
Another dubious claim that someone has “decoded” the Voynich manuscript - Vigier
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/no-someone-hasnt-cracked-the-code-of-the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/
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hyper_reality
Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a
mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of
the words just don't match up with any natural languages, and there is a large
amount of repetition of individual words with small variations, but hardly any
repeated phrases. One recent idea is that successive words were copied from
early ones, with small rearrangements of the glyphs
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf) .
As such, the text gains the characteristic of looking like a language, when in
fact it is meaningless gibberish. Possibly this was done as way of fooling
somebody rich to buy it; at some point it came into the possession of Rudolf
II, Holy Roman Emperor, and was clearly a very desirable artifact even in the
17th century.

~~~
GnarfGnarf
The "hoax" is a tempting hypothesis. There were many suckers who would have
paid big bucks for a mysterious manuscript.

But... how would a medieval forger know about linguistic patterns of natural
languages, that weren't discovered until centuries later?

The Turkish guy's hypothesis sounds like the most plausible.

~~~
sterlind
Hoax should be the hypothesis of last resort. If you have a theory that
Voynich is written in a specific cipher or language, you can test it via
internal consistency, reconstruction, cognates or sound laws. Statistically,
Voynich has morpheme distributions typical of spoken language. Someone could
have generated the text from a random distribution or method, but that's a
non-falsifiable hypothesis.. given some statistics you can always generate
such a trivial theory

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coldcode
Clearly it's written in Medieval Perl.

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Nursie
Yeah this was fun to read about when the Guardian mentioned it a week or so
back. The guy appears to have invented a language (Proto-Romance) and made
claims that this was the usual script for said language, and cracked decoding
it. And all this after only two weeks study.

Anything that can shed new light on the book is intriguing, but I'm not buying
this without extraordinary evidence.

~~~
talideon
"Extrapolated" might be a better term than "invented", to be fair to him. His
"Proto-Romance" seems to be an attempt to extrapolate an intermediate between
Vulgar Latin and the early Romance languages after they had differenciated
into Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, &c.

"Proto-Romance" is a real term, but it's typically used to refer to Vulgar
Latin.

~~~
andolanra
Speaking as someone with a linguistics background, I would say "cobbled
together" is more accurate. Cheshire's "proto-Romance" was built by choosing
words more or less at random from various Romance dictionaries (and a few non-
Romance ones) without coming up with a rigorous explanation of the grammar or
the sound changes which produced this result.

Usually, if you're proposing a proto-language, you need to give a consistent
and reasonable set of rules that have both explanatory and predictive
capability in terms of one language becoming another. I can posit a rule, for
example, that a Latin _b_ in between vowels becomes a _v_ in Italian: the
Latin _taberna_ becomes the Italian _taverna_ , the Latin _diabolus_ becomes
the Italian _diavolo_ , the Latin _habere_ becomes the Italian _avere_. This
rule means that given a Latin word, I can predict what an Italian word
descended from it would look like, and similarly, if I have an Italian word, I
can speculate what the Latin word it descended from would look like if it were
indeed of Latin origin.

The Cheshire paper makes no effort to explain the rules that get you from
Latin to his "Proto-Romance", and in turn to modern Romance languages. It's
all ad-hoc, based on grabbing whatever happened to resemble his decoding,
which is why words are borrowed from wherever he could find a match.

(Also: to be totally pedantic, the _b_ -becomes- _v_ rule mentioned above is
not the complete story, and there are exceptions, e.g. Latin _habitus_ becomes
Italian _abito_. It's a good first approximation, though.)

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r721
Language Log discussion:
[https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749)

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nyc_pizzadev
This video explains it all:

[https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0](https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0)

~~~
sterlind
This was a low-effort post, but I agree that Derek Vogt/Stephen Bax's theory
is under-appreciated. Other hypotheses are either nationalistic , working back
from the author's favorite theory to justify why it's Hindi/Turkish/your
culture here, or flavors of the null hypothesis, such as explaining away the
linguistic patterns as a sophisticated bogus language.

Vogt starts by comparing the writing system to similar-looking classes,
identifying internal (in)consistencies and _testing_ the theories on likely
cognates for stars and plants.

Derek did a good job with internal reconstruction, and in light of the recent
star chart update someone with knowledge of Romani should attempt to falsify
his hypothesis. You might not succeed, but honest historical linguistics is a
satisfying journey.

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ddingus
I love that book.

Every time I look at it, I get the feeling someone had a vision. Maybe took
something particularly great. Maybe was just a little too bat shit. Maybe
drank bad mead?

Whatever the source for the excellent illustrations, they convey a strange
land with compelling oddities. It is all fantastic!

Should this prove to be trolling?

Epic whoever you were. Well played.

~~~
92543927
I think the Voynich Manuscript was written by someone who let his/her part of
the brain responsible for language understanding run in reverse, so generating
a new language. This new language, "speaking in tongues", follows the rules of
Universal Grammar, so all frequency analysis will point to it being a legit
language, yet the language itself will be forever indecipherable. The same
holds for the undeciphered Zodiac cyphers. The "one time pad" used by the
creators was probably forgotten the next day.

~~~
fb03
The phenomena you mentioned (speaking in tongues) is called Glossolalia, and
yeah, it is essentially rhythmic mouth yapping with enough resemblance to
other 'human utterances' to be misread as an actual language.

~~~
ddingus
Side note:

I was once part of a youth group and was strongly pressured to do that.

My inhibition was profound. At that moment I gave organized religion up. I am
not religious, but do seem spiritual. Go figure.

Between that and being told who to hate and what platinum album was gonna send
me to hell, it was enough.

I could have done it that day. Make up some stuff, or just let the
vocalizations flow. But why?

I did find the others listening to garner meaning super interesting. There is
a sort of resonance possible too. Speakers, or utterers more precisely, pick
up common elements. The whole affair becomes sort of tribal.

Over time, all sorts of status, membership, meta basically, is inferred
through many sessions.

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dwighttk
I decoded the Voynich manuscript! It just says "Hey lookit this weird crap"
over and over in a bunch of made up languages.

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jerzyt
Why is there any doubt about the age of the manuscript? Hasn't it been carbon-
dated?

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jerzyt
OK, the first link answers the question. Why does the article in ArsTechnica
make it sound like it could possibly a fake made by Voynich?

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TeMPOraL
100% serious, I still maintain this is the most sensible explanation for the
Voynich manuscript [https://www.xkcd.com/593/](https://www.xkcd.com/593/),
though now I'm starting to consider that hyper_reality's explanation is even
better:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962448).

(TL;DR: xkcd - D&D book; hyper_reality - scamming someone rich.)

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michrassena
If nothing else, to the non-expert like myself, at least this claim seems
plausible. I've seen a wide range of other claims that seem way off-base. It
seems unlikely to be of Meso-American origin, for instance.

I kind of hope it remains unsolved. The document is far more compelling as a
mystery than whatever its contents might be.

