Cracking the Voynich Code: It's Not a Language, It's a Program.

For 600 years, the Voynich Manuscript has been the ultimate "nerd snipe." Cryptographers, linguists, and AI models have all tried to read it. They all failed.

Why? Because they were trying to read a blueprint as if it were a novel.

I’m a computer scientist. When I look at code, I don't ask "what does this say?" I ask "what does this do?" Working with Jérémie Émile, a reclusive classical scholar who spent 50 years staring at these pages, we realized something terrifyingly simple:

The Voynich Manuscript is not a language. It is a Generative Instruction Set (GIS).

It’s 15th-century procedural code.

The "Hello World" of 1404 AD

The breakthrough happened when we stopped looking at the letters and started looking at the structure. We noticed that specific "words" always appeared when specific topologies were present in the illustrations.

Take the prefix qo-. In linguistics, this might be a determiner. But in our analysis, it behaved exactly like a scope declaration in programming.

// Modern Pseudo-code
Scope root = new Scope();

// Voynich Script
qo- [followed by morphological commands]

Whenever qo- appears, the text that follows always describes the root system. It’s a context switch.

Case Study: The "Vase" (Plant-034)

This is the smoking gun. On folio 19r, there is a plant whose roots are inside a man-made vase. It’s one of the weirdest illustrations in the book.

The text associated with it starts with pchor.

Let's decompile that:

• p-: A morphological operator we identified as "Container" or "Sheath".
• -chor: The standard operator for "Core" or "Primary Structure".

p-chor = Container Core.

The text literally commands: "Make the core structure a container." And the artist drew a vase. It’s not a description; it’s a constructor.

The Grammar of Creation

We mapped out the entire botanical section. It follows a strict, object-oriented hierarchy:

1. Hierarchy: cthy defines the class.
2. Topology: chor (core) vs dar (appendage) defines the relationship.
3. Morphology: tor (tuber), sh (spiky), ol (round) define the shape.

It’s a system designed to generate idealized Forms—a Platonic database of nature.

Try It Yourself

I’ve ported the logic from our paper into a simple JS parser. You can type in the Voynich "words" and see the system generate the corresponding structures in real-time.

This isn't a translation. It's an execution.