Bellifortis Text and Voynichese

I’ve been away from this blog for a while working on other projects, but yesterday I came across something that reminded me of the language of the Voynich manuscript, and I decided to exorcise the idea by putting it into a blog post.

There is a 15th-century text called Bellifortis that deals with military technology. A manuscript of the text from 1405 has a strange poem at the end, apparently alluding to some kind of initiation ritual. Given the nature of the manuscript itself I wonder if there could have been a secret society like the Oculists, but connected with maintaining and employing the secrets of military engineering.

In any case, the poem in the 1405 manuscript is primarily in Latin, but with some vocabulary interspersed in an unknown language. Two Romanian scholars in 1957 interpreted the mystery language as early Albanian, and a good summary of that argument was written up by Robert Elsie.

What is interesting to me is that the enigmatic lines are very repetitive in a way that reminds me of Voynichese. Sequences like dayce dayci dayze,  ragam ragma mathy zagma, auskar auskary auskarye remind me in particular of Voynichese sequences like dchor cThor chor and daiin s okeeaiin daiin cKhey daiin.

Here are the enigmatic lines. See Elsie’s article if you want a sense of the context of the rest of the poem.

Line 11: due racha yze inbeme zabel chmielfet dayce dayci
Line 12: dayze yan yon yan

Line 18: ragam ragma mathy zagma concuti perbra
Line 19: ista aus auskar auskary ausckarye zyma bomchity
Line 20: wasram electen eleat adolecten zor dorchedine
Line 21: zebestmus lisne zehanar zehanara zensa
Line 22: echem biliat adolecten zeth dorchene zehat stochis
Line 23: lisne zehanar zehanara zehayssa

Another interesting thing about this text is that there is a Yiddish manuscript, too, from later in the 15th century (though I can’t tell if the strange poem exists in the Yiddish manuscript.) Did someone have the manuscript translated into Yiddish in order to preserve its secrecy? It seems possible, given the value of keeping military technology secret.