Voynich manuscript
Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2017 9:45 am
I've heard that there was some on social media about some new discovery about the document. What happened exactly?
I've heard of linguists plugging Linear B's phonetic values into Linear A, but I was under the impression that that resulted in unreadable gibberish. Considering cracking Linear A would open up the Minoan language for study and would be an achievement on par with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Mayan syllabary, it's a little odd that they'd keep it under wraps...Vlürch wrote:Linear A for a conlang, but since its phonetic characteristics have supposedly been deciphered but not publicly released, that's kinda off-putting tbh...
I meant said unreadable gibberish hasn't been published anywhere, but turns out I was wrong. Somehow, I hadn't been able to find that before even though I once spent hours trying to search for romanised Linear A texts... nevermind. Is there a Linear A thread? The search doesn't find one, at least, but it would be interesting. If not, maybe one should be made?Zaarin wrote:I've heard of linguists plugging Linear B's phonetic values into Linear A, but I was under the impression that that resulted in unreadable gibberish.
Never heard of that assumption, but then again, I'm neither a scholar nor a woman... and I haven't kept up with Voynich manuscript theories for a few years, and even before then I mostly found the ones about aliens or secret societies most interesting, so it's possible that I had seen "women's health" as a theory, gone "nope, that's not cool enough" and instantly forgetting about it.mèþru wrote:I saw the article and skipped straight to the debunking without reading the original page. They said that the premise, that the document is about women's health, is already widely assumed by scholars. Is that true?
Ha! Brilliant! But yeah, some sort of alchemical or magical text seems most likely to me, or else some kind of elaborate glossolalia.Ars Lande wrote:I couldn't find the original claim, but apparently the hypothesis had something to do with the drawings of baths and fountains.
There are large sections dedicated to botany and astrology, which is suggestive of a medical or alchemical text.
I still prefer this theory, though: https://xkcd.com/593/
Also, of the RPG handbooks I have seen so far, none was written in a strange alphabet (though some at least use fancy typefaces). I agree with you that the Voynich Manuscript probably is a magical text of some sort. The venerable Dr. John Dee of Enochian fame has been considered a likely candidate for authorship, for instance.Zaarin wrote:Ha! Brilliant! But yeah, some sort of alchemical or magical text seems most likely to me, or else some kind of elaborate glossolalia.Ars Lande wrote:I couldn't find the original claim, but apparently the hypothesis had something to do with the drawings of baths and fountains.
There are large sections dedicated to botany and astrology, which is suggestive of a medical or alchemical text.
I still prefer this theory, though: https://xkcd.com/593/
Then there's also the possibility it's a natlang. I recall hearing it having some of the properties of East Asian languages, such as, iirc, full-word reduplication.WeepingElf wrote:Also, of the RPG handbooks I have seen so far, none was written in a strange alphabet (though some at least use fancy typefaces). I agree with you that the Voynich Manuscript probably is a magical text of some sort. The venerable Dr. John Dee of Enochian fame has been considered a likely candidate for authorship, for instance.Zaarin wrote:Ha! Brilliant! But yeah, some sort of alchemical or magical text seems most likely to me, or else some kind of elaborate glossolalia.Ars Lande wrote:I couldn't find the original claim, but apparently the hypothesis had something to do with the drawings of baths and fountains.
There are large sections dedicated to botany and astrology, which is suggestive of a medical or alchemical text.
I still prefer this theory, though: https://xkcd.com/593/
I remember seeing a TV documentary according to which it was probably written in northern Italy in the 15th century, but I don't know how good the evidence is. It runs like this: The parchment has been C14-dated to the early to middle 15th century; and one drawing shows a castle with swallow-tail merlons, which at that time were only used in northern Italy.
An interesting question (from the standpoint of the conlang historian) is whether it is a genuine, self-contained conlang or just a cipher. I consider the latter more likely, but so far, nobody knows.
An elaborate cipher would be in keeping with many other alchemical treatises of the period, though the Voynich manuscript obviously far outdoes any of them. From what I've read, though, authorship by Dee is considered dubious because he was an immaculate record keeper and his records don't mention it. Emperor Rudolf II of the HRE was the first recorded owner of the manuscript: has there been any investigation as to whether he or someone in his court might have penned the Voynich manuscript? Rudolf II was well known as a very eccentric collector, a patron of both the sciences and the occult, and possibly just a little insane.WeepingElf wrote:Also, of the RPG handbooks I have seen so far, none was written in a strange alphabet (though some at least use fancy typefaces). I agree with you that the Voynich Manuscript probably is a magical text of some sort. The venerable Dr. John Dee of Enochian fame has been considered a likely candidate for authorship, for instance.Zaarin wrote:Ha! Brilliant! But yeah, some sort of alchemical or magical text seems most likely to me, or else some kind of elaborate glossolalia.Ars Lande wrote:I couldn't find the original claim, but apparently the hypothesis had something to do with the drawings of baths and fountains.
