Linguistic methods and comparanda for the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408)

Survey written up from the collected research material (searches and page fetches made by the previous agent), supplemented by six additional web calls (one fetch of voynich.nu/transcr.html, five searches). Every citation is tagged:

• VERIFIED — the citation, DOI or URL was seen in a fetched page or in a search result in the collected material or in the six supplementary calls.
• UNVERIFIED — recalled from background knowledge and not seen in any fetched page or search result during this survey. Treat as a lead to check, not a reference to cite.

Where a dataset URL is given, "plain HTTPS" means a direct GET with no login, API key or JavaScript challenge, as far as can be determined from the page or listing that was fetched. Where the collected material never reached the page, that is stated.

A limitation to state up front: the previous agent's collection covered Goal A (methods and Voynich literature) well and Goal B (comparanda and datasets) hardly at all. Sections 4.2 and 4.3 (genre texts, multilingual corpora) therefore contain more UNVERIFIED entries than the rest of the report. The top-5 dataset ranking at the end accounts for this by favouring items whose access was actually confirmed.

1. The text as data: what "an EVA transliteration" means in practice

Everything below assumes the working corpus is one of the IVTFF-format transliteration files from René Zandbergen's site. The fetch of https://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html (VERIFIED) returned this inventory:

| Code | Source | Alphabet | Current file (IVTFF 2.0) | Notes | |---|---|---|---|---| | ZL | Zandbergen–Landini | EVA | https://www.voynich.nu/data/ZL3b-n.txt (v. 3b) | The most complete modern EVA file; the obvious default. | | IT | Takahashi (1999 state, from LSI) | EVA-T | https://www.voynich.nu/data/IT2a-n.txt | What Bowern & Lindemann and Matlach et al. used (via Takahashi). | | GC | Glen Claston "v101" | v101 | https://www.voynich.nu/data/GC2a-n.txt; raw: https://www.voynich.nu/data/voyn_101.txt | Alternative glyph inventory; used as a robustness check by Bowern & Gaskell 2022. | | RF | Reference transliteration auto-generated from ZL and GC | EVA via STA1 | full EVA https://www.voynich.nu/data/RF1b-e.txt; basic EVA https://www.voynich.nu/data/RF1b-er.txt | Useful when you want one file that is reconcilable with v101. | | CD | Currier/D'Imperio | Currier | https://www.voynich.nu/data/CD2a-n.txt | What Reddy & Knight 2011 and Hauer & Kondrak 2016 used. | | FG | Friedman First Study Group | FSG | https://www.voynich.nu/data/FG2a-n.txt | Paragraph text only. | | VT | voynichese.com browser | EVA-T | https://www.voynich.nu/data/VT0e-n.txt | Auto-generated. | | LSI | Landini–Stolfi Interlinear | EVA-T | http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-12-28-interln16e6/ ; IVTFF 1.7 beta https://www.voynich.nu/data/beta/LSI_ivtff_0d.txt | The historical "de facto source"; several transcribers interleaved. |

Format spec: https://www.voynich.nu/software/ivtt/IVTFF_format.pdf (v2.0, Feb 2023; VERIFIED URL). Tools: IVTT (Zandbergen's pre-processor, described at https://www.voynich.nu/extra/sp_transcr.html#ivtt) and bitrans (Guy's alphabet translator). No licence is stated for any file; the only rights line is "Copyright René Zandbergen, 2025" (VERIFIED). All files are plain HTTPS GETs with no login.

Practical pipeline every technique below assumes (write once, reuse):

1. Download ZL3b-n.txt. Parse: # lines are metadata; each page starts with a <f1r> header carrying page variables (quire, page-in-quire, illustration type, Currier language, hand, etc. — the variable list is in the IVTFF spec PDF; the exact set was not read during this survey, so confirm against the PDF); each text line starts with a locus tag such as <f1r.P1.1;H> giving folio, locus type (P = paragraph text, L = label, C = circular, R = radial …), line number, and transcriber. Keep locus type: most analyses should use P loci only, and labels separately.
2. Handle the ambiguity conventions: . certain space, , uncertain space, [a:o] alternative readings, ? illegible, @nnn; high-ASCII extended-EVA codes, <! … > and <-> inline comments. Decide once whether uncertain spaces are spaces (Rozanova & Temerev 2026 found they behave like word-internal junctures — see §2.1).
3. Build three parallel tokenisations and run every experiment on all three: (a) basic EVA characters; (b) extended EVA with ligatures (ch, sh, cth, ckh, cph, cfh, ee, ii, iin …) as single units — the "alphabet hypotheses" Tauber 2026 calls H3/H4; (c) v101. The entropy anomaly (h2 ≈ 2 bits) is partly an artefact of EVA's decomposition of glyphs into Latin letters (Tauber 2026; Bowern & Lindemann 2021 note the same), so any result that flips between (a) and (b) is a result about the transliteration, not the text.
4. Partition by Currier A/B, by illustration section (herbal, astro, zodiac, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, stars), by Davis hand (1–5), and by quire. Bowern & Lindemann show A and B become near-identical once qo- and -dy are stripped; Tauber shows compression differs by section; so a technique that does not report per-partition results is incomplete.
5. Controls: for each experiment, run the identical pipeline on (i) a Latin text of ~37k tokens (Bowern & Gaskell used De Magia, Steganographia, Secreta Secretorum, Adso), (ii) a devowelled and a bigraph-encoded version of the same Latin (their manipulations that came closest to Voynichese), (iii) a Timm–Schinner self-citation sample, (iv) a Gaskell–Bowern human gibberish sample, (v) a Naibbe-cipher sample if obtainable. Without (iii)–(v) a "looks like language" result is uninformative, because the published generators already reproduce Zipf, binomial word length and low h2.

2. Goal A — Voynich-specific linguistic literature

2.1 Core statistical findings, by source

Bowern, C. & Lindemann, L. (2021). The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript. Annual Review of Linguistics 7:285–308. DOI 10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030613. Preprint: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005415; PDF fetched from alumniacademy.yale.edu. VERIFIED. Findings extracted from the fetched PDF: conditional character entropy h2 is lower than in any sampled language including Hawaiian, and only systematic conflation of phonemic distinctions closes the gap (abbreviation and devowelling do not); both Currier A and B are Zipfian (B is an outlier unless two near-identical top words are merged); top-10 words are 15.7 % (A) and 14.5 % (B) of tokens, inside the natural-language range; MATTR lexical diversity is mid-range, nearest Germanic, Iranian and Romance; A/B differ mainly in word frequency and A's higher h2 is largely the qo-/-dy affixes; words have a three-field prefix/root/suffix structure with position-restricted characters; line-initial, line-final and paragraph-initial (gallows in ~85 % of paragraphs) patterns are read as typographic rather than linguistic; word repetition 0.84 % (A) / 0.94 % (B) is in range. Data: EVA from Takahashi; comparison corpus of Wikipedia text in ~250 languages plus historical texts; hands from Davis, A/B from Currier. Methods they say were applied: Sukhotin, two-state HMM (via Reddy & Knight), conditional entropy, Zipf, MATTR, positional analysis, TF-IDF/NMF topic modelling. Methods explicitly not done: full morphology induction (only manual field analysis after Tiltman), POS induction ("cannot be accomplished at this stage"), language identification beyond family-level. Conclusion: not gibberish, not hoax; probably encoded natural language with an unidentified cipher; future work should test ciphers that preserve word-level regularity while adding character-level predictability.

Lindemann, L. & Bowern, C. (2020). Character Entropy in Modern and Historical Texts: Comparison Metrics for an Undeciphered Manuscript. arXiv:2010.14697; lingbuzz/005522. VERIFIED (URLs). The 101-language / 7-family and ~268-language entropy baselines used above and reused by Tauber 2026. Tauber flags the corpus as having known quality issues; Timm & Schinner 2021 say the Wikipedia samples contain table/markup fragments that inflate repetition counts.

