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.
But what is more likely? That this is a forgotten language of which only a single mystifying example exists (ignoring the completely unlikely plants being described in the manuscript), or that it is a work of fantasy that has merits of its own?
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.
Because researchers have spent years studying it and have come to the conclusion that those are the two most likely scenarios. I'm sure they considered and eliminated others.
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?
The Swiss patent office didn't have much scientific output either, until it had.
http://www.beds.ac.uk/aboutus/history
The linked story is from before the merger (2005), and before the center Bax works at was founded (at a third campus).
I wouldn't say that story has much relevance here. You'd want to look into the credentials of his language center and Bax himself (which look decent to me, though I don't know anything in particular.)
"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."
http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/pdfgen/exportPDF.php?bibid=2...
It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters. Not sure if that could be possible with real languages.
It's not like many languages out there end (or wrap, even!) their sentences with a couple of unique symbols.
(Or were you being silly :P)
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] http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_botanical_plants/plant....
Human nature doesn't change.
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.
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.
First you should get the PDF copy from 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-b...
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 (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
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
However I have not managed to look through much at all of previous research on this document. Just sharing my thougts.
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.
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.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fpZD_3D8_WQ
Very accessible.
Indeed, I wish that more academics made the effort to create such accessible summaries of their work.
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."
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.
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
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.
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 ?
Basically the xkcd comic would apply, just that the people (or person) that wrote it had a fairly broad linguistic ability.
But I'm just assuming.
