---
title: The Voynich manuscript – early research
description: >-
Three and a half centuries of attempts to read the Voynich manuscript: the ideas, the claimants, the codebreakers, and why every reading failed.
published: 2026-09-30
tags: ["Voynich manuscript", "history of science", "cryptography"]
draft: false
series: The Voynich manuscript
card:
image: voynich/f1r
alt: the first page of the Voynich manuscript, with the alphabet table in its margin
---
The [first post in this series](/posts/voynich-manuscript/) introduced the
Voynich manuscript as an object: a fifteenth-century book on calfskin, its
pages full of drawings and of fluent writing in a script nobody can read. This
post and the next are about the people who have tried to read it.
This one follows the ideas. Over three and a half centuries the book has been
taken for a secret treatise by a medieval friar, a cipher, shorthand, a lost
natural language, an invented one, and a hoax, and each idea brought its own
way of attacking the text. The next post takes up the same story from the
1970s on, when the main tool became counting rather than reading, and looks at
the computational methods in detail.
It goes in this order:
1. **A map of the field**: a citation graph of Voynich research,
the five kinds of work it is sorted into, and how to read it.
2. **The first readers**, in seventeenth-century Prague and Rome.
3. **Roger Bacon's cipher**: the first decipherment, and the first demolition.
4. **The codebreakers**: Friedman, Tiltman, Currier and D'Imperio.
5. **The claimants**: half a century of readings, from Cathar liturgy to
Proto-Romance.
6. **What was settled**: the results nobody now disputes.
7. **How readings fail**: the pattern every failed claim shares.
8. **The search space**: the concepts of what the book is, laid out side by
side, with what each predicts. This is the most important section of the
post, because it says where to look.
9. **What remains open**: the questions a century has not answered.
## A map of the field
Which studies of the manuscript does the field actually stand on? Searching
for "Voynich" returns thousands of items, most of them claims of a solution and
a growing number of them written by language models. The graph below is built
the other way round, from what the field itself cites. The reference lists of
the serious studies were pooled to find the works the field builds on, the
newest results, too recent to have been cited yet, were added, and each was
checked against the bibliographic databases. I compiled the graph for this
post; it is not a published dataset. That gives a canon of 69 works,
from Newbold's book of 1928 to papers published this autumn, and 329 citations
between them, found partly in the OpenAlex index and mostly by reading the
reference sections of the papers themselves.
### Five kinds of work
Before the picture, the classification it rests on, because it is the most
important thing in it. Every work in the canon makes one main kind of
contribution, and there turn out to be five kinds. Each answers a different
question and rests on a different kind of evidence.
1. **Object** (in full: the object, its hands and its order). Studies of the
physical book: the radiocarbon dating, the analysis of inks and pigments,
multispectral imaging, the palaeography that counts the scribes, the
codicology that asks in what order the leaves were written, and the
archival work on its owners. *What is this thing, when and by whom was it
made, and in what order?* The evidence is the parchment, the ink and the
documents, and it is independent of the text.
2. **Surveys** (surveys and transcriptions). The works that gather what is
known and make the text available to others: D'Imperio's survey,
Tiltman's assessment, Kahn's history of codebreaking, and the
transcriptions, from Friedman's punched cards to EVA. *What has been
tried, and what exactly does the page say?* They are the field's memory
and its infrastructure. Every statistic depends on a transcription.
3. **Statistics** (statistics and linguistics). Studies that measure the text
as it stands and compare it with languages: Currier's two languages,
Bennett's entropy, Stolfi's word grammar, Landini's spectra, and most of
the work since. *What kind of text is this, judged by its numbers?* They do
not read the text. They describe it.
4. **Generators** (generators and ciphers). Works that build a procedure,
whether a cipher, a grille or a copying rule, that produces Voynich-like
text, and then compare its output with the manuscript. *Could a process of
this kind have produced this text?* They test an idea by building it, so
that it can fail in public.
5. **Claims** (decipherment claims). Works that say they have read the text,
from Newbold to Cheshire. *What does it say?* They are drawn hollow because
nothing has been built on them. Others cite them as cautions, or as
hypotheses to test. Manly's rebuttal of Newbold sits in this lane too, next
to the claim it answered.
The five are not arbitrary. They follow the logic of the problem. A reading is
a claim about the text. Checking it needs a transcription; judging it needs
statistics; deciding whether a text like this needs meaning at all needs
generators; and all of them are bounded by what the object itself allows. So
the lanes also show how work flows: claims are tested by statistics,
statistics are answered by generators, generators are checked by statistics,
and the object constrains everything. A few works could sit in two lanes,
since Currier counted scribes as well as measuring text, and each was put
where its main contribution lies.
Here is the graph.
