23 ms·
Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adamnemecek 13y agoHere's a PDF for anyone who wants to take a stab :-) http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2002046&solrid=3519597 http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2...
- WalterSear 13y agoNice.
- neur0mancer 13y agoSomeone should build a web plataform to allow to decode it using crowdsourcing ..
- scott_karana 13y agoCrowdsourcing? Researchers already collaborate on works like this, so all we would get are unexperienced looky-loos and trolls. (Or were you being silly :P)
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoQuantity is a quality of it's own. I think getting large number of people to try something is a good way to move forward. Sure it is not efficient, but fairly reliable.
- rantanplan 13y agoAu contraire. It is efficient but fairly unreliable :)
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoI would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.
- rantanplan 13y agoIt depends on the problem. There are problems that are higly parallelizable and problems that are not. There are problems where expertise is paramount and problems where it is not. What you said is true but what I said is also true, if you stretch enough the definition of "fairly unreliable" :)
- Renaud 13y agoYou mean like a large number of people with no qualification and experience went looking for the Boston bombing suspect? I'll leave it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22214511 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22214511
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoI would argue that this is more of a mob lynching, rather than constructive combined effort. To look for models that work, look no further than open source. Projects with high amount of interest quite often do better.
- catshirt 13y agoi assure you it was intended to be a constructive combined effort. i only skimmed the article linked but it doesn't seem to reference the fact that the kid who was falsely identified was found dead, presumably by his own hand. "hell is full of good meanings, but heaven is full of good works", as they say. on a lighter note, if you consider an open source project "crowdsourced" then i posit the current collaborative academic efforts to decode the manuscript are "crowdsourced" as well.
- pyre 13y agoWhich kid is that? The one that was already missing before the bombing? http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-26/falsely-accused-bombing-suspect-confirmed-dead/4652176 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-26/falsely-accused-bombin...
- 8ig8 13y agoSomething like _Voynich Genius_ ? http://rapgenius.com http://rapgenius.com
- Geee 13y agoHah, on the page 85 that 'P' character got a bit out of hand. :) It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters. Not sure if that could be possible with real languages.
- itchitawa 13y agoThis observation lends weight to my naked women theory. That extravagent P has arms, legs, a head and ... :P
- lloeki 13y ago> It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters. It's not like many languages out there end (or wrap, even!) their sentences with a couple of unique symbols.
- russellsprouts 13y agoIt could be a poem. Psalm 119 has 22 stanzas, with the first letter of each sentence of the stanza being with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the first stanza, each verse starts with aleph, in the second beth, and so on.
- PeterisP 13y agoIt could be quite feasible if the symbol has a similar meaning to an article in English.
- msbarnett 13y agoIt's not that unlikely in highly formalized writing. You see similar phenomenon in very formal English registers, where you might see a whole run of sentences begin with "Whereas...." One after another.
- itchitawa 13y agoSurprising discovery about the Voynich manuscript - it contains hundreds of pictures of naked women, probably outnumbering the pictures of plants. Maybe the focus on botany is misguided!
- thearn4 13y agoI wish I knew more about linguistics to understand his this work further. Though it seems a bit odd to host his work on his own personal site, rather than one hosted by his institution.
- jmpe 13y agoHere's a video where the author describes the work in the paper: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ http://youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ Very accessible.
- taliesinb 13y agoThe video is great, I stayed up early into the morning watching it! Indeed, I wish that more academics made the effort to create such accessible summaries of their work.
- privong 13y ago> Though it seems a bit odd to host his work on his own personal site, rather than one hosted by his institution. Anecdotal experience of mine is that there's a trend for some academics (at least in astronomy) to put everything on their personal site. It makes for more consistent "personal branding", as your web presence isn't moved every 2-3 years as you move from postdoc to postdoc to faculty position.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoIt reminds me of attending freshman orientation. It was suggested to us that we use our university e-mail address for all professional communication. They didn't really have a good answer for whether that e-mail would stick around after I graduated. Or whether access to that account would be available forever, or whether it would be free. I didn't even bother asking why anyone would want an ugly e-mail address like pxl014000@utdallas.edu to be their official formal means of communication.
- privong 13y ago
- bencollier49 13y agoThe combination of the Voynich Manuscript's history of translation claims, taken together with the origin of this work (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3326436/Is-this-the-worst-university-in-Britain.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3326436/I...), leads me to view this with at least something of an air of caution.
- jnbiche 13y agoGiven how hard it is for even brilliant linguists to find academic posts, I wouldn't discount the author of the grounds of his home university alone.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Typhon 13y agoI read the paper and found it to be intelligible and interesting, making reasonable attempts to justify sound, plausible hypothesis. Obviously he may not be right, but his explanations are well worth reading.
