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 slightly modified version of Greek alphabet, another, more complex, was made of dots and small squiggles that were fast to write (I was fascinated with the Arabic writing system at the time and took inspiration from it even though it didn't look anything like that).
I would write pages of nonsense in that writing system, just to see how it would flow or change over time, just to find patterns, just to have fun.
I even invented my own calendar, using the 88 day revolution of Mercury around the Sun as the year.
When I look at the Voynich Manuscript, all I see is the product of a fertile imagination that went a lot farther than my early teenage attempts at building a coherent world for myself.
I believe that these unconvincing attempts at finding meaning elsewhere -or degrading the object by calling it a hoax- are distracting us from the real beauty of this work of love and imagination.
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?
I know several dialects that are dying out, that lived and evolved for hundreds of years within 50km of each other, each of which is practically incomprehensible to a speaker of the other. Seeing them in written form is painful, because some kind of mapping has to be invented to the latin character set, and I can absolutely see someone inventing their own characters for the sounds not represented.
I just created a user account for the first time to tell you that he is not actually making a false dichotomy. Had he initially presented those two as the only possible options, you would be correct. But in his response what he was in fact doing was asking which of two choices seemed more realistic, in the context of his initial statement being questioned.
That out of the 300+ plants described about 12% could match some existing ones doesn't really allow anyone to make definitive conclusion as to whether these plants could be real. I'm sure you could match some of the simple ones to more than one plant and that still 85%+ that are unaccounted for.
Beside, that doesn't detract from the fact that the author of the manuscript could still have found inspiration into existing plants, imagination doesn't preclude a basis in reality.
Maybe the manuscript was written in Mexico. Maybe it is written in a cypher to obfuscate the fact that some of its content might be believed to be heretical (it contains a fair amount of naked women and appears to have some diagrams and illustrations that may relate to a theory of the origins of life or an animistic explanation of natural phenomena).
In an case, it's certainly an interesting subject of research, but I still think that the possibility of it being a work of pure fiction, maybe for the sole amusement of an eccentric rich patron, is a possibility.
Certainly. I agree with many of your excellent points. One other possibility is that this Manuscript copied from those earlier texts while 'adding' additional 'wholly new' creations. Or even that our knowledge of the bio-diversity of Central and South America is still lacking...
When this was still a curio with no apparent ties to any part of the world, I figured it was simply another 'esoteric knowledge system' using symbols and the structures of the information to convey that information without giving it away to the uninitiated. I wondered about the placement of leaves and vascular systems, colors used in combinations, the combinations of animals and plants and placements on the page. All the sorts of things esoteric scholars used to encipher their information in other works.
I think this final bit is what captivates the modern mind: we yearn to understand, even if the subject might turn out to be "meaningless" beyond a work of fantasy.
Imagine if that was written a few centuries ago and was recently discovered without being able to know who wrote it or be able to replace it within its context. I'm pretty sure all sorts of people would speculate wildly about its hidden meaning.
> I'm not sure why we only consider that this manuscript is either a hoax or a forgotten language.
Because researchers have spent years studying it and have come to the conclusion that those are the two most likely scenarios. I'm sure they considered and eliminated others.
The combination of the Voynich Manuscript's history of translation claims, taken together with the origin of this work (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3326436/I...), leads me to view this with at least something of an air of caution.
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 80% of the manuscript that has to be gibberish because the information density is too low to be some kind of natural language... why is another attempt along these lines interesting?
then handwave away the 80% of the manuscript that has to be gibberish because the information density is too low to be some kind of natural language
Well, if you'd read more carefully, you'd know that Stephen Bax is precisely claiming that it is a natural language. And I don't know as much as you regarding the other translation attempts, but from what I gathered, they made assumptions which are incorrect from a linguistic perspective (e.g words "too long" or "too short" for it to be a natural language, which in fact only proves that it's likely not a european language)
I think you mis-read that sentence. The 'because ...' applies to 'has to be gibberish' not 'handwave away the 80%'. He's saying that it is impossible to be a natural language because the information density is too low and that this author as well as all others willfully ignore that reality.
So, presumably you think these folk are wrong then -
Probing the Statistical Properties of Unknown Texts: Application to the Voynich Manuscript
While the use of statistical physics methods to analyze large corpora has been useful to unveil many patterns in texts, no comprehensive investigation has been performed on the interdependence between syntactic and semantic factors. In this study we propose a framework for determining whether a text (e.g., written in an unknown alphabet) is compatible with a natural language and to which language it could belong. The approach is based on three types of statistical measurements, i.e. obtained from first-order statistics of word properties in a text, from the topology of complex networks representing texts, and from intermittency concepts where text is treated as a time series. Comparative experiments were performed with the New Testament in 15 different languages and with distinct books in English and Portuguese in order to quantify the dependency of the different measurements on the language and on the story being told in the book. The metrics found to be informative in distinguishing real texts from their shuffled versions include assortativity, degree and selectivity of words. As an illustration, we analyze an undeciphered medieval manuscript known as the Voynich Manuscript. We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts. We also obtain candidates for keywords of the Voynich Manuscript which could be helpful in the effort of deciphering it. Because we were able to identify statistical measurements that are more dependent on the syntax than on the semantics, the framework may also serve for text analysis in language-dependent applications.
