I have written a program to decode cryptograms and have tried to aply it to the Voynich text. The best result so far is to match 39% of the words in the first two paragraphs of the first page of the manuscript to an old english word dictionary taken from Beowolf. The result is not readable as yet, or it would be better to say not meaningful in any way. I haven't done other pages, and there needs to be a lot of improvements in the program to take into account the different possibilities in transcription errors.
In doing this excercise, it becomes apparent that there are many difficulties that will make solving this mystery very difficult.
In order to solve it in this way it will require actual transcriptions of different documents in differnt languages and time periods with out any corrections to build dictionaries of possible words. Using modern words won't work. It would also need to try different variations of the Voynich alphabet because it is not clear where some letters begin an some end or weather or not a single letter is in fact two or three letters. And to take in account that a single voynich character or stroke could represent multiple characters.
If any one tried to solve the text with only one transcription using one possible alphabet version, they would not get vary far.
Here are some things that make this difficult:
1. There was no consistant spelling rules during the time the Voynich document was written. Scribes matched the sound of words to the letters as they needed and so spelling varied from scribe to scribe and aslo the same scribe may spell a single word differently in the same document. (I tend to do this myself unintentionally.)
2. The letters of the Voynich alphabet is not known, so it becomes very difficult to determine where one letter stops and another begins. The use of shorthand symbols was aslo common during that time and so some symbols could represent multiple characters.
3. There were many various spoken dialects at the time period, and so a phonetic representation may not be easily recognizable.
Many people have suggested some of the following.
A. Mirror writing by Leonardo...
The text has a strong left slanting diagonal strokes leading to that impression. We are used to text which has right slanting strokes, thus it causes us to think it is backwords somehow.
After copying parts of the text with a calligraphy pen to get the feel of the letters better, I feel very strongly that the Voynich document was written by, (in my oppinion), a right handed scribe in left to right forward order. Leonardo was left handed. Did he also write with his right hand?
B. It was written as an excercise by a child or young aprentice in a non sense alphabet...
I think they would not use high quality vellium for that. The crudeness of the illistrations is consistant in quality of the 13th centrury or earlier. We have become quite use to very high quality printing and so we tend to think of anything less as being done by a child or by an amature.
It is possible that the scribe was an apprentice or simply a less skilled scribe copying an older document. Much of the detail could have been lost during that process and distortions of the plants could have been introduced making them difficult to recognize. It may be that the older document was in bad shape leading to introduced errors. What if the scribe didn't know the language he was copying? Would he simplify the text without realizing it? What if this is a copy of a copy of a copy? There are 10th century documents with plant illistrations in the same style as the ones in the voynich document.
C. It was a hoax in order gain money from a wealthy individual...
This should only be considered a theory until there is stronger evidense for it. As of now, it may be the best theory but it has not in anyway been proven.
So far the closest writing style to the voynich text I've been able to find is an inscription on the last page of a bible produced in England during the 13th century that has some roman letters written with the same form as the Voynich text. The same double looping LL (as a capital H) and a few other letters are simular. The overall text does not look like the same scribe, but is it possible there is a connection in either geography or culture?
http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/Scriptoriu ... 26061.html
This example is probably not connected, but I believe the scribe or author who did the voynich document probably did other documents and there is a chance he used some of the symbols or writing style.
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