- caseydurfee 13y agoThis describes many, many translation attempts of the Voynich Manuscript, though. At this point it's hard for me to consider another one of these attempts worth reading, because they all seem to follow the same pattern. Try and identify plants/stars/places in the text by their real names, work backwards from those names, find some other semi-intelligible parts of the manuscript based on that, then handwave away the 80% of the manuscript that has to be gibberish because the information density is too low to be some kind of natural language... why is another attempt along these lines interesting?
- Typhon 13y agothen handwave away the 80% of the manuscript that has to be gibberish because the information density is too low to be some kind of natural language Well, if you'd read more carefully, you'd know that Stephen Bax is precisely claiming that it is a natural language. And I don't know as much as you regarding the other translation attempts, but from what I gathered, they made assumptions which are incorrect from a linguistic perspective (e.g words "too long" or "too short" for it to be a natural language, which in fact only proves that it's likely not a european language)
- aaron695 13y agoWhy can't people just realise humour is not unique to one's own time period and culture. Jumped the shark here - "He also speculates that the reason this work is written in a language never seen before was that it was made by a small group of people who belonged to a culture that didn’t have a written form."
- Noxchi 13y agoI belong to a culture (North Caucasian) that doesn't / didn't have it's own writing script in that time frame. That also faced havoc due to mongol conquest (so this might have created refugees). This discovery excites me because the person also mentions that it has Caucasian characters in the manuscript. So maybe it was written by my ancestors.
- slurry 13y ago> This discovery excites me because the person also mentions that it has Caucasian characters in the manuscript. That actually, to my mind, increases the probability that it is nothing serious. When Westerners 'discovered' the Caucasian alphabets there was a brief mania for them among the small number of people who got excited by that kind of thing. One result was the 'Theban alphabet': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theban_alphabet Which looks semi-profound and a little like Georgian, but is only just a bog-simple glyph cipher on top of the Latin alphabet, based partly on the recent publication of Georgian grammar in Latin. Voynich's Caucasian characters may have just been following the latest trend in cryptography/occultism.
- Typhon 13y agoI am puzzled by your comment. Do you mean to imply that the Voynich manuscript is "obviously" a joke ? Do you mean to imply that, in your view, the invention of a new alphabet to write an hitherto unwritten language, which would then have failed to gain widespread acceptance, is a less realistic explanation than your own theory ? Would you please care to explain it in greater details, then ?
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- bnegreve 13y ago> Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds As the author of this work states it himself, this is a "proposed partial decoding" and it is "tentative and provisional". But anyway, the methodology is interesting and the video is worth watching. Although I'd be surprised all his speculations are correct, it seems to be the way to go.
- EGreg 13y agoThis is pretty cool, and if it is not a hoax then this is one of the only documents that remains a mystery in the age of us cracking codes, not just ones like the Zimmermann telegram and the Venona project, but even the Vigenère cipher which was eventually broken and deciphered. So this could be like navajo code talkers ... an organic language that is hard to decipher because it comes from a culture so unconnected to anything, that it developed its own symbolism. This is an intersection of cryptography and history.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoWell, he's trying to recognize the plants and work out backwards from their known names, but there's a lot of assumptions and glossing over involved in this approach. 1) A figure hints at a sunflower, but the idea is refuted based on the supposed location and date of this manuscript (sunflower is native from the American continent). 2) Another figure was recognized as "coriander", that looks nothing like it, but they went with it anyway because the transcript was possible. It looks like a botanist is more likely to figure out this manuscript than a linguist. The other theory that this manuscript is about plants from the american continent [1] is less flawed in my opinion. It could also explain why it's in an totally unfamiliar script, as it could be a pre-Spanish language, or an attempt from a foreign to codify it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7199751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7199751
- trycatch 13y agoAgree, it's hard to look at this [1] and say with a straight face that "coriander" was "convincingly identified". Short googling leads to half a dozen of alternative identifications. [1] http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_botanical_plants/plant.php?id=76 http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_botanical_plants/plant....
- TeMPOraL 13y agoI still seriously consider the xkcd interpretation to be the most likely one. https://xkcd.com/593/ https://xkcd.com/593/ Human nature doesn't change.
- ye 13y agoI started watching, and as soon as he started describing his train of thought, I realized how much bullshit it is. Oh, there's this repeating sequence that looks like English "oRoR", it must be the Arabic word for Juniper that's pronounced "aRaR". This isn't science.
