11 ms·

Voynich manuscript: the solution?

266 points by noahth 9y ago

sabujp 9y ago
tldr; By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and well being of the more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual.
jumpkickhit 9y ago
Interesting. Noticed youtube pushing Voynich in suggestions out of the blue last week, now there's an article posted up here days later.
forgotmypw 9y ago
Site no worky without javascript, could someone paste a copy, please?
questerzen 9y ago
Other people have also suggested Latin as the most likely base language. A better discussion is provided here: http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_in_the_voynich_manuscript-225418 http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_...
abakker 9y ago
My theory: it is music, not writing. I wonder if that is even possible?
- jes5199 9y ago
  any data can be interpreted as sound, but it might not be perceived as musically coherent
kitanata 9y ago
Like, is everyone ignoring the picture at the top of the article? That looks like a pretty believable direct translation of the ligatures to me. I know its not the whole thing, but it is plausibly consistent. That image is titled p16_Gibbs1.jpg. To me that hints that the author is serious and is planning to release a detailed paper. His final statement at the end of the article is really bold. "Not only is the manuscript incomplete, but its folios are in the wrong order – and all for the want of an index." Perhaps the author is going to provide the index, and the correct order for the folios while providing what he believes to be the missing pieces from other texts from that time period? This article looks like a teaser to me for something significant. Let's hope anyway.
- mcguire 9y ago
  http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html
chx 9y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
klunger 9y ago
This guy started with a hypothesis and then set out to prove it by looking for evidence. He then said the evidence was missing (hacked off) but his hypothesis was still true. Really, it is not very persuasive.
bshimmin 9y ago
I don't see a lot of "why" in this supposed solution. If what the author says is true, it sounds like an incredibly painstaking process to encode all of this, especially when it was something so tedious (it would make more sense if the source material were interesting or salacious!). I can sort of understand abbreviating the long plant names to individual symbols, referenced from an index, and I can understand ligatures for things like "etiam", but why make each and every single character represent a whole word? Surely the end result is that the manuscript, even with the index, becomes very, very hard to read? And is there a good explanation for why this document apparently stands alone in history as the only manuscript written in this way? Were there others, and we just lost them? Was this just a particularly egregious example of this forgotten art, and others written in this manner were easier to decipher? Lastly, there's a whole Wikipedia page about "scribal abbreviations" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation - if decoding the Voynich manuscript were so easy as the author makes out ("It became obvious...") then why has some other medieval expert not already figured it out in the near-century people have been studying this manuscript?
tarboreus 9y ago
He doesn't address any of the central mysteries of the manuscript, including that none of the plants in the herbarium don't actually exist in nature and the "tubes" that the women in the bath section travel through, not to mention their odd skin coloration. Plus his exploration is convenient in that he doesn't have to actually decipher anything.
fusiongyro 9y ago
Where's the actual solution? I feel like I'm missing something because what I see is some plausible commentary about it and some interesting discussion of Latin and ligatures but where's the actual decoding of the writing?
- tbrake 9y ago
  The last two paragraphs direct how to decode but no fully decoded text is available. An exercise left to the reader I suppose.
  - atemerev 9y ago
    There is a sample decoding at the top of the article. Looks plausible.
  - saalweachter 9y ago
    The image at the top is a decoding of a couple of lines of text. The decoding yields extremely boring Latin, so I'm not terribly surprised if the investigator decided not to decode the entire document.
    - quinndupont 9y ago
      That's the curious thing: to an academic there's no such thing as "extremely boring Latin", especially when it comes to the Voynich. Why we're only given a tantalizing line is odd. Perhaps there is no single "universal" solution? Perhaps this is just a guess that happens to roughly work for a single line, but nothing else?
      - fusiongyro 9y ago
        I agree. To claim a solution without writing out the whole thing so it can be analyzed in depth seems absurd to me. I'm also not convinced that the statistical analyses that have been thrown at it would fail to detect patterns of meaning that are obscured merely by abbreviation.
- 9y ago
eponeponepon 9y ago
Fascinating, if accurate - and I rather hope it is. If it is, it would make the whole thing a rather instructive example of how siloing knowledge can hide truth; the author's domain knowledge has given him the tools to identify the manuscript, but it's generally been in the domain of conspiracists and 'hidden knowledge of the ancients' types. It would be good to see a thorough study of it to test the author's hypothesis, of course.
Havoc 9y ago
Rather convenient "solution". The solution is the heading and index...which are missing. Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be solved.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Rather convenient "solution". It doesn't matter if it's convenient as long as it's also true. >Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution Huh? Indexes can be reconstructed.
- bsder 9y ago
  > Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be solved. Not at all. Someone more motivated than the author can choose to decode it. If much of it was lifted, then you can trace back the lifted "recipe" to the earlier work and construct the index. However, it's going to be very painful, slow work. For no real gain (who really cares about a sloppily done Medieval health self-help book?).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jacobush 9y ago
