Voynich cipher crib thoughts…

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Just a quick note on Voynich cipher cribs.

Even though I’ve built up a fairly substantial set of (what I think are) reasonably pragmatic deductions about how Voynichese works, actually finding any way to use those to get at the rest has (perhaps unsurprisingly) proved difficult. To recap, I suspect that…

  • “4o” steganographically codes for “lo” (and perhaps “la” as well, via some subtle letter formation difference we’re too close to the text to notice)
  • “a[i][i][i]v” steganographically enciphers Arabic digits using the startpoint of the apparent scribal flourish
  • “a[i][i][i]r” verbosely enciphers various rare plaintext letters (such as ‘z’)
  • “e[e][e]” and “ch” / “sh” verbosely encipher vowels
  • “-8” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “contractio”
  • “-9” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “suspensio”
  • “8-” enciphers “et” or “&”, as well as for Arabic numeral combination (into large numbers)
  • “t-” directs the decipherer to a horizontal Neal key (usually on the top line of a paragraph)
  • “p-” directs the decipherer to a vertical Neal key (usually down the first column of a paragraph)
  • “k-” and “f-” I’m not sure about. 🙂
  • “ot” / “op” / “ok” / “of” / “yt” / “yp” / “yk” / “yf” verbosely encipher fixed letters (hence their use in labels)
  • “or” / “ol” / “ar” / “al” verbosely encipher fixed letters
  • “cXh”, where the ch’s crossbar strikes through a gallows, enciphers the shorthand stroke “subscriptio”
  • (etc, etc)

Of course, I happily admit that all, some or none of these may well be wrong: the issue I’m discussing here is what to do next if (like me) you happen to think that there stands a good chance that these are right. Basically, where now?

It struck me a few days ago that the “aiiv” pattern has a rough analogue in part of the Florentine shorthand used by Leonardo da Vinci: as I discussed in my post on Leonardo’s handwriting, LdV used “i-with-a-circle” for ‘uno‘, and “i-with-a-circumflex” for ‘una‘. Now, today’s thought is that if (say) “aiv” similarly enciphers “uno/una”, then what would happen if we went looking for words in the astronomical quire #9 (‘Q9’) for words of the form “verbose letter” + “aiv”, just in case they encipher “l-una”, i.e. “luna”?

For example, if we look at the topmost line of f67r1 (the thrice-exalted APOD page, with what is manifestly the moon in the middle), the fourth word along is “osaiiv”. Now, I suspect that this is an example of coyness on the VMs’ author’s part, insofar as “os” probably doesn’t exist in the cipher system (i.e. the pair should actually read “or”), so he/she has used “os”as  a kind of secondary misdirection, perhaps suspecting that “oraiiv” might look slightly too crackable. 🙂

So, might “luna” be the first word in the VMs to be genuinely deciphered? It’s certainly possible, but I’d hesitate running down to the betting shop just yet: all the same, it might help point to ways of sneaking past the pack of rottweilers on the door. The titles of the Q9 planet pages might all be there on their respective top lines, if we but gothink to go  looking for them…

Review of Christopher Harris’ “Mappamundi”…

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OK, moving straight into confessional mode, I feel more than a touch ashamed that I haven’t reviewed Chris Harris’ Mappamundi loooong before now. But… even though I’ve read it twice, I still don’t really know what to say about it. Let me explain…

Sticking to the knitting, it’s a fairly trite starting point to note that it’s an historical adventure, with the main character Thomas Deerham seque(l)strated from the book “False Ambassador”.  In that first book, Harris had his hero travel from England to France to Greece (while trying to travel to the Holy Land) and onwards from there to Morea and finally back to Rome, meeting loads of interesting historical figures (such as Plethon) en route. “Mappamundi” continues in Rome with Deerham’s stealing a Toscanelli mappamundi from his only-just-dead boss (Pope Pius II), before heading fast away north across France. In Paris, he meets the vagabond / poet / trickster François Villon: they cross the Channel & end up in Essex trying it on with an eelwife (please don’t ask). Then they meet Christian Rosenkreutz (yes, really) and steal the Voynich Manuscript, which a thoroughly delighted Rosenkreutz calls one of the “Seven Tomes”. On from there to Cambridge, and Ipswich, and… off to find the lost wisdom of Atlantis, steered by the stars, the mappamundi, the VMs and Rosenkreutz’s clinical madness… and (without giving it all away) onwards from there.

