Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

For far too long, Voynich researchers have (in my opinion) tried to use statistical analysis as a thousand-ton wrecking ball, i.e. to knock down the whole Voynich edifice in a single giant swing. Find the perfect statistical experiment, runs the train of thought, and all Voynichese’s skittles will clatter down. Strrrrike!

But… even a tiny amount of reflection should be enough to show that this isn’t going to work: the intricacies and contingencies of Voynichese shout out loud that there will be no single key to unlock this door. Right now, the tests that get run give results that are – at best – like peering through multiple layers of net curtains. We do see vague silhouettes, but nothing genuinely useful appears.

Whether you think Voynichese is a language, a cipher system, or even a generated text doesn’t really matter. We all face the same initial problem: how to make Voynichese tractable, by which I mean how to flatten it (i.e. regularize it) to the point where the kind of tests people run do stand a good chance of returning results that are genuinely revealing.

A staging point model

How instead, then, should we approach Voynichese?

The answer is perhaps embarrassingly obvious and straightforward: we should collectively design and implement statistical experiments that help us move towards a series of staging posts.

Each of the models on the right (parsing model, clustering model, and inter-cluster maps) should be driven by clear-headed statistical analysis, and would help us iterate towards the staging points on the left (parsed transcription, clustered parsed transcription, final transcription).

What I’m specifically asserting here is that researchers who perform statistical experiments on the raw stroke transcription in the mistaken belief that this is as good as a final transcription are simply wasting their time: there are too many confounding curtains in the way to ever see clearly.

The Curse, statistically

A decade ago, I first talked about “The Curse of the Voynich”: my book’s title was a way of expressing the idea that there was something about the way the Voynich Manuscript was constructed that makes fools of people who try to solve it.

Interestingly, it might well be that the diagram above explains what the Curse actually is: that all the while people treat the raw (unparsed, unclustered, unnormalized) transcription as if it were the final (parsed, clustered, normalized) transcription, their statistical experiments will continue to be confounded in multiple ways, and will show them nothing useful.

Back in 2006, I reasoned (in The Curse of the Voynich) that if the nine-rosette page’s circular city with a castle at the top…

…represented Milan (one of only three cities renowned for their circular shape), then the presence of swallowtail merlons on the drawing implied it must have been drawn after 1450, when the rebuilding of the old Porta Giovia castle (that was wrecked during the Ambrosian Republic) by Francesco Sforza as [what is now known as] the Castello Sforzesco began.

Ten Years Later, A Challenge

However, Mark Knowles recently challenged me on this: how was I so sure that the older castle on the site didn’t also have swallowtail merlons?

While writing Curse, for the history of Milan I mainly relied on the collection of essays and drawings in Vergilio Vercelloni’s excellent “Atlante Storico di Milano, Città di Lombardia”, such as these two pictures from Milano fantastica, in “Historia Evangelica et actos apostolorum cum alijs illorum temporum eventibus cum figuris crebioribus delineatis”, circa 1380:

…and this old favourite (which Boucheron notes [p.199] is a copy probably made between 1456 and 1472 of an original made in the 1420s)…

On the surface, it seemed from these as though I had done enough. But coming back to it, might I have been too hasty? I decided to fetch down my copies of Evelyn Welch’s “Art and Authority in Renaissance Milan” and Patrick Boucheron’s “Le Pouvoir de Bâtir” from the book overflow in the attic and have another look…

Revisiting Milan’s Merlons

What did I find? Well: firstly, tucked away in a corner of a drawing by Galvano Fiamma (in the 1330s) of a view of Milan (reproduced as Plate IIa at the back of Boucheron’s book), the city walls appear to have some swallowtail merlons (look just inside the two outermost towers and you should see them):

And in a corner of a drawing by Anovelo da Imbonate depicting and celebrating the 1395 investiture of Gian Galeazzo Visconti (reproduced in Welch p.24), I noticed a tiny detail that I hadn’t picked up on before… yet more swallowtail merlons:

