Voynich manuscript

[Zaarin]

I maintain that the best evidence points to either a magical/alchemical text or glossolalia.

Yes, it is probably a magical or alchemical text. But whatever it is, it may have inspired a similar work in the 1970s.

Which in turn has inspired several similar works since then. If I had any artistic ability, I'd be tempted to try one myself.

[Vlürch]

I maintain that the best evidence points to either a magical/alchemical text or glossolalia.

Yes, it is probably a magical or alchemical text. But whatever it is, it may have inspired a similar work in the 1970s.

Which in turn has inspired several similar works since then. If I had any artistic ability, I'd be tempted to try one myself.

Same... I can't draw shit and have no interest in learning, simply because I just don't see the point unless I also learned to paint or whatever. I mean, I used to be really into drawing when I was a kid, but I always got disappointed by how I couldn't get anything to look photorealistic or like cool CGI shit, so I gave up.

A friend of a friend drew a few pages of what were like deformed people or aliens or whatever and wrote gibberish all over them so that there was no blank left, and the friend whose friend he was posted them somewhere online, but I have no idea how to find them or if they're even up anymore, and I don't feel like asking him because of reasons.

Also, I just found this. I haven't read it yet, only went through a few pages really quickly, but it seems like a thorough attempt at not only decipherment or analysis of the content but both simultaneously.

[Zaarin]

I maintain that the best evidence points to either a magical/alchemical text or glossolalia.

Yes, it is probably a magical or alchemical text. But whatever it is, it may have inspired a similar work in the 1970s.

Which in turn has inspired several similar works since then. If I had any artistic ability, I'd be tempted to try one myself.

Same... I can't draw shit and have no interest in learning, simply because I just don't see the point unless I also learned to paint or whatever. I mean, I used to be really into drawing when I was a kid, but I always got disappointed by how I couldn't get anything to look photorealistic or like cool CGI shit, so I gave up.

I spent years trying to learn; anyone who says "anyone can learn to draw" is wrong. :p

[mèþru]

It is true that the vast majority of people can learn to draw. But I think the phrase is only true when it comes to very simple things and there are compasses and rulers. Like, I think most people could learn to draw a character SATW-style with no colours.

[Terra]

It's Old Turkic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk

The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious medieval manuscript written in the early 15th century. To date, scientists, historians, mathematicians and linguists have struggled to decipher the manuscript. However, the mystery has finally been put to rest. Ata Team Alberta (ATA) has deciphered and translated over 30% the manuscript. Currently, a formal paper of the philological study was submitted to an academic journal in John Hopkins University.

They never explain why they can translate only 30% though. Perhaps they just haven't had time to do every page yet? In the comments he mentions that the author was multilingual, so perhaps they don't know some words because they're Arabic/Greek/Other?

The Voynich manuscript is so delightfully bizarre. A part of me wants to know what it is; a part of me would be disappointed to lose the mystery.

If you want mystery, we still have the Codex Seraphinianus.

[KathTheDragon]

Interesting. I wonder if other scholars will pick up on this, and it turns out to be correct. That'd be really cool.

[linguoboy]

This made me wonder if there'd been any further "progress". Here's what I found: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16959 ... d-debunked.

Turns out the original "decipherment" was even more kludgy than I originally thought (and I thought it was plenty kludgy enough).

[Salmoneus]

You confused me there - note that the "original" decipherment you're talking about there is a different (and later?) one than the decipherment talked about at the beginning of this thread.

Clearly, great strides are being taken in Voynichology. It's been solved three times in the last six months alone!

[mèþru]

About the video:
https://busy.org/@xp1/is-the-mysterious ... -some-text

[Travis B.]

From searching for "voynich decipherment" I came across two totally different decipherments, one which was that it was really a plagiarism of various Medieval Latin texts and was on women's health, and one which was that it was composed of alphabetically ordered anagrams of Hebrew words...

[linguoboy]

You confused me there - note that the "original" decipherment you're talking about there is a different (and later?) one than the decipherment talked about at the beginning of this thread.

I confused myself!

I do remember being amused by two different decipherments hitting the news in quick succession and not being impressed by the methodology of either.

[hwhatting]

A Turkish family finds out that the Voynich manuscript is in some kind of Old Turkish. And all the known back story is wrong, it was actually stolen from Ottoman archives. Looks totally legit.

