Research session · Voynich Manuscript

Session 7: Phase 3: procedures, fragments, lists, transliteration; book v1.2

A survey of fifteenth-century encoding procedures; per-scribe tests; six generators competing on held-out statistics; a fragmenting-cipher solver with controls; Latin list genres; the GC v101 transliteration check. Book v1.2 added Part VI.

Session 722 Oct 2026Test0

What it left open

{'fate': 'Built in session 8 (element-vocabulary solver).', 'text': 'A solver with nulls and multi-unit words (Tranchedino-type), validated on planted keys'}
{'fate': 'Built in session 8.', 'text': 'A mixed-unit simulator'}
{'fate': 'Still open.', 'text': 'A copying layer'}
{'fate': "Tested in session 8 (T21); the instrument couldn't separate the cases.", 'text': 'Homophone-choice dynamics per scribe'}
{'fate': 'Morphology induction run in session 9 (Morfessor).', 'text': 'Edge-MI decomposition; morphology induction'}

Questions raised 1

What procedure reproduces its statistics?

Q-021

QST

Answers proposed 5

A list-like text: recipes, index, glossary

H-TEXT-LIST

ANS

A published mechanical procedure produced it

H-PROCESS-GENERATORS

ANS

Each scribe ran the procedure in his own way

H-HANDS-PROCEDURE

ANS

Each word is a fragment of a verbose cipher

H-CIPHER-FRAGMENT

ANS

Results hold under every transliteration

H-TRANSLIT-ROBUST

ANS

Evidence found 7

A verbose cipher also weakens word order

F-026

EVD

Adjacent pages share vocabulary, as in languages

F-027

EVD

Every word-level result holds under the v101 transliteration; the glyph-entropy value…

F-030

EVD

Latin list genres (recipes, indexes, glossaries) are more ordered and more formulaic than…

F-029

EVD

No simulated procedure reproduces the statistics

F-025

EVD

The fragmenting-cipher solver finds no key when each written word is one plaintext unit;…

F-028

EVD

The hands are interchangeable in variant choice

F-024

EVD

Runs 31

Canonical-order (sorted anagram) test: share of words monotone under the best single ranking of units

RUN-029

RUN

Entropy law and word-order gain: residual from the H1 vs entropy-rate law (word level), sd units

RUN-023

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): paragraphs, Italian: held-out gap (own minus decoded), segments 953,…

RUN-051

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): paragraphs, Latin.novowel: held-out gap (own minus decoded), segments…

RUN-050

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): paragraphs, Latin: held-out gap (own minus decoded), segments 927,…

RUN-049

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): paragraphs, Latin: held-out gap (own minus decoded), segments 927,…

RUN-045

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin, k=4, 1 letter(s)/word: held-out…

RUN-036

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin, k=4, 1 letter(s)/word: held-out…

RUN-041

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin, k=4, 1 letter(s)/word: held-out…

RUN-046

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin, k=4, 2 letter(s)/word: held-out…

RUN-044

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin, k=4, 2 letter(s)/word: held-out…

RUN-047

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin, k=4, 2 letter(s)/word: held-out…

RUN-042

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin.novowel, k=4, 1 letter(s)/word:…

RUN-043

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): planted affix-table cipher of Latin.novowel, k=4, 1 letter(s)/word:…

RUN-048

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): rings, Latin.novowel: held-out gap (own minus decoded), segments 133,…

RUN-053

RUN

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key): rings, Latin: held-out gap (own minus decoded), segments 159, 2.06…

RUN-052

RUN

Generator competition on a held-out fingerprint battery: held-out statistics failed per generator (|z|>2)

RUN-035

RUN

Generator competition on a held-out fingerprint battery: held-out statistics failed per generator (|z|>2)

RUN-039

RUN

Generator competition on a held-out fingerprint battery: nearest generator to the manuscript in standardised held-out space

RUN-034

RUN

Generator competition on a held-out fingerprint battery: nearest generator to the manuscript in standardised held-out space

RUN-038

RUN

Held-out context scaling (Kneser-Ney orders 1-8): held-out bits/glyph at order 1,2,4,6,8

RUN-024

RUN

List-genre comparison (Latin Library texts): order gain (bits/word) of six Latin list-genre texts vs the…

RUN-040

RUN

List-genre comparison (Latin Library texts): order gain (bits/word) of six Latin list-genre texts vs the…

RUN-037

RUN

Null-glyph deletion: max h2 after deleting one glyph unit

RUN-026

RUN

Per-scribe variant choice, transition profile and error typology: herbal B, scribes 2/3/5: variant-choice G (z vs page-shuffled null);…

RUN-021

RUN

Periodicity, transposition and isomorph battery: coincidence between consecutive lines at same position

RUN-032

RUN

Periodicity, transposition and isomorph battery: glyph-disjoint isomorph pairs at same line position / anywhere