  Also a statement that the solution, even if found, would be boring as hell.
- dnautics 9y ago
  Is it consistent with the layout of other similar books of the period?
dmbaggett 9y ago
There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former linguist) is this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac
- sago 9y ago
  As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. The videos are an impressive phonological reconstruction, but I predict (based on the assumption that the math isn't lying), that it would be effectively impossible to get much beyond ad-hoc phonetic correspondences with Romany, to any predictive morphology or syntax. The solution in this article is rather plausible. If the writing is in a highly restricted vocabulary, with highly restricted syntax, and highly constrained domain, it would be possible to get the observed information density. Comparing it to, say, Linear B or Egyptian hieroglyphs is instructive. Both of those clearly have the information density of regular human language. In the end, the solution might be a combination. It might use some Roma/Syriac nouns, but it seems clear it doesn't use them in anything like a normal linguistic context. Caveat: IANALinguist
  - dmbaggett 9y ago
    >As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic. Natural language can be very surprising. :)
  - agravier 9y ago
    > regular human language. Holy Montague! You've found it! ;)
  - dotancohen 9y ago
    > As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital letters, two glyphs per letter). Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it's letter. Or Korean, where each 'letter' is composed of two or three interchangable components. Or Han, in which the number of instrument strokes in the glyph affect it's meaning. There are so many variations on what constitutes a letter, never mind an individual glyph or a full word/concept, that one cannot use strictly European analysis techniques on arbitrary writing systems.
emeraldd 9y ago
So the whole thing is written in a form of shorthand and the core index/naming that define what the individual pieces are is missing. I wonder if this wasn't meant as a "production" manuscript but as a reference document for the replication of a larger work?
- abakker 9y ago
  was thinking the same thing. Kind of like a compression algorithm. Keep this low-paper version with an index if a scribe needed to write out another copy. Of course, if that were the cases, then it would probably be for a higher volume book and some copies of the real thing might be lying around somewhere.
MikeGale 9y ago
A fascinating analysis, half done. If the whole text were decoded and the indices rebuilt, would be more convincing.
nkurz 9y ago
Other than declaring that the solution is obvious to a self-declared expert such as himself, the author (Nicholas Gibbs) doesn't appear to give any proof of his theory. So far I can can find online, this piece is the only thing he has ever published about the Voynich manuscript: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich Who is Nicholas Gibbs? Does anyone besides Nicholas Gibbs trust his opinion on these matters? And how did he convince the TLS to publish this drivel? (to avoid being entirely negative, here's a link to a blog that shows what some better Voynich research looks like: https://stephenbax.net https://stephenbax.net)
- crumbles 9y ago
  Nate Kurz? Who is this guy anyway? While he might appear to have 40018 or higher karma on Hacker News, how does that give him the authority to drag Nicholas Gibbs' name through the mud, and for what? A temporary spot at the top of the HN comments for what could be one of the sanest things I've ever read by Nicholas Gibbs? Nate didn't even have to convince anyone to allow him to publish this drivel. All he had to do was post his comment to HN, and then, based on his karma, he was not only allowed to disparage Nicholas Gibbs, who was chosen to be published by TLS, but he was able to disparage TLS in the process! (to avoid being entirely negative, here's a link to what should be discussed here: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/ https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript...)
- mcguire 9y ago
  "As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format." Oh, my. Either this is a parody or a tutorial on how to identify "crazy person goes down rat hole" situations.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    "Systematic study of every single character in the Lexicon identified further ligatures and abbreviations in the Voynich manuscript and set a precedent. It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter." And here we go....
mordae 9y ago
As Czech myself, I prefer to believe the theory of several clever guys tricking someone important to buy a nonsense book of secrets, splitting the spoils, having a good laugh. Resonates well... Heidrich called us the Laughing beasts for a reason.
dwringer 9y ago
I see comments suggesting that it wouldn't be worth the effort to translate this based on the author's hypotheses, but there has been a substantial community around trying to do just that for a long time. FWIW The NSA appears to have published a book around 1978, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma [1], and a couple of the things from this article jump out at me after having read that book that raise red flags about the article's interpretation. The idea that there were multiple artists is far from being universally accepted, and experts who have studied this in the past have not been able to conclusively state that there were more than one or two authors or artists, although the possibility does remain open. Secondly, the suggestion that each glyph represents a full word in latin has also been studied - see the link for more information, but the frequency distributions and vocabulary size do not seem to make sense if that is the case (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). In all I am surprised more progress has not been made since the advent of the internet and its crowd-sourcing potential. There is definitely no shortage of interpretations all over the internet, and in headlines from time to time. The last one I recall from a couple of months ago suggested that there was a specific Jewish birthing practice being illustrated on one of the pages that suggested a certain origin of the text. [2] [1]https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/misc/assets/files/voynich_manuscript.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-fi... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-was-italian-jew-says-scholar https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-myst...