[Zaarin]

A Turkish family finds out that the Voynich manuscript is in some kind of Old Turkish. And all the known back story is wrong, it was actually stolen from Ottoman archives. Looks totally legit.

Exactly. We all know it passed in direct succession from the Annunaki to Gilgamesh to Attila the Hun to the Kings of Hungary before the Italians stole it during the 4th Crusade, and that the Illuminati are actively working to prevent its translation lest we discover the horrible truth contained within. :p

[Vlürch]

It's Old Turkic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk

Interesting. I'm not really convinced, though, since A) they match individual letters to more than one letter in a way that a lot will be left to be resolved by context and B) if it was a Turkic language, there would presumably be longer words.

As for A, that was the case with Ottoman Turkish so it's definitely not an argument to debunk the theory, just something that I thought was weird about the claims in the video: it couldn't be a "phonemic alphabet" if eg. /o/ and /ø/ are represented by the same letter. That was the problem with Ottoman Turkish using the Arabic script, and why Uyghur etc. use additional letters; the vowels are just that important. Especially since the Voynich Manuscript predates Ottoman Turkish and is contemporary with Old Anatolian Turkish, which AFAIK did write all vowels with different diacritics, it wouldn't make sense for the author to have chosen to use the same letter for /o/ and /ø/, etc. instead of having separate letters for them, especially if they had different letters from /u/ and /y/; if there was a one-to-one correspondence between the Arabic script used to write Old Anatolian Turkish (or another Turkic alphabet) and the Voynich Manuscript, it'd make more sense, but there clearly isn't and they're not suggesting that there is, so... why would the vowels be written the way they are? And why call it a "phonemic alphabet" if it isn't?

B, on the other hand, seems like an even bigger obstacle. Turkish words (and words in other Turkic languages) can get fairly long, but AFAICT the longest words in the Voynich Manuscript are around nine letters; there probably are longer ones, but I'd expect a lot more of them and even longer ones. I mean, even three-letter words like ata ("father") can be easily inflected until they're thirteen letters: atalarımızdan ("from our fathers"), so naturally longer words would be much longer when inflected. Are they claiming that only short words were used in the entire book or something?

I guess it could be a Turkic-based creole where possessive suffixes and whatnot have been lost and where short simple words were the norm, but...

They never explain why they can translate only 30% though. Perhaps they just haven't had time to do every page yet? In the comments he mentions that the author was multilingual, so perhaps they don't know some words because they're Arabic/Greek/Other?

It seems kinda suspicious tbh, especially since in the comments he's refusing to give actual transcriptions of more than individual words and hinting at one of the commenters "getting close" and whatnot. Just seems like the kind of behaviour an ARGer or trolly conlanger or even an outright scammer would have, since they do give an English translation of one page in the video so it can't really be about wanting to protect their work before it's published and recognised... if I could be arsed, I'd try to back-translate their English translation of that page into Turkish, but I'd have to look up every other word since my Turkish is nowhere near good and that'd be too much effort for the relaxed mood I'm in right now.

If it clearly has a lot of Turkic words and influence but it doesn't really make sense as a Turkic language, something to consider could be whether it's Cappadocian Greek or something.

If you want mystery, we still have the Codex Seraphinianus.

But that was just some dude's art project in the eighties or something, right?

[masako]

But that was just some dude's art project in the eighties or something, right?

"created by the Italian artist, architect, and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978." > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

[Vlürch]

But that was just some dude's art project in the eighties or something, right?

"created by the Italian artist, architect, and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978." > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

Okay, so it was in the seventies rather than eighties. I think that makes it even more likely to just be some kind of psychedelic/surrealist art with no deeper meaning. It's definitely interesting and clearly took a lot of dedication to make, which is admirable and something I wish I could have the patience to do, and the motivation behind it could have been something personally philosophical or whatever, but I don't see how it relates to the Voynich Manuscript except possibly being inspired by it.

I mean, okay, the guy who made it is Italian so it could be argued that maybe he's a descendant of the author of the Voynich Manuscript keeping up a secret tradition or something, or even his reincarnation if such things are roughly localised to a certain cultural sphere and is a real thing, but like... why? Even the Wikipedia article on the author states he himself has said it has no hidden meaning, which could be a "he doesn't want us to dig deeper" thing, but probably not.

Anyway, I tried to find longer words in the Voynich Manuscript than nine letters and have still had no success. Then again, I've only checked out random pages of it (on Wikipedia Commons), so it could be that I've missed all the ones that do have them.