u/Technical_Bar6829

A scribe imagined, transcribing lines from Dante's \"La Divina Commedia2.

Here is an example of how I imagine the transcription of a medieval document, which resulted in the book that we now know as the Voynich manuscript.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that:

• a scribe receives Canto 1 of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia, with instructions to transcribe it to the symbols that we now call Voynich glyphs;
• the principal glyphs are defined as Glen Claston will define them six hundred years later, with the exception that the symbol that Claston will call {4o} is not two glyphs but one;
• the Italian words are written in full, without the abbreviations and concatenations of the Foligno edition;
• the producer has prescribed a one-to-one mapping of Latin letters to glyphs, either not knowing or not caring that this mapping will preserve the frequencies of the Latin letters;
• it follows, with some confidence, that each Latin letter maps approximately to the equally ranked glyph; for example e to {o}, a to {9}, i to {a}, and so on.

In this scenario, the scribe examines the first line of Canto 1, which consists of seven words:

>nel mezo del camin di nostra uita

and following the mapping that the producer has laid down, he writes the rough transcription as shown below:

https://preview.redd.it/7j7o3pbgug0h1.png?width=806&format=png&auto=webp&s=6559a4035dc2dcc795c0fc2d7add6925c373f00a

He then refers to the producer’s “slot alphabet” for the correct order in which the glyphs must be written. We do not know whether this alphabet was simple or complex; nor whether it was rigid or flexible. We might guess that it embodied rules of the following nature:

• If the "word" contains the glyph {4o}, write that glyph in the leftmost position.
• If the "word" contains the glyph {m}, write that glyph in the rightmost position.
• If the "word" contains the glyph {9}, write that glyph in the rightmost position.
• The glyphs {c} and {C} can be to the right of, but not to the left of, the glyphs {h} and {k}.

The scribe's clean copy, which he writes on the vellum, is as shown below:

https://preview.redd.it/vqegga4kug0h1.png?width=806&format=png&auto=webp&s=05894d2f506245dd69db7e37a626c85d99c96db9

Five of these seven “words” are real “words” in the Voynich manuscript; and the other two "words" differ by only one glyph from real Voynich "words".

In practice, we have no reason to believe that the source documents included La Divina Commedia, or even that they were in medieval Italian. My working assumption is that they were in languages that were spoken and written in Europe in the fifteenth century.

However, this exercise demonstrates that a one-to-one mapping of letters to glyphs, coupled with some kind of re-ordering process, can replicate real Voynich "words".

I think that the way forward is to try many candidate languages, and many alternative transliterations of the Voynich manuscript, with all the permutations that this will involve. This is not a manual task; it will necessarily be a massive computational approach. It was just such an approach that cracked the Zodiac cipher.

https://preview.redd.it/acxvz07al90h1.png?width=2100&format=png&auto=webp&s=481d7d1b5f1e9bf718610db169ee3ffdb2cbbfcb

Here's an example of how I imagine a wealthy person, who lived in the fifteenth century, and whom I call the producer. I have imagined the producer as a man; equally, it could be a woman. The scene is a mansion or palace somewhere in southern Europe. The producer is giving instructions to a team of scribes.. Later, the scribes will write the text of the book that we now know as the Voynich manuscript.

As I imagine it, the producer engages at least five scribes. They are professional piece workers, paid by the page. The producer offers them a job which will keep them busy for at least several months, possibly more than a year.

The producer shows the scribes a set of symbols or glyphs that they have never seen before. It does not faze them; they are probably accustomed to writing in Latin or Greek script, possibly Arabic or Glagolitic.

He (or she) also provides a document, or a set of documents, containing some 40,000 words of text in a language and a script that they know. Perhaps he (or she) is the author; perhaps someone else is the author. They may even be well-known documents. It does not matter.

The task of the scribes will be to transcribe the source documents into the unknown alphabet. The producer sets out a set of rules and instructions for the transcription.

For this purpose, the producer will provide over one hundred sheets of calfskin vellum, already profusely illustrated on both recto and verso. The scribes will write the text, above, below and around the illustrations.

As I imagine, there is one specific instruction. Within each word, the scribes are first to map the letters to the glyphs, and then to re-order the glyphs in a sequence that the producer prescribes. This will create the phenomenon that, six centuries later, Mary D’Imperio will call "the five states", and Massimiliano Zattera will call "the slot alphabet".

If that is so, and if the producer intended the manuscript to be readable, he (or she) introduced an element of ambiguity into the decipherment. For example, the source documents might contain words that were anagrams of each other, like "trovai" and "travio" in Italian. Such words might map to the same string of glyphs.

Perhaps the producer expected that the reader, possessing or deducing the mapping between letters and glyphs, would infer the right meaning from the context. It would not be much harder than deciphering the following line:

* eln emoz acdeilmn ãdinr aitu

which readers of fifteenth-century Tuscan-Italian would intuit as:

* nel mezo delcamin dinrã uita,

or the first line of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia, in the Foligno edition of 1472.