Voynich MS - Note from the author

Dear visitor

If you want to contact me, you may find my contact information here.

I am not reflecting all updates to the site on this page, but I maintain the site quite regularly.

I prefer not to give undue attention to the ever increasing stream of proposed text solutions. An incomplete list of them may be found here. I will update this from time to time.

Voynich MS Conference Announcement

The University of Malta has announced an online Voynich MS conference, that will be held on 30 Nov. and 1 Dec.2022. All details can be found at the Conference web site.

On-going work

• There is considerable on-going work related to transliteration of the Voynich MS, especially concerning the existing transliteration files. These have been compared, and all have been converted into a single, common format, which allows processing of all files by the same tools. A superset of all transliteration alphabets has been defined and is being introduced. A new software tool (bitrans) is presented. The basics are explained on this page, which also has links to more detailed descriptions, mostly on this page. Links to all transliteration files are provided near the bottom of the first page. The terminology has been changed to use the more correct term 'transliteration' rather than 'transcription'.
• The new results of the palaeographic analysis of Lisa Fagin Davis are being integrated into the site, for example on handwriting of the MS. Her main paper appeared on 7 May 2020.
• The biographies of the main players in the history of the MS are undergoing some revision, for the case of Barschius with some new material kindly provided by other researchers, and for Marci by taking into account important additional references. For the others it is still on-going.
• The oldest known reference to the Voynich MS, namely the 1639 letter from Kircher to Moretus, was already digitised and published on this page in May 2016. More recently, a transcription and translation of the letter have been added.
• A minor reorganisation of the material: some of the more specialised or detailed topics have been removed from the main sequences of pages, and placed into dedicated pages. These are listed (as before) here. The main sequence pages now summarise these parts.
• A full set of thumbnail images to all MS folios has been added, with links to a much updated set of page descriptions.
• The interesting work from other researchers in the area of identifying manuscripts with similarities with the Voynich MS is leading to regular updates to the page about the MS illustrations.

Recently added pages

• Some initial results of Hidden Markov Modelling (HMM) applied to the Voynich MS text. This is still experimental and will be extended. An improved explanation of the HMM technique has been provided.
• Transcription of the complete correspondence between Wilfrid Voynich and the Prague archives in 1921, with some additional later thoughts by ELV about this.
• Information about archives containing material related to the Voynich MS.
• Translations by Jacques Guy of some articles by B. Sukhotin.
• A visual representation of the unsual bigram entropy of the Voynich MS text, clearly showing why a simple mapping between Voynichese and Latin or similar languages cannot work.
• Why the Voynich MS is an original 15th century manuscript and not a modern fake by Voynich.
• Some Voynich trivia.
• A rewrite of an out-of-date page on where the MS was acquired by Voynich, with new information about the time between 1870 and 1912.