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Voynich manuscript: the solution?

the-tls.co.uk

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Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#81

Post by gecko »

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.

The summary above is a bit off. The conclusion is that it's a Syriac-derived script for a dialect of the Old Roma language. Think how Urdu is an Indic language written with a Semitic script.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#82

Post by raverbashing »

dotancohen wrote: post #72
sago wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Being the Voynich manuscript "kinda cursive" I would say it is possible you have the phenomenon of two (or more) drawings being the same letter (or ligatures happening).

> changes it's letter

changes its letter

> changes it's meaning

changes its meaning

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#83

Post by qubex »

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…

Wouldn't abbreviations (a kind of compression) actually increase the apparent information density of the text? Or have I breathtakingly misunderstood something utterly fundamental?

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#84

Post by tarboreus »

He doesn't address any of the central mysteries of the manuscript, including that none of the plants in the herbarium don't actually exist in nature and the "tubes" that the women in the bath section travel through, not to mention their odd skin coloration. Plus his exploration is convenient in that he doesn't have to actually decipher anything.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#86

Post by coroxout »

joe_the_user wrote: post #74
dotancohen wrote: post #72

Earlier 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…

I do agree that the repeated glyphs and almost-repeated "words" are a big red flag against "can this actually mean anything?", and I'm not sure the idea of abbreviations really explains that.

However, many medieval documents even in known real languages do contain almost undifferentiated glyphs one after the other:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)

Not quite the same, but something similar might conceivably apply to e.g. the Voynich's c-like characters.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#87

Post by coroxout »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #77
markbnj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might have been sold for a high price, but vellum and coloured inks were expensive at the time, and it is a very long document when a much shorter one would still seem to fit the bill.

Seems a bit of a gamble if that was the plan, and the scribes were presumably either well-to-do or trusted by someone well-to-do if they could get their hands on the raw materials. That makes the prank/con/crazy spirit writing theory seem less likely to me but certainly doesn't rule either out.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#88

Post by mcguire »

nkurz wrote: post #20

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…

"As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format."

Oh, my.

Either this is a parody or a tutorial on how to identify "crazy person goes down rat hole" situations.

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#89

Post by mcguire »

mcguire wrote: post #88
nkurz wrote: post #20

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…

" As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format. " Oh, my. Either this is a parody or a tutorial on how to identify "crazy person goes down rat hole" situations.

"Systematic study of every single character in the Lexicon identified further ligatures and abbreviations in the Voynich manuscript and set a precedent. It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter."

And here we go....

Re: Voynich manuscript: the solution?

#90

Post by mcguire »

mcguire wrote: post #89
mcguire wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format. " Oh, my. Either this is a parody or a tutorial on how to identify "crazy person goes down rat hole" situations.

" Systematic study of every single character in the Lexicon identified further ligatures and abbreviations in the Voynich manuscript and set a precedent. It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter. " And here we go....

"This was problematic until I realized that not only had the folios of the manuscript been cropped (the images of flowers and roots have been severed and the tops of folios hacked) but, more importantly, the indexes that should have been there were now absent. Indexes are present in many other similar books: a system of cross-reference for illness, complaints, names of plants and page numbers. For the sake of brevity, the name of both plant and malaise were superfluous in the text so long as they could be found in the indexes matched with a page number."

Whee! It's like a slip-n-slide greased with butter.

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