RUN-033

RUN

Periodicity, transposition and isomorph battery: period-bigram peak (period, count) in text vs within-word shuffle

RUN-031

RUN

Profile screen against 103 languages: statistics outside attested range

RUN-022

RUN

RUN-030

RUN

Sequence structure: MI decay, compressibility, BPE curve, repeated phrases: repeated 4-grams real/shuffled

RUN-025

RUN

Methods used 12

Canonical-order (sorted anagram) test

M-T10

MTH

Entropy law and word-order gain

M-T12

MTH

Fragmenting-cipher solver (joint segmentation and key)

M-T16

MTH

Generator competition on a held-out fingerprint battery

M-T15

MTH

Held-out context scaling (Kneser-Ney orders 1-8)

M-T13

MTH

List-genre comparison (Latin Library texts)

M-T17

MTH

Null-glyph deletion

M-T9

MTH

Per-scribe variant choice, transition profile and error typology

M-T14

MTH

Periodicity, transposition and isomorph battery

M-T11

MTH

Profile screen against 103 languages

M-T1

MTH

M-T8

MTH

Sequence structure: MI decay, compressibility, BPE curve, repeated phrases

M-T4

MTH

Datasets used 2

Glen Claston v101 transliteration GC2a (25 June 2025)

DAT

Zandbergen-Landini transliteration ZL3b (EVA, IVTFF 2.0, 13 May 2025)

DAT

Sources consulted 54

A Glyph Is Not a Letter, a Token Is Not a Word, a Space Is Not a Space

SRC

A new Transliteration Alphabet brings new Evidence of Word Structure and Multiple "languages" in the Voynich Manuscript

SRC

A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript

SRC

An elegant hoax? A possible solution to the Voynich manuscript

SRC

De furtivis literarum notis

SRC

De subtilitate

SRC

Deciphering a Letter from the French Wars of Religion

SRC

Demystifying the Scribes behind the Voynich Manuscript using Computational Linguistic Techniques

SRC

DetectGPT: Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection using Probability Curvature

SRC

Enciphered after all? Word-level Text Metrics are Compatible with some Types of Encipherment

SRC

Error

SRC

Fifteenth Century Cryptography

SRC

Fingerprinting Gibberish: A Quantitative Comparison of the Voynich and Sloane MS 3188

SRC

From exemplar to copy: the scribal appropriation of a Hadewijch manuscript computationally explored

SRC

GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text

SRC

Gibberish after All? Voynichese Is Statistically Similar to Human-Produced Samples of Meaningless Text

SRC

Has Gordon Rugg solved the mystery of the Voynich manuscript text? (part 1)

SRC

Has Gordon Rugg solved the mystery of the Voynich manuscript text? (part 2)

SRC

Historical Language Models in Cryptanalysis: Case Studies on English and German

SRC

Hoaxing Statistical Features of the Voynich Manuscript

SRC

Hoaxing the Voynich Manuscript, part 7: Producing the text

SRC

How many glyphs and how many scribes? Digital paleography and the Voynich manuscript

SRC

How the Voynich Manuscript Was Created

SRC

Keywords and co-occurrence patterns in the Voynich manuscript: an information-theoretic analysis

SRC

Lack of confidence in approximate Bayesian computation model choice

SRC

Letter counting: a stem cell for Cryptology, Quantitative Linguistics, and Statistics

SRC

Lost Manuscripts and Extinct Texts: A Dynamic Model of Cultural Transmission

SRC

Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes latins

SRC

Naibbe cipher paper

SRC

New paper: Fifteenth Century Cryptography Revisited

SRC

On the transmission of texts: written cultures as complex systems

SRC

Polygraphia III: The Cipher that Pretends to Be an Artificial Language

SRC

Regule ad extrahendum litteras zifferatas sine exemplo

SRC

Review of The linguistics of the Voynich manuscript by Claire Bowern and Luke Lindemann

SRC

Rightward and Downward Grapheme Distributions in the Voynich Manuscript

SRC

Schwarzweisse Magie: Der Schlüssel zum dritten Buch der Steganographia des Trithemius

SRC

Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature

SRC

Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius's Steganographia

SRC

Some important new statistical findings

SRC

Some types of scribal error in manuscripts of Pindar

SRC

and 14 more

What it produced 2

Reading Without a Key

SRC

Survey: table-driven encoding procedures, 1380-1520, and process identification

SRC

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). Session 7: Phase 3: procedures, fragments, lists, transliteration; book v1.2 [Research session SES0D8CZNK07S90]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/SES0D8CZNK07S90

@misc{mysteriesdept_ses0d8cznk07s90,
  title     = {Session 7: Phase 3: procedures, fragments, lists, transliteration; book v1.2},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Research session, catalog key SES0D8CZNK07S90},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/SES0D8CZNK07S90}
}