Wrong!
Quote from: Viking on October 26, 2011, 11:31:02 AM
Quote from: Syt on October 26, 2011, 11:08:05 AM
Hm? Ok.
Wake me again when they translate the Voynich Manuscript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript).
It's gobbeltygook.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-has-finally-been-decoded/
QuoteThe mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded
History researcher says that it's a mostly plagiarized guide to women's health.
by Annalee Newitz - Sep 9, 2017 5:10am JST
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Roughly translated, many parts of the Voynich Manuscript say that women should take a nice bath if they are feeling sick. Here you can see a woman doing just that.
Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.
Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.
After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.
The mysterious medieval Voynich Manuscript is probably a women's health manual, according to history researcher Nicholas Gibbs.
Further study of the herbs and images in the book reminded Gibbs of other Latin medical texts. When he consulted the Trotula and De Balneis Puteolanis, two commonly copied medieval Latin medical books, he realized that a lot of the Voynich Manuscript's text and images had been plagiarized directly from them (they, in turn, were copied in part from ancient Latin texts by Galen, Pliny, and Hippocrates). During the Middle Ages, it was very common for scribes to reproduce older texts to preserve the knowledge in them. There were no formal rules about copyright and authorship, and indeed books were extremely rare, so nobody complained.
Once he realized that the Voynich Manuscript was a medical textbook, Gibbs explained, it helped him understand the odd images in it. Pictures of plants referred to herbal medicines, and all the images of bathing women marked it out as a gynecological manual. Baths were often prescribed as medicine, and the Romans were particularly fond of the idea that a nice dip could cure all ills. Zodiac maps were included because ancient and medieval doctors believed that certain cures worked better under specific astrological signs. Gibbs even identified one image—copied, of course, from another manuscript—of women holding donut-shaped magnets in baths. Even back then, people believed in the pseudoscience of magnets. (The women's pseudoscience health website Goop would fit right in during the 15th century.)
The Voynich Manuscript has been reliably dated to mere decades before the invention of the printing press, so it's likely that its peculiar blend of plagiarism and curation was a dying format. Once people could just reproduce several copies of the original Trotula or De Balneis Puteolanis on a printing press, there would have been no need for scribes to painstakingly collate its information into a new, handwritten volume.
Gibbs concluded that it's likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women's medicine. Other medieval Latin scholars will certainly want to weigh in, but the sheer mundanity of Gibbs' discovery makes it sound plausible.
See for yourself! You can look at pages from the Voynich Manuscript here.
Yeah right. We have seen this claim many times before.
Yeah. Women's health manual is one of the stock interpretations, often made in imitation of Classical authors.
A guide to womens health would sure match the alien imagery :hmm:
The fact that the author doesn't explain some of the most salient questions regarding the book like "why is written using strange characters", or "what does it say", leads me to believe he hasn't decoded it at all.
Tim is fake news:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/experts-are-extremely-dubious-about-the-voynich-solution/
QuoteLast week, a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs published a long article in the Times Literary Supplement about how he'd cracked the code on the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.
As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media (we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations."
The weirdly-illustrated 15th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. In his article, Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point.
However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang, "They're not grammatically correct. It doesn't result in Latin that makes sense." She added, "Frankly I'm a little surprised the TLS published it...If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat." The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs' claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages.
The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women's health, however, might turn out to be correct. But that wasn't Gibbs' discovery. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides.
Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed "television network." Given that Gibbs' main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. In 2015, Gibbs did an interview where he said that in five years, "I would like to think I could have a returnable series up and running." Considering the dubious accuracy of many History Channel "documentaries," he might just get his wish.
Assuming the book was written sometime in the early to mid 1400s - are the any other known books from that period that contain similar themes and drawings?
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 11, 2017, 11:19:07 AM
Assuming the book was written sometime in the early to mid 1400s - are the any other known books from that period that contain similar themes and drawings?
Sicko.
I saw this video a couple of years ago that claimed it was from the Sindh region of today's Pakistan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoNm65v1thU
I don't know jack about Sindh but I did think the writing looked Indian so this appealed to my bias but since nothing ever came of it I assume it is just as much BS any other explanation :P
I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.
Quote from: celedhring on September 11, 2017, 12:03:20 PM
I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.
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.
This is supported by the fact there is no correction whatsoever found in the document, nor any text squeezed because space was running out on the paper (which would be common in any original handwritten document before printing is invented). This means either it is a carefully handwritten copy of another document, or an original that is composed of gibberish of random letters and characters made up as the author(s) go along.
Also, analysis of each chapter's lexicographic patterns, structures, and hand writing suggests that two authors were involved. Each chapter is written fully in either style, referenced to "Voynich-A" and "Voynich-B". This implies that they were working together, because they were both, in fact, using the same script and alphabet system.
Quote from: Drakken on September 11, 2017, 02:18:49 PM
Quote from: celedhring on September 11, 2017, 12:03:20 PM
I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.
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.
Like the Bible?
Quote from: The Brain on September 11, 2017, 02:27:49 PM
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:
QuoteThe "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.
Quote from: The Brain on September 11, 2017, 02:27:49 PM
Quote from: Drakken on September 11, 2017, 02:18:49 PM
Quote from: celedhring on September 11, 2017, 12:03:20 PM
I always liked the theory that it's a XVth century hoax.
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.
Like the Bible?
Ooh, edgy.
Quote from: Valmy on September 11, 2017, 11:38:43 AM
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."
Quote from: Admiral Yi on September 11, 2017, 03:38:01 PM
Quote from: Valmy on September 11, 2017, 11:38:43 AM
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.
QuoteThe 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
Quote from: Drakken on September 11, 2017, 02:18:49 PM
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?
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 11, 2017, 03:52:15 PM
Quote from: Drakken on September 11, 2017, 02:18:49 PM
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.
Quote from: grumbler on September 11, 2017, 03:58:11 PM
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.
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 11, 2017, 04:00:45 PM
Quote from: grumbler on September 11, 2017, 03:58:11 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 11, 2017, 04:08:23 PM
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.
Quote from: Drakken on September 11, 2017, 02:30:46 PM
Quote from: The Brain on September 11, 2017, 02:27:49 PM
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:
QuoteThe "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
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.
Quote from: mongers on September 11, 2017, 04:52:37 PM
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?
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 11, 2017, 04:08:23 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: Valmy on September 12, 2017, 09:18:05 AM
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.
A genius collector of occult stuff who was 200 years ahead of his time?
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 12, 2017, 09:36:42 AM
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.
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. :lol:
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 12, 2017, 09:36:42 AM
Quote from: Valmy on September 12, 2017, 09:18:05 AM
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?
Quote from: Malthus on September 12, 2017, 10:51:42 AM
Quote from: The Minsky Moment on September 12, 2017, 09:36:42 AM
Quote from: Valmy on September 12, 2017, 09:18:05 AM
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. ;)
More to the point is the +6% Cthulhu Mythos really worth it?
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.
(https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/1E-l40RI8eObGoqhkDdrIqnje-6d-Mp-CLHH-Ws1uJ30hSPBPp6ceIgCw1q-FLAylSEKLm5_dm8dWkPqw63_xeILC1Niow=w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu)
Quote from: Razgovory on September 12, 2017, 12:56:21 PM
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.
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.
Quote from: Malthus on September 12, 2017, 10:51:42 AM
Are there any other reasonable possibilities?
Any thoughts on my suggestion?
Quote from: Valmy on September 12, 2017, 02:18:30 PM
Quote from: Razgovory on September 12, 2017, 12:56:21 PM
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.