jv22222 9y ago
There is a good general synopsis of the Voynich manuscript on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript Interesting stuff!
computator 9y ago
A sample translation is the key thing I wanted to read in this article, and all they gave was an illegible low-resolution snippet without an English translation -- very annoying. As best as I can read, the purported Latin translation in the image at the top of the article says: Folia de oz et en de aqua et de radicts de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 2 et de radicis semenis ana 1 etium abonenticus confundo. Folia et cum folia et confundo etiam de eius decocole adigo aromaticus decocque de decoctio adigo aromaticus et confundo et de radicis seminis ana 3. Feeding the above to Google Translate gives: The leaves of Oz and added to the water and the aromatic radicts semen Ana ana 3 2 seed and the roots ana 1 etium abonenticus the mix. The leaves, when the leaves are decocole adigo and the mix of the aromatic decocque of the cooking adigo an aromatic mix of roots and seeds Ana 3. Yes, I realize that the author's translation might be completely mistaken, but I'm curious to read what he thinks it says. If someone can make out the words better, please do so.
- rebuilder 9y ago
  seems like it says "Folia de oz 3 et in de aqua et de radacis de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 3 et de radacis seminis ana 1 1/2 [fraction unclear] etiam aromaticus confundo." At the end of the article the author provides the following: aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc. "Folia" = "leaves". "Oz"= unknown, but can this be simply ounces? I'm not sure when the abbreviation was first used or if it was used in latin at all. "etiam"="also", "furthermore", "still" So... "3 leaves of "oz"/ 3 oz of leaves and in water and of the roots three each of 'aromaticus' three each of seeds,and of the seeds of the root 1 1/2 each also 'aromaticus' mixed." Still kind of a nonsense. It seems there's no mention of what plant or plants should be used, unless aromaticus is that plant.
- tigershark 9y ago
  Ana is the equivalent quantity of different ingredients used in the pharmaceutical preparation in Italy. To me that translation makes sense. Google translate is messing up badly it should be something like this for my remote knowledge of Latin: 1 leaf of oz in water, 3 ana (equivalent quantity) of aromatic roots, 2 ana of seeds, mix very well together. Infuse the leaves mixed together with the aromatic (roots) and with the roots infusion and mix all together with 3 ana of root seeds.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lisper 9y ago
The idea that the Voynich manuscript is a medical text seems plausible, but the theory that it uses a logographic representation (one symbol per word) rather than an alphabetic or even a syllabaric (one symbol per syllable) one seems less likely to me. A cursory examination of the manuscript (http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html) reveals that the lexicography looks much more like an alphabetic encoding than a logographic one like Chinese. The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space. Also, it appears that there are too many repeated symbols and insufficiently many distinct symbols for a logographic language.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space. Couldn't the same (whitespace separation) be done for sentences in a logographic representation?
  - lisper 9y ago
    Of course that's possible, but I don't think so. The lengths of the groups seem to me to be distributed more like words than sentences. [UPDATE:] More info here: http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html This is particularly interesting: "The apparent lack of common phrases is one of the main anomalies of the Voynich MS text." If that's really true I think that's a big clue. (Exactly what it's a clue of I'm not sure :-)
- atemerev 9y ago
  It looks more like stenography to me. You can even recognize the contours of regular Latin letters.
mntmn 9y ago
What if it is just Lorem Ipsum by someone who could draw but not actually write?
- markbnj 9y ago
  Not sure if serious, but on the off chance... seems unlikely. We create "Lorem Ipsum" gibberish to fill space because modern technology has made it trivially easy to do so. The same exercise would have taken a medieval writer many laborious hours.
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    But in contrast to Lorem Ipsum might have been sold for a high price, a la The Emperor's New Clothes? Or, there's something called "spirit writing" isn't there, a sort of written form of speaking in tongues? Presumably the doing of which is also considered to be it's own reward. Heck, perhaps a scribe went psychotic.
    - coroxout 9y ago
      It might have been sold for a high price, but vellum and coloured inks were expensive at the time, and it is a very long document when a much shorter one would still seem to fit the bill. Seems a bit of a gamble if that was the plan, and the scribes were presumably either well-to-do or trusted by someone well-to-do if they could get their hands on the raw materials. That makes the prank/con/crazy spirit writing theory seem less likely to me but certainly doesn't rule either out.
- empath75 9y ago
  A few people have hypothesized that it was the result of a case of glossolalia. Having been to the outsider art museum in Baltimore, it doesn't seem incredibly unlikely.
Nursie 9y ago
I see a theory, not a translation, am I alone in this?
- netule 9y ago
  Nope, hardly a "solution."
groby_b 9y ago
"I have a brilliant proof, but not only is the margin too small to hold it, it has been hacked off".
bjackman 9y ago
Don't have time to read this properly but have been reading about the VM lately, most interesting researchers I've found are Stephen Bax[1] and this YouTuber[2] [1] https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5 https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5 [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ Some really interesting analyses in there.

