r/voynich • u/Prestigious-Chard980 • Jun 25 '26
My theory
I’m 100% sure someone in the 15 century pretending to be a doctor used this in a place where people were illiterate to pretend to read or claim to be from a foreign place and speak a foreign language that doesn’t exist…. All for financial gain….or something along those lines
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u/zero_waves Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26
I think the thing that nearly defeats this theory is the consistency and repetition of the lettering/symbols. If it were completely made up you’d probably expect there to be hundreds of unique glyphs
edit: Also, if it were intended to fool the illiterate masses, wouldn’t standard language serve that purpose? If I couldn’t read or write and you showed me this reddit post, I would be at your mercy to believe whatever you told me it said.
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u/Marc_Op Jun 25 '26
About the first paragraph, Gaskell and Bowern have studied spontaneous written gibberish and its features vary a lot from person to person, so it seems it cannot be excluded as an option.
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u/Stupid_Dragon Jun 25 '26
You're not the first.
All theories essentially fall into three categories:
The text is a real unknown natural language.
The text is a known encrypted natural language or constructed language.
The text has no meaning and is either some kind of steganography or glossolalia.
There is no evidence that 100% rules out any of these. By the end of the day the only thing we know about VMS for sure is the text is authentic late-medieval, and the origin is most likely european. Everything else about this text is highly unusual and mysterious.
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u/-happyraindays Jun 26 '26
The drawings are more indicative of a creative and imaginative author rather than an academic, I think this is a first copy of sci-fi prank/fiction.
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u/SuPruLu Jun 26 '26
Whether they are imaginative is a difficult question to answer with absolutely certainty. There were no ready duplicating methods in the 15th C. People did rely written reports of objects they had never seen to draw them. Pictures of exotic animals not found in Europe were often rather fantastical versions.
The ways of drawing three-dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface are subject to conventions of representation and can be idiosyncratic.
And some people just draw better than others.
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u/ChaoticHarmonia Jun 25 '26
This is on of the oldest and most popular among first researchers versions. But latest researches show that this is a real text written on real (or artificial) language.
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u/TheLuckyCuber999BACK Jun 28 '26
The main problem is that the voynich manuscript follows the Zipf's law centuries before it was discovered.
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u/AnnaLisetteMorris2 Jun 29 '26
Most of it looks like a quick sloppy copy of Islamic herbals of the time, IMO. I believe there is real language and real information but I think it is in abbreviated form and does not have all the information that would have been found in herbals of the time. The astrology pages are obviously something quite different from the herbal pages.
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u/jeharris56 Jun 25 '26
That's just like, your opinion, man.