```figure
{ "chart": "voynich-research-early", "caption": "Who cites whom in Voynich research. Each dot is a work, placed at its year of first publication, in a lane for its kind: the physical object and its scribes; surveys and transcriptions; statistics and linguistics; generators and ciphers, which try to produce Voynich-like text; and decipherment claims, drawn hollow. A dot's area grows with the number of citations it receives from other works in the graph, and ★ marks a turning point, a result the field reorganised around. Each arc runs from a citing work back to the work it cites, in the cited work's colour. The key under the graph says what each lane holds. The view opens on 1924–2006: drag to reach the present, hold Ctrl or ⌘ while scrolling to zoom, and hover over a dot for its details." }
```
A few things are visible at once. Until the 1970s there is very little: a
handful of claims, each answered, if at all, by one rebuttal. Then come the
codebreakers' surveys and, in 1976, Prescott Currier, whose dot grows into the
largest in the graph. From the 1990s the statistics lane fills up, and after
2010 the picture becomes a dense web of studies citing each other and,
increasingly, citing the generators that try to imitate the text. The claims
lane, meanwhile, keeps its hollow dots small. Decipherment claims are cited,
when they are cited at all, as warnings.
The graph has its limits. Its dots measure standing within these 69 works, not
in the world at large. Some important early works survive only as typescripts
or web pages whose references cannot be read, so they appear only as things
cited, never as citing anything. And it is a selection, argued for but a
selection all the same. As a map of who built on whom, though, it is the
one this series uses, and the rest of this post and the next walk through it
from left to right. The names in the lanes above all come up there.
## The first readers
The first people we know of who tried to read the book were its
seventeenth-century owners in Prague. Georg Baresch, an alchemist, owned it by
the 1630s. He believed that it held medical knowledge brought back from the
East, perhaps by someone who had travelled there to learn it. He spent years trying to read it and got
nowhere.
So he wrote to the one man in Europe who seemed equal to the task. Athanasius
Kircher, a Jesuit in Rome, had just announced, in a book of 1636, that he could
read Egyptian hieroglyphs. He could not, as it turned out when the Rosetta Stone
was read two centuries later, but in the 1630s nobody knew that. Around 1637
Baresch sent him a copy of some of the pages. Kircher answered; the answer is
lost, but in 1639 Baresch was writing to him again for help.
When Baresch died, the book passed to Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the
university in Prague, who sent it on to Kircher in 1665. It is Marci's covering
letter that brought Rudolf II and Roger Bacon into the story, both as hearsay.
And it seems that Marci, or someone near him, tried the most direct approach of
all. In the margin of the first page, multispectral imaging has revealed a
table of three columns: a Latin alphabet, the manuscript's own letters beside
it, and a second Latin alphabet shifted by one place. Lisa Fagin Davis, who
published the images, offers two readings: an attempt to read the text with
two substitutions side by side, or Marci using the script to make a cipher of
his own. If it was an attempt at reading, it is the earliest whose working
survives, and the first known to fail.
```figure
{ "image": "voynich/f1r-margin", "alt": "The right margin of folio 1r, close up: line ends of the manuscript's text on the left, a red ornament at the top, and a faint column of small letters down the margin", "caption": "The right margin of folio 1r in ordinary light. Down the margin runs the faint column of Latin letters, a, b, c and on, that multispectral imaging resolves into three columns. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University." }
```
Then the book disappeared into the library of the Collegio Romano for two
hundred years.
## Roger Bacon's cipher
When Wilfrid Voynich bought the manuscript in 1912, he took Marci's hint and
ran with it. Roger Bacon was a thirteenth-century Franciscan with a legendary
reputation as a scientist and magician, and a book by Bacon in cipher would be
worth a fortune. Voynich had photostats made and sent them to anyone who might
help: cryptographers, historians, philologists.
The first to claim success was William Romaine Newbold, a professor of
philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. In a lecture of 1921 he announced
that the visible letters were a decoy. The real text, he said, lay in tiny
marks inside the strokes, visible under magnification: a microscopic Greek
shorthand, which, once decoded and put through several further stages of
anagramming, revealed Bacon recording discoveries centuries ahead of his time.
The claim made newspapers. Newbold died in 1926, and his book, *The Cipher of
Roger Bacon*, was published by a colleague in 1928.[^newbold]
The answer came in 1931, from John Manly, a medievalist at Chicago who had been
a codebreaker during the First World War. He looked at the same marks under the
same magnification and found that they were cracks in dried ink. He also showed
that Newbold's procedure, with its stages of anagramming, was so loose that it
could produce more or less any text the decoder wanted.[^manly]
Manly's paper is a turning point in the graph, and rightly so. It is the model
for every good rebuttal since. He did not argue that Newbold's reading was
implausible, or that Bacon could not have known what Newbold said he knew. He
tested the method, and showed that it did not constrain its own output. A
method that can produce any text has not produced this one.
