Another Look at the Voynich Manuscript

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/09/decoding-voynich-manuscript/679157/

by fortran77 • 2 years ago

47 25 2 years ago

bell-cot• 2 years ago

Summary:

'Till ~2020, Voynich research was pretty much reserved for nut jobs, and the very occasional academic intent upon career suicide.

In 2020, a senior A List scholar published her meticulous, narrow-niche Voynich research - https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/754633/pdf - which established that the Manuscript was the (physical) handiwork of 5 different scribes.

Since then, a fair number of serious researchers have done work on the Manuscript. So far, their conclusions are similarly dull and limited. (Though they do rule out many cool categories of nut theories.)

bee_rider• 2 years ago

It is sort of interesting that it is a group work. It’s odd that somebody would scribble a whole journal full of random stuff, but of course people in the olden days got bored too. Convincing four other people to scribble with you seems a bit harder, haha.

082349872349872• 2 years ago

Now that we have GenAI a whole book of random stuff is cheap, but back then it was expensive (and coordinating a group sounds even more expensive!), so we assume it must've had some meaning to someone, and get nerd-sniped into finding a reading.

(on the other hand: https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html . It's amusing to see "errata"!)

benterix• 2 years ago

Check this out: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/

(I had no idea this lore exist but got interested why my daughter suddenly started to talk about `scp`, I was wondering is she wants to copy some files between machines...)

singularity20012• 2 years ago

how do they rule out if these five hands come from the same person with long periods of not working on the script? My handwriting can certainly change when I take a three year break

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

Since then, a fair number of serious researchers have done work on the Manuscript. So far, their conclusions are similarly dull and limited. (Though they do rule out many cool categories of nut theories.)

Not limited enough to rule some things out. Kind of "We're just guessing, but their guesses are incorrect. We do know that much".

jhbadger• 2 years ago

'Till ~2020, Voynich research was pretty much reserved for nut jobs, and the very occasional academic intent upon career suicide.

I wouldn't say that. Probably the most famous Voynich researcher until modern times was William Friedman, who was a famous cryptographer who led the team who cracked PURPLE (Japan's equivalent to Enigma) in WWII. He wasn't viewed as a crackpot but was and is revered in the field of cryptography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F._Friedman

grvbck• 2 years ago

Further reading, for those interested:

Hi-res scans of the manuscript: https://archive.org/details/the-voynich-manuscript_202008/

Declassified NSA seminar (1976): https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

kencausey• 2 years ago

Here is an online folio browser:

https://www.voynich.ninja/browser/default.cfm

vzaliva• 2 years ago

I could not comment on paywalled article, but I am wondering if someone finally tried to use AI/ML on the manuscript.

karencarits• 2 years ago

This blog is actively writing about such approaches: https://voynichattacks.wordpress.com/

DonaldFisk• 2 years ago

From the Atlantic article: So little was known about the underlying language—if it was a language—that even artificial intelligence, in its current state, lacked the models to decode it. Good AI requires “massive amounts of data to learn from,” Layfield told me. “We simply don’t have that luxury with the text in the Voynich.”

canjobear• 2 years ago

How good is the accuracy of paleological methods? Have they been tested in scenarios where a ground truth later became available?

dash2• 2 years ago

Voynich Studies seems like one of those interesting fields where hi-tech meets the humanities. One person is using mathematical cryptanalysis, another has spent their life studying medieval inks, somebody else knows about early gynecology.... Archeology is in a similar place at the moment, because of the advent of ancient DNA. Fun for such different academic communities to have to interact with each other.

lantry• 2 years ago

obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/593/

Animats• 2 years ago

Question: is there any history of something like roleplaying games from that area and period?

tuggi• 2 years ago

http://archive.is/dvwsP

smusamashah• 2 years ago

To me it looks like in same vein as Codex Seraphinianus which has no language but definitely looks like its telling something.

andyjohnson0• 2 years ago

I have a copy of the YUP facsimile mentioned in the article and its a thing of beauty.

cedws• 2 years ago

I did my own amateur analysis of it once. My idea was to try and use line breaks to derive some information about how words might be delineated.

On a lot of the pages, the text is highly compressed against the illustrations. If you’re writing English you would find this hard to do, because you would need to insert a line break before a word if it’s too long. I couldn’t find any examples where the text overlapped the illustrations. That suggests to me that words are either very short, or graphemes themselves are words. Or, that the text is a meaningless hoax, because it doesn’t adhere to any rules and can be squashed against the illustrations easily.

addaon• 2 years ago

Or, it's a scriptio continua like classical greek and latin, and line breaks are permitted in the middle of words.

rasz• 2 years ago

Its doable http://tom7.org/bovex/

singularity20012• 2 years ago

short words would be consistent with the serious analysis that the language has to be tonal, Which rules out all European languages and Mostly leaves meso American or sinitic languages; which would be possible as an extra chapter to il millione, the travel report of Marco Polo, albeit reproduced and illustrated in a European context and style

matt-attack• 2 years ago

Anyone know if there’s a nice hardbound version of this? Looks like everything on Amazon is garbage.

Another Look at the Voynich Manuscript

Related Stories