Gordon Rugg’s 2004 paper
[11:59:58] vc: simple enough to do manually of course
[12:00:31] NP: The problem is one of duplicating all the local structural rules
[12:00:40] vc: Gordon’s generating gibberish by encoding gibberish
[12:01:06] NP: Basically
[12:01:25] vc: Yes, we suspect that the text contains real information in a natural language.
[12:01:30] vc: We tried this.
[12:02:06] NP: Rugg’s work requires a clever (pseudo-random) daemon to drive his grille thing… but he never specified how someone 500 years ago could generate random numbers (or even conceive of them)
[12:02:07] vc: We tried to encode for example the vulgata with our method
[12:02:10] NP: ok
[12:02:23] NP: into A or B?
[12:02:24] vc: throw dices I guess?
[12:02:26] vc: lol
[12:02:37] NP: only gives you 1-6 random
[12:02:48] vc: 3 dices
[12:02:52] vc: ect
[12:02:52] NP: two dice give you a probability curve
[12:02:56] NP: not flat
[12:03:02] vc: hmm
[12:03:06] vc: roulette wheel
[12:03:11] NP: Anachronistic
[12:03:19] vc: Ok. We use no random.
[12:03:23] NP: 🙂
[12:03:25] vc: our encoder is deterministic
[12:03:33] NP: Good!
[12:03:35] vc: that’s the point
[12:04:28] vc: We suspect that the “user” added some randomness in some of the aspects of the encoding, but this is not overwhelming
[12:04:49] NP: That’s right
[12:05:21] vc: We also picked out the A and B languages
[12:05:23] NP: Though some aspects (like space insertion into ororor-type strings) were more tactical and visual than random
[12:05:27] NP: Good!
[12:05:33] vc: with different methods
[12:05:52] vc: so we basically verified a lot of past results
[12:06:17] NP: Do you have a synthetic A paragraph you can cut and paste here?
[12:06:17] vc: After that, we decided to concentrate on the first 20 pages
[12:06:22] NP: Good!
[12:07:17] vc: for example, A languages uses ey or y at the end of the words, while B language uses edy instead
[12:07:51] vc: Synthetic sample… ok, just a minute
[12:08:29] NP: ey/y vs edy – Mark Perakh pointed this out too, and suggested that it meant B was less contracted than A. It also forms the core of Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Biological Paradox”
[12:09:25] vc: Our results are largely independent – the guys didn’t know the past results
[12:09:54] NP: That’s ok. 🙂
[12:10:41] vc: nu stom huhoicpeey strifihuicom ristngngpeet pept suhors periet pescet sticpescom ichoey pt om icpeript
[12:11:17] NP: I hope that’s not EVA
[12:11:41] vc: Y, of course not
[12:12:08] vc: not close, but the whole thing started here when some of us tried out a method which produced some non-trivial statistics very similar to VMS
[12:12:43] NP: I’m certainly getting a partially-verbose vibe off this
[12:12:52] vc: the original:
[12:13:17] vc: haec sunt verba que locutus est
[12:13:18] vc: Moses
[12:13:40] NP: Ummm… that’s pretty verbose, then. 🙂
[12:14:04] vc: Again, a deterministic, static automaton.
[12:14:15] NP: Fair enough!
[12:15:09] NP: Sorry for asking a lecturer-style question, 🙂 but how has doing that affected how you look at Voynichese?
[12:16:03] vc: Sec
[12:16:49] vc: discussing 🙂
[12:17:38] vc: it’s a coded natural language text. We suspect that the language is Italian – from measured results.
