That was my reaction; picking out some small fraction of the writing and assigning a meaning to it is trivial.
You can come up with an algorithm to generate any text. The real test is how long the algorithm is compared to the text. At worst, you can say that your algorithm is “print this string”, with the string being the text itself. In practice, with actual language, you can usually do a fair bit better than that. Can this text be compressed significantly more than most real language?
By far, this is the most logical sound “solve” I have seen. He also states there was likely a index and the pages have been cut and are out of order.
Gibbs may be correct, but I can’t say his article is especially convincing as such.
Overall, his suggestion is plausible enough, so it’s just a question of how his evidence stacks up.
On the illustrations, the massive snag is that the TLS haven’t bothered to post the comparison pieces online. The print version may include those, but I haven’t seen a copy yet.
What really worries me, however, is the (weirdly vague) suggestion that the text is possibly readable. For what does the article back this up with? The apparently key point about Latin ligatures isn’t new: D’Imperio covered this in her 1976 survey. But there’s no evidence, then or now, that this leads to a translation. Then there’s the whole suggestion about reordering. Without explaining what the correct order should be.
He may well be right, or at least pointing to useful comparisons, but I see no reason at this point for hailing this as a decipherment. I can see why the TLS have given it the PR bandwagon.
The entropy of the Voynich manuscript has been extensively studied (random example), and the intriguing result is that it does have characteristics in common with real languages, but at the same time there is no clear match. If the text is really in Latin as has been suggested (hardly an original idea), shouldn’t there be a short list of abbreviations such that any of us could use to transcribe the text starting at any random page? I saw no such thing in the TLS link given here, but perhaps it was published elsewhere? If not, I declare shenanigans.
Apparently, the reason Gibbs says there’s no list of abbreviations is that the document is incomplete, with the index missing. And I believe his work was done on behalf of some television show, so they may be holding back on some stuff.
Oh, in that case, it must be as bullet-proof as that Amelia Earhart photo!
Fine. Where is the un-abbreviated version? That should be plain text, with no interpretation needed. I’m waiting…
Does Zipf’s Law apply to this “Language”?
One thing that strikes me is that if it’s an instruction manual, as the article says, it seems like it ought to be written for maximum intelligibility. That doesn’t exclude the ligature-thesis the article advances, but one would at least expect such a style to be common; but from what little I know, the Voynich seems to be pretty unique even among books of its time.
Even if it’s intended for an audience of one, it seems odd to go through the trouble of basically inventing a whole new writing style. After all, the addressee would have to be familiar with the code, so would likely have to be taught, or have invented it; but to what end?
I’m no linguist, but if you look at cookbooks from the medieval era, there’s a lot of abbreviation and such that’s often left undefined; it’s assumed that the reader, necessarily being a literate and well-educated person, knows what the abbreviations mean, and since every pen-stroke is an investment in time and money they’re not going to bother repeating what you should already know.
The author here isn’t writing for the general public - the general public doesn’t know how to read, let alone engage in acts of chemistry. He’s writing for the benefit of fellow scholars.
Yes, but my point is that all such cookbooks will tend to follow such a style, dictated by the conventions of the day. But the Voynich seems unique, rather than cut from the same cloth as similar manuals, and thus, represents a decision to go against stylistic conventions. But why was that decision made?
Maybe it was written by a doctor.
Actually many of the original ‘cookbooks’ were not entirely cookbooks as we think of them, they were more aide memoire to a working chef. I know that I can jot a recipe down using my knowledge - I might comment that sauce maltaise is hollandaise with blood orange juice instead of writing down a recipe for it because I know how to make hollandaise sauce [both the vinegar version and the lemon juice version] so I just need to remind myself that I just need to swap in blood orange juice for the souring agent. <shrug> My first grabbed cookbook around the house tends to be my Larousse which is more or less just an encyclopedia full of aide memoires =)
I consider myself a decent home cook, but even as recently as the Julia Child books there’s a fair amount of “cook until done” type instructions–er, what? And I can’t speak about the Voynich manuscript specifically but even modern doctors use plenty of shorthand undecipherable without a key–like WARTS or TID.
Half Man Half Wit’s point is the nut of the question–why did the author, if this is indeed a medical/pharmacological text, use his/her own idiosyncratic notation?
I throw in “her” because if the text is in fact about women’s health, maybe that helps explain the difficulty of interpretation–maybe a female physician employed her own notation either because she wasn’t conversant with the current version as employed by men, or deliberately wanted it to be undecipherable to her male contemporaries.
Good point. Maybe it was written in a time and place that it would be considered heretical or inappropriate whether through content or author.
Things are falling apart for Nicholas Gibbs’s alleged Voynich deciphering:
So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”
Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved? Experts say no.
No, the Voynich Manuscript has not been ‘decoded’
Gibbs, Voynich, Wikiwars and the Times Illiteracy Supplement
Not an instruction manual for others, but a personal copy of parts of other extant manuals for one lady healer’s own use, where said healer likely only had limited access to those other books but didn’t own them (similar to the way many “family” recipe books are compiled, I think) - it’s not for general publication, but an aid to memory.
Although I prefer the RP manual theory, myself.
The illustrations are pretty good for something intended only for the original writer.