f76v/f77r Timm Pair

Voynich Manuscript

If you didn’t know, Timm Pairs* are sets of two phrases in the Voynich Manuscript that are almost identical, and not Bad Romance sequences**. Timm himself uses them as evidence of a hoax. Nick Pelling opines that nearby Timm Pairs could be the same plaintext sequence encoded slightly differently by the same system. There’s no telling what they are, if they are anything at all.

That said, I’m not here to discuss them, just present an interesting one.

f76v begins:

polarar okor

f77r begins:

poldarairol qokol

At first glance they don’t look that similar, and strictly speaking these phrases are not close to each other. What caught my attention is that almost no other folio pairs begin this similarly, not to mention two folios that (currently) face each other. As for the phrase similarity, f77r could be seen as a spruced up version of f76v’s beginning.

f76v: p-o-l-d-a-r-a-i-r-o-l / q-o-k-o-r

f77r: p-o-l-d-a-r-a-i-r-o-l / q-o-k-o-l

As for what this means (if anything), I don’t know. Just putting it out there. I thought that perhaps if I looked at similar instances, the transformations between them could lead to insights into the word structures. I haven’t been through them thoroughly but here are some I have found since then:

  • f2v begins “kooiin”, f3v begins “koaiin”, f4v begins “pchooiin”. Oddly, f29v also begins”kooiin”.
  • f54r and f55r both start with “podaiin”. (note: this also begins paragraphs in f49r and f85r1)
  • f68v3 begins “tchedy chepchy”. f68v2 begins “teeody shcthey”. These two folios face each other on a large fold-out section. Although these seem dissimilar, they have exactly the same curve-line pattern which interests me.
  • One of the starred paragraphs on f103r begins “polarar lshedy qotolaiin”. Another on f111v begins “polarar okshey qokain”.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

*Named after Torsten Timm but not discovered by him, serving as an example of Stigler’s law of eponymy. The term is a neologism by Pelling, but given that there’s nothing else to call them, I use it too.

**Bad Romance sequences are the common, repetitive, information-poor phrases peppered through the manuscript’s text like “qokedy qokedy qokeedy qokey” or “dain daiin okaiin”. This is my neologism since I’m not aware of any other name for these. They are named after the Lady Gaga song Bad Romance which is full of the phrase “ra ra-a-a-a roma roma-ma gaga ooh lala”. They are similar to, but perhaps not the same as, what David Jackson calls “epizeuxis”.
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