Two more readings followed in the 1940s. Joseph Feely took the text to be
heavily abbreviated Latin, and Leonell Strong, a cancer researcher, to be a
cipher based on a double arithmetic progression, hiding a medical text by an
English herbalist, Anthony Askham. Neither method could be made to work by
anyone else, on pages the author had not already chosen.[^claims]
## The codebreakers
### Friedman's study groups
The most famous codebreaker to take on the manuscript was William Friedman,
whose Signal Intelligence Service broke the Japanese diplomatic cipher known as
Purple. In 1944, when the war had left him with a room full of cryptanalysts
and IBM punched-card machines, he set up a study group to work on the book in
their spare time. They transcribed the text into a code that could be punched
onto cards and sorted by machine. It was the first machine-readable copy of the
manuscript, and the start of a line that leads directly to every statistic
computed on it today. The transcription was later lost, and was recovered only
in 1995.[^reeds]
The group disbanded when the war ended. Friedman organised a second one in
1962–63, and with his wife Elizebeth, a codebreaker as distinguished as he was,
kept coming back to the problem for the rest of his life. Neither group read a
word. What Friedman concluded is the most interesting idea to come out of the
period. In 1959 he and Elizebeth published a paper on anagram claims in
literature and ended it with an anagram of their own: a footnote that read as
a remark about anagrams ("I put no trust in anagrammatic acrostic cyphers, for
they are of little real value — a waste — and may prove nothing"). Its
solution was deposited in a sealed envelope and published only after
Friedman's death, in 1970. Unscrambled, it read that the manuscript was "an
early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori
type".[^friedman]
An *a priori* language is one built from scratch on philosophical principles,
not from existing languages. Several were designed in the seventeenth century,
in which words are composed from elements that each stand for a category of
things. Friedman's idea was that the regularity he saw in the manuscript's
words was of this kind. It is still open today.
### Tiltman
John Tiltman had been one of the best British codebreakers at Bletchley Park
and later worked with the American NSA. He looked at the manuscript from 1951
and published his assessment in the NSA's internal journal in 1967. His
most lasting observation was about the shape of words. They behave, he wrote,
as if assembled from a small stock of beginnings and a small stock of endings,
combined in a regular way. Today that is called slot structure, and much of
the modern work on the manuscript's word grammar starts from it.[^tiltman]
You can see what he meant in any line. Here are six words from folio 2r, each
cut into the parts that recur across the book: a beginning such as `qo`, `ch`,
`sh` or `o`; a gallows or an `o` in the middle; and an ending such as `aiin`,
`ey` or `al`.
```figure
{ "gallery": [
{ "image": "voynich/word-qotaiin", "label": "qo · t · aiin", "alt": "The word qotaiin" },
{ "image": "voynich/word-qokey", "label": "qo · k · ey", "alt": "The word qokey" },
{ "image": "voynich/word-chokaiin", "label": "ch · o · k · aiin", "alt": "The word chokaiin" },
{ "image": "voynich/word-shodaiin", "label": "sh · o · d · aiin", "alt": "The word shodaiin" },
{ "image": "voynich/word-otchal", "label": "o · t · ch · al", "alt": "The word otchal" },
{ "image": "voynich/word-daiin", "label": "d · aiin", "alt": "The word daiin" }
], "caption": "Six words from folio 2r, split into recurring parts. The split is an illustration of Tiltman's observation, not an agreed analysis: where exactly the boundaries fall is still argued about. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University." }
```
### Currier
The single most important contribution of the period came from another NSA
cryptanalyst, Prescott Currier, at a seminar in 1976.[^currier] Currier looked
at the text page by page and saw that it was not uniform. It split into two
populations, which he called languages A and B. Each has its own favourite
letters and words: some combinations common in one are rare in the other, and
pages in the same stretch of the book share one of them. Currier also saw, from
differences in the handwriting, that more than one scribe had been at work,
and that the two "languages" went with different hands.
The difference shows in the transcription, and, once you know what to look for,
on the page: B is full of words ending in the same few strokes. Here are
the opening lines of the book, in language A, and five lines from the bathing
section, in language B.