[12:18:00] vc: That’s why we are very curious about your news!
[12:18:21] NP: Let’s finish your news first!
[12:18:38] vc: ok. Was that an answer for your question?
[12:19:02] NP: Pretty much – would you like to write it up informally to publish on the blog?
[12:19:55] NP: 1000 words should cover it 🙂
[12:21:18] NP: (you don’t need to write it now!)
[12:21:25] vc: We admit that we would like to work on our theory and method a bit before publishing it, because one of the important statistical feature doesn’t match
[12:21:31] vc: yet
[12:21:35] NP: 🙂
[12:21:52] NP: ok
[12:22:06] NP: that’s good
[12:22:23] NP: what else have you been thinking about and discussing during the week?
[12:22:35] NP: VMs-wise, that is 🙂
[12:22:42] vc: 🙂
[12:22:54] vc: haha, you got the point…
[12:23:02] NP: 🙂
[12:23:56] vc: We toyed with the idea that the astrological diagrams are so poorly rendered that they aren’t astrological diagrams. They are coder tools.
[12:24:10] NP: cipher wheels?
[12:24:22] vc: Kind of. Yes.
[12:24:35] NP: (that’s been suggested many times, though never with any rigour)
[12:24:36] vc: we also tried to identify some of the star names.
[12:24:47] NP: No chance at all
[12:25:01] NP: That is a cliff with a huge pile of broken ships beneath it
[12:25:21] NP: sadly
[12:25:27] vc: been there, done that, yes
[12:25:30] NP: 🙂
[12:26:22] vc: We also observed that the takeshi transcription becomes less reliable when the text is rotated or tilted.
[12:26:36] vc: The other places – it is quite good.
[12:26:45] NP: Yes, that’s a fair enough comment
[12:27:08] NP: A complete transcription has been done, but it hasn’t been released – very frustrating
[12:27:25] NP: (by the EVMT people, Gabriel Landini mainly)
[12:27:17] vc: Also we are not contented with some of the EVA transcription’s choices of the alphabet
[12:27:34] NP: the “sh” really sucks
[12:27:39] vc: YES
[12:27:45] NP: 🙁
[12:28:53] NP: Glen Claston’s transcription added stuff in, many people use that instead purely for its better “sh” handling
[12:29:26] vc: hmm, ok
[12:29:53] NP: In a lot of ways, though, who’s to say? A single ambiguous letter shouldn’t really be enough to destroy an entire dcipherment attack
[12:30:04] NP: given that it’s not a pure polyalpha
[12:30:37] vc: of course
[12:30:54] NP: But analyses still don’t seem to get particularly close
[12:31:03] NP: Oh well
[12:31:23] vc: Analyses of whom
[12:31:24] vc: 🙂
[12:31:25] vc: ?
[12:31:29] vc: 😉
[12:31:35] NP: not yours, of course 😉
[12:32:32] NP: is that your week summarized, then?
[12:32:53] vc: Yes.
[12:33:16] NP: has it been fun? worthwhile? frustrating? dull?
[12:33:32] vc: All of them.
[12:33:34] NP: and would you do another next summer?
[12:33:57] vc: No need of it. Maybe with the rohonc codex
[12:34:00] vc: lol, of course
[12:34:13] NP: 🙂
[12:35:06] NP: I’m really pleased for you all – it sounds like you have managed to get a fairly clearheaded view of the VMs out of the whole process, and have had a bit of fun as well
[12:35:51] NP: Most VMs researchers get very tied up to a particular theory or evidence or way of looking at it – you have to keep a broader perspective to make progress here
[12:35:53] vc: let’s say two bits
[12:36:14] NP: “two bits of fun” 🙂
[12:36:21] NP: good

