6 ms·

Another dubious claim that someone has “decoded” the Voynich manuscript

51 points by Vigier 7y ago

ddingus 7y ago
I love that book. Every time I look at it, I get the feeling someone had a vision. Maybe took something particularly great. Maybe was just a little too bat shit. Maybe drank bad mead? Whatever the source for the excellent illustrations, they convey a strange land with compelling oddities. It is all fantastic! Should this prove to be trolling? Epic whoever you were. Well played.
- 92543927 7y ago
  I think the Voynich Manuscript was written by someone who let his/her part of the brain responsible for language understanding run in reverse, so generating a new language. This new language, "speaking in tongues", follows the rules of Universal Grammar, so all frequency analysis will point to it being a legit language, yet the language itself will be forever indecipherable. The same holds for the undeciphered Zodiac cyphers. The "one time pad" used by the creators was probably forgotten the next day.
  - fb03 7y ago
    The phenomena you mentioned (speaking in tongues) is called Glossolalia, and yeah, it is essentially rhythmic mouth yapping with enough resemblance to other 'human utterances' to be misread as an actual language.
    - ddingus 7y ago
      Side note: I was once part of a youth group and was strongly pressured to do that. My inhibition was profound. At that moment I gave organized religion up. I am not religious, but do seem spiritual. Go figure. Between that and being told who to hate and what platinum album was gonna send me to hell, it was enough. I could have done it that day. Make up some stuff, or just let the vocalizations flow. But why? I did find the others listening to garner meaning super interesting. There is a sort of resonance possible too. Speakers, or utterers more precisely, pick up common elements. The whole affair becomes sort of tribal. Over time, all sorts of status, membership, meta basically, is inferred through many sessions.
r721 7y ago
Language Log discussion: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749
Nursie 7y ago
Yeah this was fun to read about when the Guardian mentioned it a week or so back. The guy appears to have invented a language (Proto-Romance) and made claims that this was the usual script for said language, and cracked decoding it. And all this after only two weeks study. Anything that can shed new light on the book is intriguing, but I'm not buying this without extraordinary evidence.
- talideon 7y ago
  "Extrapolated" might be a better term than "invented", to be fair to him. His "Proto-Romance" seems to be an attempt to extrapolate an intermediate between Vulgar Latin and the early Romance languages after they had differenciated into Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, &c. "Proto-Romance" is a real term, but it's typically used to refer to Vulgar Latin.
  - andolanra 7y ago
    Speaking as someone with a linguistics background, I would say "cobbled together" is more accurate. Cheshire's "proto-Romance" was built by choosing words more or less at random from various Romance dictionaries (and a few non-Romance ones) without coming up with a rigorous explanation of the grammar or the sound changes which produced this result. Usually, if you're proposing a proto-language, you need to give a consistent and reasonable set of rules that have both explanatory and predictive capability in terms of one language becoming another. I can posit a rule, for example, that a Latin b in between vowels becomes a v in Italian: the Latin taberna becomes the Italian taverna, the Latin diabolus becomes the Italian diavolo, the Latin habere becomes the Italian avere. This rule means that given a Latin word, I can predict what an Italian word descended from it would look like, and similarly, if I have an Italian word, I can speculate what the Latin word it descended from would look like if it were indeed of Latin origin. The Cheshire paper makes no effort to explain the rules that get you from Latin to his "Proto-Romance", and in turn to modern Romance languages. It's all ad-hoc, based on grabbing whatever happened to resemble his decoding, which is why words are borrowed from wherever he could find a match. (Also: to be totally pedantic, the b-becomes-v rule mentioned above is not the complete story, and there are exceptions, e.g. Latin habitus becomes Italian abito. It's a good first approximation, though.)
coldcode 7y ago
Clearly it's written in Medieval Perl.
nyc_pizzadev 7y ago
This video explains it all: https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0 https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0
- sterlind 7y ago
  This was a low-effort post, but I agree that Derek Vogt/Stephen Bax's theory is under-appreciated. Other hypotheses are either nationalistic , working back from the author's favorite theory to justify why it's Hindi/Turkish/your culture here, or flavors of the null hypothesis, such as explaining away the linguistic patterns as a sophisticated bogus language. Vogt starts by comparing the writing system to similar-looking classes, identifying internal (in)consistencies and testing the theories on likely cognates for stars and plants. Derek did a good job with internal reconstruction, and in light of the recent star chart update someone with knowledge of Romani should attempt to falsify his hypothesis. You might not succeed, but honest historical linguistics is a satisfying journey.
michrassena 7y ago
If nothing else, to the non-expert like myself, at least this claim seems plausible. I've seen a wide range of other claims that seem way off-base. It seems unlikely to be of Meso-American origin, for instance. I kind of hope it remains unsolved. The document is far more compelling as a mystery than whatever its contents might be.
hyper_reality 7y ago
Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of the words just don't match up with any natural languages, and there is a large amount of repetition of individual words with small variations, but hardly any repeated phrases. One recent idea is that successive words were copied from early ones, with small rearrangements of the glyphs https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf . As such, the text gains the characteristic of looking like a language, when in fact it is meaningless gibberish. Possibly this was done as way of fooling somebody rich to buy it; at some point it came into the possession of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and was clearly a very desirable artifact even in the 17th century.
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  The "hoax" is a tempting hypothesis. There were many suckers who would have paid big bucks for a mysterious manuscript. But... how would a medieval forger know about linguistic patterns of natural languages, that weren't discovered until centuries later? The Turkish guy's hypothesis sounds like the most plausible.
  - sterlind 7y ago
    Hoax should be the hypothesis of last resort. If you have a theory that Voynich is written in a specific cipher or language, you can test it via internal consistency, reconstruction, cognates or sound laws. Statistically, Voynich has morpheme distributions typical of spoken language. Someone could have generated the text from a random distribution or method, but that's a non-falsifiable hypothesis.. given some statistics you can always generate such a trivial theory
dwighttk 7y ago
I decoded the Voynich manuscript! It just says "Hey lookit this weird crap" over and over in a bunch of made up languages.
jerzyt 7y ago
Why is there any doubt about the age of the manuscript? Hasn't it been carbon-dated?
- jerzyt 7y ago
  OK, the first link answers the question. Why does the article in ArsTechnica make it sound like it could possibly a fake made by Voynich?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
100% serious, I still maintain this is the most sensible explanation for the Voynich manuscript https://www.xkcd.com/593/ https://www.xkcd.com/593/, though now I'm starting to consider that hyper_reality's explanation is even better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962448. (TL;DR: xkcd - D&D book; hyper_reality - scamming someone rich.)

