Some time ago, while article-and-search hopping, I came across the Voynich Manuscript. It seems no one is quite sure whether it is an elaborate hoax, a complex code, or one of the best ‘just for sh*ts and giggles’ pieces in history. Could anyone enlighten me?
Seems to me you’ve got the current state of knowledge right there: “no one is quite sure whether it is an elaborate hoax, a complex code, or one of the best ‘just for sh*ts and giggles’ pieces in history” is as good a description you will find from someone not with a poorly justified agenda.
It remains a mystery but now the document is open domain.
If you google for it, u can find a copy to work on.
Wiki has a good entry on it.
It’s been discussed on this Board MANY times before:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=757462&highlight=Voynich
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=744645&highlight=Voynich
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=132478&highlight=Voynich
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=713830&highlight=Voynich
Thats a joke … 
haha… the main point is that since the text defies decryption, its actually strong evidence it is just gibberish writing.
The pictures seem reasonably realistic and consistent, and that doesn’t match to psychotic /demented activity (…such as someone dying or in senile dementia ).
The glyphs appear to be a mix of two known , very different fonts , and yet they seem to change through the pages… so it seems the glyphs are used haphzardly… showing it was written without reference to a written translation sheet. Many distinctive glyphs (or letters ) appear a few times on one page but then don’t get used on subsequent pages… Where the letters are somewhat similar , they are very similar on one page more often, and vary more from as the pages go along… , and yet the writer is such a poor writer that he writes some letters on one page in a very poor fashion, as if he doesn’t know his alphabets at all well enough to complete a single page accurately.
Conclusion: the writer wanted to make it look like exotic writing , but he was merely copying some papers he had at hand that he couldn’t read… he mixed up different languages alphabets - he knew not to copy entire words so that no one could say it was random words, or copied text.
Here’s a good example of how to tell its gibberish.
The drawing is obviously of arabic calanders… with the pairs of months - that is, the pair has the name, so a year is A and A’, B and B’, C and C’…
However in the writing, you can see that the only thing consistent is that the words are all short and the error rate is high among the letters.
I have it on good authority that the code to the Voynich Manuscript can be found at the bottom of the pit on Oak Island.
Can’t remember where I saw this, but there was one person who said that the plants are probably from northern Mexico, and the language is believed to be an Aztec dialect not previously known to have had a written alphabet.
So it made it across the Atlantic, all the way to Italy, all by itself, before Columbus?
Here’s an article on the Mexican hypothesis, and here’s the article itself. The authors attribute the MS to the late 1500s. They acknowledge the parchment has been dated to much earlier but don’t really address the issue except to imply that it was re-purposed.
You’re probably right, but I prefer the rpg-book explanation ^^
Great summary of the Voynich Manuscript and what it may be by Brian Dunning fro his Skeptoid website & podcast. He does great science / fact based takes on pop culture phenomena.
Great summary of the Voynich Manuscript and what it may be by Brian Dunning from his Skeptoid website & podcast. He does great science / fact based takes on pop culture phenomena.
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Update: Nicholas Gibbs (a British history researcher and expert on medieval manuscripts) says it’s a guide to women’s health and that much of it is plagiarized.
Interesting. Doesn’t sound too insane. I’d have looked for him to provide a translation of at least one page, to give a sense for how plausible it is.
Not too insane, but also much less interesting than some of us imagined.
There was a Scientific American article on it, some years ago. Someone had done some data analysis and thought he found patterns suggesting an algorithmic method of producing the text. Not random, exactly, but not “intelligent” either.
No idea if this holds water or not, but it was interesting, anyway.
I recall that article. I don’t recall for certain because it was years ago but, as I recall it didn’t say exactly that.
Linguists have said that the document seems to be statistically similar to some human languages in things like letter, word, and phrase distribution. They’ve argued that this is evidence against it being a forgery consisting of random scribblings.
The man in the article said that he could produce the same distribution by following an algorithm he’d come up with.
He wasn’t saying “oh look, there’s a pattern”. The pattern was already known. He was disputing the notion that the pattern proved it was real language, by showing that it could be produced algorithmically.
Personally, I think the patterns likely are evidence of a real language. I’m skeptical that a forger way back then would have any clue about something like statistical analysis of language, and even if he did I doubt that he would worry about that being a factor for whatever wealthy rube he tried to pawn it off on.
The article linked to in the update (post 14), claims to have solved it. States it is just abbreviated Latin.