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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @08:29PM (2 children)
Right or wrong, at least someone is trying and put their thoughts out there. How many scholars were baffled for how long before other ancient texts were correctly deciphered? How many tenured experts got it wrong and had their results published and accepted as correct for decades? A lot. But with today's instant society and the internet of uneducated experts, people jump to conclusions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:37PM
This weeken I'm gonna put lotsa effort in digging a hole. Based on it, I'm gonna claim I deciphered that Voynich manuscrip;, I hope i'm gonna get published.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:45PM
> How many scholars were baffled for how long before other ancient texts were correctly deciphered?
This is a very good point. A lot of ancient texts were completely unintelligible, like Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Some scholars thought it wasn't a real language at all, but pictographic instructions for rituals, etc... or just motifs for artwork patterns. Nobody could translate them, and it was deemed impossible to do so. So much so that the Hieroglyphs were quite often destroyed or vandalised, as they were not seen as important as finding a mummy or treasure, or whatever in the Pyramids.
And that is basically where things stood for ages, until humanity basically lucked out when we found the Rosetta Stone [wikipedia.org], which had the same text written in three scripts, one of which was Ancient Greek (which we could translate) and Egyptian.
That was the key that unlocked Hieroglyphs for us. If it wasn't for pure blind luck in finding the stone, we would still be completely stumped with Egyptian, not that different to how we are currently with the Voynich Manuscript.
Unless we find some counterpart "decoder" script for it, or we find out that there is a copy of the Voynich Manuscript in a language we understand (unlikely, as unlike Egyptian, this manuscript seems to have been deliberately written to be unreadable to people who don't have the secret) from which we can start deciphering it, chances are we will be stumped for a while.