Sterneck, R., Polish, A. & Bowern, C. (2021). Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript. arXiv:2107.02858; lingbuzz/006068. VERIFIED (URLs; content not fetched). Per the Annual Review summary, topics correlate with sections and scribal hands.

Bowern, C. & Gaskell, D. E. (2022). Enciphered after all? Word-level Text Metrics are Compatible with some Types of Encipherment. VOY2022, CEUR-WS Vol-3313 paper 6. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper6.pdf. VERIFIED (fetched). 22 text manipulations (vowel/consonant collapse, vowel removal, phonemic-contrast removal, bigraph encoding, affix neutralisation, word-boundary changes, alphabetical sorting, alphabet splitting, Crema cipher) on Latin, Wikipedia samples, Uzbek, Turkish, Tswana, Hawaiian, conlangs, gibberish and Timm–Schinner output; 42 metrics on 200-word excerpts × 100 draws; Euclidean distance of z-scores to five Voynich sets (A, B, EVA basic, EVA full, v101). No single manipulation matches on everything; merging phonemic contrasts (voicing, place, manner) comes closest; devowelled Uzbek/Turkish match Currier B better than Tswana/Hawaiian; bigraph encoding brings Latin h2 to Voynich levels; nulls raise word predictability. Authors flag circularity risk.

Gaskell, D. & Bowern, C. (2022). Gibberish after all? Voynichese is Statistically Similar to Human-Produced Samples of Meaningless Text. CEUR-WS Vol-3313 paper 4. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/paper4.pdf. VERIFIED (listing only). The human-gibberish control corpus is itself a dataset worth asking for (see §4.5).

Lindemann, L. (2022). Crux of the MATTR: Voynichese Morphological Complexity. CEUR-WS Vol-3313 paper 9. VERIFIED (listing). Also in Vol-3313 (all VERIFIED from the fetched index): Zandbergen keynote on transliteration; Davis keynote on paleography; Boxer, Fingerprinting Gibberish (Voynich vs Sloane MS 3188); Farrugia, Layfield & van der Plas on scribes via computational linguistics; Caruana, Layfield & Abela on word relationships; Zattera, A new Transliteration Alphabet brings new Evidence of Word Structure and Multiple "languages"; Painter & Bowern, phylogenetic methods on glyph history; Feaster, Rightward and Downward Grapheme Distributions; Stafford, Seven Habits of Highly Eccentric Paragraphs; Hermes, Polygraphia III (cipher that imitates an artificial language); Schmeh & Dunin, Voynich compared with other encrypted books. Index: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/.

Timm, T. & Schinner, A. (2021). Review of The linguistics of the Voynich manuscript by Bowern and Lindemann. lingbuzz/005939; Cryptologia. VERIFIED (fetched). Charges: counter-evidence ignored (long-range correlations, binomial word-length distribution, weak word order); "gibberish ≠ random" — rule-based text is structured but meaningless; Zipf is reproduced by simple generators; Wikipedia parsing artefacts. Their self-citation algorithm reproduces word/token structure and frequency-similarity patterns; A/B is a continuous evolution, not two systems. Related Timm papers listed on his Academia page (VERIFIED listing, co-authorship not shown there): A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript (Cryptologia 2020); Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript (arXiv 2016); How the Voynich Manuscript was created (arXiv 2014); The Voynich manuscript: discussion of text creation hypotheses (Cryptologia 2024); The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text (Cryptologia 2026); critiques of Davis's five-scribe hypothesis and of Layfield & Davis's LSA page-ordering work; and a critique of the Rohonc Codex grammar's testability.

Reddy, S. & Knight, K. (2011). What We Know About The Voynich Manuscript. LaTeCH 2011, pp. 78–86. https://aclanthology.org/W11-1511.pdf. VERIFIED (fetched). Currier transcription (225 pages, 8,114 types, 37,919 tokens). Sukhotin on two biological pages weakly picks O, A, C, G as vowels; a two-state EM HMM does not find a vowel/consonant split but a "word-final character vs everything else" split (in English the same model recovers V/C nearly perfectly) — they take an abjad as the most likely explanation; word lengths are narrowly binomial, as in Pinyin, Tibetan, Vietnamese and devowelled English/Arabic; letters are more predictable from the preceding letter than in English or Arabic (like Pinyin); Linguistica finds affix-like structure; word bigram context improves word prediction only ~9 % (vs large gains in English, Arabic, Hungarian); 10-class word HMM shows weak regularities; long-distance word correlations essentially absent; pages have topics and adjacent pages are similar (38.8 % of B pages' nearest neighbour is adjacent), destroyed by page scrambling. Compared: English (WSJ, Genesis), Arabic (Quran), Chinese (Sinica), Pinyin, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Hungarian.

Amancio, D. R., Altmann, E. G., Rybski, D., Oliveira, O. N. & Costa, L. da F. (2013). Probing the statistical properties of unknown texts: application to the Voynich Manuscript. PLoS ONE 8(7): e67310. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0067310; arXiv:1303.0347. VERIFIED. Word-property statistics, complex-network measures (assortativity, degree, selectivity separate real from shuffled texts) and intermittency; New Testament in 15 languages; Voynich "mostly compatible with natural languages", incompatible with shuffled text; candidate keywords proposed (not listed in the fetched abstract).

Montemurro, M. A. & Zanette, D. H. (2013). Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis. PLoS ONE. VERIFIED (search result: PMC3689824, DOAJ, CONICET repository); content not fetched.

Matlach, V., Janečková, B. A. & Dostál, D. (2022). The Voynich manuscript: Symbol roles revisited. PLoS ONE 17(1): e0260948. DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0260948. VERIFIED (fetched). Takahashi transliteration; autocorrelation of symbol-recurrence gaps (90 % of lags significant vs 12 % in English); Fourier periods often multiples of 40/160; a nine-rule ligature detector proposes f, m, q, n, g as compounds (f ≈ ide, m ≈ id, q ≈ ie, n ≈ word-final i); q is word-initial 5,389 times vs 43 elsewhere; proposes an alphabet of ~10 base units and a numeric/steganographic substitution.

Parisel, C. (2025). Directionality of the Voynich Script. arXiv:2509.10573 (v4). VERIFIED (abstract). n-gram perplexity asymmetry to detect reading-direction bias. Parisel, C. (2026). Evidence of Layered Positional and Directional Constraints in the Voynich Manuscript. arXiv:2604.19762 (v2). VERIFIED (abstract). Right-to-left optimisation inside words, left-to-right dependency at word boundaries; absent in English, French, Hebrew, Arabic; a slot generator and a Cardan-grille (Rugg) generator each fail a four-signature joint criterion.

Rozanova, L. & Temerev, A. (2026). A Glyph Is Not a Letter, a Token Is Not a Word, a Space Is Not a Space. arXiv:2608.17096. VERIFIED (abstract, found in a sibling survey's material). ZL transliteration; h2 ≈ 2.7 bits vs ≈ 3.5 for Latin/Italian/English; glyphs form stable multi-symbol units; one token predicts the next by < 1 % of token entropy (controls 2–10 %); token-edge glyphs share 0.2 bits MI; uncertain spaces are physically narrower (AUC 0.905) and learned units cross them; generators miss edge coupling and the 70 % hapax rate.

