

New clue to Voynich manuscript mystery - semiel
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/07/new-clue-voynich-manuscript-mystery

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jccooper
It would be lovely if it were a surprise addition to the corpus of pre-Spanish
meso-American language.

We do have a reasonable Nahuatl corpus, and it remains a (very minor) spoken
language, so if it is such, there's a good chance it could be understood. But
there's plenty of extinct indigenous languages with very little or no
attestation, and if it's one of those, well, hopefully it's related to
something we still know.

The orthography remains a problem, but it's quite plausible that some friar
somewhere in Mexico came up with this European-derived script to transcribe
the local language, and it didn't stick for any number of reasons. There are
several non-standardized Latinesque orthographies we know (see Carochi) for
Nahuatl, so it's a known phenomenon. (And there's still no standard system!)
The hand of the Voynich seems reasonably practiced, so it must've had some
use, but it could possibly still have been only one man over a few years.
(It's clearly not an indigenous script.)

The friar involved could perhaps be called too clever for his own good;
imagine if St Cyril wrote a few books in his script and then died of bad
gruel, and some Pope got hold of them. Same sort of thing. If the (theoretical
Spanish friar) Voynich author had been less inventive, we'd (if this theory is
true) have long since understood it.

Anyway, hopefully a few Meso-American language experts can take a look and
decide if there's a possible match.

~~~
taejo
IIRC, the distribution of letter frequencies doesn't really fit with it being
an alphabet for a natural language.

~~~
kristopolous
I believe that presumes it's a traditional phonetic alphabet. I'm not a
linguist by any measure, but the inventiveness I have seen in human languages
gives me hope here.

But let's assume this is an elaborate hoax by a masterful con-artist. Are you
really claiming that someone spent so long crafting such a forgery, with
nothing before or after - like some black dahlia of literature?

~~~
trevelyan
> like some black dahlia of literature?

What do you mean by this? I haven't heard the expression before....

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codezero
Reading the paper, they make a lot of assertions that are a bit too confident
like this plant is most definitely X and this is obviously Y. This is an
interesting idea but just because they resemble some plants doesn't make them
those plants all things considered.

Original article [http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-
voy...](http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-
voynich.html?ts=1391822845&signature=f780cf05ea21924547b2bfd7ce241b67)

~~~
ttctciyf
Previously on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7108472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7108472)

~~~
semiel
The top comment on this link has a nice explanation of why the offered
explanation is unlikely to be a sufficient one. I find the claims intriguing,
but a full decryption would definitely take more.

~~~
leoc
Here's someone else taking a [http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2014/01/21/brand-
new-new-worl...](http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2014/01/21/brand-new-new-
world-nahuatl-voynich-manuscript-theory) go at the paper, too.

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hcarvalhoalves
Well, it's a good theory. Being a manuscript from Mexico, it wouldn't be
surprising if it had eluded many researchers, who often have an European-
centric background. In Brazil there are also manuscripts in the native's, non-
written language (tupi) codified by catholic priests dating back to XVI, but
those are better understood because the language was kept alive up to the late
XIX. If it weren't that, it would be undecipherable by now, maybe called a
hoax too.

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drivers99
"If it was a hoax, then we have to invoke Jules Verne and his time machine."

I wonder if he meant H.G. Wells, or if that was a reference to Back to the
Future III.

~~~
lotharbot
Either way, I enjoyed the underlying sentiment:

when you're trying to analyze text from documents of uncertain origin, one of
the most powerful tools is to look for information that would be known to
someone living in a particular place and time, but that wouldn't have been
known to "outsiders" (ie, forgers) until after the manuscript was discovered.
For example, if you find that a manuscript discovered in the early 1900s uses
the right statistical distribution of names from a particular area in the
1600s, and that name distribution was determined from more recent
archaeological finds, that suggests the document was written by someone from
that time and place.

~~~
judk
That's like a message with a cryptographic signatures carved into the fabric
of our planet. Awesome.

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akusete
Obligatory [http://xkcd.com/593/](http://xkcd.com/593/)

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mcguire
I was going to write something similar, but nickpelling's comment is better
than what I would have come up with:

"The shockingly dull truth is that, if you compare what these two authors have
published in an American herbal medicine quarterly with the hundreds of bad
Voynich theories out there, they're doing basically the same thing in
basically the same way:-

"(1) fixating on a single observation that just happened to excite their
imagination

"(2) doggedly following the logic of that single observation to the end

"(3) ignoring or dismissing all evidence that would seem to contradict their
story"

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thearn4
The Voynich manuscript is one of my favorite mysteries. In a lot of ways, I
hope it's never really solved.

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lucasnemeth
Lost my interest when he mixed Jules Verne with H G Wells.

