4 ms·

It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I still

It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I still think that an Occam's Razor approach would rule out a hoax. How likely is it that someone (or even some group) trying to perpetrate a hoax would come up with a method which was not only undetectable by analytical tools available at the time but also by tools that wouldn't be invented even centuries later? I suppose we should compare it to the invention of the Vigenère cipher, in the 16th century, which was only broken in the 19th century. Conversely, we have examples of texts written in forgotten languages which were later translated / remain untranslated, and we don't / didn't assume them to be hoaxes (assuming they obey Zipf's Law). We also have examples of people inventing new written languages for spoken languages that didn't have a (known) written form, so I think Occam's Razor would support the hypothesis that this is what happened with the VM.

DonaldFisk 6y ago
The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. Nothing else is written in the same script. A few others from the period are encrypted, notably Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber by Giovanni Fontana, but they're trivial to decipher. Only one other I'm aware of has any naked women in baths. For other scripts, there either are numerous texts for each (e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mycaenean Greek, Khitan, Etruscan, Rongorongo), or very few short texts (e.g. Pictish). Not a stand-alone 240 page book. But there are examples of forged documents from the middle ages, e.g. the Gospel of Barnabas and the Donation of Constantine. I tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, before discovering that there were other, simpler explanations for its apparent meaningfulness (e.g. the observations described in the Montemurro & Zanette paper): http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html . It's possible it's some kind of verbose cipher devised by someone ahead of his time. It's even possible, though very unlikely, that it's written in a Northwest Caucasian language. I've ruled out other language groups. The approximate adherence to Zipf's Law is telling us something about how the text was produced. When I have time, I might look into whether state machine generated output follows Zipf's Law. I suspect it does generally, and know it does for the text I generated, but I'd like solid proof and it would be another nail in the coffin of the idea it's unencrypted or lightly encrypted text. Or it might not.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Thank you for that excellent overview. It's interesting that your Principal Component Analysis[0] pointed to a Caucasian language, as did a more recent Hypervector Analysis[1]. How likely is it that a 15th century process for generating meaningless text would not only follow Zipf's Law but also give consistent and plausible results under those analyses? [0] http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html [1] https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid39598 https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid395...

DonaldFisk 6y ago

The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. Nothing else is written in the same script. A few others from the period are encrypted, notably Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber by Giovanni Fontana, but they're trivial to decipher. Only one other I'm aware of has any naked women in baths. For other scripts, there either are numerous texts for each (e.g. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mycaenean Greek, Khitan, Etruscan, Rongorongo), or very few short texts (e.g. Pictish). Not a stand-alone 240 page book. But there are examples of forged documents from the middle ages, e.g. the Gospel of Barnabas and the Donation of Constantine. I tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, before discovering that there were other, simpler explanations for its apparent meaningfulness (e.g. the observations described in the Montemurro & Zanette paper): http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/Voynich.html . It's possible it's some kind of verbose cipher devised by someone ahead of his time. It's even possible, though very unlikely, that it's written in a Northwest Caucasian language. I've ruled out other language groups. The approximate adherence to Zipf's Law is telling us something about how the text was produced. When I have time, I might look into whether state machine generated output follows Zipf's Law. I suspect it does generally, and know it does for the text I generated, but I'd like solid proof and it would be another nail in the coffin of the idea it's unencrypted or lightly encrypted text. Or it might not.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Thank you for that excellent overview. It's interesting that your Principal Component Analysis[0] pointed to a Caucasian language, as did a more recent Hypervector Analysis[1]. How likely is it that a 15th century process for generating meaningless text would not only follow Zipf's Law but also give consistent and plausible results under those analyses? [0] http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/voynich/abkhaz.html [1] https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid39598 https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-3314-post-39598.html#pid395...