Category Archives: Voynich Manuscript

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Voynich hoax muppet advocate, stop reading this right now, otherwise you’ll only get yourself all cross and bothered, and you’ll forget to take your medication or something else just as bad.

The rest of you, particularly those who have looked at Voynichese with a bit of care and close attention, should already understand that there are lots of patterns present there, all at the same time and on many different levels: and that any sensible explanation for the internal structure would need to give a reasonable account of these numerous simultaneous patterns. In short, it’s not enough to say ‘a clever table could generate them‘: there’s far more going on than just that.

At the same time, it’s well known that there are very few apparent corrections within the Voynichese text itself; while I’ve also presented a fair bit of evidence in the past that indicates that the text was copied onto the page (say, by one or more scribes copying from wax tablets), rather than composed on the page per se. What kind of account could tie all these diverse observations together?

Today’s proposed explanation is that Voynichese may well be even more heavily structured than we tend to accept, and that copying errors (of which I think there will prove to be plenty) were simply left intact on the page rather than corrected. As opposed to the Tamam Shud cipher (which appears to have an entire line crossed out!), I suspect that here the principle will turn out to be far closer to Omar Khayyám’s well-known:

“…The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it…”

Literary aside over, let’s look at the first paragraph of a typical Voynich page (I was looking at f111r the other day following an email by Torsten T, but more or less any would do just as well) and where I’m reasonably sure the copying errors are to be found on it:-

In Takahashi’s transcription:-

kcholchdar. shar. aiip. chepchedy. […]
doiin. sheeky. okeey. okeey. qeeal. […]
dsheedy. lkeedy. chckhy. lchedy. qo[…]
saiin. oteedy. qokeey. daiin. oke[…]
saiin. sheekshy. ol. shedy. chok[…]

Error #1: I don’t believe that “aiip” is correct. Rather, what I think happened here was that the downstroke of the “p” gallows overlapped the terminal upstroke of an “n”, probably on the wax tablet. Hence, I suspect this should read “aiinp”. Philip Neal has long pointed out that words ending in gallows characters are unusual and tend to be found on the top line of pages and paragraphs: I suspect that this is a typical example of that phenomenon.

Error #2: I don’t believe that “oiin” would ever be correct Voynichese, i.e. it’s just a miscopied “aiin” (of which there are many examples to be found on just about every page), hence this should probably read “daiin”. Curiously, though, the instance stats of aiin-family groups change between A pages and B pages: aiin appears 5x more often than ain in A pages, but only 1.6x more often in B pages.

Error #3: “akeey” (as it appears on the page, though Takahashi-san has autocorrected it to the more plausible “okeey”) should almost certainly be “okeey”. Basically, the (ok:ak) and (ot:at) instance ratios are both about 100:1, which brings copying errors to my mind rather than rare linguistic features.

Error #4: “qeeal” just looks wrong (it’s the only instance in the whole VMs). But then again, there are only 4 “qoal”s and there are no “qochal”s or “qoshal”s at all (which surprised me a little bit, but hand-building Markov models of Currier A and Currier B is a job I’ve been putting off for too long). There are plenty of “qokal”s (228) and “qotal”s (72), as well as a few “qopal”s (3), “qokeal”s (5), and “qoteal”s (2). Again, these last two look like potential copying errors (i.e. qokeal -> qokal, qoteal -> qotal)

Anyway, that points to (I think) a likely four copying errors out of 56 words (or 338 characters), i.e. an average of roughly one every 14 words (or, alternatively, one per line), which – I think – is probably a pretty good figure for a scribe copying a ciphertext. At some point, I ought to repeat the exercise on a bigger sample, see if the error rate holds true (and for both Hand 1 and Hand 2, etc).

So there’s this really old manuscript, it’s in Harvard or M.I.T., and it was discovered in 1812 (though Wikipedia says “1712”) by Wilfrid Voynitch who like doesn’t even know his own name because my spell-checker keeps suggesting “Wilfred” and that’s like totes annoying when you’re trying to tweet with predictive texting and that. So I don’t trust him, and he was a chemist and invented LSD or maybe Spanish fly while he was still young: and he really could have forged the manuscript because he had a moustache and that’s always like an awesomely bad sign in films, almost as bad as a British accent. But he couldn’t have don’t that because he didn’t even know his own name so was like completely stupid or something.

And people think the manuscript is really shocking ancient wisdom or alien DNA technology from the future but we’ll have to wait for the right person to time-travel back from meeting Roger Bacon in the past before we can read it. In fact, all the TV documentaries on the Voynitch manuscript start voice-over sentences with “Could it be that…” which is film-maker code that means that they know the real answers for sure but have been paid off with premium bond money not to tell.

Of course, it’s in code AND cipher AND shorthand AND microdots AND invisible ink AND tattooed on a slave-girl’s shaved head, and it’s secretly in a lost language that only alchemists can speak when they’re really, really close to creating the Philosopher’s Stonewashed Jeans and high on ergot and caffeinated beverages and fluoride, which are all poisons that completely surrounds us, there’s a whole alt.science newsgroup about that, everyone knows that the government scientists cover it up, worse than the cigarette makers. As if we can’t see through their lies, they’re so stupid, haha.