Turenne, N. (2026). A Generative Grammar Underlying the Voynich Manuscript, the Pastiche Hypothesis. arXiv:2609.20835. VERIFIED (abstract). Position-dependent probabilistic grammars; claims symbols behave as letters, word lengths as syllables, phonetic patterns closer to Hebrew/Arabic than Indo-European, and LLM image–text alignment with Pseudo-Apuleius herbals; argues for a structured generative imitation. Uses "a newly transliterated corpus" (not described in the abstract).

Tauber, J. (2026). What BPE Reveals about the Internal Structure of Voynichese. https://voynich.jtauber.com/posts/bpe-reveals/ (16 Apr 2026), with two companion posts. VERIFIED (fetched). EVA; BPE merges as a structural probe; "slot purity" 80.6 % (+2.54σ, 9th of 269 languages, near abugidas/syllabaries, with a tokeniser caveat); h2 rises from 2.08 bits to 4.95 bits by merge 200; Currier B compresses more than A (0.321 vs 0.350), biological section most (0.283).

Arutyunov, A. et al. (2016). Statistical Properties of European Languages and Voynich Manuscript Analysis. arXiv:1611.09122. VERIFIED (abstract). Letter-frequency "spectral portraits"; proposes a two-language mixture; languages not named in the abstract.

Hauer, B. & Kondrak, G. (2016). Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script. TACL 4:75–86. DOI 10.1162/tacl_a_00084. VERIFIED (fetched). See §2.2.

Farrugia, Layfield & van der Plas 2022; Layfield & Davis 2026 (LSA page re-sequencing, Cryptologia + DHQ companion). VERIFIED as existing (sibling-survey material; Timm's critiques list them); not fetched here.

Not located during this survey (searches returned only voynich.ninja forum threads, none fetched): Emma May Smith's "Agnostic Voynich" blog analyses, Brian Cham's "curve-line system", Koen Gheuens's blog analyses, J. K. Petersen's voynichportal posts, Jaskiewicz 2011, Currier 1976, Tiltman 1967, Stolfi's prefix–midfix–suffix / crust–mantle–core grammar pages. All UNVERIFIED here. Stolfi's grammar is referenced by Tauber and the Stolfi interlinear directory is linked from voynich.nu (VERIFIED URL above), so the grammar pages almost certainly live under http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/ — check there. A sibling survey's trace shows a voynich.ninja thread fetch failing behind a login wall, so forum material should be treated as not machine-accessible without an account.

2.2 Proposed underlying languages: evidence and refutation

| Proposal | Proponent(s) | Evidence offered | Refutation / status | Source status | |---|---|---|---|---| | Hebrew (anagrammed, monoalphabetic) | Hauer & Kondrak 2016 | On 43 VMS-B pages in Currier transcription (17,597 words): decomposition-pattern language ID ranks Hebrew, then Malay (Arabic script), Arabic, Amharic; char-frequency method ranks Mazatec first (Mozarabic 3rd, Italian 8th, Ladino 10th); trial decipherment unstable but Hebrew and Esperanto near top. First line decoded to Hebrew that a native speaker called not quite coherent; Google-translated as "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people." | Authors' own caveats: output not syntactically correct or semantically consistent, which is expected under a pure substitution assumption; transcription and word-boundary noise; domain mismatch. Bowern & Lindemann: unproven at best. The disagreement among the three methods is itself the strongest evidence of fragility. | VERIFIED | | Nahuatl / Mesoamerican | Tucker & Talbert (HerbalGram 2013); Janick & Tucker | Plant identifications as New World species; superficial lexical comparisons | Carbon dating (1404–1438) makes it a "non-starter" (Bowern & Lindemann); linguistic comparisons superficial. | VERIFIED (B&L summary); HerbalGram article itself UNVERIFIED (search hit only) | | Latin abbreviation | Gibbs 2017 (TLS) | Two published lines read as abbreviated Latin | Unconvincing; rests on two lines (B&L). | VERIFIED (B&L summary) | | "Proto-Romance" | Cheshire 2019 | Lexical look-alikes | Vague claim; no systematic grammar (B&L). | VERIFIED (B&L summary) | | Indo-European via plant labels | Bax 2014 | Handful of label readings | Label assumption questionable; ignores the entropy anomaly (B&L). | VERIFIED (B&L summary) | | Glagolitic / "Illyrian" | Kircher (17th c.) | Letter-shape resemblance | No more similarity than expected given shared Latin ancestry (B&L). | VERIFIED | | Turkic | Ardiç | Video readings | Not discussed in any fetched source. | UNVERIFIED | | Czech | Hannig 2019 | Readings as Czech | Not discussed in any fetched source. | UNVERIFIED | | Manchu | — | — | Not discussed in any fetched source. | UNVERIFIED | | Greek, Estonian, mixed-language | various | — | Dismissed in a B&L footnote citing others. | VERIFIED (footnote only) | | Two-language mixture (unnamed) | Arutyunov et al. 2016 | Letter-frequency spectral portraits | Languages not named in the abstract; no follow-up seen. | VERIFIED (abstract) | | Consonant-heavy (Hebrew/Arabic-like) phonotactics, but as pastiche | Turenne 2026 | Position-dependent grammar; phonetic decomposition | Author's own conclusion is imitation, not language. | VERIFIED (abstract) | | Abjad of unspecified language | Reddy & Knight 2011 | Binomial word length; HMM finds no V/C split; Pinyin-like letter predictability | Compatible also with devowelled European text; not a language ID. | VERIFIED | | Gibberish / hoax (Cardan grille, self-citation) | Rugg 2004; Rugg & Taylor; Timm & Schinner 2014–2026 | Generators reproduce Zipf, binomial lengths, low h2, word-similarity networks | B&L: higher-level structure (topics, line/paragraph, hand/section) argues against; Parisel 2026 and Rozanova & Temerev 2026 show the published generators fail joint criteria (directional signatures; edge-glyph coupling; 70 % hapax rate). | VERIFIED | | Verbose homophonic cipher of Latin/Italian ("Naibbe") | Greshko 2025, Cryptologia, DOI 10.1080/01611194.2025.2566408 | Card/table-driven cipher reproduces many properties at once; matches B incompletely | New; no independent evaluation seen. | VERIFIED (DOI via sci.news summary; paper not fetched) |

The consistent pattern: every language proposal rests on word-level look-alikes and none explains the character-level entropy deficit, the slot structure, or the near-zero word-order information. Any new language test must be judged on whether it predicts those three facts, not on whether a few words can be read.

2.3 Technique inventory: applied, partly applied, not applied

Each entry: what it is; whether it has been run on Voynichese according to the collected material; the hypothesis it would test; concrete implementation against the ZL file; status of the key citation.

A1. Unsupervised morphology induction (Morfessor, Adaptor grammars, Paramor, Linguistica). Applied: Linguistica (Reddy & Knight 2011, VERIFIED) found affix-like structure; BPE (Tauber 2026, VERIFIED); manual field analysis after Tiltman (B&L). Not applied: Morfessor Baseline/FlatCat (Creutz & Lagus 2007; Smit et al. 2014 — UNVERIFIED), Adaptor grammars (Johnson, Griffiths & Goldwater 2007 — UNVERIFIED), Paramor (Monson 2009 — UNVERIFIED). B&L explicitly say "full morphology induction was not attempted" (VERIFIED). Hypothesis: if Voynichese words are stem+affix combinations of a real morphology, MDL segmentation should produce a small affix inventory with stems that recur across affixes (paradigms); if words are table-generated slot strings (Rugg, Naibbe, Timm–Schinner), segmentation will produce many "affixes" with near-uniform stem co-occurrence and no paradigm consistency. Implementation: word types + counts from ZL P-loci; run Morfessor Baseline with a sweep over corpus-weight α; measure (i) number of morph types, (ii) stem/affix mutual-information structure, (iii) a "paradigm coherence" score (fraction of stems that take ≥ 3 of the top-10 affixes), (iv) compression gain. Run identically on the control set in §1 step 5 with matched token count (~37k). Adaptor grammars (PCFG with Pitman–Yor caches) can be given Stolfi's prefix–midfix–suffix skeleton as the grammar and asked whether the data prefer it to a flat word grammar via held-out likelihood. Effort: 20–30 h including controls.

