The Cipher

The Voynich manuscript is written in the language of Rus. The name "Rus" is a former name of present day Ukraine. At that time, people of "Rus" (rus'ins) had no problem of reading correctly what was written. But, today, as is shown above, it is a different story. The know how is now lost. We are in the habit of reading and writing using alphabets consisting of consonants and vowels. There is no need to add vowels; they are there. Therefore, to read words written in consonants only presents a problem.

But the people of that time had no problem correctly reading what had been written because in few places in the Voynich manuscript, it states that Baby God (Bozia) does not write correctly. To me, only the consonants were there. What he (Ora) probably meant was this; in the manuscript, there is a small variation of the same letter. The variation is not due to the handwriting of a different person, but to indicate how the syllable should be read. Of course, this manuscript was written not by one person but by many, and all of them followed the rule.

Even today, in all Slavic languages, there is either a sign in the form of a letter or just a dot or dash that flags the difference in pronunciation of the word. The letters in the Voynich manu-script follow the same rule but in a different way. The letters are twisted differently. To avoid confusion in presentation of different sounds (let's say soft and hard pronouncement) of the same letter. I give only the basic sound of letter, the hard pronunciation.

In addition to letters, I found ten ciphers that did not fit anywhere. That is, I could not obtain proper meaning when any of the ten ciphers were used as letters. Soon I relaxed that the ten ciphers are numbers. To the best of my ability. I decoded ten ciphers as numbers representing 0 through 9.

The numbers 1 and 2 appear more often in the text than other numbers; therefore, I think, the ciphers for one and two are properly decoded. The rest of the numbers do appear in the text, but not in sufficient quantity to make concrete identification. I spent more time decoding the numbers than the letters. Although I think the numbers are decoded properly, from time to time, I have reservations about whether I had sufficient quantity to do the decoding.

After finalizing the decoding, I again went over the logical assumption of my decoding. But it does not matter how logical it is to me. I still cannot answer many questions that the reader may ask.

For example, in the phrase "3 times" there appear letters a and number. Let's say that the unknown cipher for number was decoded as number three (3). Then the text was searched for another statement that contained the cipher for number three. Weighing all the facts and meaning of the phrase or sentences containing the number three, it is finally assigned three as a final solution. To those who never decoded, the final solution for number three will be acceptable. But those who had something to do with decoding might question the solution. Why was the cipher for the number decoded as 3 but not 4 8, 9, or even 0 (zero)? Why should the phrase with the unknown number read ''3 times"; why not 6 times or any numbers of times? Yes, it is a logical question to which I do not have logical answer.

The time was spent weighing each statement with numbers, but the final solution is still open for questions. Because of this difficulties, the final solution for the numbers may be final or may not be. In the future, I will devote more times to this problem.

Above is given the decoded cipher for the Voynich manuscript. This is the key that enables anyone who knows the language to read the manuscript. At first, it would seem to be impractical to read words written in consonants. But with a little bit of practice, the difficulties will be removed. The meaning of a phrase or a sentence will dictate which vowel has to be used to give proper meaning.

In spite of the fact that the Voynich manuscript is written without punctuation, it yields itself to easy decoding. The writing consists of a group of letters that always represent a single word or a phrase separated by a space in between. Because of this method of writing, the sentences can be easily recognized. It does not matter where one begins to read; he should be able to recognize, after a few phrases, when one sentence ends and the next begins. When one can do that, it can be considered that he has the correct solution to the Voynich manuscript.

The Voynich manuscript is written in the language of Rus. Rus is the former name of present day Ukraine. Obviously, the language in which the manuscript is written differs from present day Ukrainian, but not by much. To explain how much the language differs, let's consider the following.

If the Voynich man-uscript were deciphered and written in present Ukrainian alphabet and then presented to a person who knows Ukrainian. without informing him that it is a ancient document, he would probably make the following remark. "Yes, I do understand what is written, but it is written by someone with a limited education in the Ukrainian language or someone of Bielorussian, Russian, or Polish background who does not have a sufficient knowledge of the Ukrainian language."

As proof, he might even point to a few words that are presently considered archaic or used more often by Bielorussian, Russian, or other Slavic nationalities but certainly not by an educated Ukrainian, who keeps his language pure.

The plain truth is that, at that time, Slavic languages were much closer to each other than they are now. With time, the common language and government of Slavs became less centralized. This, probably, opened the road to regional governments and, hence, dialects, from which present Slavic languages are formed. Once they become known as a separate group, the impasses became more pronounced on a separate or more distinct language from any other Slavic group. In approximately 400 B.C., one Slavic group, Macedonian, was known as a nation. How many other Slavic nations existed at that time no one knows. But at least one larger group of Slays existed at that time; other wise, Macedonian, with its Slavic language, would not be known as a nation.

