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Review 001 - TILTMAN, John H. (1967): THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World”

Last updated Oct. 23rd, 2021.

Reference for the text reviewed here can be found in my bibliography page.

Please refer to the home page for a set of definitions that might be relevant for this working note.

The below is my own commented summary from TILTMAN (1967) (mostly a shortened cut & paste from the original).

The original alphabet used by Tiltman is shown below (from D’IMPERIO (1978b), Fig.19); in this summary I replaced Tiltman’s alphabet with EVA. Notice that Tiltman uses “variants”, that is, some transliterated letters correspond to two different glyphs; I indicated this with a dash (e.g. Tiltman’s ‘H’ is indicated as ‘t’-‘p’, where ‘p’ is considered by Tiltman a variant writing for ‘t’).

Tiltman's alphabet

I also compare some of Tiltman’s findings with my slot model for Voynich words.

Word Structure

From pp. 7-9:

Limited the number of symbols in the transliteration alphabet to 17; most of the alphabet aligns with that used in the First Study Group (FSG). It is useless to take account of rare combinations of symbols. It is not even in every case possible to say what is a single symbol and what is not (e.g. Tiltman mentions not being satisfied that ‘a’ is not resolved into ‘ei’ or possibly ‘oi’) (a).

I take a similar approach in my Slots alphabet.
No punctuation at all (a).
‘cth’, ‘ckh’, ‘cph’, ‘cfh’ appear to be infixes of ‘t’, ‘k’, ‘p’, ‘f’ within ‘ch’ (b).

I argued there is evidence of the opposite, in my opinion.
‘m’ appears most commonly at the end of a line, rarely elsewhere (b).
Paragraphs nearly always begin with ‘k’-‘f’ or ‘t’-‘p’, most commonly as ‘f’, ‘p’, which also occur frequently in words in the top lines of paragraphs where there is some extra space (c).
‘y’ occurs quite frequently as the initial symbol of a line followed immediately by a combination of symbols which seem to be happy without it in any part of a line away from the beginning. Otherwise it occurs chiefly at end of a word, very frequently preceded by ‘d’. Hence the belief that these two have some separative or conjunctive function (d).
However, ‘y’ also seems sometimes to take the place of ‘o’ before ‘k’-‘f’ or ‘t’-‘p’ (though rarely, if ever, after ‘q’); this is particularly noticeable in some of the captions to illustrations in the astronomical section of the manuscript these most commonly begin ‘ok’-‘of’ or ‘ot’-‘op’ and it is here that we occasionally see ‘yk’-‘yf’ or ‘yt’-‘yp’ (d).

Tiltman divided words into “roots” and “suffixes” (e).

Roots	Suffixes
ok-, of-	-an, -ain, -aiin, -aiiin
ot-, op-	-ar, -air, -aiir, -aiiir
qok-, qof-	-al -am, -ail -aim, -aiil -aiim, -aiiil -aiiim *
qot-, qop-	-or
ch-	-ol
sh-	-ey, -eey, -eeey
d-	-edy, -eedy, -eeedy
s-
lk-, lf-, mk-, mf- *

(*) Notice the roots with ‘m’ variants are missing from D’IMPERIO (1978b), Fig.27.

Regarding the ‘-a’ or ‘-o’ suffixes, Tiltman points out that some of the combinations are very rare, while other are very common (e).
Suffixes beginning with ‘-a’ have their own characteristic frequency throughout the manuscript and independent of context (except in cases where two or more ‘-a’ are together in series, as referred to later) (e).
‘-a’ groups frequently occur attached directly to “roots”, particularly ‘ok’-‘of’, ‘ot’-‘op’, ‘d’, and ‘s’. ‘okaiin’-‘ofaiin’, ‘qokaiin’-‘qofaiin’, and ‘daiin’ rank high among the commonest words in the manuscript (e).
There are however many examples of 2, 3, 4 or even 5 ‘-a’ groups strung together on end with or without spaces between them. When this occurs, there appears to be some selective preference. For example, ‘ar’ is very frequently doubled, i.e., ‘ar ar’, whereas ‘aiin’ which is generally significantly commoner, is rarely found doubled. Perhaps the commonest succession of three of these groups is ‘ar ar al’-‘ar ar am’. ‘al’-‘am’ very frequently follows ‘ar’, but ‘ar’ hardly ever follows ‘al’-‘am’ (f).
‘o’, which has a very common and very definite function in “roots”, seems to occur frequently in “suffixes” in rather similar usage to ‘a’, but nearly always as ‘or’ and ‘ol’-‘om’. ‘or aiin’ is very common (g).
If all the possible ‘a’ and ‘o’ combinations can occur, then there are 24 possibilities. They may, however, be modified or qualified in some way by the prefixed symbols ‘k’-‘f’, ‘t’-‘p’, ‘ok’-‘of’, ‘ot’-‘op’, ‘ch’, ‘sh’, ‘d’, ‘s’, etc., but Tiltman was unable to come to any conclusion (h).
‘l’-‘m’, usually preceded by ‘a’ or ‘o’, is very commonly followed by ‘k’-‘f’, much less commonly by ‘t’-‘p’, with or without a space between. Tiltman suggests that a space must not necessarily be regarded as words separator (i).

On the other side, the slots model seem to suggest spaces play some role (even though separable words might constitute a counter-example).
Speaking generally, each symbol behaves as if it had its own place in an “order of precedence” within words; some symbols such as ‘o’ and ‘y’ seem to be able to occupy two functionally different places (j).

This is very in line with the slot model.
Some of the most common words, e.g., ‘okeey’-‘ofeey’, ‘okeedy’-‘ofeedy’, ‘qokeey’-‘qofeey’, ‘okaiin’-‘ofaiin’, ‘okar’-‘ofar’, ‘okal’-‘ofal’-‘okam’-‘ofam’, ‘daiin’, ‘chedy’ occur twice running, occasionally three times (k).
The occurrence of ‘e’ up to 3 times in one form of “suffix” and the symbol ‘i’ up to 3 times in the other must have some systematic significance (l).
Peter Long has suggested to the author the ‘a’ groups might represent Roman numerals (e.g. ‘ar ar al’-‘ar ar am’ for XXV). Though it accounts for the properties of the commoner combinations, it produces many impossible ones (m).
Tiltman identifies some “key-like” sequences where symbols occur singly, apparently in series, and not in their normal functions. In all cases there are symbols which rarely, if ever, occur elsewhere (n).
- The column of symbols at the left in appears to show a repeating cycle of 6 or 7 symbols 'k'-'f' (or 't'-'p'), 'o', 's', 'y', 'e', ?.
- In the succession of symbols in the circles must surely have some significance. One circle has the same series of 17 symbols repeated 4 times.
- also has an interesting column of symbols.
Tiltman does not mention two other such sequences:
- Sequences of single characters in the right margin, faded or erased.
- A vertical sequence of single characters in the left margin, aligned with some of the lines of writing.
Tiltman claims his analysis shows that the text cannot be the result of substituting single symbols for letters in the natural order (o):

“Languages simply do not behave in this way. If the single words attached to stars in the astronomical drawings, for instance, are really, as they appear to be, captions expressing the names or qualities of those stars, there can hardly he any form of transposition system involved. And yet I am not aware of any long repetitions of more than 2 or 3 words in succession, as might he expected for instance in the text under the botanical drawings.”

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