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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday September 12 2017, @05:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the back-to-the-drawing-board dept.

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."

Voynich manuscript.

Previously: Voynich Manuscript Partially Decoded


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by vux984 on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:59PM

    by vux984 (5045) on Tuesday September 12 2017, @09:59PM (#566979)

    Until someone can prove it wrong, my vote in on full-scale training project, because no other explanation can be proven more right

    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.

    Lorem ipsum out.

    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.

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