Then, when I looked at other miniatures by the same Anovelo da Imbonate, I found two other (admittedly stylized) depictions of Milan by him that also unmistakeably have swallowtail merlons:

So it would seem that Milan’s city walls may well have had swallowtail merlons prior to 1450. The problem is that the city walls aren’t the same as the Porta Giovia castle walls (built from 1358, according to Corio): and I don’t think we know enough to say whether or not the castle itself had swallowtail merlons. It’s debatable whether the drawing of the 1395 investiture (which took place in the Porta Giovia castle) depicts the castle itself having swallowtail merlons: I just don’t know.

But the short version of the long answer is that because the Porta Giovia castle was only built from 1358-1372 (or thereabouts), we can’t rely on texts written before then (such as Galvano Fiamma’s). And there seems quite good reason to suspect (the Massajo drawing notwithstanding) that the Porta Giovia castle may well have had swallowtail merlons when it was used for the Visconti investiture in 1395. But I don’t know for certain, sorry. 🙁

There are texts that might give us an answer: for example, the (1437) “De Laudibus Mediolanensium urbis panegyricus” by Pier Candido Decembrio (mentioned in Boucheron p.74), or Bernardino Corio’s “Storia di Milano”. There are plenty of documents Boucheron cites in footnotes (pp.202-205), including “Lavori ai castelli di Bellinzona nel periodo visconteo”, Bolletino della Svizzera italiana, XXV, 1903, pp.101-104 (which I’ll leave for another day). But it’s obviously quite a lot of work. 🙁

Finally, I should perhaps add that a few details by Anovelo da Imbonate have an intriguingly Voynichian feel:

Though there were plenty of other miniature artists active in the Visconti court in Milan in the decades up to 1447, parallels between their art and the Voynich Manuscript’s drawings haven’t been explored much to date. Perhaps this is a deficiency in our collective Art Historical view that should be rectified. 🙂

Whether we like it or not, history as practised nowadays is a tower built upon textuality, upon the implicit evidentiality striped within and through texts. Even archaeology (of all but the obscenely distant past) and Art History rely heavily on texts for their reconstructions.

Alternative, explicitly visual approaches to history have lost the battle to control the locus of meaning. The mid-twentieth century Warburg/Saxl/Panofsky dream that highly evolved iconography/iconology might be able to surgically extract the inner semantic life of symbols from their drab syntatical carapaces now seems hopelessly over-optimistic, fit only for the Hollywood cartoons of Dan Brown novels. Sorry, but Text won.

What, then, are contemporary historians to make of the Voynich Manuscript, a barque adrift in a wine-dark sea of textlessness? In VoynichLand, we have letters, letters everywhere, and not a jot for them to read: and without close reading’s robotic exoskeleton to work with, where could such a text-centric generation of scholars begin?

Well, given that the Voynich Manuscript’s text-like writing has so failed yielded nothing of obvious substance to linguists or cryptologists (apart from long lists of things that they are sure it is not), historians are only comfortably left with a single door leading to the disco floor…

“Step #1. Start with the pictures.”

Yes, they could indeed start with the pictures: the Voynich’s beguiling, misleading, and crisply non-religious images. These contain plants that are real, distorted, imaginary, and/or impossible; strange circular diagrams; oddly-posed nymphs arranged in tubes and pools; and curious map-like diagrams. They famously lead everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, like a bad mirror-room fight-scene in 1960s Avengers TV episodes.

Without the comforting crutch of referentiality to lean on, we can’t tell whether a given picture happens to parallel one of the plants in Ulisse Aldrovandi’s famous (so-called) “alchemical herbals” (which unfortunately seem to be neither alchemical nor particularly herbal); or whether we’re just imagining that it echoes a specific plant in this week’s interesting Arabic book of wonders; or whether its roots were drawn from a dried sample but its body was imagined; or whether a different one of the remaining three hundred and eighty post-rationalizations that have been made for that page happens to hold true.