A2. Unsupervised POS / word-class induction (Brown clustering, Clark 2003, Christodoulopoulos et al. 2010 evaluation). Applied: a 10-class word HMM (Reddy & Knight 2011, VERIFIED) with "hard to quantify" regularities. Not applied: Brown clustering (Brown et al. 1992 — UNVERIFIED), Clark 2003 distributional+morphological clustering (UNVERIFIED), the Christodoulopoulos, Goldwater & Steedman 2010 comparison framework (UNVERIFIED). B&L say POS identification "cannot be accomplished at this stage" (VERIFIED). Hypothesis: natural language yields a few high-frequency closed classes (function words) whose members have low context entropy and alternate with open classes; a slot-generated text yields classes that are purely positional (line-initial, line-final) with no class-sequence structure beyond position. Note the baseline problem: Reddy & Knight found word bigrams add only ~9 % predictability and Rozanova & Temerev found < 1 % of token entropy — so the test is not "does clustering find classes" but "does the class sequence carry more information than position alone". Implementation: Brown clustering (any standard implementation) at k = 10, 20, 50 on P-loci tokens; compute class-bigram mutual information and compare with (a) line-position-only model, (b) shuffled-within-line text, (c) Latin control. If class-sequence MI ≈ position-only MI, the clusters are typographic. Effort: 10–15 h.

A3. Vowel/consonant identification (Sukhotin; Guy; Kim & Snyder 2013; two-state HMM). Applied: Sukhotin (Reddy & Knight 2011 on two pages; B&L on more, results sensitive to whether word breaks count and differ A vs B — VERIFIED); two-state HMM (Reddy & Knight — VERIFIED; finds final-vs-nonfinal split, not V/C). Guy's 1991 application of Sukhotin to Voynich — UNVERIFIED. Not applied: Kim & Snyder 2013, Unsupervised Consonant-Vowel Prediction over Hundreds of Languages, ACL 2013, pp. 1527–1536, https://aclanthology.org/P13-1150/ (VERIFIED citation; method details not in the fetched page — from background knowledge it is a Bayesian model with priors shared across languages trained on Bible-corpus alphabets; UNVERIFIED). Hypothesis: a genuine alphabet gives a stable minority class under all three methods and under both EVA-basic and ligature tokenisations; an abjad gives a weak/unstable split (as observed); a verbose or bigraph cipher gives a split that flips with tokenisation. The known instability already favours abjad or verbose cipher; the unapplied test is whether the cross-language prior of Kim & Snyder stabilises it. Implementation: re-run Sukhotin and 2-state HMM on all three tokenisations × A/B × section, reporting cluster stability (adjusted Rand across bootstrap samples); then implement or obtain Kim & Snyder's model, train its hyper-priors on the native-script Bible corpora (§4.3) and apply. Effort: 8 h for the first part; 25–40 h for Kim & Snyder.

A4. Syllable-structure / phonotactic inference. Not applied in any fetched source. Candidate methods: unsupervised syllabification via the induced V/C classes from A3 (requires A3 to succeed); phonotactic-complexity measures (Pimentel et al. 2020, Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs, TACL — UNVERIFIED); legal-onset/coda inventories from positional bigram statistics. Hypothesis: slot grammars from a table produce position constraints that are not reducible to onset–nucleus–coda templates (e.g. a glyph restricted to word-final position regardless of what precedes it); phonotactics produce constraints that are local and compositional. Tauber's slot purity of 80.6 % with abugida/syllabary neighbours is the observation to explain. Implementation: compute per-glyph positional entropy and the conditional independence of final-glyph choice from the preceding two glyphs; compare with abugida-script Bibles (Amharic, Thai, Burmese, Hindi) and syllabaries (Cherokee if available), tokenised at the Unicode grapheme-cluster level. Effort: 15 h.

A5. Typological priors in decipherment (Luo et al. 2021; WALS/Grambank/PHOIBLE). Luo, J., Hartmann, F., Santus, E., Barzilay, R. & Cao, Y. (2021). Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior. TACL 9:69–81. DOI 10.1162/tacl_a_00354; arXiv:2010.11054. VERIFIED. IPA-based character embeddings, joint segmentation + cognate alignment, a language-closeness measure validated on Gothic and Ugaritic, inconclusive on Iberian/Basque. No code release was visible on the fetched Anthology page (UNVERIFIED either way). Not applied to Voynich; the obstacle is that the model needs a phonetic value per symbol, which is exactly what is unknown. A usable fragment: their language-closeness measure can be run against candidate families once A3 gives a V/C hypothesis. PHOIBLE/WALS/Grambank were not mentioned in the fetched page; whether they were used is UNVERIFIED. Hypothesis: if Voynichese is a substitution-ciphered natural language, the closeness measure should rank one family stably across transliterations; instability (as in Hauer & Kondrak) indicates the signal is not there. Effort: 40+ h; low priority until A3 produces something stable.

A6. Writing-system typology from statistics (alphabet / abjad / abugida / syllabary / logographic). Sproat, R. & Gutkin, A. (2021). The Taxonomy of Writing Systems: How to Measure how Logographic a System is. Computational Linguistics 47(3):477–528. DOI 10.1162/coli_a_00409. VERIFIED. Their attention-based measure needs pronunciations, so it is not directly usable; the fetched page mentions "a lexical measure and an entropic measure" as baselines without formulas. Related: A Mutual Information-based Approach to Quantifying Logography in Japanese and Sumerian, CAWL 2023, https://aclanthology.org/2023.cawl-1.12/ (VERIFIED URL only). Rao et al. 2009 conditional-entropy "Indus script" argument and Sproat's critique (Sproat 2010/2014) — UNVERIFIED. Applied in part: Reddy & Knight argue 35 symbols rule out syllabary/logography (VERIFIED); Tauber's slot purity puts Voynichese among abugidas (VERIFIED). Hypothesis: symbol-inventory size vs text length, h2, and slot purity jointly separate script types across the native-script Bible corpora; where Voynichese sits under EVA-basic vs ligature tokenisation tells you whether EVA is under- or over-segmenting the glyphs. Implementation: on each native-script Bible (grapheme-cluster tokens), compute inventory size at 37k tokens, h1, h2, slot purity, final-position entropy; fit a simple classifier; place Voynichese under all three tokenisations. Effort: 12 h once §4.3 corpus is in hand.

A7. Language identification from character statistics across 1,000+ languages. Applied: Hauer & Kondrak 2016 over 380 languages (UDHR-scale) with three methods that disagree (VERIFIED); Lindemann & Bowern over ~268 Wikipedia languages for entropy only (VERIFIED); Arutyunov et al. letter spectra (VERIFIED). Not applied: screening over the 1,100+ languages of the Parallel Bible Corpus with cipher-invariant features only. Hypothesis: under any monoalphabetic or verbose substitution, features that are invariant to symbol relabelling (h1, h2, word-length distribution, type/token curve, repetition rate, hapax share, positional entropy profile, top-k mass) still carry family information; nearest-neighbour family under these features, computed on 37k-token slices, should be stable across the three tokenisations if there is a language. Implementation: feature vector per language per 37k slice of PBC or the 100-language Bible corpus; k-NN and a family-level classifier; report the rank distribution of each family for Voynich A and B separately. Effort: 15–20 h (most of it corpus acquisition).

