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Voynich manuscript: the solution?
71–80 of 97 posts
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#72There 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 (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'.
That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital letters, two glyphs per letter).
Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it's letter. Or Korean, where each 'letter' is composed of two or three interchangable components. Or Han, in which the number of instrument strokes in the glyph affect it's meaning.
There are so many variations on what constitutes a letter, never mind an individual glyph or a full word/concept, that one cannot use strictly European analysis techniques on arbitrary writing systems.
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital letters, two glyphs per letter). Imagine an al…
Well the document is definitely European. It may be an invented writing system, but it would probably be closer to existing European ones than something totally foreign.
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital letters, two glyphs per letter). Imagine an al…
Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it's letter.
But we don't have to imagine a random alphabet which Voynich might have been written in. We can look at the actual language in the manuscript. It often shows three or four Latin-like glyphs repeated. Unless you have access to some special way these symbols are differentiated or otherwise convey information, a way that all other would-be interpreters have missed, you really don't have an argument.
And as far as European thinking goes - there's no evidence I know of a non-European origin to the manuscript.
Edit: and the languages you cite have a larger, not smaller information content than European languages, see;
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6167/most-su...
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#75This guy started with a hypothesis and then set out to prove it by looking for evidence. He then said the evidence was missing (hacked off) but his hypothesis was still true. Really, it is not very persuasive.
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 broadly agree with XKCD's interpretation but it doesn't necessarily answer the question. 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.
Think Dungeons and Dragons, not LOTR.
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#77What if it is just Lorem Ipsum by someone who could draw but not actually write?
Not sure if serious, but on the off chance... seems unlikely. We create "Lorem Ipsum" gibberish to fill space because modern technology has made it trivially easy to do so. The same exercise would have taken a medieval writer many laborious hours.
But in contrast to Lorem Ipsum might have been sold for a high price, a la The Emperor's New Clothes?
Or, there's something called "spirit writing" isn't there, a sort of written form of speaking in tongues? Presumably the doing of which is also considered to be it's own reward.
Heck, perhaps a scribe went psychotic.
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'. That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital letters, two glyphs per letter). Imagine an al…
Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it's letter. But we don't have to imagine a random alphabet which Voynich might have been written in. We can look at the actual language in the manuscript. It often shows three or four Latin-like glyphs repeated. Unless you have access to some special way these symbols a…
It's an abbreviation? I guess that's the OP's thesis.
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#79I don't see a lot of "why" in this supposed solution. If what the author says is true, it sounds like an incredibly painstaking process to encode all of this, especially when it was something so tedious (it would make more sense if the source material were interesting or salacious!). I can sort of understand abbreviating the long plant names to individual symbols, referenced from an index, and I can understand ligatures for things like "etiam", but why make each and every single character represent a whole word? Surely the end result is that the manuscript, even with the index, becomes very, very hard to read?
And is there a good explanation for why this document apparently stands alone in history as the only manuscript written in this way? Were there others, and we just lost them? Was this just a particularly egregious example of this forgotten art, and others written in this manner were easier to decipher? Lastly, there's a whole Wikipedia page about "scribal abbreviations" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation - if decoding the Voynich manuscript were so easy as the author makes out ("It became obvious...") then why has some other medieval expert not already figured it out in the near-century people have been studying this manuscript?
Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?
#80A sample translation is the key thing I wanted to read in this article, and all they gave was an illegible low-resolution snippet without an English translation -- very annoying. As best as I can read, the purported Latin translation in the image at the top of the article says: Folia de oz et en de aqua et de radicts de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 2 et de radicis semenis ana 1 etium abonenticus confundo. Folia et…
Ana is the equivalent quantity of different ingredients used in the pharmaceutical preparation in Italy.
To me that translation makes sense.
Google translate is messing up badly it should be something like this for my remote knowledge of Latin:
1 leaf of oz in water, 3 ana (equivalent quantity) of aromatic roots, 2 ana of seeds, mix very well together.
Infuse the leaves mixed together with the aromatic (roots) and with the roots infusion and mix all together with 3 ana of root seeds.