In the 1970s, Captain Prescott Currier noted that the Voynich Manuscript’s text seemed to contain two separate ‘languages’ (“A” and “B”), each containing sub-languages that varied yet further. For him, the language differences were primarily statistical rather than linguistic: to tell what we now call ‘Currier A pages’ & ‘Currier B pages’ apart, he observed that (using the EVA transcription):-

“(a) Final ‘dy’ is very high in Language ‘B’; almost non-existent in Language ‘A.’
(b) The symbol groups ‘chol’ and ‘chor’ are very high in ‘A’ and often occur repeated; low in ‘B’.
(c) The symbol groups ‘chain’ and ‘chaiin’ rarely occur in ‘B’; medium frequency in ‘A.’
(d) Initial ‘chot’ high in ‘A’; rare in ‘B.’
(e) Initial ‘cTh’ very high in ‘A’; very low in ‘B.’
(f) ‘Unattached’ finals scattered throughout Language ‘B’ texts in considerable profusion; generally much less noticeable in Language ‘A.’“

Similarly, he thought that the writing seemed to have been done by at least two hands (specifically, a larger, rounded hand he called “1” [mainly on A pages], and a more cramped, tighter hand he called “2” [mainly on B pages]), which he was convinced were those of at least two different people. He also pointed out that certain Voynichese letters appeared to have a very position-dependent behaviour, and that a line of text seems to be a functional unit in some way.

I would argue that Currier’s work has been arguably the single most influential piece of Voynich research of the last few decades, because it in effect erects a pragmatic conceptual framework for working with the Voynich Manuscript that every researcher who follows should strongly bear in mind, if not actually use.

So when I get told about so-called Voynich ‘research’ that treats the entire Voynich Manuscript as a uniformly homogenous linguistic entity (i.e. ignoring Currier completely), I give a little sigh of muted exasperation and move swiftly on. This is simply because Currier’s languages are to the Voynich manuscript what the Gillogly strings are to the Beale Ciphers: hence any claimed explanation or decryption that fails to account for Currier’s raw (yet actually rather unexpected, if you think about it) set of statistical observations is simply doomed to failure, period, even 40 years on.

I think it’s important to point out that Currier wasn’t some technical-minded Army codebreaker doing a bit of Voynich moonlighting: having graduated in Philology (with a focus on Romance Languages) from the University of Washington, he was surely perfectly placed to contribute a balanced analytical insight into the elusive internal structure of Voynichese. Hence I think the real reason that Currier’s work has been so influential in the field is that he really cared about what he was doing, and that he wanted to make a constructive, positive difference to Voynich studies.

Sadly, Currier’s insights failed to inspire a community-wide statistical assault on the Voynich Manuscript: researchers trundled on with their existing ad hoc studies, perpetually reinventing wheels – the big red revolution bus never arrived at the Voynich stop. The only obvious difference was that at least a few sensible people (Rene Zandbergen, Mark Perakh, etc) did manage to do statistical tests on A and B pages separately, which is a start, I guess… but only a start.

But because Currier restricted his work to statistical observations, he never built his framework up into the kind of thing Annales historians call a problematique, i.e. a fully rounded research question that drives future research forward. It’s all very well cleverly spotting the presence of different languages (some people prefer to say “dialects”, but it’s an open question) within the text, but that does beg some rather big questions, so-called “elephants in the room” that everyone can see but nobody talks about:-

* Why are the different languages fragmented across the document, often mixed up within a single quire?
* What gives rise to all the variation both within Currier A and within Currier B?
* Why was there a need for multiple languages at all? Why not just stick with Currier A?

Fast forward to 2013, and I think we can answer at least one of these questions, and provide reasonable (if tentative) answers to the other two.

Firstly: the simple reason that the Voynich languages are in disarray appears to be that the bifolios themselves are in disarray. I and others have uncovered numerous different codicological artefacts that strongly suggest the initial gatherings were disrupted, bound, rebound, and indeed misbound; and there is even specific evidence that quite a few bifolios ended up reversed relative to their original facing direction (i.e. folded back to front across the central crease).

Essentially, as the bifolios themselves were scrambled, so too were the languages: which is why A bifolios and B bifolios appear juxtaposed within individual bound quires. Yet given that there are large homogenous stretches of A and B bifolios, it seems likely that the scrambling wasn’t absolute – while I don’t think the Voynich bifolios were ever blown down a street in the wind, I do believe that what we see arose from a combination of planned shuffling (e.g. moving the large multi-panel bifolios towards the back and binding them there) and unplanned shuffling (binding breaking on some quires, spilling the bifolios onto the floor).