- Renaud 13y agoI'm not sure why we only consider that this manuscript is either a hoax or a forgotten language. Why can't it be an expression of whimsical fantasy? When I was 12, as an introvert kid with too much imagination, I started inventing my own language. I would make up words, sometimes based off various other languages, sometime simply based on how they sounded. It had a couple of different writing systems, one was a slightly modified version of Greek alphabet, another, more complex, was made of dots and small squiggles that were fast to write (I was fascinated with the Arabic writing system at the time and took inspiration from it even though it didn't look anything like that). I would write pages of nonsense in that writing system, just to see how it would flow or change over time, just to find patterns, just to have fun. I even invented my own calendar, using the 88 day revolution of Mercury around the Sun as the year. When I look at the Voynich Manuscript, all I see is the product of a fertile imagination that went a lot farther than my early teenage attempts at building a coherent world for myself. I believe that these unconvincing attempts at finding meaning elsewhere -or degrading the object by calling it a hoax- are distracting us from the real beauty of this work of love and imagination.
- bunderbunder 13y agoPerhaps not unlike the Codex Seraphinianus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus
- Renaud 13y agoExactly. Imagine if that was written a few centuries ago and was recently discovered without being able to know who wrote it or be able to replace it within its context. I'm pretty sure all sorts of people would speculate wildly about its hidden meaning.
- pavanky 13y agoUnlike late 20th century, Writing in the 15th century was rare and a costly endeavor. It is possible that it is an expression of whimsical fantasy. But it would be highly unlikely for this reason.
- Juha 13y agoThe video offers very interesting view on how he approaches the problem and proceeds to solve the problem. From scientific point of view it just seems like guesswork, but as video goes further it's clear he has a real methodology to it. I was also very impressed how he all the time seemed very objective and used words like "probably", "could" and "possibly" to communicate that his findings still need further review.
- marlin 13y agoThis news led me to finally have a look at the manuscript, there are some very curious details in the text. First you should get the PDF copy from http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2002046&solrid=3519597 http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2... The page numbering used below is taken from the Yale PDF. * On page 49v in the left margin, you can clearly read "1 2 3 4 5", suggesting again to me that the writer had previous knowledge of other languages. The same page has more arabic number series in the left margin of the page, "0 2 9" repeats, and "8 9" occurs (read top-down). I may be confused by the apperance of the symbols. However the "1 2 3 4 5" sequence is a extremely unlikely coincidence. * These numbers in the left margin can be seen on several other pages, such as 54v. Again, i may be confused by the appearance of the symbols. However the more i look at it, it does look like a code. * On 57v, we can see what appears to be an alphabet sequence in the circles. The sequence is mirrored on the other part of the same circle in the second circle counted from the outside. * Page 66r again has a left-column top-down list of symbols, what looks like a encryption key of sorts. Many clues in the document makes me believe it is unlikely to orginate from america, such as crossbowmen, castles and bath houses. I published a longer write up on my blog, at http://martinlindhe.blogspot.se/2014/02/the-other-day-news-broke-about-stephen.html http://martinlindhe.blogspot.se/2014/02/the-other-day-news-b...
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoIf I remember correctly from earlier discussions about this script, these numbers were written much later by some other owners to keep track of the ordering.
- marlin 13y agoThere are page numbering on every 2 pages in the top right/left corner. But I am not referring to these numbers. Here is the "12345" sequence on 49v: http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f49v/0.5/0.5/2.50 http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f49v/0.5/0.5/2.50 (top left corner, read top-to-bottom) Here is the "alphabet sequence", on 57v: http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f57v/0.5/0.5/2.50 http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f57v/0.5/0.5/2.50 at least the second & third from outside circles have repeating patterns of symbols. It looks a bit like a substitiution code key to me. For reference, the page numbering you mentioned can be seen here, "57" in top right corner: http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f57r/0.5/0.344/2.50 http://www.jasondavies.com/voynich/#f57r/0.5/0.344/2.50 However I have not managed to look through much at all of previous research on this document. Just sharing my thougts.
- Luyt 13y agoThere is a skeptoid episode about the Voynich manuscript: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252 http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252 "A famous analysis done in the 1970's by US Navy cryptographer Prescott Currier found that the Voynich manuscript is written in two distinct languages. He used the term languages, but also cautioned that they're also consistent with different subject matter, different encryption schemes, or possibly just different dialects. He called them Voynich-A and Voynich-B. Interestingly, Voynich-A and Voynich-B are in two different handwritings, though both use the same alphabet and script. Every page of the book is written entirely in either A or B. The Biology and Star sections of the book are written in Voynich-B; the others are written in Voynich-A. The exception is the first and largest section, Botanical, which contains some of each. But they're not simply interspersed. The way the book is bound uses bifolios, which are groups of pages folded together, which are then stacked on top of one another to be bound. Each bifolio in the Voynich manuscript is written entirely in one language or the other."
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cLeEOGPw 13y agoExistance of Voynich-A and Voynich-B dialects supports the theory that the script was invented by a small group of people. Different languages also is consistent with the theory that the script is written in some language that didn't previously have a writing.
- darkhorn 13y agoStatistics student here. If one of the languages in the manuscript is a Turkic dialect then statistical word analyses won't be helpfull.