Tool · the flip side of the validator
Combinatorial generator — Llull's wheel
The validator asks 'does this reading beat chance?'. This tool does the opposite: it shows how Voynich words could be BORN from three wheels — a prefix, a core, a suffix — in the spirit of Ramon Llull's combinatorial art. Spin the wheels and see how many 'invented' words turn out to be actually written in the manuscript.
How it works
- The three wheels are reconstructed from the real words of the transcription: the most frequent prefixes, cores and suffixes.
- Every prefix+core+suffix combination is a possible word. The tool checks whether that word is ATTESTED, i.e. actually appears in the manuscript.
- Many random combinations land on real words: the sign of a generative structure, not a transcribed language.
- It is not a decipherment: it shows the 'how it is generated', not the 'what it says'.
Or build the word by hand: tap one element in each wheel.
With a few dozen pieces you generate a huge part of the Voynich 'vocabulary'. The research measures it on the whole text: 23 prefixes × 553 cores × 19 suffixes give 241,661 possible words, but the manuscript uses only 6,827 (3%). That is exactly what you expect from a combinatorial mechanism, not from a message.
The wheels here are a simplified reconstruction for demonstration (the most common prefixes, cores and suffixes). The 'attested / not attested' check, on the other hand, is exact: it compares each word against the real list of the manuscript's types. STA notation (voynich.nu); the computation runs in your browser.