266 points by noahth 9y ago

tldr; By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval period, an instruction manual for the health and well being of the more well to do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual.

jumpkickhit 9y ago

Interesting. Noticed youtube pushing Voynich in suggestions out of the blue last week, now there's an article posted up here days later.

forgotmypw 9y ago

Site no worky without javascript, could someone paste a copy, please?

questerzen 9y ago

Other people have also suggested Latin as the most likely base language. A better discussion is provided here: http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_in_the_voynich_manuscript-225418 http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_...

abakker 9y ago

My theory: it is music, not writing. I wonder if that is even possible?

jes5199 9y ago
any data can be interpreted as sound, but it might not be perceived as musically coherent

kitanata 9y ago

Like, is everyone ignoring the picture at the top of the article? That looks like a pretty believable direct translation of the ligatures to me. I know its not the whole thing, but it is plausibly consistent. That image is titled p16_Gibbs1.jpg. To me that hints that the author is serious and is planning to release a detailed paper. His final statement at the end of the article is really bold. "Not only is the manuscript incomplete, but its folios are in the wrong order – and all for the want of an index." Perhaps the author is going to provide the index, and the correct order for the folios while providing what he believes to be the missing pieces from other texts from that time period? This article looks like a teaser to me for something significant. Let's hope anyway.

mcguire 9y ago
http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html

chx 9y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

klunger 9y ago

This guy started with a hypothesis and then set out to prove it by looking for evidence. He then said the evidence was missing (hacked off) but his hypothesis was still true. Really, it is not very persuasive.

bshimmin 9y ago

I don't see a lot of "why" in this supposed solution. If what the author says is true, it sounds like an incredibly painstaking process to encode all of this, especially when it was something so tedious (it would make more sense if the source material were interesting or salacious!). I can sort of understand abbreviating the long plant names to individual symbols, referenced from an index, and I can understand ligatures for things like "etiam", but why make each and every single character represent a whole word? Surely the end result is that the manuscript, even with the index, becomes very, very hard to read? And is there a good explanation for why this document apparently stands alone in history as the only manuscript written in this way? Were there others, and we just lost them? Was this just a particularly egregious example of this forgotten art, and others written in this manner were easier to decipher? Lastly, there's a whole Wikipedia page about "scribal abbreviations" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation - if decoding the Voynich manuscript were so easy as the author makes out ("It became obvious...") then why has some other medieval expert not already figured it out in the near-century people have been studying this manuscript?