But on the bright side, it’s not as if we’re talking about a set of drawings that has previously made fools of just about everyone who has tried to form a sensible opinion about them, right? [*hollow laugh*]

So, “start with the pictures” it is. But what should we do then? Again, there seems little choice:

“Step #2. Find a telling detail.”

In my opinion, here’s where it all start to go wrong: where the road leads only to a cliff-edge, and one that has a sizeable drop below it into the sea.

The elephant-in-the-room question here is this: if looking for telling details is such a good idea, why is it that more then a century’s worth of looking for telling details has revealed practically nothing?

Is it because everyone who has ever looked at the Voynich Manuscript has been stupid, or inexperienced, or foolish, or delusional, or crazy, or marginal, or naive? Because that’s essentially what would need to be true for your own contribution to bring a new bottle to the party, if all you’re going to do yourself is look for telling details.

The thing that almost nobody seems to grasp is that we collectively have already applied an extraordinary amount of eyeballs at this issue.

Even though the Voynich’s imagery has been seen and ‘closely read’ for over a century by all manner of people, to date this has – in terms of finding the single telling detail that can place even part of it within an illustrative or semantic tradition – achieved nothing, zilch, nada.

Incidentally, this leads (I think) to one of only two basic constructional models: (a) the drawings in the Voynich Manuscript are from a self-contained culture whose internal frame of reference sits quite apart from anything we’re used to looking at [a suggestion which I’m certain the palaeography refutes completely]; or (b) the process of making the drawings for the Voynich Manuscript somehow consciously stripped out their referentiality.

But I’m not imagining for a moment that what I’m pointing out will stop anyone else from reinventing this same square wheel: all I’m saying is that this is how people approach the Voynich Manuscript, and why they then get themselves into a one-way tangle.

“Step #3. Draw a big conclusion.”

Finally, this is the point in the chain of the argument where the cart rolls properly over the cliff: though it’s a long way down, at least gravity’s accelerative force means anybody in it won’t have very long to wait before the sea comes up to meet them (relatively speaking).

How is it that anyone can comfortably draw a step #3 macro-conclusion from the itty-bitty (and horrendously uncertain) detail they latched onto in step #2? As proofs go, this step is completely contingent on at least three different things:
(a) on perfect identification of the detail itself,
(b) on perfect correlation with essentially the same thing but in an external tradition, and
(c) on the logical presumption that this is necessarily the only feasible explanation for the correlation

Each of these three would be extremely difficult to prove on its own, never mind when all three are required to be true at the same time for their sum to be true.

In my experience, when people put forward a Voynich manuscript macro-conclusion based on local correlation with some micro-detail they have noticed, they almost always haven’t noticed how weakly supported their overall argument is. Not only that, but why is it – given the image-rich source their external tradition normally is – that they can typically only point to a single image in it that supports their claimed correlation? That is fairly bankrupt, intellectually speaking.

How can we fix this issue?

This is a really hard problem. Art History tends to furnish historians with the illusion that they can use its conceptual tricks and technical ‘flow’ to tackle the Voynich Manuscript one single isolated detail at a time, but this isn’t really true in any useful sense.

A picture is a connected constellation of techniques, formed not only of ways of expressing things, but also of ways of seeing things. And so it’s a mystery why there should be such an otherness to the Voynich Manuscript’s drawings that deconstructing any part of it leaves us with next to nothing in our hands.

Part of this problem is easy to spot, insofar as there are plenty of places where we still can’t tell content from decoration from elaboration from emendation. Even a cursory look at pages such as the nine-rosette page or f116v should elicit the conclusion that they are made up of multiple layers, i.e. multiple codicological contributions.

For me, until someone uses tricks such as DNA analysis and Raman imaging to properly analyze the manuscript’s codicological layers, internal construction, and/or the original bifolio order of each of the sections, too many people will continue trying to read not “the unreadable”, but “the not-yet readable”: all of which will continue to lead to all manner of foolish reasoning and conclusions, as it has done for many decades.