```figure
{ "image": "voynich/f1r-opening", "alt": "The first five lines of folio 1r, in a looped, rounded script", "caption": "Language A: folio 1r, lines 1–5. In transcription the first line reads fachys ykal ar ataiin shol shory cthres y kor sholdy. Words like shol, chol and cthy, and endings in -aiin and -ol, are typical. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.", "wide": true }
```
```figure
{ "image": "voynich/f75r-lines", "alt": "Five lines of folio 75r, in the same script, with many words ending in a similar pattern", "caption": "Language B: folio 75r, lines 1–5, to the right of the drawing. The first line reads okeey qokar shyk chedy qotar shedy. Words beginning qok- and ending -edy, such as chedy, shedy and qokeedy, are everywhere in B and rare in A. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.", "wide": true }
```
And he made an observation whose importance has only grown: that "the line is a
functional entity". The first word of a line and the last word behave
differently from words in the middle, as if the line itself were a unit of
the text and not just where the writing happened to run out of space. In
ordinary writing, the end of a line changes the words on it only in small ways,
by dividing or abbreviating one at the margin.
He noticed a third thing, in passing: that some word endings are followed by
particular word beginnings far more often than chance would allow.
Currier used "language" loosely, for a marked statistical difference between
two bodies of text, and said that it "in no way implies the existence of any
underlying language". He spoke of two authors and of two systems of writing,
and leaned towards thinking that the text was not a straightforward record of a
language. His observations, the two languages, the line as a unit and the link
between one word and the next, turned out to be things any later theory has
had to account for, which is why he is the largest dot in the graph.
### D'Imperio
In 1978 Mary D'Imperio, also of the NSA, published *The Voynich Manuscript: An
Elegant Enigma*, a survey of everything that had been tried and proposed until
then.[^dimperio] It covers the history, the illustrations section by section,
every theory and the reasons for doubting it, and it remains the place to start
for anyone who wants to know what was known before computers. It was
declassified and is now freely available.
By the end of the 1970s, then, the best cryptanalysts of the century had worked
on the manuscript and failed to read it. What they left behind was a set of
observations: that the words were built from parts, that the text came in two
varieties, that lines were units, that the letters were unusually predictable.
None of these looked like what a cipher of the period should produce, or like
what a natural language written in an ordinary alphabet should produce. They
looked like a puzzle.
## The claimants
The readings did not stop. They became, if anything, more frequent. Here are
the ones the field has thought worth answering, roughly in order; most of them
are in the graph.
**Brumbaugh, 1975–78.** Robert Brumbaugh, a philosopher at Yale, proposed that
the book was a forgery made to sell to Rudolf II, with Latin under a two-stage
numerical cipher. He also read star maps in it. Nobody could repeat his
procedure, and the radiocarbon date, which puts the parchment a century and a
half before Rudolf, has made the premise very unlikely: a forger would have
needed old blank parchment.
**Levitov, 1987.** Leo Levitov read the text as the liturgy of the Cathars, the
heretics of southern France, written in a Flemish-based creole with loan words
from Old French and Old High German. Historians found
no trace of such a liturgy, and linguists no trace of such a language.
**Tucker and Talbert, 2013; Janick and Tucker, 2018.** Arthur Tucker, a
botanist, with Rexford Talbert, an information technologist, and later with the
horticulturist Jules Janick, saw New World plants in the herbal and proposed
that the text was Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, from sixteenth-century
Mexico. The radiocarbon date is a serious problem for this, since it puts the
parchment before Columbus.
**Bax, 2014.** Stephen Bax, a linguist, proposed readings of about ten words,
mostly labels beside plants and stars, which he took to be names. It is the
most careful of the reading proposals, and the most modest: he called it
provisional, and asked others to extend it. Nobody managed to.
**Hauer and Kondrak, 2016.** Two computer scientists built a method for
identifying the language behind a text written in an unknown script, even when
the letters of each word have been scrambled. Its language identification
worked well on 380 known languages. Applied to the manuscript, it suggested Hebrew with anagrammed
words. The method was sound and interesting, but the reading was not: the
"translation" of the first line leaned on Google Translate, and Hebrew
specialists did not accept it.
**Gibbs, 2017.** Nicholas Gibbs proposed in the *Times Literary Supplement*
that the book was a women's health manual in abbreviated Latin, copied from
known medieval sources. Specialists found that his Latin did not make sense,
that the parallels he presented as discoveries had long been known, and that
his proof rested on two lines.
**Ardıç, 2018.** Ahmet Ardıç and his family read the text as a phonetic
rendering of Old Turkish. It was treated more respectfully than most: Lisa
Fagin Davis, the leading palaeographer of the manuscript, called it one of the
few solutions she had seen that was consistent and repeatable. It has not been
confirmed by anyone else.
**Cheshire, 2019.** Gerard Cheshire published in a peer-reviewed journal,
*Romance Studies*, the claim that the text was "calligraphic Proto-Romance",
and the University of Bristol, where he was an honorary research associate,
announced that he had "succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics
scholars and computer programs have failed". Linguists pointed out that
Proto-Romance is the reconstructed ancestor of the Romance languages, spoken
centuries before any of them was written, and could not be the written
language of a fifteenth-century book; and that Cheshire described it in turn
as that ancestor and as a Mediterranean lingua franca, which contradict each
other. Bristol withdrew its press release within days.[^cheshire]
In the last two years there has been a new wave: readings produced with the help of large
language models, deposited by the hundred in open repositories. The next post
comes back to those.