51 points by Vigier 7y ago

I love that book. Every time I look at it, I get the feeling someone had a vision. Maybe took something particularly great. Maybe was just a little too bat shit. Maybe drank bad mead? Whatever the source for the excellent illustrations, they convey a strange land with compelling oddities. It is all fantastic! Should this prove to be trolling? Epic whoever you were. Well played.

92543927 7y ago
I think the Voynich Manuscript was written by someone who let his/her part of the brain responsible for language understanding run in reverse, so generating a new language. This new language, "speaking in tongues", follows the rules of Universal Grammar, so all frequency analysis will point to it being a legit language, yet the language itself will be forever indecipherable. The same holds for the undeciphered Zodiac cyphers. The "one time pad" used by the creators was probably forgotten the next day.
- fb03 7y ago
  The phenomena you mentioned (speaking in tongues) is called Glossolalia, and yeah, it is essentially rhythmic mouth yapping with enough resemblance to other 'human utterances' to be misread as an actual language.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Side note: I was once part of a youth group and was strongly pressured to do that. My inhibition was profound. At that moment I gave organized religion up. I am not religious, but do seem spiritual. Go figure. Between that and being told who to hate and what platinum album was gonna send me to hell, it was enough. I could have done it that day. Make up some stuff, or just let the vocalizations flow. But why? I did find the others listening to garner meaning super interesting. There is a sort of resonance possible too. Speakers, or utterers more precisely, pick up common elements. The whole affair becomes sort of tribal. Over time, all sorts of status, membership, meta basically, is inferred through many sessions.

r721 7y ago

Language Log discussion: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749

Nursie 7y ago

Yeah this was fun to read about when the Guardian mentioned it a week or so back. The guy appears to have invented a language (Proto-Romance) and made claims that this was the usual script for said language, and cracked decoding it. And all this after only two weeks study. Anything that can shed new light on the book is intriguing, but I'm not buying this without extraordinary evidence.