And anyone who says that Leonardo da Vinci wrote the manuscript is like so totally right, if you look at his notebooks there’s a helicopter and a bicycle and a T-1000 default form and he was writing in like mirror writing but he wasn’t using a mirror because they hadn’t been invented yet, duh. But it can’t actually have been Leonardo because there’s like lots of pictures of naked women in it and he was a gay vegetarian genius or something and that would have messed with his mind too much so he would have like imploded instantly.

But the real problem is that nobody wants to solve the Voynitch because it’s too much fun just pushing the numbers around and drawing graphs and infographics and stuff and they’re like getting paid by the hour by the CIA not to solve it so the economics are giving them the wrong financial incentive. Which means that they’re all getting rich on the back of us ordinary Internet surfers, especially that Cipher Mysteries guy who has like a Rolls Royce just for driving the mile down the drive to the gate of his mansion. He’s so rich, he pays the xkcd guy to draw stuff badly so nobody believes him when he tells the truth about stuff.

So I kind of met this guy on a mailing list who had solved the Voynitch and was about to publish his solution on the Internet but like the Men In Black burnt his house down and reduced him to a quivering empty shell of his former self, just like he was on crystal meth, except he swore he wasn’t (and I believe him). Worst thing is that they hypnotized him so that he couldn’t say the letter ‘c’ and it turns out that that is really important to the Voynitch’s secret secrets – people keep calling it the “Voynich Manuscript” but that’s because they can’t spell and that’s basically really annoying and stuff.

And anyway it turns out the answers are all in the Vatican Secret Archives which aren’t really “secret” they’re just called that to distract attention from the real secret archives which are in a bomb-proof basement two miles underneath Fatima in Portugal. But the really important stuff they put in the Secret Archives because nobody who knows how it all really works would think to look there, so it’s a huge double-bluff. The Catholic Church has been like that since 760 B.C., apparently they had to invent Christ because they had started 760 years Before something important beginning with “C” and the only word they could think of back then was “Christ”. And all the secrets of the early church are written in the Voynitch manuscript because that’s exactly where you’d hide something so dangerous it could bring the whole Church down. And that would cause real continuity problems for when TV repeat old episodes of the Simpsons with Ned Flanders in.

Only problem is that the Voynich is all definitely a hoax because if you have the right set of tables it has been scientifically proved you can write sentences that look just like peer-reviewed science, and then people will fund you to write whatever nonsense you fancy about anything you like. A bit like how Leonardo got paid to sit around and design butch-looking techno weapons even though he was a pacifist and the contradiction might make his brain explode. People don’t understand that the Voynitch is all about plant RNA and stimulating harmonics in your brain waves, you try reading it out loud you might become a genius or your own head might explode too just like Leonardo’s nearly did, nobody knows, that’s why it’s so dangerous and kept under wraps by the WTO.

And anyway, all the really powerful pages have already been removed, they’re been stored for safe keeping inside the Ark of the Covenant which is for real in a warehouse on the Isle of Wight. Nobody realises that the Indiana Jones warehouse thing was filmed in the actual place itself, they’re just laughing at us and we’ll never know because they have a Black Team removing all the good stuff from the archives just as we get close to seeing it, so we only get to see details that don’t make any sense.

From my small corner of the world, it often seems to me that some things really are not only unexplained, but also just plain inexplicable.

For example: even though the entire world had already learnt from famed transit lounger Edward Snowden that the NSA and GCHQ are silently tapping vast swathes of the Internet and phone traffic, why is it that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now so utterly aghast to discover that the Americans ‘may’ [*] have also been tapping her mobile? Excuse my impertinence, but does she not actually read the newspapers even slightly?

So you can see the big problem contemporary TV producers face: when matched up against modern mysteries of such massive magnitude and moral moronity, how can shows such as “The Unexplained Files” honestly expect to compete? Ohhhh, I seeeee – I hear you resignedly mumble to yourself – by including a piece on The Voynich Manuscript, that’s how. And, sadly, tragically, awfully, you’d be absolutely right.

Having talked with researchers from “The Unexplained Files” at the beginning of the year, I can honestly say that they trawled really hard to dig up some “alien” angle on the Voynich (its unearthly language, its unworldly herbs, William Romaine Newbold’s pet galaxy, putative telescopic technology, etc) to fit the show’s slack-jawed you-would-see-the-aliens-among-us-if-you-only-opened-your-stupid-dumb-eyes televisual conceit. Fox Mulder would have been so proud. Well, dumbstruck.

We gotta have us some talking heads, Mikey: so on they wheeled Gerry Kennedy and even his Royal Hoaxness Gordon Rugg for our viewing pleasure, along with several single-actor historical micro-mise-en-scènes to visually jolly the grindingly dull narrative along to its inevitable heavy question marks.

But of course, without Big Jim Finn and his Star Trek / Hebrew end-times message, or (my personal favourite) Dan Burisch and his “dangerous information” from the future-via-the-past, their overwhipped soufflé came out flatter than a losing politician’s smile.

If I described their Voynich documentary segment as “less than the sum of its parts”, it would be somewhat misleading: because none of the individual parts amounted to much at all either. Really, it was as if some poor bugger was told to eat the dismal Wikipedia Voynich article a paragraph at a time and then regurgitate it to try to entertain our new grey alien overlords. But with a gun at his or her cringing head.

File under AP (for “Alien Pants”). Or better still, just flee. Not so much “Unexplained Files” as “Inexplicably Commissioned”, sorry. 🙁

[*] weasel word included on the advice of my corporate attorneys, Fitz-Suitswell and Plunderham LLP