I, like a lot of people, got briefly obsessed with the Voynich manuscript. It’s just interesting is all. We love a good mystery.
At some point I had the thought, “I should make my own manuscript in the same fashion, just as a fun art project!” Followed almost immediately after by, “oh, this is just someone’s fun art project, isn’t it?”
That’s fine, that’s enough. It’s still cool and has created it’s own story in history now.
Given that it was in a king’s library at one point, I think the “alchemist’s hoax for money” theory sounds pretty accurate. Court astrologers were very much jockeying for power just like anyone else at court, and convincing a king that you held a text nobody else could read that held real secrets would go a long way.
We just didn’t find the dice.
The paradoxical nature of the Voynich is part of its allure. It’s so easy to think it’s “just a hoax”, but then you start looking into it and more and more the hoax theory starts to feel unlikely. Then you start to think “maybe it is a language”, but the more you look into that the less sense it makes as a language with all the strange patterns and rules and behaviors that are so unlike known languages.
It’s a very compelling mystery, it doesn’t surprise me that it has consumed so many people and destroyed quite a few careers.
The most compelling hypothesis I saw for the language explanation was that it was Manchu with an unusual romanization. It’s such a rare language (basically dead language at this point) that it would make sense why the statistics line up for a real language, but people haven’t managed to decode it. Then add to that the fact that it’s not super clear what glyphs are stylistic differences and which ones are alternate glyphs, and it’s not even clear where to split the forms into different glyphs because they’re all connected, and it kind of makes sense.
This video is the most compelling case I’ve seen for it not being a real language. Like I say, it’s kind of sad to think it might not have a real decoding.
I don’t believe Voynichese is any known or unknown natural language, and even unusual Romanisation wouldn’t explain the peculiarities of the manuscript text. In my opinion, there are only two likely scenarios:
1) Voynichese is an unknown constructed language
2) Voynichese is highly structured gibberish, created systematically and with great care to mimic the behaviour of real language.
Even if the second is correct, it would be a remarkable achievement for some early 15th century scribes. The amount of linguistic awareness required to create this language-looking gibberish is impressive in itself.
- Yeah, this is interesting. I’m a little skeptical of any analysis that proceeds immediately to statistical analysis of one particular assignment of “letters” with the implied boundaries to the letterforms, without apparently dealing with the nontrivial problem of figuring out how likely it is that any particular shape is a particular “letter” or where the boundaries are. But you could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).
- You need the http:// in front of your link, it’s being processed as a relative link compared with this document
- Why is Leisure Suit Larry at the top of this paper
Edit: I backwards
showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that wouldn’t exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish. In fact, the highly regular and peculiar (often repetitive) structures of it is part of the problem. Now, that doesn’t mean it contains meaningful information, or indeed that it is a language at all. In fact those rigid and repetitive structures that distinguish it from random noise also make it incompatible with known natural human languages.
It could (and most likely is) simply be highly structured, deliberate and constrained nonsense, devised by a semi-random process following a complex algorithm. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the semi-random part somehow hides encoded information, though with the number of distinguished codebreakers who have had a crack at it I am skeptical. It would also be a highly sophisticated form of cryptography for 15th century Europe.
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Ah damn it I’ll fix the link
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Isn’t 90s web design just the absolute pinnacle?
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish.
Yeah, you’re right, I wrote my language backwards. I just fixed it. “You could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish” is what I meant.
I mean, the statistical properties that set Voynichese apart from natural languages are very widely documented. The very low entropy is perhaps the largest issue, playing into the repetitive nature of it and creating “loops” as per this video (elaborated on in this blog post)
Even then though, we can never prove a negative. It’s impossible to prove it’s not a natural language, we can only demonstrate that it works in ways that are completely different from all other known languages.
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https://youtube.com/@voynichtalk
This is a great channel that goes into great detail of basically all theories and the biggest pros/cons is them
His favorite theory is that it’s an old hoax, aiming to sell the book to a well known collector back then
And the text is “generated” with a simple algorithm (simple enough to do manually back in the day)
Duh.
i saw a great explanation how it was made in a documentary i can never track down again cuz the internet is terrible now. it’s been a long time since I saw it, but the idea was they basically wrote letters on the page using some form of stencil to give the “illusion” of real, unknown words as opposed to strings of random letters. they recreated a little and it looked essentially the same. throw some illustrations of plants and stars in there, and bam you get to sell people a mystical mysterious book of knowledge
It’s absolutely a hoax. I only first learned of it the other day, but there’s no question that if we haven’t decoded it by now, it’s not a real language.
Edit: changed a typo from decided to decoded.
So Linear A is a hoax too, then? The Phaistos disk is a hoax? Mesoamerican hieroglyphs are a hoax? Longshan symbols are a hoax? What a nonsense argument.
Well, generelly, I understand where you are coming from, but I think the enormous price of book production at the time makes it really an unreasonably expensive hoax.
Yeah, but we can only speculate on the intended outcome. If it was to trick a superstitious head of state that someone had secrete arcane knowledge that could be used to grant them supernatural powers, the con could perhaps pay off huge.
All evidence suggests it was created in the first decades of the 1400s by several scribes. It would have taken weeks to write, and probably a year to finalize including the illustrations. The materials and labour cost would have been rather expensive at the time. It could still be a hoax, but it’s a very old and elaborate one in that case.
It is, however, incredibly unlikely that the text itself is a natural language. That much is widely agreed among experts. The big question is whether the text contains meaningful information at all. Is it a conlang, an elaborate code or is it a nonsense text generated through a series of rules and mechanisms that merely visually imitates language?
Earlier statistical analysis had shown it had some definite similarities to a real human language, it’s not just gibberish or an amateur hoax. I have to say I’m a little bit sad that it seems like it’s turning out it was just sophisticated gibberish.
It’s still completely up in the air, and as I said above: paradoxical. Voynichese doesn’t behave like any known language, and has several problems besides just entropy. On the other hand it obeys Zipf’s Law, and topic analysis indicates the content of the writing varies with the subject matter of the pages, like a real language would.