[I then went into a long digression about the “Antonio of Florence”, about which I’ve already posted far too much to the blog… so –SNIP–]

[12:51:50] vc: ooo wait a sec…
[12:52:16] vc: Can we ask Philip Neal to post some some pages of a reference book he uses?
[12:52:42] vc: sorry about the redundancy
[12:53:02] NP: He’s a medieval Latin scholar by training, what kind of thing would you want?
[12:53:39] vc: about the alchemical herbals. Can we manage it later?
[12:53:45] vc: Please go on
[12:53:51] NP: Well.. that’s about it
[12:54:10] NP: Obviously I typed faster than I thought 🙂

[13:00:11] vc: What do you know? How much people is working on a voynich-deciphering automaton based on markov thingies and such?
[13:00:37] vc: So basically with the same hypotheses like ours?
[13:00:57] NP: The problem with markov models is that they will choke on verbose ciphers, where letters are polyvalent
[13:01:08] NP: Nobody in the literature seems to have picked this up
[13:01:24] vc: bad for them
[13:01:50] NP: Unless you pre-tokenize the stream, Markov model finders will just get very confused
[13:02:03] NP: and give you a linguist-friendly CVCV-style model
[13:02:11] NP: that is cryptographically wrong
[13:03:04] NP: perhaps “multi-functional” rather than “polyvalent”, I’m not sure :O
[13:04:23] NP: So, I’m not convinced that anyone who has applied Markov model-style analysis to the VMs has yet got anywhere
[13:04:29] NP: Which is a shame
[13:05:04] NP: But there you go
[13:05:25] vc: We hope.
[13:05:47] NP: 🙂

[13:06:24] NP: Right – I’ve got to go now (sadly)
[13:06:48] NP: I hope I’ve been a positive influence on your week and not too dogmatic
[13:07:09] vc: Why, of course
[13:07:16] NP: And that I’ve helped steer you in generally positive / constructive directions
[13:07:30] vc: Yes, indeed.
[13:07:35] NP: (Because there are plenty of blind alleys to explore)
[13:07:41] NP: (and to avoid)
[13:07:52] vc: VBI…
[13:07:52] vc: 🙂
[13:08:07] NP: Plenty of that to step in, yes
[13:08:14] NP: 🙂
[13:08:24] NP: And I don’t mean puddles
[13:09:42] vc: Well, thank you again for the ideas and the lots of information 🙂
[13:11:18] vc: Unfortunately semester starts in weeks, so we can’t keep working on this project
[13:12:04] vc: but as soon as we earn some results, we will definitely contact you
[13:12:15] NP: Excellent, looking forward to that
[13:12:54] NP: Well, it was very nice to meet you all – please feel free to subscribe to Cipher Mysteries by email or RSS (it’s free) so you can keep up with all the latest happenings.
[13:13:23] vc: ok 🙂
[13:13:57] NP: Best wishes, and see you all for the Rohonc week next summer 🙂
[13:14:04] NP: !!!!!
[13:14:11] vc: lol 🙂
[13:14:21] vc: that’s right! 😉
[13:15:16] NP: Excellent – gotta fly, ciao!
[13:15:36] vc: Best!
[13:15:37] vc: bye

A big tip of the hat to Rafal Prinke: thanks to a swift reply from him last night, I can now say definitively that “The True Path of Alchemy” is not the VMs (confirming Rene’s suspicion), because both still exist independently. And the romanticized 1904 mention of the former by Henry Carrington Bolton that quickened my historical pulse yesterday with its uncanny resemblance to the VMs was, shall we say, rather less than 100% accurate. All the same, the affair is not completely closed just yet…

The manuscript of “The True Path of Alchemy” currently lives in the National Museum Library in Prague (though it doesn’t appear in any of their online catalogues). The first person to write about it in any detail was Otakar Zachar, whose 112-page 1899 monograph “Mistra Antonia z Florencie Cesta spravedlivá v alchymii” is available online (you can download it as a set of six 20-page PDFs). As an aside, “Otakar” was the name of Rudolph II’s pet lion, whose death in 1612 was (reputedly) seen as a portent of Rudolph’s own death later that year. Just so you know! 🙂

Zachar’s monograph contains (facing p.47) only one rather underwhelming scan of the original manuscript’s text: click on the following cropped & enhanced thumbnail to see a larger version:-

TruePath-f22v-f23r
“The True Path of Alchemy” f22v and f23r

Unless I’m hugely mistaken (no laughing at the back), the True Path appears to be written not in Italian or Latin but in Czech / Bohemian in an apparently 15th century hand, with the folio numbering in a standard 16th century hand.