I really want you understand that this isn’t because people are inherently foolish: rather, it’s because they almost all want to kid themselves that they can draw a solid macro-conclusion from an isolated and uncertain micro-similarity. And all the while that this continues to be the collective research norm, I have little doubt that we’re going to get nowhere.

Alexandra Marraccini’s presentation

You can see the slides and the draft article accompanying Alexandra Marracini’s recent talk here (courtesy of academia.edu).

The core of Marraccini’s argument seems to reduce to this: that if one or more of the circular castle roundels in the Voynich Manuscript’s nine-rosette foldout is in fact the same flattened city that appears in BL Sloane MS 4016 f.8v and/or Vat.Chig. F.VII 158 f.12r and/or BNF Lat 6823 f.13r (the first two of which also have a little dragon in one herbal root), then we might be able to place the Voynich Manuscript in one branch of the Tractatus de Herbis tradition (all of which derive from Firenze Biblioteca dipartemental e di Botanica MS 106).

Even though this is arguably a reasonable starting point for future investigation, I’m not yet seeing a lot of methodological ‘air’ between what she’s doing and the mass of detail-driven Voynich single-image theories Marraccini would doubtless wish to distance herself from. The structural weakness of their arguments are still – to a very large degree – her argument’s weakness too.

Going forward, this amounts to a theoretical lacuna which I think she might do well to address: that there is no obvious historical / analytical methodology to apply here that satisfactorily bridges the gap between micro-similarities and macro-conclusion in the absence of accompanying texts. OK, pointing to an absence is perhaps a bit more of a problematique than most historians these days are comfortable with, but I’m only the messenger here, sorry.

Anyway, there’s a nice transcription of the Q&A session she gave after her presentation (courtesy of VViews) here, which I’m sure many Voynich researchers will find interesting.

Oddly, though, the questions from an audience Voynichero with my 2006 book “The Curse of the Voynich” in mind were almost exactly the opposite of what I would myself have asked (had I been there). The single most important question is: why is your argument structurally any better than all the other similar arguments that have been put forward?

So, what is missing here?

The answer to this certainly isn’t working hypotheses about the Voynich Manuscript, because there’s no obvious shortage of those. Even the suggestion that there might be some stemmatic relation (however vague and ill-defined) between the drawings in Voynich Manuscript and BL Sloane MS 4016 has been floating around for some years.

Instead, what I think is missing is a whole set of evidential basics: for example, physical data and associated reasoning that tell us without almost no doubt which paints were original (answer: not many of them) and which were added later; or (perhaps more importantly) what the original bifolio nesting order was.

With these to work with, we could reject many, many incorrect hypotheses: and we might – with just a little bit of luck – possibly be able to use one or two as fixed points to pivot the whole discourse round, like an Archimedean Lever.

The alternative, sadly, is a long sequence of more badly-structured arguments, Groundhog Day-stylee. Even if my ice-carving technique has got stupendously good, it would be nice to have a change, right?

Well, here’s a thing. The Thirteenth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference, to be held in a month’s time at Merton College (31st March 2017 to 1st April 2017) on the theme of “Time : Aspects and Approaches”, has a Voynich-themed paper in its Manuscripts and Archives session on the second day (11:30am to 1:00pm).

This is “Asphalt and Bitumen, Sodom and Gomorrah: Placing Yale’s Voynich Manuscript on the Herbal Timeline“, presented by Alexandra Marraccini of the University of Chicago. The description runs like this:

Yale Beinecke MS 408, colloquially known as the Voynich manuscript, is largely untouched by modern manuscript scholars. Written in an unreadable cipher or language, and of Italianate origin, but also dated to Rudolphine court circles, the manuscript is often treated as a scholarly pariah. This paper attempts to give the Voynich manuscript context for serious iconographic debate using a case study of Salernian and Pseudo- Apuleian herbals and their stemmae. Treating images of the flattened cities of Sodom and Gommorah from Vatican Chig. F VII 158, BL Sloane 4016, and several other exempla from the Bodleian and beyond, this essays situates the Voynich iconography, both in otherwise unidentified foldouts and in the manuscript’s explicitly plant-based portion, within the tradition of Northern Italian herbals of the 14th-15th centuries, which also had strong alchemical and astrological ties. In anchoring the Voynich images to the dateable and traceable herbal manuscript timeline, this paper attempts to re-situate the manuscript as approachable in a truly scholarly context, and to re-characterise it, no longer as an ahistorical artefact, but as an object rooted in a pictorial tradition tied to a particular place and time.