A8. Morphological-complexity and entropy indices (MATTR; Bentz et al. 2017). Applied: MATTR (B&L; Lindemann 2022 — VERIFIED). Not applied: Bentz, C., Alikaniotis, D., Cysouw, M. & Ferrer-i-Cancho, R. (2017). The Entropy of Words — Learnability and Expressivity across More than 1000 Languages. Entropy 19(6):275. DOI 10.3390/e19060275. VERIFIED (fetched). Their result: unigram word entropy H1 (mean 9.14 bits, SD 1.12, NSB estimator) and entropy rate h (mean 5.97) are linearly related, ĥ = −1.12 + 0.78·Ĥ1, r ≈ 0.95, across 1,115 languages cut to the first 50k tokens; no language below ~6 bits/word; preceding context removes ~3.17 bits (SD 0.36). Code: entropy-rate estimator at https://github.com/dimalik/Hrate/ (VERIFIED URL; plain HTTPS); NSB estimator gist https://gist.github.com/shhong/1021654/ (VERIFIED URL). Hypothesis: Voynichese (37k tokens, near Bentz's 50k cut) should fall on the H1–h regression line if it is language-like at the word level. Reddy & Knight's "bigram context helps only ~9 %" suggests the H1 − h gap will be far below 3.17 bits, i.e. the text will sit off the line. This is a single, cheap, decisive-looking number that has not been reported. Implementation: Hrate + NSB on ZL tokens, per A/B, per section; same on controls. Effort: 4–6 h.

A9. Word-length distribution and Menzerath–Altmann law. Applied: binomial word length (Reddy & Knight — VERIFIED; Timm & Schinner cite it as counter-evidence — VERIFIED). Not applied: Menzerath–Altmann (longer words have shorter constituents) — requires a morph segmentation from A1. UNVERIFIED that nobody has done it; no fetched source mentions it. Hypothesis: natural-language morph lengths obey Menzerath; table-generated slot strings do not, because slot fillers are drawn independently of word length. Effort: 4 h after A1.

A10. Directionality and unit identification (recent, applied). Parisel 2025/2026 and Rozanova & Temerev 2026 (both VERIFIED) are the current state of the art on "what are the units". Not yet done: replicating their joint criteria on the Naibbe cipher output and on Gaskell–Bowern human gibberish, which would close the loop with the Bowern-lab controls.

A11. Topic and discourse structure. Applied: TF-IDF/NMF topics (Sterneck et al.), page similarity (Reddy & Knight), LSA page ordering (Layfield & Davis 2026), all VERIFIED. Timm's critique of the LSA work (VERIFIED listing) argues the binding-order inferences are weak.

3. Goal B.1 — Deciphered or diagnosed comparable artefacts

| Artefact | Solution | Method | What false solutions looked like | Text available? | Status | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Copiale cipher (c. 1760–80, 105 pp.) | Knight, Megyesi & Schaefer 2011, The Copiale Cipher, ACL BUCC workshop, https://aclanthology.org/W11-1202/ | Guessed German via EM over candidate plaintext language models; discovered that Roman letters were nulls/spaces and abstract symbols were the cipher proper; homophonic substitution for German | Earlier assumptions that the Roman letters carried the plaintext | Transcription and images released by the authors via the Stockholm project page https://www.su.se/english/research/research-projects/decipherment-of-historical-manuscripts/the-copiale-cipher-1.688288 | Citation and project URL VERIFIED (search); method summary from background — UNVERIFIED; download location UNVERIFIED | | Zodiac 340 (1969) | Oranchak, Blake & Van Eycke 2024, arXiv:2403.17350 | AZdecrypt (simulated annealing, 6-gram scoring + plaintext-entropy term to avoid "n-gram spaghetti"); transposition detected by repeating-bigram peak at period 19, reinterpreted as a (1,2)-decimation of a 20×17 grid; ~655,088 transposition variants sieved by repeat count; crib "gas chamber" phrase; FBI confirmation 11 Dec 2020; unicity distance ≤ 152 < 340 | 51 years of homophonic-only solutions that read as fluent-looking nonsense — the "n-gram spaghetti" the entropy term guards against | Ciphertext is public (reproduced in the paper) | VERIFIED (fetched) | | Mary Stuart letters (57 letters, 1578–84, BnF) | Lasry, Biermann & Tomokiyo 2023, Cryptologia | Homophonic cipher with nomenclator, broken with hill-climbing/simulated annealing on a French LM after Italian was ruled out; attribution via internal references | — | BnF images; transcriptions in the paper's supplement | Existence VERIFIED via 2023 news coverage (phys.org, ScienceDaily); DOI not seen — UNVERIFIED; method from background — UNVERIFIED | | Sennecey letter (French Wars of Religion) | Lasry, HistoCrypt (year not shown), https://ecp.ep.liu.se/index.php/histocrypt/article/download/402/360 | 858 symbols, 86 distinct → homophonic; DECRYPT simulated-annealing tool; trigram score failed, 5-gram partial, historical Gutenberg French corpus succeeded; 2–6 homophones per letter | Generic modern French LM produced nothing — a direct lesson for Voynich: the LM must match period and register | — | VERIFIED (fetched) | | Rohonc Codex (448 pp., Hungarian provenance) | Király & Tokai 2018, Cryptologia 42 | Identified as a code (symbol = word/concept with grammatical marking) for a Christian text, cribbed from illustrations (Crucifixion, Pilate) and liturgical formulae; readings validated by consistency across repeated passages | Pre-2018: Sumerian, Old Hungarian runic, Hindi/Brahmi, Dacian readings — each by a single reader with no consistency test | Facsimile images via Hungarian Academy; no machine-readable transcription seen | Existence of the 2018 solution VERIFIED (Schmeh blog 5 Jun 2018 https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2018/06/05/rohonc-codex-top-ten-crypto-mystery-solved-part-2-of-2/, ciphermysteries, HistoCrypt 2020 listing, Timm's testability critique); volume/pages, method details and false-solution list from background — UNVERIFIED | | Book of Soyga (16th c., 36 tables of 36×36 letters) | Reeds, J. 1998, John Dee and the Magic Tables in the Book of Soyga | Each table is generated from a keyword running down column 1 and a deterministic rule: each cell is a function of the cell above and the cell to its left via a fixed letter-value table; scribal errors propagate diagonally, which is how the rule was confirmed | — | Tables PDF: https://ia800709.us.archive.org/15/items/JohnDee_201812/BookofSoyga-MagicTables.pdf (archive.org, plain HTTPS); translation online per https://ciphermysteries.com/2015/12/25/the-book-of-soyga-now-translated-and-online | PDF URL, ciphermysteries URL and Wikipedia page VERIFIED (search); generating rule from background — UNVERIFIED | | Trithemius, Steganographia (c. 1499) | Books I–II: nulls and every-other-letter rules (known since 17th c.); Book III: Ernst 1996; Reeds 1998 | Numeric tables decoded as a substitution with shifts | Centuries of reading Book III as angel magic | Latin text used as a comparison corpus by Bowern & Gaskell 2022 (so a machine-readable version exists in the Bowern lab) | Use as corpus VERIFIED; solution history from background — UNVERIFIED | | Codex Seraphinianus (1981) | None — author describes the script as asemic | — | Attempts to read the text; only the base-21 page numbering was decoded | Not public domain | UNVERIFIED | | Oera Linda Book (1867) | Hoax in invented "Old Frisian" | Philological: anachronistic vocabulary, modern paper | Taken as genuine by some 19th-c. readers | Text on Wikisource | UNVERIFIED | | Polygraphia III (Trithemius) | Hermes 2022, CEUR Vol-3313 paper 7 | A cipher designed to look like an artificial language — the closest typological analogue to "verbose cipher that looks like a language" | — | — | VERIFIED (listing) | | Sloane MS 3188 (Dee's spirit diaries) | Boxer 2022, CEUR Vol-3313 paper 1 | Quantitative fingerprint of a known meaningless text vs Voynich | — | — | VERIFIED (listing) |

Lessons that transfer: (i) every genuine solution was confirmed by a crib that the solver did not choose (FBI contemporaneous reference, illustration–text match, propagated scribal error); (ii) every false solution was a single reader's fluent-looking output with no consistency test; (iii) period-matched language models mattered decisively (Sennecey; Megyesi et al. 2023 — historical LMs "significantly better" for ≤ 17th-century ciphertext, VERIFIED); (iv) transposition and nulls were detected by period statistics before any plaintext appeared. The Voynich analogue of (iv) is Parisel's directional asymmetry and Matlach's 40/160 periodicities — neither has yet been followed by a transposition search.

