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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: 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.