Zachar also includes (facing his page 24) an image of a flask with a crown, which unfortunately appears as a near-black page in the scan (though you can just about resurrect it using fairly heavy image enhancement):-

TruePath-flask
“The True Path of Alchemy”, flask with a crown

According to note 43 on this webpage, a more up-to-date article on the Ms by V Karpenko appeared in Ambix 37, 61 (1990), which I shall try to read. Karpenko mentions that the ms contains 13 questions for telling whether an alchemist is false. Presumably #1 is: “does he/she claim to be an alchemist?” 🙂

As to attribution, one webpage I found seems to claim that the manuscript was actually written by Jan z Lazu (A.K.A. “Laznioro”, reputedly the first Czech alchemist) [the claim appears here as well]: but as my Czech extends no further than occasional words such as “rukopisu” (manuscript), I couldn’t say whether that relates to authorship, translation, or adaptation. Perhaps my Czech mate Hurychnioro will have a look and tell me how badly I’ve got it wrong. 🙂

I then went hunting for the MS reference in the scans of the National Museum Library’s card index, where Zachar’s book merits five cards (is that five copies? or five cross-references?): the card annotations mention “86 J 121”, “Schiller 294”, and “Zeyer 1977”. However, even though “86 J …” appears to be a plausible-looking shelfmark for the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze, searching for “86 J 121” in the Manuscriptorium returned no hits. Oh well!

Rene Zandbergen also very kindly sent over the GIFs absent from the voynich.nu site: unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious mention of the “True Path” there. Really, to identify any manuscript in the Kunstkammer inventory (whether the True Path or even the Voynich Manuscript!), you’d need to know how it was bound (i.e. whether the cover was red or white leather etc) and what else was bound in with it. Zachar and/or Karpenko may well have included this information, of course, but I’ve yet to get quite that far. 🙁

And so… back to Bolton, where this all started.

If you compare the basic factuality with Bolton’s floridity, I think you’d have to conclude that the two don’t quite gel:-

  • 1475” – should have been 1457 (d’oh!)
  • “beautifully illuminated” – though there are some pictures and illuminated letters, from the poor quality of the handwriting I’d be fairly surprised if they were “beautiful” per se
  • “rare” – given that it’s the only extant copy, perhaps we’ll give Bolton the benefit of the doubt on this one 🙂
  • couched in exceedingly obscure and mystical language” – the jury’s out, as Karpenko seems to gives the impression that the text is a touch more rational than most alchemical texts. All the same, an alchemy text that’s not exceedingly obscure is probably a fake, so perhaps this is just Bolton being tautologous. 🙂
  • “library of Wresowitz” – Rafal Prinke highlights a good-sized 1855 article on Czech alchemy by Ferdinand Mikovec in the periodical “Lumir”, which says that Vaclav Vresovec z Vresovic (d. 1583) bequeathed his library (containing various alchemical mss) to the town council of Mala Strana in Prague. However, even though linking “The True Path” to this collection would be a good guess, I saw no mention at all of Counsellor VVzV in Zachar’s monograph, so I’m a little skeptical…
  • high price” – without any textual source, this may well be another Boltonian ’embellishment’, let’s say. 🙂

Despite my obvious disappointment that the True Path hasn’t turned out to be an early sighting of the Voynich Manuscript, I remain optimistic that it might yet turn out to be linked with Filarete. For example, 1457 is a perfect match for when the Florentine claimed to have been collecting and writing his little books of secrets in his (ample) spare time. It may well be that nobody to date has thought to examine “The True Path of Alchemy” specifically with a Filarete hypothesis in mind – might there be some textual ‘tell’ hidden in there? There’s only one way to find out…

Finally, Zachar includes (pp.91-95) a decent chunk of Latin taken from Knihovna Národního muzea v Praze MS III H 11 that relates to this manuscript. Thanks to the online magic of Manuscriptorium, I can see that these Observationes quaedam circa suprascriptum processum Bohemicum appear on pages 129r to 153r, and that they were written at the beginning of the 17th century (the text specifically mentions “1606”). Later on I’ll ask Philip Neal if there’s anything hugely interesting there – though the chances are quite small, you never know until you look!

