I came across some entries on Youtube, on this famous mystery. According to the Wikipedia articles, nobody has ever cracked the code that the text is written in.
I was wondering: we now have powerful supercomputers, that could be used to analyze the text, and spot any patterns that could lead to a deciphering. If it is a substitutional code of soem kind, we ought to be able to crack it.
The fact that professional cryptographers have been baffled by it leads me to suspect it is a hoax…but that leads to another question-why?
Evidently, it impressed some very bright people (Athanasius Kircher was one). It also survived the Catholic church-as a (possible) herectical text, something like this probably stood a good chance of being burned.
Have there been any recent attempts at decoding it?
Nothing new that I’ve heard of. The fact that it hasn’t been decoded suggests that it is a hoax. However, we haven’t decoded rongorongo text, either, and that is certainly not a hoax.
The counter-however is that we have very little rongorongo text to work with yet a lot of Voynich text. To a cryptographer, more is better.
If no one knew what it said, why would the Catholic Church think it was heretical?
Perhaps because they didn’t know what it said, and therefore couldn’t prove it wasn’t heretical.
I’m sure this has been posted before: Obligatory xkcd
The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer has an excellent article about the manuscript. Conclusion: it’s a hoax.
Here’s someone who claims to have decoded the text and identified the plants, Barbara Sherwood. At first glance she appears to be a classic case of “I know nothing, therefore I can do what the experts can’t.”
In spite of her claim (which is that everything is Italian, and in anagrams), she doesn’t present any translation of the text beyond plant names.
But I’m sure plant experts, who are looking at the drawings, not the words, would have figured out the plant species by now if they were real plants anytime in the last 1000 years.
So she doesn’t know shit about plants or Italian, but claims the text is anagrammed Italian and she can identify the plants. :rolleyes:
I think that’s called the S. Palin posit…
Aha! Something I actually know something about!
There was carbon-dating done on the manuscript, with the conclusion that the vellum is from the early 1400s and the ink was put on there very soon afterwards, so if it IS a hoax, it is a medieval (and therefore, I feel) interesting hoax. But I don’t think it’s a hoax.
There are some who still claim that it has to be enciphered in a very complicated cryptological system (this is actually probably the majority view, see http://www.ciphermysteries.com/ for the most up-to-date theories and specifically about that sort of thing)…I myself believe it is either a constructed language or an attempt to write a language which did not have an alphabet and which either has not survived or was written with an entirely different alphabet afterwards.
I personally believe that the Voynich is actually a copy of a much older manuscript, but that is only speculation as of now.
Any specific questions about the Voynich I can try to answer.
What is the strongest reason you have for that feeling?
The creation dates don’t seem to be much in doubt.
I think that with all the cryptographic minds and computer functions available today, if it could be decrypted, it would have been. Cryptography wasn’t all that advanced in the 15th century.
OTOH, if you wanted to just make stuff up for the fun of it, the Voynich Manuscript would be a likely end product. I think it’s just a clever artist and/or writer having fun and maybe too much time on their hands. Haven’t you ever doodled nonsense drawings? This just goes a little farther.
People create elaborate hoaxes today. Why not 500 years ago?
First of all, I don’t think it’s a cipher, I think it’s a written example of a language (and a copy of an original text at that), but even people who do think it’s a cipher have plenty of reasons to show why it hasn’t been deciphered yet. And if it is indeed a plain-text of an unknown language, it certainly could not be deciphered. Hieroglyphics weren’t deciphered until the Rosetta Stone was found, after all.
Secondly, I’m open to the suggestion that it could be a hoax, but it IS very elaborate. And if it is a hoax, I can’t believe that at least some of the images aren’t copies from other books at the time – virtually none of the imagery has direct parallels to existing manuscripts. The same with the script – I would LOVE to see another example of a hoax this elaborate that is from roughly the same time period.