Secondly: I strongly believe that the structural and palaeographic differences between A pages and B pages tells a strong story of two major writing phases (let’s call them the “A phase” and the “B phase”). Identifying different composition phases through close reading is the kind of thing that modern historians do all the time, so this isn’t a fundamentally new approach: the only nuance here is that rather than close textual analysis (for Critical Reading) or art technique de-layering (for Art History), we’re instead looking at a cryptanalytical close reading. But then again, isn’t that what Currier was hoping for?

Note that I’m not speculating here about why there were two writing phases: at this point it’s enough just to identify them and give them names. But it does point to some interesting questions about why there should be both Herbal A pages and Herbal B pages, and what the difference between them might turn out to be (a topic upon which I’ve previously speculated more than enough for one lifetime, some would say).

Thirdly: within each of the A & B writing phases, I believe that the variations in the statistics will turn out to have arisen because of cryptographic evolution during each phase. By this, I mean that the core cryptographic system in use at the outset of each phase evolved during the various writing phases, as the author(s) finessed the system to work around specific cryptographic challenges encountered along the way, and so ending up a very different beast at the close.

I suspect that this will prove to be a set of “ratchet” effects, in that once changes were made to the system they would probably tend to stay in place until they in turn were replaced or finessed. I therefore believe that the cryptanalytical challenge we face is working out the evolutionary curves that the A system and the B system traced out – quantifying and then mapping them as if the system driving them were a probabilistic Markov state machine, its configuration relentlessly evolving as the text flows from page to page to page.

As to the specifics of how we should do this, you’ll have to wait for the next post…

Though I haven’t posted much about the Voynich Manuscript here recently, I have actually been doing a lot of research into it (for Curse 2), as well as a lot of thinking about how to decrypt it, mainly by trying to devise cryptological mechanisms that stand even a passing chance of achieving that (an “attack vector”, if you like).

Yesterday, I came up with something new (well, new to me, anyway). Having recently read a pile of books on WW2 codebreakers (e.g. the excellent “The Man Who Broke Purple”) and WW2 codebreaking (thanks to the whole cipher pigeon thing), an idea fresh in my mind was that one way to break a cipher system would be to get multiple instances of the same plaintext enciphered in different ways, and use that to understand how the cryptographic framework works. So… might there be any plaintext in the Voynich that was enciphered multiple times?

Well: it’s well known that a fair number of the herbal pictures reappear as small versions in the two pharma sections. These might well be visual recipes (as normally believed); or a visual cross-referencing hack (in the Quattrocento style of Mariano Taccola); or nonsense; or something else entirely. At the very least, however, this does tell a visual story about the content: that the drawings are far from completely arbitrary [as would be convenient for some people’s Voynich theories], but instead are consistent and rule-based, even if we can’t yet discern what those rules are.

But what struck me as possibly offering us a chink into the Voynich’s cryptographic armour is the presence of two herbal pages as well as a recipe page all containing what seems to be the same plant… f17v, f96v & f99r:

Might it be that these three pages not only contain the same plant, but also the same (or very similar) plaintext enciphered in different ways? As readers of The Curse of the Voynich will doubtless know, I have a whole constellation of long-standing hunches about how Voynichese works: but finding effective ways of testing all these ideas has proved immensely tricky.

Anyway, let’s have a look at the texts (in EVA) [I’ve used Stolfi’s transcription as a broad starting point, and ‘bold’ed the Neal keys on the two herbal pages’ top lines]:

f17v.P.1;F pchodol chor fchy opydaiin odaldy –
f17v.P.2;F ycheey keeor ctho dal okol odaiin okal –
f17v.P.3;F oldaik odaiin okal oldaiin chockhol olol –
f17v.P.4;F kchor fchol cphol olcheol okeeey –
f17v.P.5;F ychol chol dolcheey tchol dar ckhy –
f17v.P.6;F oekor or okaiin or otaiin d –
f17v.P.7;F sor chkeey poiis chor os saiin –
f17v.P.8;F qokeey kcha rol dy chol daiin sy –
f17v.P.9;F ycheol shol kchol chol taiin ol –
f17v.P.10;F oytor okeor okar okol doiir am –
f17v.P.11;F qokcheo qokoiir ctheol chol –
f17v.P.12;F oy choy keaiin chckhey ol chor –
f17v.P.13;F ykeor chol chol cthol chkor sheol –
f17v.P.14;F olor okeeol chodaiin okeol tchory –
f17v.P.15;F ychor cthy cheeky cheo otor oteol –
f17v.P.16;F okcheol chol okeol cthol otcheolo –
f17v.P.17;F m qoain sar she dol qopchaiin cthor –
f17v.P.18;F otor cheeor ol chol dor chr oreees –
f17v.P.19;F dain chey qoaiin cthor cholchom –
f17v.P.20;F ykeey okeey cheor chol sho ydaiin –
f17v.P.21;F oal cheor sholor or shecthy cpheor daiin –
f17v.P.22;F qokeee dar chey keeor cheeol ctheey cthy –
f17v.P.23;F chkeey okeor char okeom =

