The video offers very interesting view on how he approaches the problem and proceeds to solve the problem. From scientific point of view it just seems like guesswork, but as video goes further it's clear he has a real methodology to it. I was also very impressed how he all the time seemed very objective and used words like "probably", "could" and "possibly" to communicate that his findings still need further review.
Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the paper and found it to be intelligible and interesting, making reasonable attempts to justify sound, plausible hypothesis. Obviously he may not be right, but his explanations are well worth reading.
This describes many, many translation attempts of the Voynich Manuscript, though. At this point it's hard for me to consider another one of these attempts worth reading, because they all seem to follow the same pattern. Try and identify plants/stars/places in the text by their real names, work backwards from those names, find some other semi-intelligible parts of the manuscript based on that, then handwave away the 8…
Is it possible that the the author intentionally duplicates word for the sake of obfuscation, thus leading to the information density problem?
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#63I wish I knew more about linguistics to understand his this work further. Though it seems a bit odd to host his work on his own personal site, rather than one hosted by his institution.
> Though it seems a bit odd to host his work on his own personal site, rather than one hosted by his institution. Anecdotal experience of mine is that there's a trend for some academics (at least in astronomy) to put everything on their personal site. It makes for more consistent "personal branding", as your web presence isn't moved every 2-3 years as you move from postdoc to postdoc to faculty position.
Yup. Another example of this (from economics) is danariely.com.
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read the paper and found it to be intelligible and interesting, making reasonable attempts to justify sound, plausible hypothesis. Obviously he may not be right, but his explanations are well worth reading.
This describes many, many translation attempts of the Voynich Manuscript, though. At this point it's hard for me to consider another one of these attempts worth reading, because they all seem to follow the same pattern. Try and identify plants/stars/places in the text by their real names, work backwards from those names, find some other semi-intelligible parts of the manuscript based on that, then handwave away the 8…
Hm, if a portion has substantially low entropy compared to natural language, maybe it was records of something?
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unlike late 20th century, Writing in the 15th century was rare and a costly endeavor. It is possible that it is an expression of whimsical fantasy. But it would be highly unlikely for this reason.
Well, it certainly point toward a rich patron in any case, someone who could afford all this manual labour. But what is more likely? That this is a forgotten language of which only a single mystifying example exists (ignoring the completely unlikely plants being described in the manuscript), or that it is a work of fantasy that has merits of its own?
Now you are making a false dichotomy.
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the implication is that a likely explanation of the situation is that if the alphabet is a mish mash of other languages it is also possibly just a made up conglomeration that was used to make up the manuscript. Basically the xkcd comic would apply, just that the people (or person) that wrote it had a fairly broad linguistic ability. But I'm just assuming.
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…
Well as an aside, I myself when I was about 14 or so made up my own alphabet based on random glyphs i liked.
I used it to take notes in school and what not, but it was pretty simple. I did things like the thorn for th so it wasn't a direct 1->1 thing. So I could easily see #1 as a possibility. I just hope #2 is true. But its unlikely we'll know in our lifetime given that manuscripts history.
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This describes many, many translation attempts of the Voynich Manuscript, though. At this point it's hard for me to consider another one of these attempts worth reading, because they all seem to follow the same pattern. Try and identify plants/stars/places in the text by their real names, work backwards from those names, find some other semi-intelligible parts of the manuscript based on that, then handwave away the 8…
Is it possible that the the author intentionally duplicates word for the sake of obfuscation, thus leading to the information density problem?
It's more likely (if we take on the assumption that this is natural language) that the author is not writing in a written language style. It can be hard to appreciate how much spoken language is a literate society is influenced by writing; much of that is due to the fact that we largely keep our memories outside of our skulls these days. Oral language, especially that which is meant to be passed along, is full of repetition, alliteration, rhyme and pun. If the script is something more like an abjad than an alphabet, the repetition may not necessarily be repetition. That may pose additional serious problems if the language (if it is a real language) is an effective isolate (having no documented surviving relatives). An abjad is hard enough to deal with when you have a Semitic-style non-concatenative morphology (words of related meanings have consonants in common, with the vowels changing), but if there is punning without semantically common roots, then all you know is that you have words close to each other that use the same consonants.
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#68Here'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 weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters.
It's not like many languages out there end (or wrap, even!) their sentences with a couple of unique symbols.
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many papers on perpetual motion machines have you wanted to read in the last year? Does that make any commentary that you might make on the subject utterly worthless?
To dismiss a paper on perpetual motion machines you just need to know the implications of the first or second law of thermodynamics, about which there is, for all intents and purposes, unanimous consensus. To dismiss attempted translations of the Voynich manuscript, you'd need to read the attempted translation because there is no consensus whatsoever about the manufascript, except for the fact that it is untranslated…
That would only be true if every attempted translation were unique.
In other words, once you've dismissed one paper barking up the wrong tree you can confidently dismiss all the others that appear to be barking up the same tree.
Re: Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
#70I'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…
I did a similar thing too. I wrote a lot of bad adventure fiction in Runic around that same age, around 10-12. I still have most of it.