Of all the Voynich novels I know of, you could reasonably argue that Mappamundi sticks closest to what we might expect of the VMs’ pre-1600 provenance. What with its Toulon-Occitan-like zodiac month names, and abbreviated longhand Latin quire numbering that Barbara B claims appears in a herbal rebound in England in the 15th century, and perhaps in England picking up its alleged connection with Roger Bacon; all these details tally reasonably nicely with Harris’ account, some intentionally, some not (I’d predict).

Of course, by now you’ll have worked out that Mappamundi is by no means an airport novel – the absence of (for example) millennia-long secret conspiracies, hidden mountains of ancient gold, mysterious powers over life & death that an unreadable book holds, but which only a Harvard Professor of Assyrian Stuff with eidetic memory can unlock, etc etc should be more than a bit of hint. Nor is it experimental literature (even though it plainly merges real historical figures with hallucinatory ones such as Christian RosenKreutz), nor even Umberto Eco-esque über-erudite historical musings masquerading as high literature.

Actually… when you strip it all back, it’s just a historical romp across Europe, in very much the same kind of line (and indeed roughly the same time-period) as Dorothy Dunnett’s well-known Niccolo Rising series. But whereas I alway got the feeling that Dunnett was trying not to re-write history but rather just to thread her own imagined saga through the countless empty holes in a genuine historical tapestry, the presence of Rosenkreutz and the VMs (and even Atlantis) in Mappamundi moves that book sideways into a rather less clear position.

I suppose what it all comes down to is that Harris’ admixure of the notoriously false with the notoriously uncertain with the manifestly true largely negates the effect of all his careful research: the reader stops trusting the author’s historical eye and empathy. Look, I’m not saying it’s as bad a pseudo-historical trip as Forrest Gump: but it did manage to consistently put me out of my readership comfort zone, which is something you could never accuse Dunnett of, for example.

The awful thing is that Harris’ book-writing craft is so spot-on in so many ways (I get to read countless books by authors whose skills aren’t a patch on his), which makes criticising him for what is only really a kind of implicit epistemological confusion foisted on his readers feel somewhat unjust. But many (if not most) of those same readers will likely have a keen eye for history, and that side of me really didn’t enjoy the ride here.

Ultimately, even though I’m supposed to balance up all these factors and finish the review by rotating my haughty Imperial thumb upwards or downwards, this time around I just don’t know what to do. I loved the Dorothy Dunnett side of it while simultaneously hating the Forrest Gump side of it (which included the ending): and it seemed to oscillate between these two extrema throughout. I guess you’ll have to read it for yourself and make up your own mind, sorry if that sounds like a cop-out. =:-o

Review of “The Alexander Cipher”…

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Another day, another historical mystery airport novel to review, this time with Will Adams’ protagonist Daniel Knox exercising his “outcast Egyptologist” mojo in and around Alexandria, Siwa etc. Will Knox be able to solve all the clues and use his exceptional underwater swimming skills to find Alexander The Great’s fabulous (but lost) golden catafalque, or will the various people trying to kill him get there first?

<spoiler on>
Of course he bloody does.
<spoiler off>

And therein lies the rub. The problem with calling your novel “The Alexander Cipher” is that even though it pitches your book well to passing bookshop fingers, it pretty much flags the fact that Chapters 1-2 are going to be spent describing Alexander’s fabulous treasure, and most of the rest of the book is going to involve the main characters’ chasing flimsy clues to find it, culminating in a set piece finale. And Daniel Knox is really not a very likeable hero: even when he’s doing noble & morally correct things in difficult circumstances, you still want to give him a slap. And the cipher itself is just Greek written in Demotic characters, so isn’t really much cop.

