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So much for that Voynich manuscript "solution"
Last week, a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs published a long article in the Times Literary Supplement about how he'd cracked the code on the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.
As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media (we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations."
The weirdly-illustrated 15th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. In his article, Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point.
However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang, "They're not grammatically correct. It doesn't result in Latin that makes sense." She added, "Frankly I'm a little surprised the TLS published it...If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat."
Previously: Voynich Manuscript Partially Decoded
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @05:47PM (11 children)
Maybe I'm stretching here - but couldn't the Voynich manuscript be written in some sort of dog Latin? There doesn't seem to be much evidence that the manuscript actually has been cracked, but that seems to me a bad argument against it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:12PM (7 children)
To me, it looks like a medieval monk's homework (or punishment). A lot of repeated symbols and crude drawings, because it took years of training before they could master the skills to flawlessly copy books.
I saw one book from that era in Scotland the other day: jaw-dropping amazing letter consistency and page detail. Art and skill.
Before you get to that art level, you need to practice. This manuscript is drawn on average quality "paper" and was probably bound with wood. Not exactly a masterwork.
Until someone can prove it wrong, my vote in on full-scale training project, because no other explanation can be proven more right
Lorem ipsum out.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:33PM
To me, it looks like a junior coder's homework (or punishment). A lot of code reuse and unnecessary comments, because it takes years of practice before they can master the skills to flawlessly copy-and-paste from Stack Oberflow.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:13PM
That is the best possible answer I've ever heard for it. The time period is correct, and you have an interesting point about what it was written on.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:40PM (1 child)
Very interesting thought (and the larger theme is: what if this simply has a lot less meaning than we're looking for), but that explanation does have a couple of problems, too:
- If this is a training project, why isn't the text an intelligible copy of (fragments of) something? Making up a decent lore ipsum is hard, and there is little point to it.
- If this is a training project, why are there no obvious repetitions of whole sections? You want to try, and try again, to achieve perfection, not just try and move on.
- If this is a training project, wouldn't you expect to see some visible progression from worse to better, or at least from simple to more complex? At the least, this will have taken months to complete.
- If this is a training project, why was it bound into a book at all? Wouldn't you expect separate training units for drawing/writing, and bookbinding? (And if it's a training project for bookbinding, using the copyist student's scrap paper, again, why doesn't it contain duplicates or intelligible fragments, or unfinished segments?)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday September 12 2017, @10:19PM
I didn't say it was a great hypothesis, just that it was both somewhat plausible and not more far-fetched than some of the other ones out there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:59PM
It doesn't really pass the smell test. It's pretty well known that they practiced on texts that actually needed to be copied. Even if it was truly throw-away work they'd still just practice on documents that actually existed that were representative samples of the techniques they were working on. And if it it were a work for students to train on, there probably would be lots of copies floating around... the same way millions of attics in america have pages with 'The quick brown fox...' in 1st grade handwriting lying around in some dusty box.
As you likely know "Lorem ipsum" isn't gibberish. It's a scrambled section of an existing work. But not so scrambled as to been a deliberate attempt to codify or obscure anything. I suspect if we could go back in time the printer just grabbed a plate from a work in latin lying around and just hastily and clumsily reworked it to fit into the space he was trying to fill. (basically 'cut n paste' but in a context applicable to how printing presses worked.)
If the voynich manuscript was like lorum ipsum... it'd be maybe two chapters from the bible, a recipe for beer, the local wine harvest figures, and page 3-5 of beowulf... and it would be recognizable as such.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Wednesday September 13 2017, @10:38AM (1 child)
My understanding is that while the character diatribution is "weird" compared to normal writing, it's high enough entropy per symbol that it would be hard to fake without using an RNG. Handwriting analysis suggested that it wasn't written character by character.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday September 13 2017, @04:27PM
> it wasn't written character by character
I know what you mean, yet that wording ...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 12 2017, @06:38PM (2 children)
It could be written in somebody's personal made-up language, for all we know. One of the proposed theories involves this being the scrawlings of a person who is just plain nuts.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:07PM (1 child)
Tolkien wrote in his own personal made up language. Made a fuckton more sense than the Voynich Manuscript, and I would think that linguists could decipher Tolkien's language without too much hassle. It was after all a serious attempt to create a new language with a strong foundation in linguistics.
I personally believe Voynich's Manuscript is more of a free association log than anything else, and I bet it didn't even make real sense to the author. Otherwise, it was intended to be difficult to decipher, and if so, massive success. It may never be decoded.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @09:04AM
A better comparison would be the Codex Seraphinianus. [wikipedia.org]