The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded

[Malthus]

I don't know jack about Sindh

I know one thing about Sindh.  When the British general Napier conquered the place he sent a one word dispatch back to headquarters: "peccavi."  Latin for "I have sinned."

Sadly, because I love this anecdote, it wasn't him.

The most brief and brilliant example of a favourite British form of humour, the pun. In 1843 Sir Charles Napier conquered the Indian province of Sind (now southeast Pakistan), and was criticized in parliament in 1844 for his ruthless campaign. A girl in her teens, Catherine Winkworth (1827–78), remarked to her teacher that Napier's despatch to the governor general of India, after capturing Sind, should have been Peccavi (Latin for 'I have sinned'). She sent her joke to the new humorous magazine *Punch, which printed it as a factual report under Foreign Affairs. As a result the pun has usually been credited to Napier.

http://www.historyworld.net/Articles/PlainTextArticles.asp?aid=zah&pid=937

http://www.historyextra.com/blog/sir-charles-napiers-sin

[The Minsky Moment]

That it is a hoax or a book of nonsense, made to impress clients and marks, is the theory that best fits Occam's Razor, IMHO. This book was made to look occult and mysterious, not to be read and understood.

That would involve considerable effort and cost.  To what end?  Who at that particular point in history would be the clients or marks to be impressed and who would be doing the impressing?

[grumbler]

That it is a hoax or a book of nonsense, made to impress clients and marks, is the theory that best fits Occam's Razor, IMHO. This book was made to look occult and mysterious, not to be read and understood.

That would involve considerable effort and cost.  To what end?  Who at that particular point in history would be the clients or marks to be impressed and who would be doing the impressing?

Supposedly Rudolf II, who is said to have paid a fortune for it.  That's all anecdotal, but he was mentally ill and perhaps suggestible.

[The Minsky Moment]

Supposedly Rudolf II, who is said to have paid a fortune for it.  That's all anecdotal, but he was mentally ill and perhaps suggestible.

Problem is that supposedly happened 150-200 years after the dating people date the manuscript.

[grumbler]

Supposedly Rudolf II, who is said to have paid a fortune for it.  That's all anecdotal, but he was mentally ill and perhaps suggestible.

Problem is that supposedly happened 150-200 years after the dating people date the manuscript.

Bah!  Those are just facts.

[The Minsky Moment]

Occurs to me the other problem with the hoax theory, is that if the goal was to fool hypothetical early 15th century suckers, the elaborate effort to make the fake gibberish document scan like a natural language would seem to be a huge waste.  Something quite a bit simpler and crude would be more than sufficient for purpose.

[mongers]

Occurs to me the other problem with the hoax theory, is that if the goal was to fool hypothetical early 15th century suckers, the elaborate effort to make the fake gibberish document scan like a natural language would seem to be a huge waste.  Something quite a bit simpler and crude would be more than sufficient for purpose.

OK I'll come clean, it was an accumulation of more coherent postings I had intended to make on Languish, but hadn't ever gotten around to them, preferring instead my 'stream of consciousness' style.

[jimmy olsen]

Like the Bible?

At least the Bible was meant to be intelligible to the priests who read it. This book was meant to be intelligible to no one, not even the authors. This remains to my mind the likeliest explanation: The medieval equivalent for occultists and astrologists to market their "expertise", like seeing books on Quantum Physics (TM) in a woo-woo doctor's library inside their office.

The "science" of cryptography in the XVth century was amateurish at best, so if there was a hidden language somewhere in it would have easily been decrypted by today's standards, with the power of our modern computers. That it is still not, suggests that this is not written in code.

However, that it would be a hoax does not mean that the authors have not put a lot of work in it. Great pains have been taken to create this document and make it look utterly credible. Quoting Brian Dunning on the Skeptoid Podcast:

The "complete nonsense" theory has one thing working against it. If it is nonsense, it's very good nonsense. It's almost too good to expect of an amateur.

Computational analysis of the text has been run, exhaustively, many times by many different researchers, using many different techniques. This allows us not only to try and translate it (at which all attempts have met utter failure), but also to compare its metrics to those of actual languages. The letter frequency, word length, and word frequency are very similar to what we see in real languages. But they don't quite match those of any real languages.

It's speculation, but I can imagine a monk or professional scribe who does this all the time being well aware of such things and deliberately giving the book a realistic appearance, but it seems less likely that an amateur, just a Joe Blow or professional from a different field, would happen to write gibberish that's such good gibberish.

Or it could be written in an obscure language that's now dead and only a few scholars know and that's why decryption has failed 

[dps]

It's possible that it was written by someone who was not, strictly speaking, literate.  That is, it was written by someone who hadn't been formally taught to read and write, but who developed their own writing system.  That would account for it having similarities to many other written languages, but not quite matching up to any of them.

OTOH, while I know that people who can't read and write do sometimes develop their own method of "writing", I'm not aware of any other example that would be that detailed and complicated.

[grumbler]

OK I'll come clean, it was an accumulation of more coherent postings I had intended to make on Languish, but hadn't ever gotten around to them, preferring instead my 'stream of consciousness' style.

So you are confirming the gibberish theory, then?

[Drakken]

Occurs to me the other problem with the hoax theory, is that if the goal was to fool hypothetical early 15th century suckers, the elaborate effort to make the fake gibberish document scan like a natural language would seem to be a huge waste.  Something quite a bit simpler and crude would be more than sufficient for purpose.

If it were only the written content, I would agree with you. However, the same can be said about the illustrations as well.

If we skip the chapters on alchemy, cosmology, and astrology, sections on Pharmaceutical or Herbal subjects contain species of herbs and plants that were illustrated, which could theoretically be linked to real species that were known to exist at the time by botanists. However, not a single one of them have been successfully identified to represent a real specimen. One botanist did assert the Voynich Manuscript had something a kind to a New World Sunflower illustrated in it, but it remains speculative even to this day.

[Valmy]

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.

[The Minsky Moment]

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 Brain]

A genius collector of occult stuff who was 200 years ahead of his time?

[Drakken]

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.

By all analysis, the currently available circumstantial evidence demonstrates that the manuscript was indeed drafted sometime in the XVth century. Theories on hoaxes due to post-medieval production do not present satisfactory evidence that goes against this. I have no reason to doubt that it was made in that period, by people of that period, for a specific reason compatible with that period, which can include marketing a knowledge in the occult.

a) The paper was carbon-dated to be indeed from early XVth century. However, it is currently no good way to reliably date ink.
b) An analysis of the ink shows that the pigments used were made were available at the time
c) It was demonstrated that the ink on the document was the first application
d) Parchment paper is organic in nature, and it was rare to store it for long periods, and never for decades or centuries. Usually, it was made for the purpose to be used within weeks or months after production.