Though The Alexander Cipher manages to compile nearly every questionable story ever told about Alexander T. Great and thread them neatly into the story (yes, Adams has manifestly done plenty of research), its character narrative only ever oscillates between first and second gear, never really getting any traction on the people. It’s as though Adams never wants to leave us alone in the room with Knox (or indeed anyone else) for very long, when there’s some questionable archaeological derring-do to be moved onto and done instead.

Really, even though Adams’ research and plotting all hit the right kinds of spot in a relentlessly metronomic kind way, what I ended up noticing most is the overwhelming lack of humanity that pervades each page. When you feel that the guiding force in the book’s universe is a curious stop-motion Newtonian pinball rather than the subtleties of chess or poker, it seems that only a single facet of the human condition has made the cut when the storyline was constructed.

Just to make sure I hadn’t missed something important, I then read Adams’ sequel “The Exodus Quest” (which again features Daniel Knox plus many of the same supporting characters). Same basic thing, but with less gold in play.

It would be easy to pin the blame on (say) Hollywood action flicks for somehow merging macho with Asperger’s Syndrome and for conflating urgency with sociopathy, both stylistic tics which I think Will Adams sometimes allows his protagonists to fall prey to. However Hollywood is (by and large) lazy and unimaginative, and prefers to appropriate shorthand cultural stereotypes of the day rather than to invent them afresh. So that would probably be missing the real point: which is that we moderns all have a bit of a void in our hearts as far as what our appropriate gendered self-image should be. Is being a ‘man’ really as politically jut-jawed and horrendously vacuous as these books portray? Is being a ‘woman‘ really all about beautiful complicity and self-destructive revenge? Perhaps it is better not to have any such self-image if these are all there is on offer on the cultural smorgasbord.

In the end, arguably the most awful thing about Will Adams is that he has written a series of books where the main character comes across as being more tenderly in love with his put-upon heap of a jeep than with anybody else. Though my guess is that he probably originally intended this as light relief, in the end Knox’s jeep became the female lead in the whole saga, the central love interest. OK, to me that’s just a bit wrong, but make of it what you will for yourself.

Review of Bill Napier’s “Shattered Icon”…

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Carrying on with (what is rapidly turning into) Cipher Mysteries BookFest ’10, I’ve had Bill Napier’s (2003) “Shattered Icon” on my list of Voynich-related novels for simply ages, so a review is somewhat overdue. Napier, a “Scottish astronomer who lives in Ireland and has a professorship in Wales“, was so engaged by rumours of a 16th century calendrical plot that he felt compelled to write a book about it. However, if you’re already expecting a stereotypically clunky “Domain Expert” novel, you’ll be pleasantly surprised – he writes pretty well, and has constructed a nice “parallel periods” opus out of his historical obsession.

Even though (as it turns out) this isn’t actually a Voynich novel nor even really a cipher mystery (the secrets are hidden by allusion rather than by cryptography), there’s still plenty of interest for Cipher Mysteries readers, such as a little bit about Bright’s Characterie (arguably the first modern shorthand). Perhaps more intriguingly, the calendar stuff that fascinated Napier so much is all to do with John Dee and his cunning 33-year leap day cycle (an elegant blend of maths, numerology and religion, because that was Jesus’ age when he was crucified, Dan Brown fans).

Having lived in the Caribbean myself for a while (though many years ago), I also rather liked the smattering of patois Napier slips in when the characters are hacking around Jamaica; and (in the parallel timeline) there’s a little bit of Elizabethan apothecary-based fun too. So there’s plenty of good stuff for a typical Cipher Mysteries reader to enjoy, and pretty much all of it dovetails properly into the overall story without too much frenetic plotting overkill.