There are large sections dedicated to botany and astrology, which is suggestive of a medical or alchemical text.
I still prefer this theory, though: https://xkcd.com/593/
I remember seeing a TV documentary according to which it was probably written in northern Italy in the 15th century, but I don't know how good the evidence is. It runs like this: The parchment has been C14-dated to the early to middle 15th century; and one drawing shows a castle with swallow-tail merlons, which at that time were only used in northern Italy.
An interesting question (from the standpoint of the conlang historian) is whether it is a genuine, self-contained conlang or just a cipher. I consider the latter more likely, but so far, nobody knows.
So John Dee is pretty unlikely, as he would have been negative a century old back then.Wikipedia wrote:The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438
It could be, but there are words being repeated three times. No language known to have ever existed does that AFAIK. The only way I can imagine it making sense is if it was an onomatopoeia, but why would there be onomatopoeia in a book that seems to describe plants and shit? Maybe if it really does have magical formulas or something, it could make sense, I guess, but other than that...Zju wrote:Then there's also the possibility it's a natlang. I recall hearing it having some of the properties of East Asian languages, such as, iirc, full-word reduplication.
Yeah but couldnt the paper have been old but still usable? I mean, it's still around today, right? I wouldnt count him out just because the paper he wrote on had been manufactured a century earlier.mèþru wrote:So John Dee is pretty unlikely, as he would have been negative a century old back then.Wikipedia wrote:The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438
For the three ttimes repetition thing, I've been thinking it could be a full reduplication followed or preceeded by the same word used in another phrase (maybe polysemy, maybe homonymy, maybe not even that). E.g. consider the sentences "I watch watches" - but with plurality being expressed by full reduplication, as in Indonesian - the sentences would then become "I watch watch watch". Or the buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo thing. Three and more times word in a row is definitely a thing to occur, even if rarely.Vlürch wrote:It could be, but there are words being repeated three times. No language known to have ever existed does that AFAIK. The only way I can imagine it making sense is if it was an onomatopoeia, but why would there be onomatopoeia in a book that seems to describe plants and shit? Maybe if it really does have magical formulas or something, it could make sense, I guess, but other than that...Zju wrote:Then there's also the possibility it's a natlang. I recall hearing it having some of the properties of East Asian languages, such as, iirc, full-word reduplication.
...although now that I think about it, they could be adverbs like Japanese ぐるぐる and ゆらゆら, etc. They can be repeated three, four or even more times, so... hmm... if they were written with spaces, that would look similar to the repetition of words in the Voynich manuscript... hmm...
Yes, but with many of those the problem is that the natlang they're written in (if they really are scripts encoding languages, which is doubtful for several of the listed scripts) itself isn't known from other sources. Looking at when and where the manuscript was probably written (ca. 15th / 16th century Europe), the number of potential natlangs it could be written in is limited. I think the chance that it's written in some now-lost undocumented natural laguage is very, very small; my money is either on gibberish with some rules or on some kind of philosophical or magician conlang / secret language.mèþru wrote:@hwhatting
There's plenty of undeciphered scripts that could possibly be for a natlang
That's not impossible, though I think the likelihood of a stack of vellum pages lying unused for 100+ years is rather small.Soap wrote:Yeah but couldnt the paper have been old but still usable? I mean, it's still around today, right? I wouldnt count him out just because the paper he wrote on had been manufactured a century earlier.mèþru wrote:So John Dee is pretty unlikely, as he would have been negative a century old back then.Wikipedia wrote:The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438
That said, I wouldnt think that something like Enochian and the Voynich manuscript could have come from the same person. The Voynich manuscript looks like it took years of work to put together, whereas the Enochian language looks like something a 10-year-old scratched out in an hour during math class. (z always pronounced /zod/? Seriously?)
If fifteenth century vellum is unlikely to sit around unused for one century, don't you think it's fair to assume that it's even more unlikely to sit around unused for four? Carbon dating confirmed the age of the vellum; vellum was expensive and not the kind of thing you made and then just tossed aside indefinitely. I think the age of the vellum pretty absolutely rules out that it's a modern forgery, though it doesn't rule out the possibility that it was some sort of hoax or practical joke in its own time--though someone went to an awful lot of work for their joke if that's the case.kuroda wrote:My only curiosity is, here, why no one has brought up all the many arguments that the Voynich is a recent fake? In other words, a conlang. One with enviable production values?
I''m not a Europeanist, so I'm not speaking from intimacy so much as from scenting bullshit projected on others: the Voynich manuscript, to me, screams out its ~19th-century cleversticks origins.
Yes, it is probably a magical or alchemical text. But whatever it is, it may have inspired a similar work in the 1970s.Zaarin wrote:I maintain that the best evidence points to either a magical/alchemical text or glossolalia.