## What was settled
By 2000, a century of attempts had produced few answers about what the text
says, but several results about the book and the text that nobody now
disputes. They are worth setting apart, because everything later builds on
them.
**Settled beyond reasonable doubt:**
- **No reading has survived.** Every decipherment proposed since 1921 has
failed independent testing, or never submitted to it.
- **Newbold's hidden writing does not exist.** The marks he read are cracks in
dried ink (Manly, 1931).
- **The book is a genuine medieval object** with a documented history from
Prague in the 1630s, which disposes of every theory of a modern forgery.
The radiocarbon date of 2009 later fixed the parchment to 1404–1438.
- **Words are built from parts.** A small stock of beginnings, middles and
endings, combined in a regular order, makes up nearly every word (Tiltman,
1967, and Stolfi's grammar of 2000).
- **The text comes in two varieties.** Currier's languages A and B differ in
their favourite letters and words, and pages in the same stretch of the book
share one of them (Currier, 1976).
- **The line is a unit.** The first and last words of a line behave
differently from words in its middle (Currier, 1976).
- **Neighbouring words are linked.** Certain word endings are followed by
certain beginnings far more often than chance would give (noticed by
Currier in 1976, measured by Reddy and Knight in 2011, and treated
systematically in 2019).
**Shown, but argued over then and since:**
- **Several scribes.** Currier saw more than one hand. How many, and whether
they match his two languages, is still disputed.
- **Not a simple cipher of a European language.** The codebreakers suspected
it from the start. The measurements that put it beyond doubt came later and
belong to the next post.
## How readings fail
Looking at the claims together, they fail in remarkably consistent ways. It is
worth setting the pattern out, because it is the most useful thing a history
of failed decipherments has to teach.
1. **The key is adjusted to the text.** The mapping from signs to letters is
changed from passage to passage until something readable comes out, and the
readable output is then offered as proof of the mapping. This is circular.
2. **Words are matched one by one.** Individual groups of letters are paired
with plausible words, with no account of grammar. Any large enough
vocabulary will supply matches.
3. **Languages are switched.** When a word will not fit the proposed language,
another one is brought in.
4. **The method does not repeat.** Applied by someone else, or to a page the
author did not choose, the procedure yields nothing.
5. **A few lines stand in for the book.** Two lines are translated, and the
rest of the book is assumed to follow.
6. **The structure of the text is ignored.** Currier's two languages, the line
as a unit and the regular shape of the words are left unexplained, though a
reading that does not predict them cannot be right.
7. **The press is told first.** The claim reaches journalists before it reaches
the people who could check it.
Manly saw the essential point in 1931. A decipherment is a claim about a
procedure, not about a text: that a fixed procedure, applied to any page, gives
the same readable result. Every reading in the graph so far has either failed
that test or never been put to it.
## The search space
This is the part of the history that matters most for everything that follows
in this series.
Every attempt described above is a bet on what kind of object the manuscript
is. Newbold bet on hidden writing, Strong and Brumbaugh on a
cipher, Friedman on
an invented language, the claimants on one natural language or another. Seen
from a distance, the bets are not scattered at random. They cover a space of
possibilities that can be laid out quite precisely, and laying it out tells us
where to look, what each kind of answer would have to explain, and which
regions have already been searched.
### Three questions
The space is organised by three questions, asked in order.
1. **Does the text carry a message at all?** Either the writing encodes
something a reader could recover, or it was produced to look like writing
and encodes nothing.
2. **If it does, in what language?** A language that is known and recorded
elsewhere, such as Latin, German or Turkish; a natural language that is
lost or was never written down; or a language invented for the purpose.
3. **How is that language put on the page?** In an ordinary alphabet, one sign
for one sound; in a script that records fewer distinctions than the language
makes; through a cipher that disguises the letters; through
abbreviation or shorthand, where signs stand for syllables or words; hidden
inside something else; or not as language at all, but as a notation, a code
of the kind used for quantities, positions or catalogue entries.
Each answer to the three questions is a concept of what the manuscript is.