I recently bumped into a “Random Freebie” from blogger “Miss Black Pepper”: apropos of nothing much, she posted up a Voynich Manuscript Scrabble Tile Set, composed of nice little images clipped from the Voynich Manuscript (which she happens to rather like).

Of course, this set me wondering what a real Voynich Scrabble would look like. You see, the most appalling thing about this idea is that it is actually possible, in much the sameway that you don’t need to know what an ULVA is (don’t ask, but many people apparently eat it) to use it to score in Scrabble.

For Voynichese, the problem is that the alphabet used for most transcriptions (called EVA Hand 1) is a stroke-based alphabet, designed to capture what the letters look like (rather than what they are). Though elegant in its own linguistic way, this unfortunately led to a number of (frankly) rather odd design decisions, with a number of apparently unitary “glyphs” being split up into overlapping component bits. If you reassemble the most obviously glyph-like stroke groups back into glyphs, you could just about get a moderately workable set of Scrabble tiles. Note the four tall letters in the top-left row (these are called “gallows”) and the four “vowel-like” glyphs in the top-right row (these are transcribed as “a, e, i, o”).

voynich-scrabble-eva
Voynich Scrabble tiles (using the EVA transcription)

Voynich researchers have spent a lot of time working out abstract models for Voynichese, tiny generative grammars that attempt to predict what should (or indeed shouldn’t) be a valid Voynich word: Jorge Stolfi’s “core-mantle-crust” paradigm is one such model. But the awkward fact remains that none of these works massively well, either generating many more words than actually appear or generating far too few words of those that do appear in the ms.

(And anyway, the question remains what kind of vocab could ever be algorithmically generated… but let’s stay on track here).

You could use Voynichese tiles to play one of two basic types of Voynich Scrabble:

  1. You can only play words that actually appear in the Voynich Manuscript
  2. You can only play words as predicted by [Person X]’s generative grammar

(Quick hint: don’t play rule-set #1 against Philip Neal or Glen Claston, they’ll probably thrash the pants off you.)

Another factor that hasn’t been considered enough is the specific language differences that occur within the Voynich Manuscript. Prescott Currier identified ‘A’ and ‘B’ languages: but labels have a different usage pattern too, as do line-initial, paragraph-initial and word-initial letters. And so you might add a special kind of dialect ‘mode’ to your Voynich Scrabble, that only lets you play ‘A’-language words or ‘B’-language words (or label words) at certain times.

However, one problem I have is that I simply don’t trust the so-called ‘Voynich vowels’. For example, Voynichese ‘o’ functions in so many different ways within the text that I cannot easily believe it is a letter per se: rather, I would argue that it is a multi-function ‘trick’ token, that performs different jobs in different contexts. I’m also deeply suspicious about the ‘a’ and ‘i’ letters, particularly when they appear in ‘aiin’ groups: I argued in my book that these are used as a kind of visual framework to encode numbers using the backwards flourish of the “n” (which seems more like a ‘v’). And so I think the ‘vowels’ form a great big hole for linguists to jump willingly into (but that’s another story entirely).

Anyway, given that I have also long suggested that a small set of letter-pairs / letter-groups would form a more usable starting point for cryptanalysis than ‘raw’ EVA, here are the tiles I’d expect the original author to be most comfortable playing with (you’ll notice the absence of free-standing ‘a’, ‘i’ and ‘o’ from the set). Agree or disagree, here they are:-

voynich-scrabble-paired
Voynich Scrabble (using Nick Pelling’s verbose pairs)

Happy Voynich Scrabbling! 🙂

PS: OK, “ulva” is the name of the sea lettuce ulva lactuca, an edible algae / seaweed. Aren’t you glad you don’t play Scrabble competitively? 🙂

Here’s a quicky idea…

I have (possibly literally) a ton of books in my library, most of which seems to revolve around early modern / Renaissance history, telescopes, ciphers, and themes touching on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript. And somehow the mound keeps on growing, week on week. Even though I love them all, I can appreciate that (actually) this is a bit of a waste: and that I should really find some way of sharing the ones I’m not currently referring to with like-minded telescope / mystery / cipher / history aficionados (such as you, of course!)