OK, I’d be the first to admit that it’s far from perfect: most notably, I didn’t really buy into any of the main characters, nor even the modern conspiracy driving the plotline. Still, it’s a given that every book has faults: the issue is more whether the story manages to transcend those faults… and I think in this case, it really does. Though Max McCoy’s Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone, Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum, and Lev Grossman’s Codex are all arguably better books, “Shattered Icon” is a good read, one I recommend to you all. Even though it’s not strictly a cipher mystery! 🙂

The least mysterious manuscript in the world…

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I recently radared a Voynich Manuscript namecheck in a short online blogpost riffing on meaning, love and secrecy. If you manage to get past the author’s densely-textured surface style, there are some good moments in there:

  • “The secret assures us the nearly sure possibility of content but retracts its guarantee at the very limit of its donation. The secret does not only tease, it seduces.“
  • “The secret and its content are terrible adversaries and anyone who confuses the content of a secret with the secret itself is an imbecile.“

I rather like the image conjured up of the secret and the content being at war with each other – it is certainly true that we Voynich researchers spend a lot of time hunting for places where the content overflows the jar, subtly breaking the visual monotony of the ciphertext factory. These are the casualties lining the battlefront of this curious civil war, and are almost paratextual insofar as they comfortably reside on neither side of the line.

For me, the strange paradox that emerges from this is that even though the ciphertext artefact side of the Voynich Manuscript is known as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world”, if its contents ultimately prove to be as hyperrational as I suspect then there should be no great degree of interpretation involved in reading it – no symbolism, no allusion, no internal textual layeredness. That is, perhaps the Voynich Manuscript’s contents will turn out to be the least mysterious manuscript in the world?

Review of “The Charlemagne Pursuit”…

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In my opinion, cipher mystery-themed airport novels tend (as I wrote here a few days ago) to be written by (1) “Rack Pack” writers, (2) “Domain Experts”, or (3) “Wannabe Screenwriters”. Having read Steve Berry’s book “The Templar Legacy” (2006) as a warm-up, I recently moved on to his “The Charlemagne Pursuit” (2008), where the serial use of the main character ‘Cotton Malone’ places Berry firmly amongst the Rack Pack. But is he Rack the Knife or Rack the Hack?

The first thing I’d say is that The Charlemagne Pursuit is definitely put together far better than its predecessor, whose cardboard Bond-world characters such as ‘Cassiopeia Vitt’ (who it seems unfortunately reappears in later Cotton Malone books) and ghastly Templar clichés reduced the art of reading from a pleasure to a struggle. Really, compared with the sparky horses-in-the-New-York-museum start to Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar“, Berry’s The Templar Legacy remained ungrippingly pedestrian throughout.

All the same, The Charlemagne Pursuit is no less stuffed with airport mystery fodder – beautiful Nazi-family twin sisters, ancient architectural hints, buried clues, castles, Atlantis, Ahnenerbe, secret submarines, Voynich Manuscript-style documents, professional killers, unlikeable protagonist, etc. Yet what I found most frustrating is that if you stripped out all the history / lost civilizations / Nazi / mad admiral guff, the raw core of the story – Cotton Malone hunting down his dead submariner father, with surprising success – would be basically OK. And so I felt at the end that I’d read a decent-enough 100-page book ripped into a 600-pager by a sustained ingestion of airport novel steroids.

For sure, Berry’s book fully deserves its place in my Big Fat List as probably the highest-profile Voynich Manuscript novel yet: but the VMs is mainly treated as a kind of codicological template to help generate the various mysterious books Berry’s narrative requires along the way, rather than actually engaged with in any interesting or intriguing manner – not actually disdain, but certainly something close to disinterest. And perhaps it’s just me, but there’s also something just a bit desperate about his scattergun constructional style, which comes across not unlike a neurotic parent grabbing every soft toy in turn to try to placate an unhappy toddler. Ultimately, I’d rather read a book with half (if not less!) as many themes weaved together but explored in a more engaging way: but perhaps that’s a grossly unreasonable expectation of the genre, you’ll have to make up your own mind.