Drawn as a tree, read from left to right:
```figure
{ "chart": "voynich-search-space", "caption": "The search space as a tree. Each branch answers one of the three questions, and each leaf on the right is one concept of what the manuscript is. The concepts are cores, not exclusive categories: a cipher can be applied to an invented language, and a book can mix a notation in its labels with prose in its paragraphs." }
```
These are the ones that have been seriously proposed.
| Concept | The language | How it is written |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Known language, invented alphabet | known | one sign for one sound |
| Language in a lossy script | known or unknown | signs that merge distinctions the language makes |
| Lost or unrecorded language | unknown | one sign for one sound |
| Cipher | known | letters disguised by a system |
| Abbreviation or shorthand | known | signs for syllables and words |
| Hidden writing | known | concealed inside the visible text |
| Invented language | invented | an alphabet, or a system of word parts |
| Notation | none | a code, not a language |
| Meaningless text | none | marks that only look like writing |
The concepts are not all exclusive. A cipher can be applied to an invented
language, a text can be part meaningful and part filler, and a book can mix a
notation in its labels with prose in its paragraphs. But each has a core, and
each core makes different predictions about what the text should look like.
That is what makes the space searchable.
### A known language in an invented alphabet
**The idea.** The text is just what it looks like: a natural language, written
phonetically in a script made up for it, so that each sign stands for a sound,
or for a few closely related sounds. The language is one we know. Only the
alphabet is new.
**Who held it.** Most of the modern claimants, each with a different language:
Old Turkish (Ardıç), Nahuatl (Tucker and Talbert), "Proto-Romance" (Cheshire),
and, behind scrambled words, Hebrew (Hauer and Kondrak). Levitov's mixture of
Flemish and German belongs here too.
**What it predicts.** The text should have the statistics of the language in
question: its letter frequencies, its typical combinations, its word lengths,
the way one word constrains the next. And once the right language is found, a
fixed assignment of sounds to signs should produce readable text on every page.
**Where it is weak.** No proposed language has passed the second test, and the
statistics, as the next post shows, do not match the European languages at
all. The manuscript's letters are far more predictable than those of Latin,
German or Italian. Languages with simple syllables come closer, especially
tonal languages whose Latin spelling leaves the tones unwritten, though none
reaches it; that keeps the door open for languages from further afield. That is the concept's strength and its
weakness: it is the simplest explanation, and every specific version of it has
failed.
### A language in a lossy script
**The idea.** A natural language, known or unknown, written in a script that
records fewer distinctions than the language makes: signs that stand for
several sounds at once, as when a spelling leaves tone or vowel quality
unwritten. (Leaving vowels out altogether, as an abjad does, makes letters
less predictable, not more.) The text would then be language, but not readable
sound by sound.
**Who held it.** It is the explanation Luke Lindemann and Claire Bowern
suggest, in the most thorough linguistic studies of the text (2020 and 2021):
an encoding, whether a script or a cipher, that is not one sign for one
sound.[^lindemann] The next post
describes them.
**What supports it.** Words whose frequencies and distribution through the
book look like those of a language, vocabulary that changes with the subject
of the section, and letters more predictable than in any alphabet measured, in
the way a script that merges distinctions would make them.
**What it predicts.** The statistics of a language, but with the letter level
flattened: fewer distinctions, so letters more predictable than in any
ordinary alphabet.
**Where it is weak.** Without knowing the language or the script's rules it is
hard to test, and it has to explain why the losses are as systematic as the
measurements say.
### A lost or unrecorded language
**The idea.** A natural language, written phonetically, but one that is no
longer spoken or was never written down anywhere else: a regional dialect, the
language of a small community, a language from far outside Europe. Baresch's
belief that the book held knowledge from the East points this way.
**What supports it.** The same statistics as the previous concept: word
frequencies and topic-bound vocabulary of the kind languages show.
**What it predicts.** The statistics of *a* natural language, without a
particular one to compare against: words that recur by topic, a stable
grammar, sounds that combine the way sounds do in speech.
**Where it is weak.** It is very hard to test. Without a known language to
compare, almost any oddity can be put down to the unknown one.
### A cipher
**The idea.** A known language, usually Latin or an Italian or German
vernacular, disguised by a system that replaces its letters. This was the
first idea anyone had (Marci's table of three alphabets, if it was an attempt
at a key, tests the simplest cipher there is), and it was the working assumption of the
codebreakers.
**Who held it.** Marci (if the table on the first page is his), Voynich with
his Roger Bacon, Strong, Brumbaugh, and
the codebreakers until the 1950s. In its modern form it is held by those who
study homophonic ciphers, in which each letter can be written in several ways.
**What it predicts.** Depends on the cipher. A simple substitution, one sign
for one letter, keeps every statistic of the language underneath except the
shapes of the letters, so the text would look like Latin in disguise. A
homophonic cipher, with several signs or strings of signs for each letter,
flattens the letter frequencies and can change much else. Transposition, which
reorders letters, keeps the single-letter frequencies and scrambles the letter
pairs and the words.