All the same, it’s not immediately obvious how. For example, Marke Fincher wants (quite rightly) to borrow my copy of James Morrison’s excellent book “The Astrolabe” – but it’s a hefty old thing, and so wouldn’t be cheap to pop in the post. And so the right question to ask is: what’s a good way to share?

The image vaguely forming in my mind is of a roughly-once-a-month meet in a central London pub, where I wheel along a heap of books (some pre-requested, others just of general interest) and merrily pass them on, hoping to see them return intact at some stage in the future. I’ve been meaning to meet up with various people anyway (basically, to catch up with Marke and Philip Neal etc), and so adding a book-sharing angle on it seems to me like an eminently sensible community-ish thing to do.

Would anyone else be interested? Email me or comment below, thanks! 🙂

Not content with having given us fantastic English translations of all the key 17th century VMs-related documents, my old friend Philip Neal has found a new VMs-related letter.

Sensibly, he was looking in the Kircher correspondence archives when he found a new letter by Godefridus Kinner to Kircher [recto and verso]: more usefully, here are links to his transcription, translation and notes.

I think Philip’s translation skillfully keeps the charm of the letter (and the wheeziness of the letter-writer) intact. The direct linking of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (and its apparent duplication by the king’s Royal Society) with the new societies in Germany, and the comparisons with the follies of alchemy and judicial astrology left me with a curious sensation of speed, as though someone had just opened the door to a dusty medieval room for a modern breeze to sweep rapidly through it. It was even clear to Kinner that the times certainly were a-changing.
 
As a nice aside, Philip points out that “one problem [this letter[ solves is the date of the Beinecke letter: 1665 and not 1666“. As always, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step: even something as tiny like this may ultimately yield a surprisingly fine result, who knows?

Here’s a link to Elias Schwerdtfeger’s very interesting “Das Voynich Blog”.

Elias has worked really hard behind the scenes to find ways of visualising the statistics expressing what “old hand” Voynichologists (such as, say, Philip Neal & I) see when we look at the Voynich – you know, the highly bonded, multi-level internal structure that exists at the stroke, character, glyph, digraph, word, line, paragraph, page and section levels.

As an aside, I’ve long disagreed with Renaissance encipherment hypotheses for the VMs based on moving alphabets, specifically because they fundamentally destroy these kinds of internal structure: the only way to keep such hypotheses alive is then to argue (as, for example, my old friend GC does) that these structures are part of the “surface language”, i.e. that the encipherer is dynamically stretching his plaintext to mimic these structures in the ciphertext. Yes, it’s possible, but… put all the pieces together and it’s a bit too much of a stretch for me.

Incidentally, I’ve been looking at f2v recently, specifically because of the “fa” marginalia there (one of the very few marginalia I didn’t really cover in my book, “The Curse of the Voynich”). Elias discusses f2v at some length, proposing the eminently sensible (and testable) hypothesis that the same pe(rso)n that/who made the dubious (o)ish(i) emendation to the last line of f2v also added the “fa” marking above the second paragraph. They’re both in similar darker ink (which is a good start): but I think that the Beinecke’s scans – though fantastic for most purposes – fall just short of being able to resolve this kind of question definitively.

Actually, I’ve got a list of about 50 similar/related cross-indexing questions like that I’d like to address (say, by multispectral imaging or Raman imaging) in the future. But for now, that project is stalled (because the Beinecke turned my proposals down). Oh well: maybe next year…