Yes, one of the major reasons I feel it is not a hoax is because it is genuinely from the era and it is so elaborate. There is also apparently statistical properties of the text which makes it language-like (I apologize for my vocabulary in this matter – statistics is not my field), yet it is certainly not like Latin, Greek, etc.
It certainly could be a hoax, but I think that it has not been proven satisfactorily either way really, and I’m on the not-a-hoax side of the fence.
I wanted to add just one more thing:
Assume it is a hoax. OK, cool. Who wrote and illustrated it? What was the reason for making it, and what was the purpose of the manuscript? These are the questions I want answered – it doesn’t really matter if it’s a hoax or not.
I don’t care about reading it. It’s not going to give any secrets of the universe or anything – it looks like a boring herbal to me.
It’s the Necronomicon
" Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
It’s not a hoax. That implies deception. Nobody sat down to make this fake book to fool people hundreds of years later.
It’s an *imitation *of a book. Like how Kramer’s book is supposed to be a coffee table? Well, Kramer’s coffee table book is not a real coffee table. Real coffee tables are sturdy and more furniture-like than book-like. Yet, functionally, it could be a coffee table. But practically, Kramer’s book is more of an imitation of a coffee table.
You know how furniture stores put random books on shelves to dress up their furniture? Or they put plastic imitation books that look like fancy bound tomes in there next to the decorative plastic television? Just like there is a demand-for and utility-of decorative imitation books today, there was a similar demand for such books hundreds of years ago, when they were elite symbols of status and wealth.
You know what else is supposed to be an elite symbol of status and good taste? A fancy coffee table dressed up with a fancy coffee table book.
So hundreds of years ago, books were rare and expensive. To create one, you needed an author with years of training to produce the content, a scribe with years of training to do the labor, and materials. Simple economics dictates someone would hit upon the idea to cut down the first two costs in the equation by skipping the years of book-learnin’ and kollege edumacation. The result is a saleable book that meets the important consumer criteria of possessing a rare and valuable-looking book that can be displayed and showed off to illiterate friends. The actual contents of the book is barely a secondary consideration.
They did, 500 years ago and more – not for mischief but to achieve actual political goals. See the Donation of Constantine. But what goal could an unreadable manuscript have been meant to further?
Why does it have to have a goal? Why couldn’t it just be the scribblings of someone with an imaginative, artistic bent and a lot of time on their hands?
The fact that it resembles so little else suggests that it is not a derivative work, but an original. Haven’t you ever doodled all over a schoolbook, or seem someone who has?
A man named Gordon Rugg proposed that the words in book could have been generated from a grid of nonsense “syllables” in order to create a mysterious-looking book (in order to sell it to a rich collector). I guess the theory is that it’s easier to write undecipherable gibberish and convince someone that it’s a masterpiece than it is to write an actual masterpiece.
That theory seems pretty dicey to me, as well.
The problem with that is that 1) the materials would be really expensive and 2) it does appear to be a single, sustained effort.
I don’t entirely buy the “created as a status symbol” thing. For one thing, if that was the sort of thing people did in 15th century, you’d think we’d have other examples. As far as I know, there are none. There were enough books around that if someone had the skills and materials to scribe a book, you could find a book to copy–much easier than inventing something. And novelty would not have been important to an illiterate marcher lord wanting to impress his neighbors. A set of Pslams or Confessions or something like that would have been just as good and a fraction of the cost in terms of time and effort.
I tend to think “made by a crazy person” myself, who may well have been able to “read” the script through the haze of their insanity, much as a small child drags their pen in loops and whirls while talking, and then sees meaning in the “writing” they’ve created. It just seems too sustained to be a casual effort, but too random to carry real meaning. That leaves crazy.
I’ll go with you on the principle, but I’d pull back on “batshit crazy” to just “a little quirky crazy.”
Are all artists crazy? A artist who makes an abstract painting might not have a market for it, but he just likes to create, what to him, is “art.” The meaning is in his mind and the very act of creation. I don’t see the Voynich as much different from that. For all we know, it was private musings and never intended to be seen by anyone else.