BL Sloane 4016 is a similar-looking herbal that Voynich researchers know well. Most famously, Alan Touwaide wrote a 500-page scholarly commentary on it (as mentioned in Rene’s summary of Touwaide’s chapter in the recent Yale facsimile). It dates to the 1440s in Lombardy, and even has a frog (‘rana’) on folio 81:

Marracini herself is an art historian who previously graduated from Yale, and who has an almost impossibly perfect set of research interests:

Her research focuses on Late Medieval and Early Modern scientific images, particularly alchemical and medical material, in England, Scotland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Her interests in the field also include book history and manuscript studies, Late Antique material culture, and the historiography of art, particularly in Warburgian contexts. Currently, she is writing on the history of Hermetic-scientific images and diagrams, and her work on Elias Ashmole’s copies of the Ripley Scrolls is forthcoming in the journal Abraxas.

All of which looks almost too good to be true. It’s just a shame her presentation falls on April Fool’s Day, so we’re bound to have people claiming that she doesn’t really exist and it’s all a conspiracy etc. 😉

Voynich researchers without a significant maths grounding are often intimidated by the concept of entropy. But all it is is an aggregate measure of how [in]effectively you can predict the next token in a sequence, given a preceding context of a certain size. The more predictable tokens are (on average), the smaller the entropy: the more unpredictable they are, the larger the entropy.

For example, if the first order (i.e. no context at all) entropy measurement of a certain text was 3.0 bits, then it would have almost exactly the same average information content-ness per character as a random series of eight different digits (e.g. 1-8). This is because entropy is a log2 value, and log2(8) = 3. (Of course, what is usually the case is that some letters are more frequent than others: but entropy is the bottom line figure averaged out over the whole text you’re interested in.)

And the same goes for second order entropy, with the only difference being that because we always know there what the preceding letter or token was, we can make a more effective guess as to what the next letter or token will be. For example, if we know the previous English letter was ‘q’, then there is a very high chance that the next letter will be ‘u’, and a far lower chance that the next letter will be, say, ‘k’. (Unless it just happens to be a text about the current Mayor of London with all the spaces removed.)

And so it should proceed beyond that: the longer the preceding context, the more effectively you should be to predict the next letter, and so the lower the entropy value.

As always, there are practical difficulties to consider (e.g. what to do across page boundaries, how to handle free-standing labels, whether to filter out key-like sequences, etc) in order to normalize the sequence you’re working with, but that’s basically as far as you can go with the concept of entropy without having to define the maths behind it a little more formally.

Voynich Entropy

However, even a moment’s thought should be sufficient to throw up the flaw in using entropy as a mathematical torch to try to cast light on the Voynich Manuscript’s “Voynichese” text… that because we don’t yet know what makes up a single token, we don’t know whether or not the entropy values we get are telling us anything interesting.

EVA transcriptions are closer to stroke based than to glyph based: so it makes little (or indeed no) sense to calculate entropy values for EVA. And as for people who claim to be able to read EVA off the page as, say, mirrored Hebrew… I don’t think so. :-/

But what is the correct mapping or grouping for EVA, i.e. the set of rules you should apply to EVA to turn it into the set of tokens that will give us genuine results? Nobody knows. And, oddly, nobody seems to be even asking any more. Which doesn’t bode well.

