I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure
I built this project as a way to learn more about NLP by applying it to something weird and unsolved. The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century book written in an unknown script. No one’s been able to translate it, and many think it’s a hoax, a cipher, or a constructed language. I wasn’t trying to decode it — I just wanted to see: does it behave like a structured language? I stripped a handful of common suffix-like endings (aiin, dy, etc.) to isolate what looked like root forms. I know that’s a strong assumption — I call it out directly in the repo — but it helped clarify the clustering. From…
I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure launched on May 18, 2025 with 381 votes, #63 of 7,905 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
This project applies natural language processing to analyze the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th-century text written in an unknown script. Rather than attempting translation or decryption, it uses SBERT embeddings and clustering to examine whether the manuscript exhibits structural properties of a language. The creator extracted potential root forms by removing suffix-like patterns, then used KMeans clustering and Markov transition matrices to model word relationships and flow. Built as a learning exercise, it explores linguistic patterns in a historically mysterious document without claiming to decode it.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Contribute to brianmg/voynich-nlp-analysis development by creating an account on GitHub.
This started as a personal challenge to figure out what modern NLP could tell us about the Voynich Manuscript — without falling into translation speculation or pattern hallucination. I'm not a linguist or cryptographer. I just wanted to see if something as strange as Voynichese would hold up under real language modeling: clustering, POS inference, Markov transitions, and section-specific patterns. This repo walks through everything — from suffix stripping to SBERT embeddings to building a lexicon hypothesis. No magic, no GPT guessing. Just a skeptical test of whether the manuscript has structure that behaves like language , even if we don’t know what it’s saying. The Voynich Manuscript…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
I built this project as a way to learn more about NLP by applying it to something weird and unsolved. The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century book written in an unknown script. No one’s been able to translate it, and many think it’s a hoax, a cipher, or a constructed language. I wasn’t trying to decode it — I just…
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