tarboreus 9y ago

He doesn't address any of the central mysteries of the manuscript, including that none of the plants in the herbarium don't actually exist in nature and the "tubes" that the women in the bath section travel through, not to mention their odd skin coloration. Plus his exploration is convenient in that he doesn't have to actually decipher anything.

fusiongyro 9y ago

Where's the actual solution? I feel like I'm missing something because what I see is some plausible commentary about it and some interesting discussion of Latin and ligatures but where's the actual decoding of the writing?

tbrake 9y ago
The last two paragraphs direct how to decode but no fully decoded text is available. An exercise left to the reader I suppose.
- atemerev 9y ago
  There is a sample decoding at the top of the article. Looks plausible.
- saalweachter 9y ago
  The image at the top is a decoding of a couple of lines of text. The decoding yields extremely boring Latin, so I'm not terribly surprised if the investigator decided not to decode the entire document.
  - quinndupont 9y ago
    That's the curious thing: to an academic there's no such thing as "extremely boring Latin", especially when it comes to the Voynich. Why we're only given a tantalizing line is odd. Perhaps there is no single "universal" solution? Perhaps this is just a guess that happens to roughly work for a single line, but nothing else?
    - fusiongyro 9y ago
      I agree. To claim a solution without writing out the whole thing so it can be analyzed in depth seems absurd to me. I'm also not convinced that the statistical analyses that have been thrown at it would fail to detect patterns of meaning that are obscured merely by abbreviation.
9y ago

eponeponepon 9y ago

Fascinating, if accurate - and I rather hope it is. If it is, it would make the whole thing a rather instructive example of how siloing knowledge can hide truth; the author's domain knowledge has given him the tools to identify the manuscript, but it's generally been in the domain of conspiracists and 'hidden knowledge of the ancients' types. It would be good to see a thorough study of it to test the author's hypothesis, of course.

Havoc 9y ago

Rather convenient "solution". The solution is the heading and index...which are missing. Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be solved.

coldtea 9y ago
>Rather convenient "solution". It doesn't matter if it's convenient as long as it's also true. >Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution Huh? Indexes can be reconstructed.
bsder 9y ago
> Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be solved. Not at all. Someone more motivated than the author can choose to decode it. If much of it was lifted, then you can trace back the lifted "recipe" to the earlier work and construct the index. However, it's going to be very painful, slow work. For no real gain (who really cares about a sloppily done Medieval health self-help book?).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jacobush 9y ago
Also a statement that the solution, even if found, would be boring as hell.
dnautics 9y ago
Is it consistent with the layout of other similar books of the period?

dmbaggett 9y ago

There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former linguist) is this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4 tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac

sago 9y ago
As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. The videos are an impressive phonological reconstruction, but I predict (based on the assumption that the math isn't lying), that it would be effectively impossible to get much beyond ad-hoc phonetic correspondences with Romany, to any predictive morphology or syntax. The solution in this article is rather plausible. If the writing is in a highly restricted vocabulary, with highly restricted syntax, and highly constrained domain, it would be possible to get the observed information density. Comparing it to, say, Linear B or Egyptian hieroglyphs is instructive. Both of those clearly have the information density of regular human language. In the end, the solution might be a combination. It might use some Roma/Syriac nouns, but it seems clear it doesn't use them in anything like a normal linguistic context. Caveat: IANALinguist
- dmbaggett 9y ago
  >As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic. Natural language can be very surprising. :)
- agravier 9y ago
  > regular human language. Holy Montague! You've found it! ;)
- dotancohen 9y ago
  > As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic (or -- a fortiori -- logographic or syllabic) representation of a human language. If true then it is almost certainly not 'real writing'. That is an extraordinarily European viewpoint, where alphabets have a few tens of glyphs, each representing a single letter (or, in the case of capital letters, two glyphs per letter). Imagine an alphabet similar to Arabic where each letter may have up to five glyphs, or even an alphabet in which the _position_ of the glyph changes it's letter. Or Korean, where each 'letter' is composed of two or three interchangable components. Or Han, in which the number of instrument strokes in the glyph affect it's meaning. There are so many variations on what constitutes a letter, never mind an individual glyph or a full word/concept, that one cannot use strictly European analysis techniques on arbitrary writing systems.

emeraldd 9y ago

So the whole thing is written in a form of shorthand and the core index/naming that define what the individual pieces are is missing. I wonder if this wasn't meant as a "production" manuscript but as a reference document for the replication of a larger work?

abakker 9y ago
was thinking the same thing. Kind of like a compression algorithm. Keep this low-paper version with an index if a scribe needed to write out another copy. Of course, if that were the cases, then it would probably be for a higher volume book and some copies of the real thing might be lying around somewhere.