All the same, entropy does sometimes yield us interesting glimpses inside the Voynichese engine. For example, looking at the Currier A pages only in the Takahashi transcription and using ch/sh/cth/ckh/cfh/cph as tokens (which is a pretty basic glyphifying starting point), you get [“h1” = first order entropy, “h2” = second order entropy]:

63667 input tokens, 56222 output tokens, h1 = 4.95, h2 = 4.03

This has a first order information content of 56222 x 4.95 = 278299 bits, and a second order information content of (56222-1) x 4.03 = 226571 bits.

If you then also replace all the occurrences of ain/aiin/aiiin/oin/oiin/oiiin with their own tokens, you get:

63667 input tokens, 51562 output tokens, h1 = 5.21, h2 = 4.01

This has a first order information content of 51562 x 5.21 = 268638 bits, and a second order information content of (51562-1) x 4.01 = 206760 bits. What is interesting here is that even though the h1 value increases a fair bit (as you’d expect from extending the post-parsed alphabet with additional tokens), the h2 value decreases very slightly, which I find a bit surprising.

And if, continuing in this vein, you also convert air/aiir/aiiir/sain/saiin/saiiin/dain/daiin/daiiin to glyphs, you get:

63667 input tokens, 50387 output tokens, h1 = 5.49, h2 = 4.04

This has a first order information content of 50387 x 5.49 = 276625 bits, and a second order information content of (50387-1) x 4.04 = 203559 bits. Again what I find interesting is that once again the h1 value increases a fair bit, but the h2 value barely moves.

And so it does seem to me that Voynich entropy may yet prove to be a useful tool in determining what is going on with all the different possible parsings. For example, I do wonder if there might be a practical way of exhaustively / hillclimbingly determining the particular parsing / grouping that maximises the post-parsed h1:h2 ratio for Voynichese. I don’t believe anyone has yet succeeded in doing this, so there may be plenty of room for good new work here – just a thought! 🙂

Voynich Parsing

To me, the confounding beauty of Voynichese is that all the while we cannot even parse it into tokens, the vast modern cryptological toolbox normally at our disposal does us no good.

Even so, it’s obvious (I think) that ch and sh are both tokens: this is largely because EVA was designed to be able to cope with strikethrough gallows characters (e.g. cth, ckh etc) without multiplying the number of glyphs excessively.

However, if you ask whether or not qo, ee, eee, ii, iii, dy, etc should be treated as tokens, you’ll get a wide range of responses. And as for ar, or, al, ol, am etc, you won’t get a typical linguistic researcher to throw away their precious vowel to gain a token, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were wrong there.

The Language Gap

The Voynich Manuscript throws into sharp relief a shortcoming of our statistical toolbox: specifically, its excessive reliance on our having previously modelled the text stream accurately and reliably.

But if the first giant hurdle we face is parsing it, what kind of conceptual or technical tools should we be using to do this? And on an even more basic level, what kind of language should we as researchers use to try to collaborate on toppling this first statue? As problems go, this is a precursor both to cryptology and to linguistic analysis.

As far as cipher people and linguist people go: in general, both groups usually assume (wrongly) that all the heavy lifting has been done by the time they get a transcription in their hands. But I think there is ample reason to conclude that we’re not yet in the cinema, but are still stuck in the foyer, all the while there is a world of difference between a stroke transcription and a parsed transcription that few seem comfortable to acknowledge.

In some ways, it’s the shortest of distances from [Ethel Voynich] to [Ethel Merman], so why not “Voynich, The Musical“? Close your eyes, imagine a Broadway stage, take out a mortgage to get yourself a semi-affordable seat, spill a drink on your leg, and you’re as good as there…

VOYNICH – THE MUSICAL!

Act One, Scene One

It’s 1912. A single spotlight illuminates an old trunk in the middle of an otherwise empty wooden stage: there’s dust in the air. We hear slow, sustained violins off-stage, harbingers of the big discovery that is about to happen.