In summary, I did enjoy bits of it: but most of it came across as a Nazi-themed rollercoaster ride where you don’t care much for any of the twists and turns, let alone the characters.

Review of David Gibbins’ “Atlantis”…

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This being Cipher Mysteries, I try to read a fair bit of mysterious cipher-related stuff along the way, both non-fiction and fiction. Yet just as you’d expect, most cipher mystery fiction tends more to the ‘airport novel’ end of the spectrum than the ‘lit-rit-cher’ end. Which pleasantly brings to mind (well, to my mind, at least) Elvis Costello’s “God’s Comic” as he finally meets his Maker:-

So there He was on a water-bed
Drinking a cola of a mystery brand
Reading an airport novelette
Listening to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s “Requiem”

Nicely pitched scansion, and perhaps even more richly ironic if the airport novelette in question happened to have one of those interminably Byzantine two-millennia-long-conspiracy-to-hide-the-truth-about-Jesus’-non-death-on-the-cross plotlines we’re so waerily familiar with now. But I digress!

Wearing my book publisher hat, I’d say you can divide cipher mystery airport novel writers into three quite distinct camps:-

  1. The Rack Pack. People who write strings of pacy, mostly character-driven novels but who scout around for interesting historical stuff to build their fantastical plotting and obscure conspiracies around. (These books tend to suffer from “slabs”, i.e. lumps of undigested Wikipedia-style research littering the text, and to rely heavily on secondary characters who ‘just happen’ to be world-renowned Harvard Professors of Obscure Historical Linguistics etc. They can also be quite hard to tell apart).
  2. Domain Experts. People who happen to be experts in some technical / research field and fall victim to the questionable notion that a particular historical mystery that happens to overlap their field would make an amazing basis for a novel, but then decide to write that book. I mean, how hard can it be? (These books tend to suffer from inexpert plotting, clunky characterization, and non-credible relationships between characters. But at least most of the technical details are right).
  3. Wannabe Screenwriters. People who are terrifically personally ambitious and have a deep love of film, and who see the airport novel medium as a great way to express their high-octane visual imagination, while also giving themselves an outside chance of their books’ being optioned for a Major Motion Picture. (These books tend to be bad on just about every level you can name, but are probably a terrifically good read if you’re the kind of person who has a copy of “Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft” in your toilet).

All of which is a fairly longwinded way of introducing David Gibbins’ (2005) novel “Atlantis”. From the moment you read that the author “has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life” and that “[this] is his first novel“, you can be pretty sure that this is going to fall squarely into Camp #2 territory.

The cipher connection isn’t hard to work out: the front cover has a gold-embossed representation of something not unlike the Phaistos Disk, though it has to be said that the shapes are upside-down (relative to the real Phaistos Disk) and in a quite different order, while a few other plausible-looking pictogram-style shapes have been added to the mix. Though that’s OK, because these differences are part of the story (which kicks off with a second Phaistos Disk being discovered in an ancient shipwreck, but this time it’s made of gold).

Commendably, the spine of the book has one of the Phaistos Disc symbols (which Gibbins has both as “outstretched eagle god” and as the sign of “Atlantis”, though note that he requires you rotate it 90 degrees to see it even slightly as a bird), making it the only cipher novel I know of with a single genuine historical cipher mystery character shape as its central motif. Please tell me if there’s another one!

There’s actually a bit of literature on this shape, which is #21 in Sir Arthur Evans’ much-noted list of the disk’s pictograms. Here are some of the better-known theories about it proposed over the years:-

  • Comb (Godart, 1995)
  • Weaving comb (Dettmer, 1989)
  • Hoe or rake (Aartun, 1992)
  • Palace floor-plan (not sure who suggested this?)
  • Swedish rock carvings of a team of plowing oxen (Woudhuizen, !?!?!?!?)