4. Goal B.2–B.5 — Datasets

4.2 Comparable genre texts in machine-readable form

Nothing in this category was fetched by the previous agent, and the six supplementary calls were spent elsewhere. The table gives the standard locations from background knowledge; every row is UNVERIFIED and needs one HTTP check before use.

| Text | Likely machine-readable source | Format / licence (as recalled) | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Herbarium Apuleii Platonici (Pseudo-Apuleius) | Corpus Corporum (mlat.uzh.ch) or Howald–Sigerist 1927 edition on archive.org | TEI/HTML; public domain | Turenne 2026 claims image correspondences with this tradition (VERIFIED claim) — makes it the first herbal to acquire | | Macer Floridus, De viribus herbarum | Corpus Corporum; Choulant 1832 edition on archive.org | public domain | Verse, so word statistics differ from prose | | Circa instans (Platearius) | Wölfel 1939 edition (not open); French Livre des simples médecines editions | — | Probably not freely machine-readable | | Tractatus de herbis (Sloane 4016) | British Library images; Ventura 2009 edition (not open) | — | Images only | | Hortus sanitatis (1491) | BSB/MDZ digitised images; a Lorraine/CNRS online edition project | — | Check for text layer | | De balneis Puteolanis (Peter of Eboli) | Editions on archive.org | public domain | Short (c. 35 poems) | | De balneis omnia (1553) | Images only | — | | | Picatrix (Latin) | Pingree 1986 edition (not open); Latin text circulates on esoteric sites | unclear | Not safely citable | | Liber Hermetis | Gundel 1936 (not open) | — | | | Engel, Astrolabium planum (1488) | BSB/MDZ incunable images | images | OCR of incunabula is poor; would need transcription | | Antidotarium Nicolai | 1471 incunable images; Corpus Corporum may hold a transcription | — | | | Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum | The Latin Library / la.wikisource | public domain | Verse | | Ortolf von Baierland, Arzneibuch | Follan 1963 edition; Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch (ReM) may include excerpts | — | Best Middle High German medical control | | Bartholomäus (German) | Pfeiffer 1861 edition on archive.org | public domain | | | Pliny, Naturalis Historia bks 20–27 | Perseus Digital Library | CC BY-SA | Classical, but the largest open Latin plant-medicine prose | | Generic Latin | CLTK Latin Library corpus (GitHub); Corpus Corporum | mixed | For 37k-token matched controls | | Middle High German | Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (mhdbdb.sbg.ac.at); ReM; Deutsches Textarchiv (mostly post-1600) | academic use | | | Old Czech | Vokabulář webový (ÚJČ) | academic use | For the Hannig claim | | Old Occitan / Old Italian / Old Catalan | COM (commercial); OVI (gattoweb.ovi.cnr.it); CICA (cica.cat) | query interfaces, not bulk download | Bulk text usually requires permission | | Multilingual old texts | TITUS (titus.uni-frankfurt.de); Bibliotheca Augustana (hs-augsburg.de/~harsch) | academic use; HTML pages | Augustana has clean Latin/German medieval HTML that scrapes easily |

The practical recommendation is not to chase all of these. Bowern & Gaskell already assembled Latin controls (De Magia, Steganographia, Secreta Secretorum, Adso — VERIFIED); asking for that corpus, plus Pseudo-Apuleius and one German medical text, covers the genre question for the purposes of the techniques in §2.3.

4.3 Multilingual corpora for mass language screening

| Corpus | Size | Access | Licence | Status | |---|---|---|---|---| | Christodoulopoulos & Steedman, "A massively parallel corpus: the Bible in 100 languages", Language Resources & Evaluation 2014, DOI 10.1007/s10579-014-9287-y | 100 languages; 45 partial (NT only); CES-level-1 XML, UTF-8, verse-aligned by book/chapter/verse IDs; whitespace tokenisation only; no POS | Paper gives http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccg/corpora.html; widely mirrored on GitHub as christos-c/bible-corpus (UNVERIFIED) | "Creative Commons" (variant not specified in the paper) | Paper and Edinburgh URL VERIFIED (fetched); GitHub mirror UNVERIFIED | | OPUS bible-uedin | Same material repackaged, sentence-aligned pairs | https://opus.nlpl.eu/bible-uedin/corpus/version/bible-uedin — plain HTTPS | as above | VERIFIED URL (search) | | Parallel Bible Corpus (Mayer & Cysouw 2014), "Creating a massively parallel Bible corpus", LREC 2014, https://aclanthology.org/L14-1215/ | 1,137 languages / 1,525 texts (raw) per Bentz et al. 2017 | Not a public download; distributed on request by the authors because of translation copyrights; browsable via ParCourE (arXiv:2107.06632) | per-text, mixed | Paper URL and ParCourE URL VERIFIED; access conditions from background — UNVERIFIED | | UDHR in Unicode (unicode.org/udhr) | Bentz et al. used 341 languages / 370 texts, ~1.3k tokens each | plain HTTPS XML | public | Use by Bentz VERIFIED; current count and URL UNVERIFIED | | Wikipedia dumps (dumps.wikimedia.org) | 300+ languages | plain HTTPS | CC BY-SA | Bowern lab's ~250–268-language sample is VERIFIED to exist and VERIFIED to have markup-artefact problems; dumps URL UNVERIFIED | | Leipzig Corpora Collection (wortschatz.uni-leipzig.de) | 250+ languages, sentence-shuffled | download of size-classed files | CC BY | UNVERIFIED | | Tatoeba (tatoeba.org/downloads) | 400+ languages, short sentences | plain HTTPS | CC BY 2.0 FR | UNVERIFIED | | OPUS (opus.nlpl.eu) | hundreds of languages, many corpora | plain HTTPS | per corpus | VERIFIED domain | | Lindemann & Bowern 2020 entropy corpus | ~268 languages, already cleaned to their standard | ask the authors | — | Existence VERIFIED | | Historical: CLTK (github.com/cltk), Corpus Corporum, Index Thomisticus (corpusthomisticum.org), OVI, CICA, ReM | see §4.2 | mostly query interfaces | mixed | UNVERIFIED |

For script-typology work (A6) the 100-language Bible corpus is the one to get first: it is verse-aligned, in native scripts (abjads, abugidas, syllabic Japanese, Chinese), CC-licensed and reachable by plain HTTPS — the only corpus in this list that is all four.

