{
  "abstract": "The Voynich Manuscript exhibits strong statistical regularities, but the distinction between recoverable grammar and recoverable lexical meaning remains unresolved. This study asks how far a progressively frozen, cross-validated analysis can reconstruct the manuscript’s internal word-building system without assigning meanings from illustrations, candidate languages, or post-hoc English paraphrase.\n\nUsing canonical transcription, protected holdout partitions, alternate-transcription replication, exact host substitutions, and adversarial stopping rules, the analysis recovers a cumulative left-edge morphology, a transferable inventory of 39 surface CORE-0 stem/bodies, reproducible host-by-right-state coupling, a stable K/T referential contrast, and a directed network among powered lexical cores.\n\nThe 39-core inventory predicts protected-frame combinatorics and content-blind contextual fingerprints out of sample, while attempts to decompose these bodies into a deeper transferable root layer fail. Nine recurring hosts show strongly replicated coupling to EY/EEY/EDY right-edge states, supporting a distributed morphological paradigm rather than independent left- and right-side systems. A 28-node directed CORE network also replicates across canonical calibration, untouched Holdout, and alternate-transcription tests, yielding neutral outbound- and inbound-biased stem classes without requiring part-of-speech or semantic assignments.\n\nOn the project’s fully constrained 1,609-line benchmark, 12,299 of 12,495 positions are role-naturalizable (98.4314%), leaving 196 opaque positions. This percentage is explicitly a conditional benchmark-maturity statistic, not a measure of literal plaintext recovery or manuscript-wide translation accuracy.\n\nRepeated attempts to cross from structural organization to ordinary lexical meaning—including deeper-root induction, topic clustering, functional-neighborhood anchoring, local lexical syntax, illustration matching, source-language fitting, and prospective semantic transfer—fail the project’s promotion criteria. The resulting contribution is therefore a structural decipherment rather than a lexical one: a reproducible grammatical and morphological architecture together with an empirically identified lexical-identifiability ceiling.\n\nThe work extends, but is distinct from, the earlier controlled-translation release at DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22049207.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Dominik Research Institute"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Matthew Dominik",
      "orcid": "0009-0007-9449-2630"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ckpj265e94qcg.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.5281/zenodo.23444474",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "ckpj265e94qcg",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23444474",
  "language": "eng",
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [],
  "openalex": null,
  "pdf_url": "https://zenodo.org/api/records/23444474/files/Voynich_Structural_Decipherment_Without_Lexical_Recovery_v1.0%20(1).pdf/content",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-18",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ckpj265e94qcg.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-11-01T12:20:48Z",
      "native_id": "23444474",
      "source": "zenodo",
      "url": "https://zenodo.org/records/23444474"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [],
  "title": "Structural Decipherment Without Lexical Recovery: A Cross-Validated Morphological Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript",
  "title_text": "Structural Decipherment Without Lexical Recovery: A Cross-Validated Morphological Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-01T12:20:48Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/ckpj265e94qcg",
  "venue": "Zenodo",
  "versions": []
}