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Voynich manuscript: the solution?

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Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#51

Post by atemerev »

lisper wrote: post #34

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…

It looks more like stenography to me. You can even recognize the contours of regular Latin letters.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#52

Post by kingofpandora »

dmbaggett wrote: post #14

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

> tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac

Roma and Syriac are two radically different languages (Indo-European vs Semitic), so it's peculiar that the conclusion would be that it's one of the two!

Disclaimer, I haven't watched the video.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#53

Post by lisper »

coldtea wrote: post #47
lisper wrote: post #34

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…

> The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space. Couldn't the same (whitespace separation) be done for sentences in a logographic representation?

Of course that's possible, but I don't think so. The lengths of the groups seem to me to be distributed more like words than sentences.

[UPDATE:] More info here: http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html

This is particularly interesting:

"The apparent lack of common phrases is one of the main anomalies of the Voynich MS text."

If that's really true I think that's a big clue. (Exactly what it's a clue of I'm not sure :-)

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#54

Post by sannee »

unkown-unknowns wrote: post #21
hcs wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of the work that was done to reverse engineer the Intel ME 11 [1], it was compressed with an unknown Huffman code which the team was nevertheless able to recover somehow. And that was with variable-length words! [1] http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html

From your link: > In particular, MINIX was chosen as the basis for the operating system (previously, ThreadX RTOS had been used). Now ME firmware includes a full-fledged operating system [...] Woah, did I read that correctly? That there is a version of MINIX running inside of the Intel processors of presumably almost every modern computer with an Intel CPU that has Intel ME in it? If so then that's insanely cool! I m…

Would be interesting to estimate if there are more MINIX instances or Linux instances running at this point.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#56

Post by rnhmjoj »

kingofpandora wrote: post #52
dmbaggett wrote: post #14

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

> tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac Roma and Syriac are two radically different languages (Indo-European vs Semitic), so it's peculiar that the conclusion would be that it's one of the two! Disclaimer, I haven't watched the video.

If I understand correctly his hypotheses is that the Roma while migrating from India to Europe picked up features of various languages, in particular they used an earlier version of Syriac for spelling their language. The Voynich language was based on this language but diverged substantially by losing the /d/ sound and more.

Watch the third video[1], it's much shorter but provides quite compelling evidence to support his theory.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-nFNt0

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#57

Post by dmbaggett »

sago wrote: post #50
dmbaggett wrote: post #14

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

As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. 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…

>As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic.

Natural language can be very surprising. :)

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

sannee wrote: post #54
unkown-unknowns wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From your link: > In particular, MINIX was chosen as the basis for the operating system (previously, ThreadX RTOS had been used). Now ME firmware includes a full-fledged operating system [...] Woah, did I read that correctly? That there is a version of MINIX running inside of the Intel processors of presumably almost every modern computer with an Intel CPU that has Intel ME in it? If so then that's insanely cool! I m…

Would be interesting to estimate if there are more MINIX instances or Linux instances running at this point.

If you count Android devices as running Linux, then no, since most of them are ARM-based.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#59

Post by ouid »

dmbaggett wrote: post #14

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

He has a third video now. I know because I watched all of them.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#60

Post by ollin »

dmbaggett wrote: post #14

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

Very interesting videos! Do you know of any discussion by linguists of this analysis? I checked /r/linguistics and couldn't find anything, but I'm a bit worried about posting it there since I'm not enough of a linguist to judge the merits of the analysis myself. I found some discussion of Bax's work here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/64p2hw/secret_... but nothing about Volder.
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