MikeGale 9y ago

A fascinating analysis, half done. If the whole text were decoded and the indices rebuilt, would be more convincing.

nkurz 9y ago

Other than declaring that the solution is obvious to a self-declared expert such as himself, the author (Nicholas Gibbs) doesn't appear to give any proof of his theory. So far I can can find online, this piece is the only thing he has ever published about the Voynich manuscript: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich Who is Nicholas Gibbs? Does anyone besides Nicholas Gibbs trust his opinion on these matters? And how did he convince the TLS to publish this drivel? (to avoid being entirely negative, here's a link to a blog that shows what some better Voynich research looks like: https://stephenbax.net https://stephenbax.net)

crumbles 9y ago
Nate Kurz? Who is this guy anyway? While he might appear to have 40018 or higher karma on Hacker News, how does that give him the authority to drag Nicholas Gibbs' name through the mud, and for what? A temporary spot at the top of the HN comments for what could be one of the sanest things I've ever read by Nicholas Gibbs? Nate didn't even have to convince anyone to allow him to publish this drivel. All he had to do was post his comment to HN, and then, based on his karma, he was not only allowed to disparage Nicholas Gibbs, who was chosen to be published by TLS, but he was able to disparage TLS in the process! (to avoid being entirely negative, here's a link to what should be discussed here: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/ https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript...)
mcguire 9y ago
"As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format." Oh, my. Either this is a parody or a tutorial on how to identify "crazy person goes down rat hole" situations.
- mcguire 9y ago
  "Systematic study of every single character in the Lexicon identified further ligatures and abbreviations in the Voynich manuscript and set a precedent. It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter." And here we go....

mordae 9y ago

As Czech myself, I prefer to believe the theory of several clever guys tricking someone important to buy a nonsense book of secrets, splitting the spoils, having a good laugh. Resonates well... Heidrich called us the Laughing beasts for a reason.

dwringer 9y ago

I see comments suggesting that it wouldn't be worth the effort to translate this based on the author's hypotheses, but there has been a substantial community around trying to do just that for a long time. FWIW The NSA appears to have published a book around 1978, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma [1], and a couple of the things from this article jump out at me after having read that book that raise red flags about the article's interpretation. The idea that there were multiple artists is far from being universally accepted, and experts who have studied this in the past have not been able to conclusively state that there were more than one or two authors or artists, although the possibility does remain open. Secondly, the suggestion that each glyph represents a full word in latin has also been studied - see the link for more information, but the frequency distributions and vocabulary size do not seem to make sense if that is the case (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). In all I am surprised more progress has not been made since the advent of the internet and its crowd-sourcing potential. There is definitely no shortage of interpretations all over the internet, and in headlines from time to time. The last one I recall from a couple of months ago suggested that there was a specific Jewish birthing practice being illustrated on one of the pages that suggested a certain origin of the text. [2] [1]https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-figures-publications/publications/misc/assets/files/voynich_manuscript.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-fi... [2]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-was-italian-jew-says-scholar https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-myst...

jv22222 9y ago

There is a good general synopsis of the Voynich manuscript on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript Interesting stuff!

computator 9y ago

A sample translation is the key thing I wanted to read in this article, and all they gave was an illegible low-resolution snippet without an English translation -- very annoying. As best as I can read, the purported Latin translation in the image at the top of the article says: Folia de oz et en de aqua et de radicts de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 2 et de radicis semenis ana 1 etium abonenticus confundo. Folia et cum folia et confundo etiam de eius decocole adigo aromaticus decocque de decoctio adigo aromaticus et confundo et de radicis seminis ana 3. Feeding the above to Google Translate gives: The leaves of Oz and added to the water and the aromatic radicts semen Ana ana 3 2 seed and the roots ana 1 etium abonenticus the mix. The leaves, when the leaves are decocole adigo and the mix of the aromatic decocque of the cooking adigo an aromatic mix of roots and seeds Ana 3. Yes, I realize that the author's translation might be completely mistaken, but I'm curious to read what he thinks it says. If someone can make out the words better, please do so.

