4 ms·
I've seen nothing that persuades me even a little bit away from the most common theory, which is that it's basically a hoax. It's a pseudo-occult book produced
by TillE 11y ago
I've seen nothing that persuades me even a little bit away from the most common theory, which is that it's basically a hoax. It's a pseudo-occult book produced by some creative individual for fun and/or profit.
There are some contemporary alchemical manuscripts which are written at least partly in code, for example, but the illustrations strongly suggest that Voynich is pure fantasy.
- throwaway2048 11y agoIt obeys statistical models of natural language that "fake text" would not at all. This sort of statistical modelling of language would almost certainly be unknown at the time it was produced. I find the hoax theory to be pretty unsatisfactory. Even if the overall goal was some kind of hoax, the text itself almost certainly carries semantic meaning, and that in itself is fascinating due to its apparent indecipherability.
- Houshalter 11y agoYes it's definitely a real language that has been written down, and not one that we know of. So the only question is if it's a made up language, or a real language that has been lost. A made up language is possible, but seems less likely. There are thousands of real languages that have been lost to the world.
- acqq 11y agoAny links to the "statistical" proof the that the text is not fake? I've seen just the opposite, that the statistics are really too weird, compared to anything we know. Which, to me, is a bit too much.
- ajuc 11y agohttp://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0066344 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- acqq 11y agoThanks. Still, for me, if the text produced with the Cardan grille wouldn't have such statistics, that would be a proof for me that the "language" is real. That's what I hoped to find. If the Cardan grille generated text would pass the statistics too, I'd still more believe the text to be a kind of hoax. The game isn't "lets find which statistics Voynich passes" but "let's disprove the hypothesis it is a hoax" by finding a test which all claimed hoaxes schemes obviously fail.
- ajuc 11y ago1. Cardan grille was invented in 1550. Voynish manuscript is almost 100 year older by carbon dating 3. Why do you give hoax higher prior probability? EDIT: I was wrong about the possible distributions so there's no point 2.
- acqq 11y ago1. Technically, the velum seems to be older, we don't know when the manuscript is written. 3. Because nothing else "fits" with anything else we know of. When we find first text in an unknown language, typically it's some religious thing. The illustrations are at best "dream" constructs when not intentional attempt to make an "original" hoax. Otherwise, it's obvious that it's not something out of some non-western culture.