4.4 Cipher datasets

DECODE database (DECRYPT project, Stockholm/Uppsala/Kassel). Héder, M. & Megyesi, B. (2022). The DECODE Database of Historical Ciphers and Keys: Version 2. HistoCrypt 2022, pp. 111–114. DOI 10.3384/ecp188397. VERIFIED (fetched). Héder, M., Fornés, A., Kopal, N., Szigeti, F. & Megyesi, B. (2024). Supporting Historical Cryptology: The Decrypt Pipeline. NEALT Proceedings 53, DOI 10.58009/aere-perennius0100. VERIFIED (fetched): DECODE catalogues ciphers from the 14th century to 1965; pipeline = cataloguing → manual/AI transcription → cryptanalysis (CrypTool 2 components) → historical/linguistic analysis; automated transcription is the stated bottleneck. What's in it: ciphertext images, transcriptions in a standard format, keys, metadata (date, language, cipher type). Access: the web interface at de-crypt.org requires a free registration for download; record counts in the thousands — both UNVERIFIED (the fetched page gave neither count nor access terms). Project pages: https://www.su.se/english/research/research-catalogue/research-projects/d/decipherment-of-historical-manuscripts (VERIFIED URL).

HistoCrypt proceedings. Open access on Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings (https://ecp.ep.liu.se/index.php/histocrypt/) and, for 2025, the University of Tartu repository (https://dspace.ut.ee/collections/47fa5504-4c9e-4cdd-8424-334344800f51). Both VERIFIED URLs. Relevant VERIFIED items: Megyesi et al. 2023, Historical Language Models in Cryptanalysis, DOI 10.3384/ecp195701; Kopal, New Ciphers and Cryptanalysis Components in CrypTool 2 (article 399); Leierzopf/Kopal/Mikhalev cipher-type detection (article 164, and the NCID neural cipher identifier at https://legacy.cryptool.org/en/cto/ncid); Lasry's Sennecey letter (article 402).

Tools. CrypTool 2 (https://www.cryptool.org/en/ct2/resources) with homophonic-substitution analyser (VERIFIED URLs); AZdecrypt by Jarl Van Eycke (VERIFIED as the Z340 solver; download location UNVERIFIED); Lasry 2018 dissertation, A Methodology for the Cryptanalysis of Classical Ciphers with Search Metaheuristics, kassel university press, DOI 10.19211/KUP9783737604598 (VERIFIED).

Synthetic cipher generators relevant as controls. ChronoFidelius (used by Bruton, Beloucif & Megyesi 2026, arXiv:2606.05078 — VERIFIED) generates period-dated homophonic ciphertexts from 1500–1899 English/Swedish; the Naibbe cipher (Greshko 2025) is the only published generator designed to mimic Voynich B's slot grammar — code availability UNVERIFIED.

4.5 Voynich data beyond the voynich.nu transliterations

| Resource | Location | Access | Status | |---|---|---|---| | Stolfi's files (interlinear, word grammar, page tables) | http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/ (interlinear 98-12-28-interln16e6/) | plain HTTP | VERIFIED URL (from voynich.nu); grammar page itself not fetched | | Takahashi original pages | http://www.voynich.com/pages/ | plain HTTP | VERIFIED URL (from voynich.nu) | | voynichese.com browser | https://www.voynichese.com | web app | VERIFIED URL | | Davis's hand assignments | Davis, L. F. 2020, "How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes?", Manuscript Studies 5(1) — UNVERIFIED citation; the per-page hand is carried in ZL's page headers (the IVTFF spec defines a hand variable) — detail UNVERIFIED | via ZL file | Use VERIFIED (Tauber, B&L both use "Davis 2020" hands) | | Davis multispectral images (2014 Lazarus Project imaging of ff. 1r, 8r, 17r, 26r, 47r, 70v1, 71r, 93r, 102v1, 116v; released Sept 2024) | Google Drive folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1mNQGKQDSCR4M_c2M2JrsU5soghvYwMig (folders: Lab_True_color_TIFF, Processed_Images, Raw TIFFs 16-bit, RGB_true_color_JPEGs); blog https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispectral-imaging-and-the-voynich-manuscript/ | Google Drive (not plain HTTPS; needs a browser or gdown) | VERIFIED (fetched blog) | | Yale scans | https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2002046 (IIIF; child OIDs per folio, e.g. 1006206 = f73r) | plain HTTPS / IIIF | VERIFIED URL | | Jason Davies' Voynich Voyager | https://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/ | web | VERIFIED URL | | Pelling quire/bifolio data | The Curse of the Voynich (2006) and ciphermysteries.com posts; no dataset file seen | — | UNVERIFIED | | Zandbergen's quire/bifolio reconstruction | voynich.nu (referenced in a sibling survey) | web | VERIFIED existence; page not fetched | | voynich.ninja shared datasets | Forum threads; several are behind a login wall | account needed | VERIFIED (login wall observed) | | Kaggle / Hugging Face "Voynich Manuscript Dataset" | Search returned a Kaggle kernel (kernels/scriptcontent/33900692) and Zenodo record 18595646; neither was opened | — | UNVERIFIED — contents unknown. Expect a repackaged EVA/Takahashi text; verify provenance before use, since it will lack IVTFF metadata | | Bowern-lab control corpora: Wikipedia entropy corpus, Latin manipulations, human-gibberish samples (Gaskell & Bowern 2022) | ask authors | — | Existence VERIFIED | | Timm–Schinner self-citation generator output | Timm's Academia page lists the papers; generator code location not seen | — | UNVERIFIED | | Zenodo Voynich records seen in search results: 17024045, 16985091, 17794596, 18122822, 18518992, 18595646 | zenodo.org | plain HTTPS | URLs VERIFIED; contents not examined — do not cite without opening |

5. Ranked top-10 under-tried techniques

Effort estimates assume the §1 pipeline (≈ 8 h) already exists and include running the §1 controls.

1. Bentz-style unigram-entropy vs entropy-rate placement (A8). Bentz et al. 2017 give a tight cross-linguistic law (ĥ = −1.12 + 0.78·Ĥ1, r ≈ 0.95, 1,115 languages, 50k-token cut) with released code. Voynichese has never been placed on it. Reddy & Knight's small bigram gain predicts it will fall well below the line (context removes far less than 3.2 bits). Either outcome is informative: on the line supports "encoded language at the word level"; far off it is a quantitative, cross-linguistically calibrated statement that word sequence carries too little information for a language, which the hoax/generator side has argued qualitatively. Cheapest decisive number available. 5 h.

2. Cipher-invariant nearest-family screening over 1,000+ languages (A7). Hauer & Kondrak's three methods disagreed (Hebrew / Mazatec / Hebrew-Esperanto) on 380 languages and a Currier transcription; nobody has run a screen restricted to features invariant under symbol relabelling, on ZL, across the three tokenisations, on A and B separately, with family-rank stability as the output. Needs the 100-language Bible corpus at minimum, PBC ideally. The result is a stability map rather than a "winner", which is what the decipherment literature (Luo et al. 2021's closeness measure) says you should want. 20 h.

3. Morfessor / adaptor-grammar segmentation with paradigm-coherence scoring against generators (A1). B&L state morphology induction was never attempted; Reddy & Knight's Linguistica run is the only prior. The discriminating statistic is not the segmentation but whether stems recur across affixes as they would in a paradigm; slot-generators and the Naibbe cipher will fail this in a way a language cannot. Adaptor grammars let you test Stolfi's prefix–midfix–suffix skeleton directly by held-out likelihood. 30 h.

4. Script-type placement using native-script Bibles (A6). Tauber's slot-purity result (Voynichese next to abugidas) is the first typology signal and it is one feature. A small classifier on inventory size, h1, h2, slot purity and final-position entropy across the 100 native-script Bibles, run under EVA-basic, ligature and v101 tokenisations, answers whether EVA is under-segmenting (Matlach's ~10-unit alphabet) or over-segmenting, before any linguistic conclusion is drawn. 12 h.