**Where it is weak.** Simple substitution was suspected from early on and has
since been ruled out: the text does not have the statistics of any European
language under any assignment of letters. Fifteenth-century chancery ciphers
used substitution with several signs for common letters, dummy signs and code
words for names, and Alberti described a cipher disk around 1467. None of them
turns each letter into a string of several signs that together form regular
words, which is what the text seems to need. That gap is precisely what recent work has tried to close by
building ciphers that could have been worked by hand at the time, and the next
post comes back to it.
### Abbreviation or shorthand
**The idea.** A known language, almost always Latin, written in a system of
contractions in which a sign stands for a syllable, an ending or a whole word.
Medieval scribes abbreviated constantly, with a shared repertoire of marks for
common endings and words, so the idea is natural. Some of the manuscript's
signs even look like Latin abbreviation marks.
**Who held it.** Newbold (whose hidden writing was a shorthand), Feely, and
Gibbs.
**What it predicts.** A small set of signs doing a lot of work at the ends of
words, where Latin abbreviation was concentrated, and words that are short
because they are compressed.
**Where it is weak.** No one has produced a system that expands the text into
Latin consistently across the book. And the abbreviation that scribes actually
used makes a text less predictable letter by letter, not more, because it adds
signs and removes the predictable letters they replace. Its other effects have
hardly been measured: once, on short excerpts, an abbreviated Latin text came
out among the texts nearest the manuscript, though no nearer than other
candidates.[^bowerngaskell] Whether
some heavier, private system of contraction could work is still an open
question.
### Hidden writing
**The idea.** The visible text is a decoy, or a carrier, and the real message
is hidden somewhere else: in the shapes of the strokes, in selected letters, in
the first letters of lines, in the drawings. This is steganography, the hiding
of a message rather than the disguising of it.
**Who held it.** Newbold, whose microscopic shorthand inside the strokes is the
classic case. Searches for messages in the line initials or in particular
positions of the text have recurred ever since.
**What it predicts.** That the carrier text may be meaningless filler, and that
the selected positions, read in order, give a readable text.
**Where it is weak.** Newbold's marks turned out to be cracks in the ink, and
no selection of positions has yet produced anything. But the concept has a
consequence worth keeping in mind: the statistics of a carrier text tell us
nothing about whether there is a hidden message.
### An invented language
**The idea.** A language constructed for the book, not inherited. Friedman's
version was a philosophical language of the *a priori* kind, in which words
are built from elements that each stand for a category, so that a word's
spelling tells you what kind of thing it names. Simpler versions are possible:
a private language with its own vocabulary and grammar, or a known language
dressed in invented word forms.
**Who held it.** Friedman, and in a sense Tiltman, whose words made of
beginnings and endings are just what a systematic invented vocabulary would
produce.
**What it predicts.** Words with a very regular internal structure, built from
a small stock of parts in a fixed order, and a vocabulary that is systematic
rather than historical, without the irregularities that real languages
accumulate.
**Where it is weak.** The best-known philosophical languages were designed in
the seventeenth century, two hundred years after the parchment was made, and
nothing comparable is known from the early fifteenth. Earlier precedents are
partial: Hildegard of Bingen's invented vocabulary of the twelfth century, a
glossary of made-up words used inside Latin, and Ramon Llull's art of combining
letters that stand for concepts, of the thirteenth; neither is a written
language of the kind the manuscript would need. And without a key, an
invented language is almost impossible to confirm: there is nothing outside
the book to compare it with.
### A notation
**The idea.** Not language at all, but a code for something else: quantities,
dosages, calendar positions, catalogue numbers, the properties of the plants in
the pictures. In that case the "words" would be entries in a system, and the
meaning would lie in the structure and in the drawings, not in sentences.
**Who held it.** Several recent proposals read the book as a technical system,
for instance as a medical and astrological reference in which the sections
index one another. None has been published in a peer-reviewed venue.
**What it predicts.** Labels and entries that vary systematically with what
they label, structure that follows the pictures, and little of the
word-to-word grammar of running text.
**Where it is weak.** It does not obviously explain why the paragraphs look so
much like running text, page after page. But it fits the book's evident
medical and astrological flavour, and it takes the drawings seriously, which
the linguistic concepts mostly do not.
### Meaningless text
**The idea.** The writing encodes nothing. It was produced to look like a
language, by a procedure or by a practised hand, whether to deceive a buyer or
for some reason we can no longer recover.
**Who held it.** The old forgery theories, such as the suspicion that Voynich
forged the book himself, belong here, and were disposed of by the documents and
the physical evidence. The concept itself survived, and in 2004 it came back in
a much stronger form, as a procedure that can be run. That story belongs to
the next post.
**What supports it.** The regular, repetitive words, the weak dependence of
one whole word on the word before it, and the fact that people asked to write meaningless
text by hand produce something statistically close to it. The next post
describes that experiment.
