Voynich Manuscript

I have been intrigued by this ever since I heard of it...

What do you guys and gals think?

http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_13.htm

I think the text is gibberish based on the fact that it's been this long and still nobody can read it. The pictures, however, are probably symbolic of alchemy.

[Casey]

It seems far too regular and logical to be simply random. I'm open to it being an as-yet unknown language, but it puzzles me that it's never even been partially translated.

Codes fascinate me. I spent quite some time in HS pondering the Kryptos Cipher, eventually cracking the first two levels, but the third and fourth eluded me.

[Richard W]

There's a book called the Codex Seraphinianus, made by an Italian artist called Luigi Serafini and published in 1981; it's basically like this manuscript. It's an illustrated encyclopedia of an alien civilization, written in an imagined script.

It's also never been "decoded", because in my opinion there's nothing to decode. There's definitely a pattern to the script - I got as far as working the numbering out at one point, and the symbols are consistent but it changes bases part way through, as far as I could tell (up to a certain number, it's in one base but beyond that it switches to another - I don't remember exactly). But that's easy; to make any sense of the text would need a lot of work that frankly wouldn't be worth it - if there is actually anything to decrypt (doubtful) then who's to say it would be worth reading? I believe people have tried more seriously than I did, but you'd have to think there was something worth decrypting to put in any serious effort.

To my mind, the point of the book is that there is no point - it's an objet d'art in itself. There has to be a "pattern" and a "logic" behind the script, or the whole thing would be cheap and not worth doing, but there doesn't have to be a meaning.

Same with this manuscript. If it seems "far too regular and logical to be simply random" then it probably is - anybody trying to make something interesting would have to impose some sort of order. But regularity and logic don't imply meaning.

I've read about this manuscript before, but I don't remember where - I thought it might have been in The Code Book by Simon Singh, or Le Ton Beau De Marot by Douglas Hofstadter (where I first heard of the Codex Seraphinianus). But neither mention it in the index.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

There was an article in Scientific American Magazine, a year or two ago, in which the author suggested that the text of the Voynich Manuscript might be gibberish...but gibberish generated by a matrix or algorithm. Essentially, the text is so regular, it might be "programmatic" without actually containing any linguistic information.

There is a related linguistic conceit (or do I mean concept? No, I think "conceit" is better) called the "travesty." This is a way of generating random text that has the same distribution patterns as given text. For example, you can analyze, say, 100 pages of Edgar Poe, and determine his personal and unique letter-pattern-probabilities, to a depth of, say, five letters, then generate random text that follows the same distribution.

It isn't proven (is it provable?) that this is how the Voynich Manuscript was produced, but it is one intriguing possibility.

Silas

[Richard W]

I think this is a good example of overanalysis. It would be far easier to make something like this - with no inherent meaning - than to extract a definitive meaning from it. If you made it with no inherent meaning, then it would be extremely unlikely (not to say impossible) that somebody could extract a convincing definitive meaning from it.

From the article:

One problem with the earlier hoax theory is that, as will be shown, certain word statistics (Zipf's laws) found in the manuscript are characteristic of natural languages. In other words, it is unlikely that any forgery from 16th century would "by chance" produce a text that follows Zipf's laws (first postulated in 1935).

That's not a problem with the "hoax" theory - it's a misunderstanding of the idea of "laws" and "statistics". If this guy Zipf managed to analyse language statistically and show up certain patterns on a formal basis, then anybody who was paying attention could have noticed similar patterns on a less formal basis, and built them into the imagined script. They wouldn't even have necessarily had to be consciously thinking about it - just literate and intuitive. Formalizing these things is far harder than making an "intuitive" approximation to them. Laziness really pays off sometimes.

(eta) I'm using a lot of inverted commas - the "hoax" part was probably the most relevant, though. To me, a hoax implies something that's set up deliberately to fool people for some sort of (financial or otherwise) gain. I can see somebody making this just for fun; it doesn't have to be a hoax to be meaningless. Although I'm sure it would be tempting to take the piss out of all the people who would seize on it as something significant.

(eta again) I think that the Scientific American article was where I previously read about it, Silas - a friend gave me a copy when I showed him the Codex Seraphinianus.

[Joostik]

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

There was an article in Scientific American Magazine, a year or two ago, in which the author suggested that the text of the Voynich Manuscript might be gibberish...but gibberish generated by a matrix or algorithm.

Some time ago I read an article (possibly the same?) which convincinly argued the manuscript was made using a quite simple matrix. In other words, it's complete gibberish, produced through a cryptographic tool/randomizer. I'll have to look it up, just not this evening, it's a bit late already...

[ganzfeld]

Voynich thread on the old board:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/u...2;t=000522;p=1

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by ganzfeld

Voynich thread on the old board:
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/u...2;t=000522;p=1

(OT) The book that Silas described in that thread sounds like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner, to me.

[snopes]

Written in "alien" characters, illustrated with sketches, and dating back hundreds of years, the Voynich Manuscript has puzzled cryptographers, historians and bibliophiles for centuries.

And now the mystery has finally come to an end, according to a businessman from Finland named Viekko Latvala, a self described "prophet of god," who says he has decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world's most mysterious manuscript.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...ch-manuscript/

[thorny locust]

Not qualified to comment on the manuscript in general, but I have a nitpick of the analysis about halfway down the page of the story linked to in the OP of this thread:

If the "red pepper" is colored green, that doesn't mean it can't be a member of the species they're referring to as "red pepper". Red peppers start off green; the drawing could just be of an immature stage.

That might be why they're calling the identification "not certain" rather than incorrect; but if they mean to imply that red and green peppers are different things, they're wrong about that.

[Skeptic]

Originally Posted by Dobers

I think the text is gibberish based on the fact that it's been this long and still nobody can read it. The pictures, however, are probably symbolic of alchemy.

There are demonstrably genuine cyphers that have not been decoded, with Linear A being a prime example.

[Floater]

Originally Posted by snopes

And now the mystery has finally come to an end, according to a businessman from Finland named Viekko Latvala ...

And the couldn't even get the man's name right, it's Veikko.

[Casey]

Originally Posted by snopes

Written in "alien" characters, illustrated with sketches, and dating back hundreds of years, the Voynich Manuscript has puzzled cryptographers, historians and bibliophiles for centuries.

I don't buy it. He says he "decoded" it but provides absolutely no information on how- at the moment, for all we know he could have simply written whatever he wanted to write, it's not reproducible.

Kryptos I, II and III have been cracked along with most of IV except for 97 characters. The keys are openly out there, and you can apply them to prove its effectiveness. This guy doesn't do that.

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by Casey

He says he "decoded" it but provides absolutely no information on how ...

He does - essentially he says that "God told him" the meaning. Nobody else can do it because God hasn't told them what it means.

[Floater]

I saw a TV program about the manuscript yesterday. Unfortunately I didn't see the start of it, but apparently they had pointed out a number of possible creators, ending with the result of a radiocarbon dating showing that the parchment came from ca 1420, thereby excluding all the possible names that had been mentioned as they were much younger than that. Sorry, but I don't buy that. The only people that can be excluded are those that lived before that date, not the ones that lived after.

[ganzfeld]

I agree with you. If the parchment was from 1420 then anyone who lived from 1420 on could have had a hand in the creation. Brian Dunning said this about that, however:

And from history, we know that parchment was always in good demand; it would have been virtually inconceivable for perfectly good parchment to sit unused for decades or centuries waiting for someone to come along and make a forgery on it. Combined with the fact that we have no reason to doubt the history of the book's ownership as given in Marci's letter, we can be pretty confident that the book was written about the same time as the parchment was made.