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Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

medievalists.net

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Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#101

Post by klibertp »

Renaud wrote: post #51

I'm not sure why we only consider that this manuscript is either a hoax or a forgotten language. Why can't it be an expression of whimsical fantasy? When I was 12, as an introvert kid with too much imagination, I started inventing my own language. I would make up words, sometimes based off various other languages, sometime simply based on how they sounded. It had a couple of different writing systems, one was a sligh…

Too much imagination? You've since lost too much of it if you think there is such a thing as "too much imagination" :)

Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#103

Post by aaron695 »

Typhon wrote: post #84
aaron695 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda. Probability one - it's a joke/hoax/fun. Hence it's unique and no one has any idea about it in current day. The small group of people who created it had a laugh and are long dead. Probability two, it's a bizarre exciting new language we know absolutely nothing about in anything else. It's freely available on the internet for everyone to see, incredibly popular and know around the world and looked at by many exp…

Or maybe it's an existing language in a yet unknown script. they don't really get how much people in the past and in other cultures are just like us, they like funny, silly and fun things too Thank you for your condescension. Obviously, philologists, linguists and other specialists are stupidly wasting their time while you have it all figured out based on the "obvious" insight of one rather lame XKCD strip.

Meh, every few months on HN there's a story about how someone has decoded the Voynich differently.

Basically it's a cold reading each time. But people still buy into it.

You're welcome to believe what you want but to a logical person they can't all be correct, so something is going on here other than science.

Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#104

Post by cLeEOGPw »

marlin wrote: post #97
cLeEOGPw wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly from earlier discussions about this script, these numbers were written much later by some other owners to keep track of the ordering.

There are page numbering on every 2 pages in the top right/left corner. But I am not referring to these numbers. Here is the "12345" sequence on 49v: http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f49v/0.5/0.5/2.50 (top left corner, read top-to-bottom) Here is the "alphabet sequence", on 57v: http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f57v/0.5/0.5/2.50 at least the second & third from outside circles have repeating patterns of symbols…

Well, since the script seems to be influenced by Arabic writings, authors should have known Arabic numbering too. But it's not clear if these are original writings, as you said, we should look into previous research.

Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#105

Post by rantanplan »

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #44
rantanplan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire. It is efficient but fairly unreliable :)

I would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.

It depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the definition of "fairly unreliable" :)

Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#106

Post by pyre »

catshirt wrote: post #98
pyre wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original post could be construed as suggesting that he killed himself due to the false accusations.

he was a depressive runaway and a racist internet lynch mob was threatening to kill his family for something he didn't do. i suggested a correlation, i didn't propose it as fact. i'm curious as to what scenario you consider more probable?

It seems entirely possible that he was dead at the time that the lynch mob was hurling accusations at him, unless I'm missing something.

Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#107

Post by msbarnett »

Geee wrote: post #45
adamnemecek wrote: post #3

Here's a PDF for anyone who wants to take a stab :-) http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2...

Hah, on the page 85 that 'P' character got a bit out of hand. :) It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters. Not sure if that could be possible with real languages.

It's not that unlikely in highly formalized writing. You see similar phenomenon in very formal English registers, where you might see a whole run of sentences begin with "Whereas...." One after another.

Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds

#108

Post by catshirt »

pyre wrote: post #106
catshirt wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he was a depressive runaway and a racist internet lynch mob was threatening to kill his family for something he didn't do. i suggested a correlation, i didn't propose it as fact. i'm curious as to what scenario you consider more probable?

It seems entirely possible that he was dead at the time that the lynch mob was hurling accusations at him, unless I'm missing something.

you're right. i was considering the events in the order they were revealed, not necessarily the event they occurred. i'm not sure which it is now.
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