Because the document was written in a language that does not agree with any grammatical language of any Slavic nation, one may take a different approach and consider that this docu-ment is written in Bielorussian, Russian, Polish, or any Slavic language other than Ukrainian. Because the Slavic languages are related to each other, and the manuscript is written in an alphabet consisting of consonants only, therefore, there is a possibility to decode the writing in any Slavic language. The overall meaning will be the same. But, again, due to the uniqueness of each Slavic language, there will be exceptions to the language used. Such an example is the word 'tse" which means; this, that, it, and is used in the Ukrainian language only. In addition to that, the words ''Se'' and ''to, te'' are also used in this manuscript and have the same meaning as "tse." Due to the first fact that only Ukrainians use the word "tse, Se, and te" at present, and, second, the fight took place in the steppes of Rus, which is the present-day Ukraine, therefore, the Voynich manuscript is considered to be written in the Ukrainian language. Thus, the manuscript is translated into English by using a Ukrainian dictionary.

Only, on a few occasions, I referred to Russian or Polish dictionaries for definition of archaic words or to establish a meaning that is not clearly given in the Ukrainian dictionary.

In order to present the text of the Voynich manuscript to readers, I decided to show the decoded text of the manuscript in the original language, using the Latin alphabet. Here again, I found difficulties as to how to correctly present the sounds of Ukrainian language to English speaking people, sounds that do not exist in the English language.

Thus, I decided to define the sound of each letter. The alphabet, with equivalent sounds, is given below. This will help the reader to reproduce the sound of the original language used in the text as closely as possible. Due to the difficulties in duplicating the soft sounds of some letters, I decided to give only hard sound pronunciation.

The above given alphabet and equivalent sounds should be used to read the text in original language.

The above information will help the reader to read the text in the original language of Rus. The name Rus, as I mentioned before, is an old name of Ukraine. Due to the fact that the root name "Rus" appears in the name of Russia in the English spelling, the reader may assume that the name Rus and Russia are one and the same. The plain truth is that they are not. Of course, one can argue this point from the English point of writing and show that the root word "Rus" can be made out of the word Russia. Because of this ambiguity, I will try to explain the difference.

The two words ''Rus'' and ''Russia'' have two different meanings. First, let's take the word Russia and define the meaning. The Russians never call their country "Rus" but ''Rasieja". "Rasieja" is the Russian pronunciation of Russia. The meaning of ''Rasieja'' is: Ra is the former name of the river Volga. Sieja means to seed, to plant with seeds, to spread.

Thus, Rasieja, when it defines the nation, means; the people that live or spread around the river Volga. That the root word "Rus" appears in the English spelling of Russia is probably due to the following: in English, the letter ''u" sounds as ''a"; thus, to have the proper sound for river ''Ra. '' it is written ''Ru. '' In the word ''sieja,'' the word is pronounced very softly; thus, in English, the sound, probably, is duplicated as double ''s." But, with time, the intention was lost, and now the double ''s" is pronounced as "sh." If it is not so, and the root word ''Rus'' is in the word ''Rasieja,'' then, in the Enlgish language, there is no name for "Rasieja."

To define the meaning of the word "Rus," let me start with the word "rusiawy," which can be found in many Slavic dictionaries. The meaning of the word ''rusiawy'' is:

Rus means of fair complextion (a root word). iawv is the ending signifying who is, in this case, he is. Thus, "Rusiawy" means he is of fair complexion, not blond. When the word ''Rus" refers to the nation, it means; people of fair complextion or light colored.

In addition to the above stated meaning, there is also a difference in pronunciation of the word ''Rus.'' The letters in Rus'' have the following sounds:

From the etymological meaning of the two words "Rus" and'Rasieja," one can see that the word "Rus" has different meaning than the word "Rasieja," known in English language as Russia.

It seems to me that, in the past, it was a custom to name the nations by the color. For example, there were Rus, Bielorus, and Karorus. The word Rus is defined above; the meaning for Bielorus and Karorus is: Bielorus white colored people, blonds. Karorus hazel or brown colored people

The Karorus name vanished long time ago. The Rus as a name for a country was changed to Ukraine. This was done probably due to the fact that many countries were misinformed and regarded that Rus and Rasieja are one and the same name. The only ancient name for a country that survived to the present day is Bielorus. which is known in the English speaking world as Belorussia or Byelorussia.

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