More usefully, Balistier (2000) notes that Ingo Pini (1970) pointed out that this particular pictogram very likely has Minoan origins, as evidenced by the similarities between it and a five-toothed comb design found on clay fragment HM 992 (also found at Phaistos, and dating to the 18th century BC).  And here it is:-

HM-992

Clay fragment HM 1992: the five-pronged comb-like shape is on the left

 This striking visual parallel is often cited as proof of the Phaistos Disk’s authenticity, with the only small problem being that it may well be that Luigi Pernier ‘excavated’ them both… but that’s another story entirely.

Anyway, does Gibbins manage to save himself from falling into all the Domain Expert airport novel traps? Actually… no. And what’s worse, from the minute the protagonist Jack Howard (“unlikely scion of one of England’s most ancient families“, p.13) makes “a mental note to email the image to Professor James Dillen, his old mentor at Cambridge University and the world’s leading authority on the ancient scripts of Greece” (p.16), it’s abundantly clear that Gibbins has drunk too deeply from the Rack Pack’s well of clichés. Moreover, from the breathless military helicopter fetishism and Wired editorialese, he has dipped his bucket into the Wannabe Screenwriters’ gadget-strewn watering hole more than a few times as well.

All of which superficial nonsense I could actual forgive Gibbins for (it is, after all, an airport novel, and many top-tier writers have fallen into these same traps over the years). However (and sorry if this is a spoiler) the point near the end where Jack Howard unilaterally fires a nuclear warhead onto the bad guys’ hi-tech hide-out is just not OK by me. Yes, they killed his friends, etc etc: but a nuclear warhead? Really? Really??

It’s at this point the alert reader stops to wonder whether the whole book is some kind of high-camp “The Producers” so-bad-it’s-good joke, or some knowing Alan Sokal hoax on the airport novel genre, or perhaps even some Umberto Eco-esque prolonged literary inversion. Though these all sound fairly unbelievable, the alternative – that the author really thinks that this kind of stuff is OK – is so much worse that it’s not really conceivable. And once you’ve ruled out the impossible…

Hoax astronaut!

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I love this picture from the Porco Cane blog:-

During 1992 restoration work on the Cathedral of Salamanca, this astronaut ensnared by vines was added by Jeronimo Garcia, along with “a dragon eating ice cream, a lynx, a bull, and a crayfish“, all approved by the appropriate committee etc. Perhaps this will confuse archaeologists a millennium hence? Probably not.

Doubtless more than a few of our problems with the Voynich Manuscript arise from looking at it out of its original context: perhaps it too consists of ancient visual themes peppered with humorous contemporary additions, but we are too far removed in time to see the jokes, let alone get them?

Voynichese vs Marginalia – the nature of unreadability…

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Even when I’ve shown the VMs’ marginalia to some very clever, very experienced historians / palaeographers, you can see that there’s a easy stopping point tempting them: that because they are unreadable, they must necessarily be cryptographically unreadable.

But the two types of mark are manifestly not the same: they have quite different types of unreadability. That is, one seems intentionally unreadable, the other seems unintentionally unreadable. But even this overloads the word “unreadable” to breaking point, obscuring the core difference between the two which is this: that one is easy to apprehend but tricky to comprehend, while the other is easy to comprehend but tricky to apprehend. Alternatively, you can pitch this as “legible but obfuscated” vs “illegible but sensible”, if you think that helps. 🙂

What I’m clumsily trying to point out is that ‘unreadable’ is one of those words that really gets in the way of inter-domain collaboration, by offering up domain experts an easy alibi to avoid engaging with the VMs’ many problematiques. In the case of the VMs’ marginalia, the real reason an expert palaeographer should stand clear is the absence of a proper codicological analysis of the key pages supported by some state-of-the-art scans. Whereas this lacuna can be filled (in time), writing the marginalia off as necessarily cryptographic (and perhaps uncrackably so) is just crabwalking out of the way.