Oh, I don't really have an opinion either way or the other (as I don't have enough information on it). I was just clarifying the intent of my grandparent.
Well, in clarifying someone else's intent you appear to have gone a bit further and seemed to be supportive of them about what is and isn't reality in this case, which doesn't seem to make much sense if you don't actually have an opinion on this subject.
How do you know their intent anyway? Are they actually your grandparent?
I think you mis-read my original post. The last sentence had this structure: "He's saying ... and ..." (i.e., he said both those things [including the one about reality]).
And, I knew his intent based on reading comprehension and context.
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.
Remember, journalism. If he even said that, his next sentence might have been "Of course, that had been tried a thousand times and wasn't very new by itself."
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.
The linked story is from before the merger (2005), and before the center Bax works at was founded (at a third campus).
I wouldn't say that story has much relevance here. You'd want to look into the credentials of his language center and Bax himself (which look decent to me, though I don't know anything in particular.)
However, if you given an appropriate weighting for The Telegraph and consider the influence of Betterige, any reasonable Bayesian analysis would conclude from this evidence that Luton can't be all that bad.
"A famous analysis done in the 1970's by US Navy cryptographer Prescott Currier found that the Voynich manuscript is written in two distinct languages. He used the term languages, but also cautioned that they're also consistent with different subject matter, different encryption schemes, or possibly just different dialects. He called them Voynich-A and Voynich-B. Interestingly, Voynich-A and Voynich-B are in two different handwritings, though both use the same alphabet and script. Every page of the book is written entirely in either A or B. The Biology and Star sections of the book are written in Voynich-B; the others are written in Voynich-A. The exception is the first and largest section, Botanical, which contains some of each. But they're not simply interspersed. The way the book is bound uses bifolios, which are groups of pages folded together, which are then stacked on top of one another to be bound. Each bifolio in the Voynich manuscript is written entirely in one language or the other."
Existance of Voynich-A and Voynich-B dialects supports the theory that the script was invented by a small group of people. Different languages also is consistent with the theory that the script is written in some language that didn't previously have a writing.
Surprising discovery about the Voynich manuscript - it contains hundreds of pictures of naked women, probably outnumbering the pictures of plants. Maybe the focus on botany is misguided!
It could be a poem. Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, with the first letter of each sentence of the stanza being with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the first stanza, each verse starts with aleph, in the second beth, and so on.
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.
Quantity is a quality of it's own. I think getting large number of people to try something is a good way to move forward. Sure it is not efficient, but fairly reliable.
i assure you it was intended to be a constructive combined effort. i only skimmed the article linked but it doesn't seem to reference the fact that the kid who was falsely identified was found dead, presumably by his own hand. "hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works", as they say.
on a lighter note, if you consider an open source project "crowdsourced" then i posit the current collaborative academic efforts to decode the manuscript are "crowdsourced" as well.
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" :)
Well, he's trying to recognize the plants and work out backwards from their known names, but there's a lot of assumptions and glossing over involved in this approach.
1) A figure hints at a sunflower, but the idea is refuted based on the supposed location and date of this manuscript (sunflower is native from the American continent).
2) Another figure was recognized as "coriander", that looks nothing like it, but they went with it anyway because the transcript was possible.
It looks like a botanist is more likely to figure out this manuscript than a linguist. The other theory that this manuscript is about plants from the american continent [1] is less flawed in my opinion. It could also explain why it's in an totally unfamiliar script, as it could be a pre-Spanish language, or an attempt from a foreign to codify it.
Agree, it's hard to look at this [1] and say with a straight face that "coriander" was "convincingly identified". Short googling leads to half a dozen of alternative identifications.
This is pretty cool, and if it is not a hoax then this is one of the only documents that remains a mystery in the age of us cracking codes, not just ones like the Zimmermann telegram and the Venona project, but even the Vigenère cipher which was eventually broken and deciphered.
So this could be like navajo code talkers ... an organic language that is hard to decipher because it comes from a culture so unconnected to anything, that it developed its own symbolism. This is an intersection of cryptography and history.
> Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
As the author of this work states it himself, this is a "proposed partial decoding" and it is "tentative and provisional".
But anyway, the methodology is interesting and the video is worth watching. Although I'd be surprised all his speculations are correct, it seems to be the way to go.
The page numbering used below is taken from the Yale PDF.
* On page 49v in the left margin, you can clearly read "1 2 3 4 5", suggesting again to me that the writer had previous knowledge of other languages. The same page has more arabic number series in the left margin of the page, "0 2 9" repeats, and "8 9" occurs (read top-down). I may be confused by the apperance of the symbols. However the "1 2 3 4 5" sequence is a extremely unlikely coincidence.