rebuilder 9y ago
seems like it says "Folia de oz 3 et in de aqua et de radacis de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 3 et de radacis seminis ana 1 1/2 [fraction unclear] etiam aromaticus confundo." At the end of the article the author provides the following: aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc. "Folia" = "leaves". "Oz"= unknown, but can this be simply ounces? I'm not sure when the abbreviation was first used or if it was used in latin at all. "etiam"="also", "furthermore", "still" So... "3 leaves of "oz"/ 3 oz of leaves and in water and of the roots three each of 'aromaticus' three each of seeds,and of the seeds of the root 1 1/2 each also 'aromaticus' mixed." Still kind of a nonsense. It seems there's no mention of what plant or plants should be used, unless aromaticus is that plant.
tigershark 9y ago
Ana is the equivalent quantity of different ingredients used in the pharmaceutical preparation in Italy. To me that translation makes sense. Google translate is messing up badly it should be something like this for my remote knowledge of Latin: 1 leaf of oz in water, 3 ana (equivalent quantity) of aromatic roots, 2 ana of seeds, mix very well together. Infuse the leaves mixed together with the aromatic (roots) and with the roots infusion and mix all together with 3 ana of root seeds.

deleted 9y ago

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lisper 9y ago

The idea that the Voynich manuscript is a medical text seems plausible, but the theory that it uses a logographic representation (one symbol per word) rather than an alphabetic or even a syllabaric (one symbol per syllable) one seems less likely to me. A cursory examination of the manuscript (http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html) reveals that the lexicography looks much more like an alphabetic encoding than a logographic one like Chinese. The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space. Also, it appears that there are too many repeated symbols and insufficiently many distinct symbols for a logographic language.

coldtea 9y ago
>The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space. Couldn't the same (whitespace separation) be done for sentences in a logographic representation?
- lisper 9y ago
  Of course that's possible, but I don't think so. The lengths of the groups seem to me to be distributed more like words than sentences. [UPDATE:] More info here: http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html http://www.voynich.nu/analysis.html This is particularly interesting: "The apparent lack of common phrases is one of the main anomalies of the Voynich MS text." If that's really true I think that's a big clue. (Exactly what it's a clue of I'm not sure :-)
atemerev 9y ago
It looks more like stenography to me. You can even recognize the contours of regular Latin letters.

mntmn 9y ago

What if it is just Lorem Ipsum by someone who could draw but not actually write?

markbnj 9y ago
Not sure if serious, but on the off chance... seems unlikely. We create "Lorem Ipsum" gibberish to fill space because modern technology has made it trivially easy to do so. The same exercise would have taken a medieval writer many laborious hours.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  But in contrast to Lorem Ipsum might have been sold for a high price, a la The Emperor's New Clothes? Or, there's something called "spirit writing" isn't there, a sort of written form of speaking in tongues? Presumably the doing of which is also considered to be it's own reward. Heck, perhaps a scribe went psychotic.
  - coroxout 9y ago
    It might have been sold for a high price, but vellum and coloured inks were expensive at the time, and it is a very long document when a much shorter one would still seem to fit the bill. Seems a bit of a gamble if that was the plan, and the scribes were presumably either well-to-do or trusted by someone well-to-do if they could get their hands on the raw materials. That makes the prank/con/crazy spirit writing theory seem less likely to me but certainly doesn't rule either out.
empath75 9y ago
A few people have hypothesized that it was the result of a case of glossolalia. Having been to the outsider art museum in Baltimore, it doesn't seem incredibly unlikely.

Nursie 9y ago

I see a theory, not a translation, am I alone in this?

netule 9y ago
Nope, hardly a "solution."

groby_b 9y ago

"I have a brilliant proof, but not only is the margin too small to hold it, it has been hacked off".

bjackman 9y ago

Don't have time to read this properly but have been reading about the VM lately, most interesting researchers I've found are Stephen Bax[1] and this YouTuber[2] [1] https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5 https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5 [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ Some really interesting analyses in there.