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[1] https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ
Some really interesting analyses in there.
There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former linguist) is this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac
Other than declaring that the solution is obvious to a self-declared expert such as himself, the author (Nicholas Gibbs) doesn't appear to give any proof of his theory. So far I can can find online, this piece is the only thing he has ever published about the Voynich manuscript: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich Who is Nicholas Gibbs? Does anyone besides Nicholas Gibbs trust his opinion on these…
> A chance remark just over three years ago brought me a commission from a television production company to analyse the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript and examine the commentators’ theories.
Other than declaring that the solution is obvious to a self-declared expert such as himself, the author (Nicholas Gibbs) doesn't appear to give any proof of his theory. So far I can can find online, this piece is the only thing he has ever published about the Voynich manuscript: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich Who is Nicholas Gibbs? Does anyone besides Nicholas Gibbs trust his opinion on these…
You know, it does seem odd that there's no background on the author and his qualifications attached to the article, and I can't seem to find any sign of him elsewhere.
By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich
manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies
lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval
period, an instruction manual for the health and
well being of the more well to do women in society,
which was quite possibly tailored to a single
individual.The idea that the Voynich manuscript is a medical text seems plausible, but the theory that it uses a logographic representation (one symbol per word) rather than an alphabetic or even a syllabaric (one symbol per syllable) one seems less likely to me. A cursory examination of the manuscript ( http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html ) reveals that the lexicography looks much more like an alphabetic encoding than a logograp…
Couldn't the same (whitespace separation) be done for sentences in a logographic representation?
Rather convenient "solution". The solution is the heading and index...which are missing. Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be solved.
It doesn't matter if it's convenient as long as it's also true.
>Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution
Huh? Indexes can be reconstructed.
There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former linguist) is this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac
I always thought XKCD's interpretation[1] of what the manuscript is about was, despite being comical in nature, the most intriguing... 1: https://xkcd.com/593/
I mean if tolkien had written the Lord Of The Rings in elvish the XKCD answer would still be essentially correct but it wouldn't tell us what it said.
There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former linguist) is this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac
The videos are an impressive phonological reconstruction, but I predict (based on the assumption that the math isn't lying), that it would be effectively impossible to get much beyond ad-hoc phonetic correspondences with Romany, to any predictive morphology or syntax.
The solution in this article is rather plausible. If the writing is in a highly restricted vocabulary, with highly restricted syntax, and highly constrained domain, it would be possible to get the observed information density.
Comparing it to, say, Linear B or Egyptian hieroglyphs is instructive. Both of those clearly have the information density of regular human language.
In the end, the solution might be a combination. It might use some Roma/Syriac nouns, but it seems clear it doesn't use them in anything like a normal linguistic context.
Caveat: IANALinguist