The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded

[Drakken]

An idea that I entertain about why a thing such as the Voynich document could exist, which is totally unproven and unsupported yet as good as any, is that this book could have been a Medieval version of the Sokal affair: A contemporary document wholly made up of gibberish with the purpose to be presented to bust out charlatans.

My humble reasoning is this: Medieval books were rare and costly to produce. It was a rich document with elaborate drawings that would take months, even years of work to produce. This would have cost manhours to any scribe and double it was indeed composed by two working in tandem. If it is not a personal project of two hoaxers who happened to be monks or scribes, it must have been made for a fee on the order of a rich patron, but with specifications that it reads and seems as occult and knowledgeable as possible.

It would not make sense to target illiterate people, who would not be able to read or understand anything anyway. It was for a target audience of people who could read and believe that the owner was detaining precious, secret knowledge on the "natural sciences".

So, why do we have just one book? The is the only occurrence (so far) of a written document from the Medieval era of such conditions. If you want to pretend to have such knowledge, why stop at one book? What if it was ordered by a nobleman or a rich merchantman for the purpose to show to occultists instead, and test and spot hoaxers? It would be very easy to use, knowing full well that it is a false document.

[Malthus]

I mean this is an era of confidence tricks with things like hundreds of teeth of St. Apollonia and, of course, the Shroud of Turin which hey was supposedly made around the same time.

Relics of dubious provenance and pious forgeries (eg. Donation of Constantine) can be found throughout the long Middle Ages, but this is something different in nature of scope.  It's one thing to get a bunch of old teeth and gin up some bogus testimonials, or to write up 20 paragraphs in Latin and pass it off as 400 years older.  That's fairly simple work and there is a broad "market" for such artifacts and claims.  This is really something else.

I understand that by the early 1600s, there is a combination of interest in occultish stuff, a growing market for obscure or unusual books, and even some greater sophistication in codes and cryptography - if the book was dated then, the hoax theory makes perfect sense.  But barring some inexplicable error in the parchment dating, it's a harder case to make.

The issue then is what could it plausibly be?

I see three basic possibilities:

1 - The aforementioned hoax, either for profit or some other reason.

2 - Secret medical, religious, or magical knowledge (or all three together), hidden behind an elaborate code.

The problem with possibility #2 is that medieval codes simply weren't sophisticated enough to withstand modern decoding techniques - it ought to have been cracked by now.

3 - Gibberish produced for some other reason (lunatic monk?)

The problem with this is that, allegedly, the writing displays some of the characteristics of actual language.

...

Are there any other reasonable possibilities? 

[Drakken]

I mean this is an era of confidence tricks with things like hundreds of teeth of St. Apollonia and, of course, the Shroud of Turin which hey was supposedly made around the same time.

Relics of dubious provenance and pious forgeries (eg. Donation of Constantine) can be found throughout the long Middle Ages, but this is something different in nature of scope.  It's one thing to get a bunch of old teeth and gin up some bogus testimonials, or to write up 20 paragraphs in Latin and pass it off as 400 years older.  That's fairly simple work and there is a broad "market" for such artifacts and claims.  This is really something else.

I understand that by the early 1600s, there is a combination of interest in occultish stuff, a growing market for obscure or unusual books, and even some greater sophistication in codes and cryptography - if the book was dated then, the hoax theory makes perfect sense.  But barring some inexplicable error in the parchment dating, it's a harder case to make.

The issue then is what could it plausibly be?

I see three basic possibilities:

1 - The aforementioned hoax, either for profit or some other reason.

2 - Secret medical, religious, or magical knowledge (or all three together), hidden behind an elaborate code.

The problem with possibility #2 is that medieval codes simply weren't sophisticated enough to withstand modern decoding techniques - it ought to have been cracked by now.

3 - Gibberish produced for some other reason (lunatic monk?)

The problem with this is that, allegedly, the writing displays some of the characteristics of actual language.

...

Are there any other reasonable possibilities?

See above. 

[The Brain]

More to the point is the +6% Cthulhu Mythos really worth it?

[Razgovory]

Drakken's argument assumes the book is suppose to be about some kind of "occult" topic.  I don't see a particular reason to see why we would make that assumption.  What he refers to as "woo-woo" was what passed as medical knowledge in those days.  The illustrations wouldn't look out of place in a medieval herbal or book of medicine.  If you simply needed a book that looked mysterious getting one written in Arabic, Turkish, or some other non-European language would probably be sufficient.

My guess is that it's written in some non-European language, possibly a dead language.

[Jacob]

[Valmy]

Drakken's argument assumes the book is suppose to be about some kind of "occult" topic.  I don't see a particular reason to see why we would make that assumption.  What he refers to as "woo-woo" was what passed as medical knowledge in those days.  The illustrations wouldn't look out of place in a medieval herbal or book of medicine.  If you simply needed a book that looked mysterious getting one written in Arabic, Turkish, or some other non-European language would probably be sufficient.

My guess is that it's written in some non-European language, possibly a dead language.

So no linguists have ever thought to compare it to any existing languages and scripts before? That would imply it is an isolate dead language written in a completely isolate dead script that was using Euro-ME style illustrations of completely unknown plants that was somehow in a parchment book that somehow appeared in Europe shortly after it was written?

That seems pretty weird. I mean if that guy I referenced earlier had a decent idea that it was a central asian language - that would be logical but it does not seem that went anywhere.

[The Minsky Moment]

Seems to me the key here is knowledge of the early 15th century milieu in which it arose.  Who was literate at the time and what kinds of skills did they have?  What kinds of books with similar themes or drawings were circulating at the time? (Gibbs alluded to a couple). What sorts of people had the kind of skill to write a book like this and what plausible motivations could they have?  What was the market for books generally and of books of this type?  If the hypothesis is that it's a foreign or lost language, then what was the state of linguistic knowledge at that time and place and what kinds of languages might people have some exposure to?  If the hypothesis is that it is oriented towards people interested in the occult, what sort of occult interests existed at the time and how were they expressed or manifested?

Etc.

[dps]

Are there any other reasonable possibilities? 

Any thoughts on my suggestion?

[Razgovory]

Drakken's argument assumes the book is suppose to be about some kind of "occult" topic.  I don't see a particular reason to see why we would make that assumption.  What he refers to as "woo-woo" was what passed as medical knowledge in those days.  The illustrations wouldn't look out of place in a medieval herbal or book of medicine.  If you simply needed a book that looked mysterious getting one written in Arabic, Turkish, or some other non-European language would probably be sufficient.

My guess is that it's written in some non-European language, possibly a dead language.

So no linguists have ever thought to compare it to any existing languages and scripts before? That would imply it is an isolate dead language written in a completely isolate dead script that was using Euro-ME style illustrations of completely unknown plants that was somehow in a parchment book that somehow appeared in Europe shortly after it was written?

That seems pretty weird. I mean if that guy I referenced earlier had a decent idea that it was a central asian language - that would be logical but it does not seem that went anywhere.

It may not be a language isolate, but it could be.  I don't how much access people have had to the Voynich manuscript until recently and of that group of people how many were trained in the languages of the medieval Caucasus?  Probably not a lot.  It's also possible that the language didn't have a written form and the author created one for it.