**What it predicts.** Text with the surface regularities of the procedure that
made it, and without the properties usually taken as signs of meaning: words
that cluster by topic, phrases that recur because they say the same thing,
structure that spans sentences. Topic clusters are not decisive on their own,
though: a procedure that changes from section to section, or a change of
scribe, can produce them too.
**Where it is weak.** It has to explain why a meaningless text would be
written so carefully, by one or more scribes (the number is disputed), over
more than two hundred pages, with the drawings outlined in what is, in all
probability, the same ink. And like every concept here, it has to account for all the properties of
the text, including the ones that look like meaning.
### What the space tells us
Set out like this, the history stops looking like a sequence of failures and
starts looking like a search. Some regions have been searched thoroughly and
found empty: simple substitution of a European language, ordinary Latin
abbreviation as an explanation of how predictable the letters are, Newbold's
hidden marks. Some have been searched badly, one
language or one claimant at a time. And some have hardly been searched at all.
It also shows what a good question looks like. Asking "what does this word
mean?" presupposes answers to all three questions above. Asking "what kind of
process could have produced this text?" does not. It is a question about where
in the space the manuscript lies, and the measurements described in the next
post are attempts to answer it.
## What remains open
The search space is itself the list of open questions. Put plainly, after a
century nobody can yet answer any of these:
1. **Does the text carry a message at all?** Meaningful and meaningless text
both remain possible.
2. **If it does, in what kind of language?** Known, lost or invented.
3. **How is it put on the page?** Alphabet, cipher, abbreviation, hidden
writing or notation.
4. **What are Currier's two languages?** Two systems of writing, two authors,
two stages of one process, or something else.
5. **What is the line for?** Currier's words still stand: the line is a
functional entity, and "what its function is, I don't know".
6. **Do the words belong to the pictures?** The labels sit beside drawings, but
no label has been tied to what it labels.
7. **What language are the month names on the zodiac pages?** They are among
the few readable words in the book, probably in a later hand, and nobody has
settled where they come from.
The next post takes up the first four with the tools that replaced reading.
## What comes next
By the late 1970s the codebreakers had given up on reading the manuscript and
turned to measuring it, and with Currier the first computer measurements had
already been made. The next post follows that turn: transcriptions in a shared
alphabet, entropy and word statistics, the generators built to imitate the
text, machine learning, and the move in the last few years towards benchmarks
and controls. The graph comes with it, opened on the decades where most of it
lies.
[^newbold]: W. R. Newbold, *The Cipher of Roger Bacon*, ed. R. G. Kent
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928).
[^manly]: J. M. Manly, "Roger Bacon and the Voynich MS", *Speculum* 6/3
(1931), 345–391.
[^claims]: J. M. Feely, *Roger Bacon's Cypher: The Right Key Found* (Rochester,
1943); L. C. Strong, "Anthony Askham, the Author of the Voynich Manuscript",
*Science* 101 (1945), 608–609. The reasons the later claims in this post
failed are those given in the published rebuttals.
[^reeds]: J. Reeds, "William F. Friedman's Transcription of the Voynich
Manuscript", *Cryptologia* 19/1 (1995), 1–23.
[^friedman]: W. F. Friedman and E. S. Friedman, "Acrostics, Anagrams, and
Chaucer", *Philological Quarterly* 38 (1959), 1–20. The solution of the
closing anagram was published in *Philological Quarterly* in 1970, after
Friedman's death in 1969.
[^bowerngaskell]: C. Bowern and D. Gaskell, "Enciphered after All?", in
*Proceedings of the International Conference on the Voynich Manuscript
2022*, CEUR-WS 3313; the abbreviated text is a *Secreta Secretorum* with
its scribal abbreviations kept.
[^tiltman]: J. H. Tiltman, "The Voynich Manuscript: 'The Most Mysterious
Manuscript in the World'", *NSA Technical Journal* 12/3 (1967),
declassified.
[^currier]: P. Currier, "Papers on the Voynich Manuscript", in M. E. D'Imperio
(ed.), *New Research on the Voynich Manuscript: Proceedings of a Seminar,
30 November 1976* (Washington, 1976); [transcribed at
voynich.nu](https://www.voynich.nu/extra/curr_main.html).
[^dimperio]: M. E. D'Imperio, *The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma* (Fort
George G. Meade: National Security Agency, 1978), declassified.
[^lindemann]: L. Lindemann and C. Bowern, "Character Entropy in Modern and
Historical Texts", [arXiv:2010.14697](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14697)
(2020); C. Bowern and L. Lindemann, "The Linguistics of the Voynich
Manuscript", *Annual Review of Linguistics* 7 (2021), 285–308.
[^cheshire]: G. Cheshire, "The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich)
Explained", *Romance Studies* 37/1 (2019), 30–67. The university's
statement and the linguists' replies were widely reported at the time.