
Secret Knowledge – or a Hoax? - Vigier
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/voynich-manuscript-secret-knowledge-or-hoax/
======
Nursie
The definite way it talks about the herbal section towards the end of the
article is unfounded. Some of the herbal has in fact been the key to an
attempt to translate a few words in recent years.

It may be hoax, it may not. But declaring "the plants in the book's herbal
section never did and never could exist in nature" is nonsense.

Not all pages depict impossible plants and the drawings themselves may be
highly derived, second or third hand illustrations.

IMHO it's unlikely to be a hoax due to the expense of such a hoax at the time,
and I understand language patterm analysis looks about right - i.e. if it's a
hoax it is a damn clever one and seems to defeat methods of analysis far ahead
of its time.

Either way I doubt it contains the secret knowledge of the ancients.

\--edit-- In fact inconsistency and weirdness in medieval manuscripts is
really not evidence of a hoax to me - evidence they got things wrong, evidence
of magical and mythical thinking, sure. But not specifically of a hoax.

~~~
DonaldFisk
I'm not sure that "hoax" is the right word for it. The vellum's been
radiocarbon dated to early 15th century, and the illustrations suggest a
similar time period. So that rules out a hoax.

The question is whether the text contains any meaningful encoded information,
or is completely meaningless.

~~~
Nursie
Well, it rules out a more recent hoax. I would consider a book produced in the
early 15th century that deliberately contained.nothing of use to be something
of a hoax. A magician's prop, for instance.

There's another question of whether, even if information was once encoded in
there, it is recoverable. Either because of some sort of hash-like function
applied to the data, or just because there's not enough to go on.

It's certainly intriguing.

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DonaldFisk
I've recently carried out a through statistical analysis of the text and
concluded that it's almost certainly meaningless, and have figured out how the
text could have been generated.

I'll start a new thread ...
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14091216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14091216))

~~~
Nursie
On a brief scan that looks hideously complicated and more than a little like
extracting a property of some text and the being surprised that when you
replay you get something similar. Can you say that your technique, when
applied to any and all natural languages, absolutely does not do something
similar?

I'm not sure many people are going to buy it.

~~~
DonaldFisk
I had that thought myself. Briefly, my theory is that the different parts of
the text were generated using state transition tables. The actual weights on
the transitions are arbitrary, and can only be determined by reverse
engineering the original manuscript.

Only one (physical) table needs to be generated at first, but the values of
the transition weights do need to be changed as the scribe proceeds through
the manuscript.

Could it be used for English? I doubt it. The morphology of English and other
Indo-European languages is too complex to for a reasonably-sized state machine
to realistically generate.

Maybe for something more regular such as Pinyin Mandarin or Yale Cantonese BUT
the output wouldn't fool anyone who knows those languages, and a linguist who
had never seen them before would very quickly become suspicious - no
discernable word order, common words repeated several times in a row.

~~~
mcbits
Some people with schizophrenia invent their own languages and alphabets, and
their speech can seem randomly generated in severe cases. Or an alchemist
might have been exposed to chemicals that caused schizophrenic symptoms. I
wonder if the statistics would be similar.

~~~
DonaldFisk
While it's still worth testing that, my understanding is that it's very
difficult for _anyone_ to think up values indistinguishable from random, and
this appears to be what we're dealing with here.

What I'm proposing is that the words we see are the _output_ of a random
process, but that their _order_ appears to be random, in the statistical
sense. However, everyone who's studied the text agrees that the glyph
distribution within words conforms to a well-defined syntax, and there are
significant differences between different parts of the text. My theory
explains these.

Of course, a well-designed cipher will appear to be random, and the input to
the text generation process appears to be just that, but the problem is that
there's no way of subsequently decrypting the text, as information (in the
mathematical sense, as well as the everyday sense) would be lost.

------
joshuaheard
If you are familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, there is no new information
in this article. My lay theory is that it was an art project by some bored
monk, or someone who wrote those types of books had dementia or something that
allowed his motor skills to operate, but the mind was gone. Either that or
aliens.

~~~
anotheryou
did you see this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-
nFNt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-nFNt0) (watch part 1 and 2 for
the details)

He convinced me at least :)

He kinda takes off where Stephen Bax left it, but also uncovers some
methodical errors of Bax.