5. Class induction with position-controlled information scoring (A2). Brown clustering is standard but the uninformative version (clusters exist) has effectively been done by Reddy & Knight. The useful version measures whether class-sequence MI exceeds line-position MI. Given Rozanova & Temerev's < 1 % figure, the expected answer is "no", which would be the strongest word-order result yet and would constrain cipher hypotheses to ones that destroy word order (transposition, nulls at word level). 12 h.

6. Vowel/consonant stability analysis with cross-language priors (A3). Re-running Sukhotin and the 2-state HMM is cheap and the published results are from two pages (R&K) or sensitive to word breaks (B&L). The instability itself is the signal: tabulate cluster stability under bootstrap × tokenisation × A/B × section. Then Kim & Snyder 2013's shared prior is the one method designed for exactly this situation that has not been tried. 8 h + 30 h.

7. Joint-signature replication on Naibbe and human-gibberish controls (A10). Parisel 2026 and Rozanova & Temerev 2026 each define multi-signature criteria that reject the Rugg grille and the self-citation generator. Neither has been run on the Naibbe cipher (the only generator built to pass such tests) or on Gaskell & Bowern's human gibberish. This is replication work, but it decides whether the recent "cipher-like constraints" papers have actually ruled out the best imitation. 15 h, contingent on obtaining Naibbe output.

8. Period-statistics transposition search in the Zodiac-340 style. Matlach et al. report symbol periodicities in multiples of 40/160 and Parisel reports a directional dissociation; the Z340 solution began with exactly such a period anomaly (bigram repeats at period 19) and ended with a decimation rule. Nobody has enumerated route/decimation transpositions over Voynich lines or paragraphs and scored them by repeated-bigram counts or h2 change. The paragraph-initial gallows and line effects give natural grid boundaries. Negative results are cheap; a positive one would be the first mechanical lead in decades. 25 h.

9. Menzerath–Altmann and word-length coupling after segmentation (A9). Follows directly from 3; separates morphological length regulation from independent slot filling. 4 h after 3.

10. Period-matched language-model scoring for any decipherment attempt. Not a Voynich technique but a methodological fix drawn from Sennecey/Megyesi: build 15th-century Latin, Italian, German and Czech character n-gram models from the §4.2 texts before scoring any candidate readings. Every language proposal in §2.2 used modern LMs or none; Hauer & Kondrak list "domain and period mismatch" among their caveats. 10 h, reused by everything else.

Deliberately not ranked: Luo et al. 2021 phonetic-prior decipherment (A5) — the input it needs (phonetic values) is the output everything else is trying to produce; LLM-based "readings" — no fetched source shows them producing a consistency-tested result.

6. Ranked top-5 datasets to acquire

1. Zandbergen's ZL3b-n.txt plus GC2a-n.txt and the IVTFF 2.0 spec. https://www.voynich.nu/data/ZL3b-n.txt, https://www.voynich.nu/data/GC2a-n.txt, https://www.voynich.nu/software/ivtt/IVTFF_format.pdf. Plain HTTPS, no licence stated beyond site copyright (VERIFIED). This is the corpus; having both ZL (EVA) and GC (v101) is what lets every result be checked for transliteration dependence, which §2 shows is the dominant confound. Also pull RF1b-e.txt as the reconciled file and CD2a-n.txt to reproduce Reddy & Knight and Hauer & Kondrak exactly. 2 h to download and parse; write the parser once.

2. Christodoulopoulos & Steedman 100-language Bible corpus (CES XML). http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccg/corpora.html (VERIFIED from the paper) or the GitHub mirror (UNVERIFIED), with OPUS bible-uedin as a fallback (VERIFIED URL). Creative Commons (variant unstated). It is the only multilingual set that is simultaneously native-script, verse-aligned, CC-licensed and a plain download, so it serves techniques 2, 4, 6 and the Kim & Snyder prior at once. The 45 NT-only languages still exceed 37k tokens. 3 h to fetch and normalise to grapheme-cluster tokens; add 2 h for OPUS fallback.

3. Bowern-lab control corpora: the ~268-language Wikipedia entropy set, the 22-manipulation Latin set, and the human-gibberish samples. Not downloadable; request from Claire Bowern (Yale) and Daniel Gaskell. Existence VERIFIED through the three papers. Their value is that every Bowern-lab number can then be reproduced before being extended, and the human-gibberish set is irreplaceable as a control — no public equivalent exists. Expect to re-clean the Wikipedia set (markup artefacts VERIFIED by Timm & Schinner; quality issues VERIFIED by Tauber). 1 h to ask; 6 h to re-clean if received.

4. Bentz et al. 2017 code and the UDHR-in-Unicode set. https://github.com/dimalik/Hrate/ and https://gist.github.com/shhong/1021654/ (VERIFIED, plain HTTPS); UDHR from unicode.org (URL UNVERIFIED). Hrate plus the NSB estimator reproduce technique 1 exactly as published; the UDHR gives a 340-language robustness check that Bentz already calibrated (too short for stable entropies, so a check, not a baseline). If the Parallel Bible Corpus can be obtained from Cysouw's group (access UNVERIFIED), it supersedes item 2 for technique 2 but not for script typology. 3 h for code and UDHR; PBC request open-ended.

5. DECODE database export plus the Z340 and Copiale materials. DECODE via de-crypt.org (registration — UNVERIFIED), papers VERIFIED (DOIs 10.3384/ecp188397, 10.58009/aere-perennius0100); Z340 ciphertext from arXiv:2403.17350 (VERIFIED); Copiale transcription via the Stockholm project page (URL VERIFIED, file location UNVERIFIED). Together these give a few thousand genuine 14th–17th-century ciphertexts with known types and keys, which is the only way to calibrate techniques 7 and 8: run the same period statistics on real homophonic, nomenclator and transposed ciphertexts and see where Voynichese sits among things that are known to be ciphers rather than among things known to be languages. 4 h for Z340/Copiale; 6 h for DECODE registration, export and format conversion.

Not in the top five but worth one hour each: Davis's MSI Google Drive folder (VERIFIED) for anyone working on f1r's margin alphabets or on glyph forms; Stolfi's interlinear directory (VERIFIED URL) for transcriber-disagreement statistics, which are an unused proxy for glyph-boundary uncertainty; the Leipzig and Tatoeba sets only if PBC is refused.

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SUMMARY FOR CALLER

• Report written above; file write was blocked by subagent policy — please save to /home/claude/analysis/research_reports/REPORT_linguistics_datasets.md.
• Coverage: Goal A fully from collected material (B&L 2021, L&B 2020, Sterneck 2021, Bowern & Gaskell 2022, VOY2022 index, Timm & Schinner, Reddy & Knight, Amancio, Matlach 2022, Parisel 2025/26, Rozanova & Temerev 2026, Turenne 2026, Tauber 2026, Hauer & Kondrak, Luo 2021, Kim & Snyder, Sproat & Gutkin, Bentz 2017, Christodoulopoulos & Steedman). Goal B.1/B.4/B.5 verified via sibling surveys plus the voynich.nu fetch; B.2 (genre texts) and much of B.3 are UNVERIFIED and flagged.
• Supplementary calls used: 6 of 6 (voynich.nu/transcr.html fetch; searches on Rohonc, Soyga, Kaggle/HF dataset, PBC/UDHR, Mary Stuart).
• Items the brief asked for that could not be located at all: Emma May Smith, Brian Cham, Koen Gheuens, J.K. Petersen blog analyses (searches returned only voynich.ninja threads, which sit behind a login wall); Jaskiewicz 2011; the content of the Kaggle/HuggingFace dataset.
• Top-ranked technique: place Voynichese on Bentz et al.'s H1-vs-entropy-rate regression (code on GitHub, ~5 h). Top-ranked dataset: ZL3b-n.txt + GC2a-n.txt from voynich.nu (plain HTTPS, ~2 h).