The Righteous Indignation podcast had an interview recently with a cryptographer named Klaus Schmeh, who I gather has been doing a lot of work around the Voynich Manuscript (disclaimer: I am not a cryptographer, I don’t know much about the Voynich Manuscript, and I know nothing about Mr. Schmeh). One of the suggestions he brought up was that it could have been a hoax manuscript, created with the intent of selling it to a wealthy collector of rare and unusual books. I think the idea was to find a gullible nobleman with more money than sense, and essentially say, “Oooh, look at this mysterious text with the indecipherable language I’ve just discovered. Wouldn’t that be an incredible addition to your collection?”
Don’t know if it’s any more likely than any of the other hypotheses floating around, but it did seem plausible.
If it were not for the plants being fanciful, I’d try to see if it matched whatever we might have on the Dacian culture, that being an advanced yet extinguished language. But that would be if it were true that it predated the writing. I doubt very much it did.
The key is the drawings of things not directly relevant: ‘man’ and ‘castle’ rather than the plants. The people and buildings seem very much to be of the middle ages and later, rather than any theoretical 5th century origin.
Further, the fanciful plants seem to be partially stitched together in a Frankensteinian manner. Roots of one, bloom of another, and so on. Not always, but in at least a few distinct cases.
My theory is that the book was part of a scam: an inducement of some sort to fund an exploration to a foreign and unknown land, perhaps. Maybe a Prester John scheme.
Why not a hoax, what else did people have to do with their time?
It doesn’t have to be deliberate, it could just be someone trying to be creative.
It’s not like they had books or TV to occupy their time and one can only look at the stars for so long (well most people anyway). So you could set out on a project to occupy your time.
The second part of that sentence is not true. In English, for example, one can write a perfectly valid sentence with the word “that” five times in a row and one with the word “had” twelve times in a row. I’m sure the same is true in other languages.
I did look at the article that claimed the words were anagrams…this seems reasonable, because many Renaissance authors (Galileo was one) wrote treatises with anagrammic words in them. The remarkable thing is that this book has no commentary associated with it-the very learned Athanasius Kircher owned it, but had little or nothing to say about it. It is like having a book in your library that you never have read-why own it? The plant part of the work is interesting-analysts have noted that the flowers and plants do not seem to be identifiable.
So, maybe it is a mystery that will never be solved.
Yes, but these are totally contrived brain teaser type questions. While they may be grammatically correct, they wouldn’t show up in a real life application.
I like the Japanese sentence: すもももももももももももももすももももものうち (Sumomo mo momo, momo mo momo, momo mo sumomo mo momo uchi – it’s easier to understand with word breaks, but Japanese doesn’t use those).
I was just looking at some images of the manuscript online (sorry, lost the link) and I was struck by how much they reminded me of the art of Henry Darger and other “outsider” art I’ve seen. I do wonder if the whole manuscript might be the work of a very early outsider artist who felt compelled to make it by the images and ideas in his head. I guess that gets back to the “crazy person” suggestion.
I like to believe that the manuscript is actually an artifact from a parallel universe. I keep hoping that it’ll never be proven to be a hoax or a legitimate encrypted book, because, as I said, I like to believe it’s an artifact.
I keep thinking it would make a great macguffin for an RPG.
I’m in the ‘bizarre work of art’ camp personally. Much like Luigi Serafini’s 1981 Codex Seraphinianus which may have been partially inspired by the Voynich manuscript.
‘Malo malo malo malo’ is a perfectly good Latin sentence (usually rendered as ‘I’d rather be in an apple tree than a bad man in adversity’), though like other examples, obviously somewhat contrived (like ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo’).
I do remember hearing that the Voynich ‘language’ is unusually repetitive, however: while it’s not impossible to have multiple occurrences of the same word in succession in most languages, this happens far more often in the manuscript than one would expect it to. Of course, this could be just a stylistic idiosyncrasy of the author (there have been entire books written that lack the vowel ‘e’, after all), but personally, I think that this points to some sort of ‘randomizing’ scheme being used to determine what ‘words’ to put where (though I speak from a position of near total ignorance here, it doesn’t seem entirely inconceivable that one could hit on a scheme that reproduces some features of language – statistics like word entropy etc. – correctly, while leading to some curious features, like the word repetitions).
I remember reading somewhere that there was a theory about it being an attempt to transcribe an Oriental language - has that been disproved at all? I think one of the arguments was that the plants could have been from the Orient.