talideon 7y ago
"Extrapolated" might be a better term than "invented", to be fair to him. His "Proto-Romance" seems to be an attempt to extrapolate an intermediate between Vulgar Latin and the early Romance languages after they had differenciated into Old French, Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, &c. "Proto-Romance" is a real term, but it's typically used to refer to Vulgar Latin.
- andolanra 7y ago
  Speaking as someone with a linguistics background, I would say "cobbled together" is more accurate. Cheshire's "proto-Romance" was built by choosing words more or less at random from various Romance dictionaries (and a few non-Romance ones) without coming up with a rigorous explanation of the grammar or the sound changes which produced this result. Usually, if you're proposing a proto-language, you need to give a consistent and reasonable set of rules that have both explanatory and predictive capability in terms of one language becoming another. I can posit a rule, for example, that a Latin b in between vowels becomes a v in Italian: the Latin taberna becomes the Italian taverna, the Latin diabolus becomes the Italian diavolo, the Latin habere becomes the Italian avere. This rule means that given a Latin word, I can predict what an Italian word descended from it would look like, and similarly, if I have an Italian word, I can speculate what the Latin word it descended from would look like if it were indeed of Latin origin. The Cheshire paper makes no effort to explain the rules that get you from Latin to his "Proto-Romance", and in turn to modern Romance languages. It's all ad-hoc, based on grabbing whatever happened to resemble his decoding, which is why words are borrowed from wherever he could find a match. (Also: to be totally pedantic, the b-becomes-v rule mentioned above is not the complete story, and there are exceptions, e.g. Latin habitus becomes Italian abito. It's a good first approximation, though.)

coldcode 7y ago

Clearly it's written in Medieval Perl.

nyc_pizzadev 7y ago

This video explains it all: https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0 https://youtu.be/lhtZc-nFNt0

sterlind 7y ago
This was a low-effort post, but I agree that Derek Vogt/Stephen Bax's theory is under-appreciated. Other hypotheses are either nationalistic , working back from the author's favorite theory to justify why it's Hindi/Turkish/your culture here, or flavors of the null hypothesis, such as explaining away the linguistic patterns as a sophisticated bogus language. Vogt starts by comparing the writing system to similar-looking classes, identifying internal (in)consistencies and testing the theories on likely cognates for stars and plants. Derek did a good job with internal reconstruction, and in light of the recent star chart update someone with knowledge of Romani should attempt to falsify his hypothesis. You might not succeed, but honest historical linguistics is a satisfying journey.

michrassena 7y ago

If nothing else, to the non-expert like myself, at least this claim seems plausible. I've seen a wide range of other claims that seem way off-base. It seems unlikely to be of Meso-American origin, for instance. I kind of hope it remains unsolved. The document is far more compelling as a mystery than whatever its contents might be.

hyper_reality 7y ago

Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of the words just don't match up with any natural languages, and there is a large amount of repetition of individual words with small variations, but hardly any repeated phrases. One recent idea is that successive words were copied from early ones, with small rearrangements of the glyphs https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf . As such, the text gains the characteristic of looking like a language, when in fact it is meaningless gibberish. Possibly this was done as way of fooling somebody rich to buy it; at some point it came into the possession of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and was clearly a very desirable artifact even in the 17th century.

GnarfGnarf 7y ago
The "hoax" is a tempting hypothesis. There were many suckers who would have paid big bucks for a mysterious manuscript. But... how would a medieval forger know about linguistic patterns of natural languages, that weren't discovered until centuries later? The Turkish guy's hypothesis sounds like the most plausible.
- sterlind 7y ago
  Hoax should be the hypothesis of last resort. If you have a theory that Voynich is written in a specific cipher or language, you can test it via internal consistency, reconstruction, cognates or sound laws. Statistically, Voynich has morpheme distributions typical of spoken language. Someone could have generated the text from a random distribution or method, but that's a non-falsifiable hypothesis.. given some statistics you can always generate such a trivial theory

dwighttk 7y ago

I decoded the Voynich manuscript! It just says "Hey lookit this weird crap" over and over in a bunch of made up languages.

jerzyt 7y ago

Why is there any doubt about the age of the manuscript? Hasn't it been carbon-dated?

jerzyt 7y ago
OK, the first link answers the question. Why does the article in ArsTechnica make it sound like it could possibly a fake made by Voynich?

TeMPOraL 7y ago

100% serious, I still maintain this is the most sensible explanation for the Voynich manuscript https://www.xkcd.com/593/ https://www.xkcd.com/593/, though now I'm starting to consider that hyper_reality's explanation is even better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19962448. (TL;DR: xkcd - D&D book; hyper_reality - scamming someone rich.)