* These numbers in the left margin can be seen on several other pages, such as 54v. Again, i may be confused by the appearance of the symbols. However the more i look at it, it does look like a code.
* On 57v, we can see what appears to be an alphabet sequence in the circles. The sequence is mirrored on the other part of the same circle in the second circle counted from the outside.
* Page 66r again has a left-column top-down list of symbols, what looks like a encryption key of sorts.
Many clues in the document makes me believe it is unlikely to orginate from america, such as crossbowmen, castles and bath houses.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It reminds me of attending freshman orientation. It was suggested to us that we use our university e-mail address for all professional communication.
They didn't really have a good answer for whether that e-mail would stick around after I graduated. Or whether access to that account would be available forever, or whether it would be free.
I didn't even bother asking why anyone would want an ugly e-mail address like pxl014000@utdallas.edu to be their official formal means of communication.
I was promised when I was in school that my email would be maintained forever. They shut it off last year, about 10 years after the promise. No skin off my nose, since I used a "real" one even then, but it inconvenienced some people I knew.
(In other news, I recommend owning your own domain quite highly. You can use it to farm services out to any number of providers with just some DNS entries, but it means you can switch any of them any time just as easily.)
> They didn't really have a good answer for whether that e-mail would stick around after I graduated. Or whether access to that account would be available forever, or whether it would be free.
Yeah, that can be an issue. It seems to be pretty common now for universities to let folks keep their email addresses (since they often outsource the addresses to google).
> I didn't even bother asking why anyone would want an ugly e-mail address like pxl014000@utdallas.edu to be their official formal means of communication.
Very true. Though, often one can set up an email alias (assuming you don't have a name that's too common!).
Why can't people just realise humour is not unique to one's own time period and culture.
Jumped the shark here -
"He also speculates that the reason this work is written in a language never seen before was that it was made by a small group of people who belonged to a culture that didn’t have a written form."
I belong to a culture (North Caucasian) that doesn't / didn't have it's own writing script in that time frame. That also faced havoc due to mongol conquest (so this might have created refugees).
This discovery excites me because the person also mentions that it has Caucasian characters in the manuscript. So maybe it was written by my ancestors.
> This discovery excites me because the person also mentions that it has Caucasian characters in the manuscript.
That actually, to my mind, increases the probability that it is nothing serious. When Westerners 'discovered' the Caucasian alphabets there was a brief mania for them among the small number of people who got excited by that kind of thing. One result was the 'Theban alphabet':
Which looks semi-profound and a little like Georgian, but is only just a bog-simple glyph cipher on top of the Latin alphabet, based partly on the recent publication of Georgian grammar in Latin.
Voynich's Caucasian characters may have just been following the latest trend in cryptography/occultism.
Do you mean to imply that the Voynich manuscript is "obviously" a joke ?
Do you mean to imply that, in your view, the invention of a new alphabet to write an hitherto unwritten language, which would then have failed to gain widespread acceptance, is a less realistic explanation than your own theory ?
Would you please care to explain it in greater details, then ?
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.
For pretty much all real smaller languages the alphabet and writing concepts was a mishmash of other, more developed languages that their educated people happened to know. And usually the early versions were horrible, horrible mismatches trying to fit a square peg into a round hole; multiple sounds mapping to a single 'proper' letter, making up new symbols, making up new writing concepts to represent peculiarities of grammar (and then finding out that these concepts don't really work).
There are languages that have tried multiple very different scripts - depending on time period, latin, cyrillic and arabic-style; with different writing styles of the exact same spoken language having almost nothing in common if they were developed in isolation because of differences in location&country.
Would Korean fall under this category along with Vietnamese?
I ask because while I can't read Korean, I know enough to sound things out based on its character set. Which is really really cool.
I also dated a vietnamese girl and the latin script they use now instead of the hanji/chinese derived script in use prior is so pervasive almost nobody can read older vietnamese outside of scholars.
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 experts in many fields for years. And now someone has decoded it! (In a paper yet to pass peer review?)
I'd go with one myself and I think the reason people chose two is because 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.
Choosing two doesn't really make sense and I'm just putting my opinion out there why people do.
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.
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.
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 slightly modified version of Greek alphabet, another, more complex, was made of dots and small squiggles that were fast to write (I was fascinated with the Arabic writing system at the time and took inspiration from it even though it didn't look anything like that).
I would write pages of nonsense in that writing system, just to see how it would flow or change over time, just to find patterns, just to have fun.
I even invented my own calendar, using the 88 day revolution of Mercury around the Sun as the year.
When I look at the Voynich Manuscript, all I see is the product of a fertile imagination that went a lot farther than my early teenage attempts at building a coherent world for myself.
I believe that these unconvincing attempts at finding meaning elsewhere -or degrading the object by calling it a hoax- are distracting us from the real beauty of this work of love and imagination.