5 ms·
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
by 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 agoHoax 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