f96v.P.1;F psheas sheeor qoepsheody odar ocpheo opar ysar aso* –
f96v.P.2;F ytear yteor olcheey dteodaiin saro qoches ycheom –
f96v.P.3;F dcheoteos cpheos sar chcthosy cth ytch*y daiin –
f96v.P.4;F dsheos sheey teo cthy ctheodody –
f96v.P.5;F tockhy cthey ckheeody ar chey key –
f96v.P.6;F yteeody teodar alchey sy –
f96v.P.7;F sheodal chor ary cthol –
f96v.P.8;F ycheey ckheal daiins –
f96v.P.9;F oeol ckheor cheor aiin –
f96v.P.10;F ctheor oral char ckhey –
f96v.P.11;F sar os checkhey socth –
f96v.P.12;F sosar cheekeo daiin –
f96v.P.13;F soy sar cheor =

f99r.P4.13;F tol.keey.ctheey-{plant}
f99r.P4.14;F ykeol.okeol.o!ckheo.chol.cheodal.okeo!r.alcheem.orar-{plant}
f99r.P4.15;F okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey.daiin.okeol!s.aiin.olaiir.o!olshl-
f99r.P4.16;F qokeeo.okeey.qokeey.okisy.qokeeo.sar.sheseky.or.al-{plant}
f99r.P4.17;F **aiin.c!!!!khey.acthey.dy.daiin.okor.okeey.shcth!!!*!sh-
f99r.P4.18;H ychor.ols.or.am.air.om

The first thing I’d note is that, even though both herbal pages are marked up as “Herbal A” pages, their ciphertexts appear to have a completely different internal structure from each other. Specifically, f17v has lots of repetitive sequences such as “ychol chol dolcheey tchol ” / “chol chol cthol” / “okeor okar okol“, etc; while f96v has a different (dare I say more sophisticated?) feel altogether, with a nicely fluid use of letters. By way of further contrast, f99v is full of “ee” shapes such as “keey etheey” / “okeeey.keey.keeor.okeey” / “qokeeo.okeey.qokeey“, which looks clunky and repetitive in a quite different way from f17v.

The fact that all three text sequences accompany broadly the same diagram is surely some kind of indication that their contents could well be related in some way. However, there is (as far as I can see) no obvious textual overlap between the three of them. Hence I really don’t think the significant differences here can be accounted for purely in terms of presumed content. As a consequence, even though all three texts share the same glyphic building blocks, I think the precise ways the cipher system was employed in all three differ quite widely.

Unfortunately, this probably points to a weakness in the way we tend to talk about Voynichese: that we haven’t really established anything like a proper cryptographic ‘roadmap’ of the system’s evolution to help us navigate these differences with confidence. The page classifications we have inherited from Prescott Currier remain helpful in a fairly high-level sense, but I think our cryptanalytical needs have outstripped their low-level utility – they aren’t really strong enough tools to help us deal with the ciphertext itself.

And so my real Voynich research lead of the day is simply this: that I think we don’t yet know enough about the cryptanalytical differences between individual pages of Voynichese to be able to group /categorise / classify them effectively. What were the stages of evolution of the cipher system? What shapes or groups evolved into (or were replaced by) what? And why has it taken us more than a century to ask such basic questions?

Maybe, though, this is simply a consequence of the lack of detailed codicological insight we have into the original bifolio nesting and gathering layout (as well as composition order). If we had all that properly locked down, then perhaps we’d start to be more inquisitive about the changes going on in the cipher system, rather than just saying “it’s an A-page” or “it’s a B-page”.

Right now, looking at these three short sections, I have to say that it feels to me as if we still know next to nothing about how this cipher actually works.