WILFRID appears stage right. He is well dressed (though a little tweedy for our modern tastes), and wears small round glasses. He looks in the prime of his life – there’s a vigour and physical excitement to him. He approaches the trunk, opens it, takes out an old book and peers inside it. As his eyes grow ever wider, the violins swell, and he sings his first number “Friends To The End”.

WILFRID

This never happened – I wasn’t here.
There was never a trunk (that was junk), isn’t this queer?
I conjured a castle, to hide Jesuit lies…
While the customer’s king, I’ll say anything (however unwise).

[Chorus] But you, you were always real
Even if you made me feel
Like an antiquarian schlemiel –
I couldn’t comprehend.
But I knew, I knew when I met
My ugly duckling Juliet
With your strange alphabet
We’d be friends to the end…
Friends to the end.

Act One, Scene Two

Back in London, WILFRID hesitantly shows his newly-acquired manuscript to his wife ETHEL: he thinks it’s going to make them rich. However, ETHEL cannot believe that he has wasted money on something as unbelievably stupid as a book that nobody can read. To make her feelings on the matter completely clear, she sings her angry opening number “Down the drain”.

ETHEL

Little naked women
Standing round or swimming
What is this you’re bringing
To our house?
You can’t read a word of it
Written by a heretic
I can’t see the benefit
To man or mouse

[Chorus] You put good money / Down the drain
Buying enciphered / Castles in Spain
Were those nymphs fogging / Your revolutionary brain?
Or has their writing sent you / Completely insane?

Act One, Scene Three

WILFRID has moved to New York, and is trying (unsuccessfully) to convince wealthy American collectors to buy his unreadable manuscript. Though his sales patter normally charms the birds down off the trees, he’s finding it difficult to find anyone with any affinity for this unusual artefact. His song “It’s No Use” documents his ongoing struggle.

WILFRID

There’s jazz and money in the air
The excitement of a New World at play
New rules, new wealth, new clothes, new hair
America strides into a brand new day

You, sir, with your spats and suits
Your garden parties and Egyptiana
Might I interest you in this book’s strange roots
And its hard-to-pin-down flora and fauna?

[Chorus] It’s no use
My duckling’s no swan
I’ve cooked my goose
My big chance has gone
I’ll find no willing
Bibliophile
Who’ll pay more than a shilling
They’re too mercantile

Act One, Scene Four

It’s 1930 in New York. WILFRID is dying, having never been able to sell his “Roger Bacon” manuscript. ETHEL brings his beloved manuscript to him, so that he can see it one last time. WILFRID sings a song to both of them: “It’s Time To Say Goodbye”.

WILFRID

Perhaps I was wrong / To hope for the best
To follow every wastrel clue / Like a man possessed
Why can’t anybody else / See what I see?
Are they put off by mere / Indecipherability?

[Chorus] It’s time to say goodbye
To the woman I have loved
And greet the naked angels
Hovering above
I’ve seen them for years
Sitting on my shelves
Filling every page of
Quires eleven and twelve

Two of the least commented-on aspects of the Voynich Manuscript’s “Voynichese” alphabet are (a) its symmetry and (b) its partitioning into quite well-known (but distinct) usage groups. For example:

* the four gallows characters, where EVA t and EVA k are almost always interchangeable, while the single-leg shapes for EVA p and EVA f closely mirror the double-leg shapes for EVA t and EVA k. (And let’s leave the strikethrough gallows aside for the moment.)

* the EVA aiin family of letter groups, which all operate in a very specific way: there are no contexts where ain appears that you wouldn’t also see aiin or even aiiin.

* the ar / or / al / ol group, whose members seem to appear within words in much the same way as each other. The air and aiir letter groups might also be related to this set, though this isn’t not 100% clear. Similarly, -am often seems to me (with a hat tip to Emma May Smith, who discussed -m recently) to be something closer to a combination of ar and hyphen, i.e. that -am at the end of a line often resembles the end of the first half of a word broken in half by the line-ending (and where the second half of the word is at the start of the next line, but disguised with an extra letter inserted before it).

