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Author Topic: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!  (Read 2610 times)

Allaya

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The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« on: May 15, 2019, 04:58:52 pm »
Holy crappity crap, y'all!

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566

It's a long read, but well worth it.
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.  — Shirley Chisholm
No doubt the truth can be unpleasant, but I am not sure that unpleasantness is the same as the truth.  — Roger Ebert
It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their livelihood depends upon them not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair (adapted)
People cannot be reasoned out of an opinion that they have not reasoned themselves into. — Fisher Ames (adapted)

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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #1 on: May 15, 2019, 05:23:39 pm »
It's a long read, but well worth it.

Interesting indeed.
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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #2 on: May 16, 2019, 06:23:19 pm »
Holy crappity crap, y'all!

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566

It's a long read, but well worth it.

I read the whole article and found it fascinating. I'd heard about some of the other analyses of the manuscript (including one that thought it was a forgery/hoax) but this one looks to actually be accurate.

I hope that someday there will be a book on the history of decipherment attempts, like there are for the Rosetta Stone.

Also, I'm tempted to learn this writing system. It looks like fun - and more interesting than the 'esoteric' alphabets I've seen in magick books.
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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #3 on: May 16, 2019, 09:09:27 pm »
Holy crappity crap, y'all!

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566

It's a long read, but well worth it.

Having seen a number of false alarms on this, I'm still a bit wary, but I've stashed the link for later perusal and expect it to be fascinating.

Also moved the thread, because where you had it is more for specific discussions of books, whereas a search indicated that all (but one, which I also moved, from Sci & Tech) previous Voynich news was here in the History forum.

Sunflower
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scoutyote

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Allaya

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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #5 on: May 18, 2019, 06:39:42 pm »
Good read but sadly no.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/no-someone-hasnt-cracked-the-code-of-the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript/

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-48309665

Dammit, University of Bristol...check your stuff before declaring something that potentially monumental to the press.

*adds University of Bristol to this month's Shit List*
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.  — Shirley Chisholm
No doubt the truth can be unpleasant, but I am not sure that unpleasantness is the same as the truth.  — Roger Ebert
It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their livelihood depends upon them not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair (adapted)
People cannot be reasoned out of an opinion that they have not reasoned themselves into. — Fisher Ames (adapted)

SunflowerP

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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #6 on: May 20, 2019, 07:02:32 pm »
Good read but sadly no.

<stashes those links, too> Yeah, I was afraid of that.

Fortunately, I wasn't really expecting more than 'good read but sadly no'; a genuine decoding would have been a bonus had that been the case, but I wasn't counting on it.

Sunflower
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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #7 on: May 20, 2019, 08:39:18 pm »
<stashes those links, too> Yeah, I was afraid of that.

Fortunately, I wasn't really expecting more than 'good read but sadly no'; a genuine decoding would have been a bonus had that been the case, but I wasn't counting on it.

Sunflower

Having read both now ... I'd say that this decoding is not so much 'disproved' as 'unprovable' given that it states that Voynich is an example of both an extinct dialect and an extinct writing system.

Best counterarguments:
- That this decoding doesn't account for letter frequencies typical in Romance languages
- That this decoding hasn't been applied to longer passages

Worst counterarguments:
- That letterforms that are also found in the Latin alphabet are assigned different values than in Latin. (That's something that happens all the time between writing systems.)
- That the decoding assigns the same set of letters different meanings in different places. (Puns and double meanings are a thing ...)

In general, the rebutter doesn't like how subjective and interpretive this decoding is, which, yeah, is academically unsound ... but what else is anyone going to do, in the absence of a Rosetta stone or similar key. I'd agree now that this isn't definitive, but I'm still making it my headcanon.  ;)
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Allaya

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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #8 on: May 21, 2019, 04:00:21 am »
In general, the rebutter doesn't like how subjective and interpretive this decoding is, which, yeah, is academically unsound ... but what else is anyone going to do, in the absence of a Rosetta stone or similar key. I'd agree now that this isn't definitive, but I'm still making it my headcanon.  ;)

See, now why do you have to be all reasonable and practically force me steal that there viewpoint like a raccoon with a bag of chips?
Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.  — Shirley Chisholm
No doubt the truth can be unpleasant, but I am not sure that unpleasantness is the same as the truth.  — Roger Ebert
It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their livelihood depends upon them not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair (adapted)
People cannot be reasoned out of an opinion that they have not reasoned themselves into. — Fisher Ames (adapted)

Sefiru

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Re: The Voynich Manuscript is a mystery no more!!
« Reply #9 on: May 21, 2019, 06:44:14 pm »
See, now why do you have to be all reasonable and practically force me steal that there viewpoint like a raccoon with a bag of chips?

I'm an Evil Librul that way  ;D

While the actual translation of the text might be dubious, I think the proposed origin of the manuscript in this paper is pretty plausible in several ways.
- geographically isolated Romance dialect? Some of those are still around, even after the printing press and modern transportation. And many, many more gone extinct for those same reasons.
- Dialect at border of a language group influenced by neighboring languages? Everywhere, all the time.
- group creates their own writing system by borrowing existing signs and assigning their own sound values? Many examples from Cuneiform to Cherokee.
- Intellectually inclined community of women develops their own writing system? That's how Hiragana came to be.

... I likes me some historical lignuistics / linguistic history.
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