But perhaps I’m wrong, and the pragmatic reason historical experts feel comfortable manufacturing reasons (such as the above) not to get involved is that there is a fusty stench of unfunded academic death perceived to be lingering in the air above the VMs, by which I mean that they collectively think there is much more to lose by getting involved than there is to gain. Though in many ways such a view would be fair enough, few are brave enough to admit to it. Personally, I believe that there is an enormous amount to gain: but that the widespread (and arguably dominant?) contemporary practice of history as simply a close reading of fragments of historical texts is what gets in the way, as this does not give historians the tools to deal with a primarily non-verbal text situated outside most of the stylized art history mainstream.Creating alibis is much easier than having to face up to gaps in your core methodology.

New Romanian Voynich theory…

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Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript’s plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian?

Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there’s a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief Wikipedia page), which is not terrifically far from the VMs’ timeline. And others have fleetingly suggested Romanian before: Kevin Knight’s well-known slides showed a machine-generated match for “VAS92 9FAE AR APAM ZOE ZOR9 QOR92 9 FOR ZOE89” [the first few words of f1r in Prescott Currier’s transcription] as Romanian (though admittedly Knight qualifies the auto-generated Romanian plaintext as “nonsense”). After all, Romanian is merely one of the many Romance languages, and we’ve had no shortage of those proposed.

So boldly step forward “Secret Sauce”, a member of the Ssssshh (“Super Secret History”) group of “less motivated and (less) enlightened Illuminati”, who all hail from Arizona somewhere utterly secret indeed. Except that their town “starts with a T and has an ASU in it“. Their image gallery shows clearly that the group has between four and five members, presumably depending on whether or not the waiter is taking the photo.

So far, so non-Romanian: but step through their “‎Doorway to the Origin of Never Told Ancient Secret Knowledge” (i.e. “DONTASK”)‎ and you’ll see that they take the radial labels on f67r1 (the famous APOD page) to be month names (ticking clockwise around from the double line in the outer rings) and use them as cribs into the underlying language. After looking at lots of month names in different languages, Secret Sauce noted that “traditional Romanian (or a closely related language) used terms for October and November which started with the same sound (B)“, and so concluded that enciphered Romanian would be a “likely candidate” for Voynichese’s plaintext. Follow this through and you get (if you squint a bit) a verbose-cipher-like set of correspondences between Voynichese and Romanian. Though it has to be said that quite a few Voynichese letters are marked up as corresponding to multiple plaintext Romanian letters. Nonetheless, here’s the start of Voynich Manuscript page f1r as deciphered into Romanian:-

Special-Sauce-Voynich-transcription

…(etc) which Special Sauce somewhat hopefully renders as…

There are many gifts (which have been) set aside to bestow upon (us) in return (for our) humility.

We journey through (life) in passionate servitude (to God).

(Our) Heavenly Mother has chosen to reward (us).

Forgiveness (is) the gateway (to) a wondrous celestial land.

(There is) a grand home in paradise (in which) to live.

(etc etc)

Even if I am somewhat impressed at seeing “yt” and “yp” translate to “h” and “p/pa” (respectively), I have to say I’m getting more than a hint of a Stojko / Levitov buzz off this. Which is to say that more or less any transliteration could be rendered into a stream of nearest-match word fragments, corrected into nearby target language words, the grammar fixed, lacunae filled, organized into short punchy sentence-like blocks, and then all translated and resequenced into something almost resembling language. This is broadly parallel to the the way that the liquid substance dished out by the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser to Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

Even if you do manage to overlook this kind of non-workingness, the problem then becomes that this kind of approach inevitably doesn’t scale up to a full-length document the size of the VMs: John Stojko couldn’t really explain why anyone would write such repetitive historico-religious “Old Ukrainian” nonsense on such a large scale, and the same would seem to be true here.

So… sorry, Special Sauce, but I don’t think you’ve cracked the secrets of the VMs yet. But here’s a modern-day secret that you might like!