* the -dy and -y word endings, which both seem to be cut from almost exactly the same cloth.

* the e / ee / eee / ch / sh / eo group, which seem to me to function slightly differently between A and B pages.

* the qo group, which almost universally seems to operate as a prefix. In those places where we get l- words, we also get qol a lot: and where l- words don’t appear, we get almost no instances of qol.

Cross all the above instances out, and what remains is a very sharply reduced set of usage groups, such as d- words (in particular daiin, which seems to operate in a mysterious world all of its own), o- words (particularly in front of gallows), and y- words.

What about EVA s?

But if you do do this kind of crossing out, you also won’t find a comfortable place for EVA ‘s’ to go. In fact, to my eyes EVA ‘s’ appears to be the single most anomalous character in the Voynichese alphabet: there’s a strong case to be made that it is the most ‘exposed’ single glyph of all of them, and – by that same token – the one we should spend most time on trying to understand. What I’m saying is that EVA s might well be the weakest link in the Voynichese chain.

If you remember to put aside all the completely different ‘sh’ characters (sharing ‘s’ for both of these glyphs was, in my opinion, a foolish mistake in the design of the EVA transcription scheme, *sigh*), you find that ‘s’ occurs about 1.71% of the time in A pages, and about 1.00% of the time in B pages. If you remove any ‘as’ or ‘os’ pairs (as being probably miscopied or mistranscribed ‘ar’ / ‘or’ pairs) from these stats, these figures go down to 1.34% and 0.83% respectively.

And yet some A pages have numerous s characters (e.g f14r, f15r, f24r), while others have one or fewer s characters (e.g. f14v, f18r, f19r): that this single statistic can differ so much between the two sides of the same folio is something that hasn’t really been noted before, as far as I can recall. [Unless any Lorites out there care to show me the precedent I’ve missed: in one of Friedman’s groups, no doubt.]

All of which incidentally reminds me of something that Glen Claston told me he noticed when he was making his transcription (but which I now can’t find in my email archive, *sigh*): that Voynichese had different clusterings of letter usages that would seem to go into and out of fashion (almost as if one kind of ‘mode’ was active now, and then a different mode active later), sometimes by paragraph, sometimes by page. If this is correct, then perhaps ‘s’ is an active part of some ‘modes’ but not others – just an idea.

What about saiin vs daiin?

I find it interesting that sdaiin occurs only once (on f66r), while sdain, sdaiiin, dsain, dsaiin, and dsaiiin don’t occur at all: yet saiin occurs 144 times.

If s- is some kind of prefix token here, then it seems that so too is d-, and in a way that makes the two avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

My suspicion (for what it’s worth) is that while both work as prefix tokens, they in fact code for two quite different classes of mechanisms: and, moreover, that both prefixes are more meta-linguistic than linguistic in any useful sense.

And what about the first column?

EVA s also has a strong tendency to appear as the first letter of a (non-paragraph-starting) line, particularly in Balneo B pages – but this may possibly be because Balneo B tends to have longer paragraphs than elsewhere.

Combine this (a) with the well-known observation that the first word on each line tends to be slightly longer on average than all the other words on a line, and (b) with Philip Neal’s suggestion that the first letters down some Voynich Manuscript pages might well be a vertical ‘key’ or something similar, and you get an interesting possibility to consider: that line-initial ‘s’ may specifically operate as a null that the writing system needs to prepend to certain (typically short) words.

I was thinking about this today, triggered by a Voynich Ninja forum discussion: I wondered if it might be possible to construct a statistical experiment to test my suggestion that line-initial s- might function as a null character that gets prepended to certain short words (such as aiin).

According to the tentative model I have in mind, the (aiin : daiin) ratio for non-line-initial words should be roughly the same as the (saiin : daiin) ratio for line-initial words. And perhaps it would be good to then repeat broadly the same test for non-line-initial (ar : dar) vs line-initial (sar : dar), etc.

However, I don’t have the right counting tools to do this easily: can anyone please run this test? Thanks!