Can you show me a page from a text written in another language that uses those repetitions multiple times on the same page? On nearly every page?
Or maybe it is just a base seven numerical system of a Cult of Cattle Herders. Maybe it is Minoan (mythologically Atlanteaen?).
The amateurish quality of the art is also a red flag; manuscripts of that time were usually much better illustrated.
Yeah sure.
Murrumbeek nunurrunkella kuding Pungdyl
Marman, koongee palleek mongeit woorwoorrer
bar beeker ; bar kuding Jesus Christ Tindee
mummum murrumbununner Lord; wellainer
burrawee woorwoorrer mongonner koolinge bagrook
marnameek ; wellainer nillam koolinglilbuk
weakeit bar berbuk, narlumboon burrung ;
wellainer weagoulaneit bar numbuk ; wellainer
tinderbeek bengero ganmel yellenwa, kuding
commargee numnumo, bar kubboweer woorwooroit
bar narlumby ulbinner munung Pundgyl
Marmanieek ; uungo yellenwa Jesus Christ nerlingo
mongoin umarko koolinge bagrook terridee
kargeeiek ; bar pindoner boundup bar meungo.
That use of “woorwoorrer” and “woorwoorroit” means “heaven” and it appears in the Bible in this language, well, as often as heaven appears in the Bible, which may not be every page, but will be damn close in large sections.
Or the use of the term yaltji here.
Couldn’t it be an examination of language itself, albeit in another language?
I’m reminded of The Epistolae of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, where he, amongst other things, writes passages in extreme hyperbaton.
I’m perfectly willing to accept that it’s a fake, but it’s still a 14th century fake without parallel, as far as I am aware. Even if the reason for writing was “For shits and giggles”, that’s pretty amazing.
Blake writes:
> The problem is that you already said it. You said outright that it was unlikely to
> be an ordinary language.
I said it because I had been assured that there were a number of examples similar to “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo” in the manuscript. Now you’re telling me that there aren’t any repetitions that long in the manuscript, and you’re apparently telling me that I was stupid for believing the poster who seemed to be claiming that there are examples like this. Once again, I’m tired of messed around with. Give me a list of the repetitions and near-repetitions in the manuscript. Till you do, there’s nothing to argue about.
Why would it be “an examination of language itself” when the pictures in the manuscript all seem to show that it’s something else?
Is the full text available anywhere? I’ve only ever seen the same few images over and over.
I’m going to go with the cop-out answer: maybe it’s about lots of things. I’ve got a copy of The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical from the 1880s, and it has entries on history, geography and the natural world, as well as strange sentences; for example, Odo tenet mulum, madidam mappam tenet anna.
Could the weird flowers have been added by a different scribe? There are Old English texts where the pictures were added in afterwards. That’s just adding layers of complexity for complexity’s sake, though.
Based on the layout of the text and the pictures, it’s pretty certain that the pictures were there first.
As for the person who asked for the full text:
(I hope the link works, if not put in Voynich and Yale in Google like I did)
Could it be that the “words” don’t represent words but phonemes or syllables? Perhaps gollog and gollodg stand for very different sounds, in a language that does things like niwa ni wa ni wa niwatori imasu (“in the garden there are two chickens”) or chichiichichinin (“you ran to me”).
Here’s another full-text link (necessarily rendered in pictures).
I think there are PDF versions out there, too … those are, of course, raster images (JPEGs, BMPs, TIFFs, and such) just saved as a single PDF. It would take a while, but you could save your own raster images to your drive from the Wikipedia Commons site I linked to.
As for words repeated three times … perhaps it is a textual description of a pattern. My understanding is that the words repeated three times are short ones. So maybe what’s being communicated is something like:
“The petals of the sunflower are arranged in an ABA ABA ABA pattern.”
Or it might just be a reference to the author’s great great great grandfather.
I’m missing where the same word gets repeated three times.
We’ll probably never know what the thing was, because it’s purpose is likely simply lost to history. It could be the product of some con man trying to start a religion - a ‘holy book’ written in an ‘ancient language’ that only he could ‘read’ could be quite the ticket. Or it could have simply been someone creating a fantastic ‘relic’ from mystic lands, to be sold to the first sucker in a carriage.
Or it could have been an artist’s attempt to leave a mystery to the world, precisely to mess with people’s heads in the future. Andy Warhol (or Andy Kaufman, for that matter) could have done such a thing for giggles.
Does anybody know how much a book like this would have cost to produce in the early 15th century? How many people would have been involved in its production?
I’m only familiar with book production in the first millenium AD, so I don’t know what the process would have been 400 years on.
I saw this article today and thought of this thread:
University of Arizona researchers have carbon-dated the manuscript and estimate that it was produced between 1404 to 1438.
I have to echo Double Foolscap and ask how much a manuscript like this would have cost to produce in the early 1400s. Surely it would have been fabulously expensive.