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The Writing System of the Voynich Text

Before this current book, it has not been known at all what the mysterious Voynich glyphs were about, whether they concealed a cipher or not.

This book demonstrates that the Voynich glyphs have several renderings and constitute an elaborate writing system, partially based on medieval Latin writing traditions including letters, ligatures, abbreviations, and truncations.

The presence of these inhomogeneous cryptographic and linguistic features resolves several long-standing puzzles. For example, the position dependent Voynich glyphs, occurring preferably at word-beginnings and word-endings [Stolfi00, Palmer14], correspond to specific (word-beginning and word-ending) medieval Latin abbreviations. Furthermore, the mixed representation of letters and abbreviations in the Voynich glyphs remarkably skews the statistical features of the Voynich text, giving rise to rather unusual statistical behavior (shorter words, unusual glyph occurrence frequencies and glyph-glyph correlations). Besides, the multiple renderings of the Voynich glyphs also explain the mysterious, glossolalia-like word repetitions and alliterations prevailing in the Voynich text: the repeated or alliterated glyph sequences represent different words (upon transcription).

Making use of analogies of crystal growth and quantum mechanics, the author of this book developed a context-propagation-based approach toward the decryption of this cunning, polysemous (polyphonic), non-local, context-dependent cipher. The underlying language of the decrypted Voynich text segments turned out to be Latin and the retrieved contents were shocking. Finally, the decrypted texts are in full accord with the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript which convey concealed representations.

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