---
title: "A Generative Grammar Underlying the Voynich Manuscript, the Pastiche — paper by Turenne (2026)"
description: "The paper asks what kind of object the Voynich Manuscript is: an encoded natural language, meaningless gibberish, or something else. 70 references."
authors: ["Nicolas Turenne"]
year: 2026
venue: "arXiv:2609.20835"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20835"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2609.20835"
arxiv: "2609.20835"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/turenne-2026-generative-grammar-underlying-voynich-manuscript/"
---
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# A Generative Grammar Underlying the Voynich Manuscript, the Pastiche Hypothesis: Evidence from Large Language Models

**Authors:** Nicolas Turenne · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** arXiv:2609.20835 · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20835) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.20835) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2609.20835](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2609.20835) · [arXiv 2609.20835](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20835) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7213932908)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper asks what kind of object the Voynich Manuscript is: an encoded natural language, meaningless gibberish, or something else. Turenne works from the Zandbergen transcription (232 pages) and uses several kinds of evidence. These are glyph and n‑gram statistics, a phonetic comparison of glyph sequences against Indo‑European, Semitic and Asian languages, and substitution of the most frequent symbols with letters of candidate languages. He also tests for statistically improbable runs of repeated initial glyphs, builds a position‑dependent probabilistic word generator, and matches the plant drawings to medieval herbals with LLM‑based image–text tools.

The glyphs act like letters, yet word lengths look like syllable counts. The sound profile sits nearer to consonant‑heavy Hebrew or Arabic than to European languages. A simple prefix/suffix bigram grammar is enough to reproduce Zipf‑like word frequencies.

The author's conclusion is the "pastiche" hypothesis: the book is a deliberate imitation of a medieval medicinal herbal, built by rule. On this view it encodes no real language, but it is not random noise either. The work matters because it shows how surface statistics alone can make an artificial text look like language.

## Key points
- Corpus statistics:
  - The corpus has 423 distinct glyphs, and 47 of them cover 99.6% of all occurrences.
  - Only 69 glyph bigrams and 365 trigrams appear potentially significant.
  - Word frequencies follow a Zipfian distribution.
- Image analysis: 129 plant drawings were examined through 874 queries to three systems (one large multimodal model, one small multimodal model, one hybrid image retrieval system), with 23,720 image consultations. The drawings point mainly to the Pseudo‑Apuleius tradition and to Mediterranean species.
- Some passages contain eight consecutive words that start with the same glyph. The author argues this is practically impossible in natural text outside corpora of millions of words or constructed texts.
- Replacing the most frequent Voynich symbols with frequent letters of medieval Western European languages yields no meaningful words.
- The novel glyphs are read as inspired by Cistercian numerals, and the cyclic diagrams are linked to Ramon Llull's philosophical figures.

## Interesting ideas
- A run of identical word‑initial letters is easy to compute and nearly impossible by chance, so it works as a cheap rare‑event detector of constructed text.
- A tiny positional grammar (preferred bigram prefixes and suffixes) reproduces Zipf's law without any meaning. This shows that matching frequency laws proves little about whether text is real language.
- The paper tests separately whether the units behave like letters (sequence distribution) and whether words behave like syllable chains (length distribution). Splitting the evidence this way catches mismatched levels of segmentation.
- Plant identification was not trusted to one model; three heterogeneous visual systems were queried many times and their answers pooled.
- Frequency‑rank substitution was used as a falsification test (does mapping the top symbols to top letters yield words?) rather than as a decipherment attempt.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Use such run‑probability checks as a negative‑control filter on LLM‑teacher or self‑play outputs, so degenerate or templated sentences are rejected before they enter silver data.
- **I2** (back): When evaluating the text → graph → text compressor or generator, never accept Zipf‑type or n‑gram similarity as success; require that regenerated text re‑parses into the same frames.
- **I3** (tokens): Compare token‑ and morpheme‑length distributions against reference English to spot tokenizer or morphology segmentation that has drifted to the wrong unit size.
- **I4** (learn): This mirrors witness‑parser agreement and suggests mixing architecturally different LLM teachers, keeping only labels they converge on.
- **I5** (answer): Build analogous falsification probes for readers, e.g. scrambled or symbol‑substituted fables, where a correct system must report that no answer is supported.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Sorbonne Université](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/sorbonne-universite/) — University, Paris, France · 19 works · 7,010 citations

Also on the byline: [Unité de Modélisation Mathématique et Informatique des Systèmes Complexes](https://ror.org/053kxkj53) · [Institut de Recherche pour le Développement](https://ror.org/05q3vnk25).

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## Cite

Cite as: Nicolas Turenne. 2026. A Generative Grammar Underlying the Voynich Manuscript, the Pastiche Hypothesis: Evidence from Large Language Models. arXiv:2609.20835.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{turenne2026generative,
  title = {{A Generative Grammar Underlying the Voynich Manuscript, the Pastiche Hypothesis: Evidence from Large Language Models}},
  author = {Nicolas Turenne},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.20835},
  eprint = {2609.20835},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2609.20835}
}
```

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70 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*