~~~
joshuaheard
Fantastic. I believe it really is a language. I hope it gets translated soon.

His linguistic analysis shows that the book was written in a dialect of the
language of the Gypsies, aka the Roma People, nomads who slowly migrated from
India, through the Middle East, to Europe starting 1500 years ago. This is why
the language contains elements from so many language groups, and no one can
figure it out. It is probably some sort of reference book they kept with them
as it contains star charts and plant descriptions.

~~~
anotheryou
I'm surprised though, that no old roma stumbled upon it and recognised the
language or anything. It sounds like someone speaking their language could
speed up translations tremedously :).

~~~
joshuaheard
I read up on the Roma on Wikipedia after seeing the video, and apparently,
they branched off during their migration into several groups. Their language
branched off as well, taking on characteristics of their home countries.
Wikipedia said the various dialects probably become so distinct, they likely
could not understand each other. Eventually, some died out or were
assimilated, which could explain your point.

I can't wait until they actually translate it to find out what it is. Maybe
they should start with a Roma translator.

------
anotheryou
I'm pretty sure this guy solved (part of) it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ)

if you want to skip the basics jump right in to part 2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4)

He kinda takes off where Stephen Bax left it, but also uncovers some
methodical errors of Bax.

I'd be very interested in what someone who knows a bit more about this than me
thinks of this.

edit: short version in his update: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-
nFNt0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-nFNt0)

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kazinator
The Internet self publishing phenomenon informs us that there is no shortage
of lunatics in the world willing to crank out pages and pages of gibberish.

This is just the old school version of someone's rambling blog or kooky Usenet
postings.

Or it could be a _Lorem ipsum_ intended to demonstrate someone's typesetting
services. "I can take your manuscript and make these types of illustrations
with this style of text flowing around them for this kind of general look. Oh,
don't try to read the text, it's just gibberish for illustrative purposes."

~~~
Nursie
Inventing a whole new alphabet for your typesetting demo is going a bit far...

Also it's not typeset, it's handwritten.

------
strictnein
Looking at the example page they provided (slight NSFW warning, there's
crudely drawn nudes present):

[http://www.nybooks.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/duffy_2-04...](http://www.nybooks.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/03/duffy_2-042017.jpg)

That's the first time I've ever looked at the pages closely, and man does that
just look like a couple of nonsense words repeated fairly frequently, with
slight variations.

~~~
ballenf
Looks like a lorem ipsum web mockup to me. Maybe was an early equivalent of a
sales pitch for the author's skills. Just seems like odd features like the
fold-out pages, sketches of plants and nudes to combine in one unless the sole
purpose was basically marketing.

Can't wait for 100 years from now people trying to read meaning into all the
various lorem variations combined with kitten placeholder images out there.
"This culture revolved around mysterious repeated verses praising the juvenile
feline in all its forms."

~~~
tribune
This would be a completely impractical way of "marketing", though. Surely an
author could use real words (or at least real characters like Lorem Ipsum) for
that. And why would he fill a whole manuscript?

------
billwear
You might try to see if it's come kind of contextual speedwriting. I learned a
version of speedwriting in college in which the letter "e" and the letter "i"
are exactly the same and deduced later by context; likewise, the letter "h"
and the letters "la" appear to be the same. In other words, it might be more
of a crude symbolic code. Just a thought.

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biofox
For those interested in Terence McKenna, I highly recommend his lecture on the
Voynich Manuscript:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTBOaaeTxm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTBOaaeTxm8)

~~~
najajomo
Terence McKenna, he of the DMT induced Machine elves :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THa7kpuVwO4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THa7kpuVwO4)

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swayvil
The Voynich Manuscript!

Here it is for your perusal :
[https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript](https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript)

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Animats
Mandatory XKCD: [1]

[1] [https://xkcd.com/593/](https://xkcd.com/593/)

------
beaconstudios
this article is really rambling. I don't need to know the entire history of
the manuscript and all the characters involved in its movement to pick up on
the intrigue of the story.

~~~
lithos
Compared to some articles about the book it's not the worst.

It's also an interest piece, rather than normal news. So the editor will let
things slide.

