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    Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

    The Voynich manuscript is one of the more interesting of history's mysteries.

    It's the real deal - a manuscript which has been carbon dated to between 1400 and 1440.

    It seems to be divided into three sections, the first has illustrations of plants, the second of stars, and the third seems to be pictures of naked women going down the plumbing.

    We have to look at the pictures because, even though there is text, nobody has been able to figure out how to read it.

    Here's some quick info: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html

    And here is a downloadable copy of the full manuscript, if you want to try to figure this thing out: http://www.archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript

    So what the heck is this thing? An elaborate ancient hoax? Secret knowledge from the past?
    Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.


    #2
    Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

    OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.............neat!

    I'll have to take a better look later on! I have less fun stuff to get done right now...
    Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of HistoryPagan Devotionals, because the wind and the rain is our Bible
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      #3
      Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

      It's probably just a secret code, or more likely the scribblings of a madman.

      Literacy wasn't a terribly common thing back then, so it wouldn't surprise me if people just came up with their own systems of reading and writing.

      I think it might be an almanac or a journal, that's certainly what it looks like.
      Trust is knowing someone or something well enough to have a good idea of their motivations and character, for good or for ill. People often say trust when they mean faith.

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        #4
        Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

        It may well be a code, but, if so, nobody has been able to decipher it, even with very sophisticated technology.

        So it may be gibberish, except that the "letters" repeat like you'd expect letters to do, and even "words" repeat like you'd expect. It is "language like," not just random scribbling.

        One really interesting feature is that there are drawings which seem to shower cross sections of stems - showing cell structure. This would be an amazing anachronism... The first known microscope that could reveal those details wasn't invented until a hundred years later.

        But those may not be cells... Without the text, we can't tell for sure what is being depicted...
        Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.

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          #5
          Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

          The thing about gibberish is that it IS almost always language like, Twinglish, feral proto-speak and whatnot are all pretty much true languages.

          The only way it could be random gibberish is if it was written specifically to be random gibberish, humans are very pattern oriented creatures. We see and put patterns in everything.
          Trust is knowing someone or something well enough to have a good idea of their motivations and character, for good or for ill. People often say trust when they mean faith.

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            #6
            Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

            Originally posted by Denarius View Post
            Literacy wasn't a terribly common thing back then, so it wouldn't surprise me if people just came up with their own systems of reading and writing.

            .
            No, actually they didn't. Spelling was certainly rather freehand, but writing tended to follow a pattern. The whole point about writing is that you normally want it to be read by someone else, so you might make the effort to create a code (think of Samuel Pepys) but only if you were already literate.

            And the elite were nearly always literate in that period. Or at least, they liked other people to think that they were!
            www.thewolfenhowlepress.com


            Phantom Turnips never die.... they just get stewed occasionally....

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              #7
              Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

              Here's a guy who claims to be able to translate it. He says it's a warning about a forthcoming apocalypse, brought to us by aliens: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci...nuscrito02.htm
              Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.

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                #8
                Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                I think it's beautiful.

                I also think it's someone's personal shorthand. The figures that look like 8s & the ones that look like tall Pi symbols makes me think about how I take my own notes. I've never taken a shorthand class, so I've got combinations of grammatical symbols, medical symbols and other random bits thrown together. The way some of them recur in the manuscript seems to me to be too frequent for individual letters, but phonetic sounds might make sense.

                Originally posted by B. de Corbin View Post
                Here's a guy who claims to be able to translate it. He says it's a warning about a forthcoming apocalypse, brought to us by aliens: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci...nuscrito02.htm
                Of course it is. I mean, why else would someone draw anatomical diagrams of flowers & star maps all over the place?
                The forum member formerly known as perzephone. Or Perze. I've shed a skin.

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                  #9
                  Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                  I think it's beautiful also - it's not so much the plants and starcharts, although the foldouts are really remarkable. I'm just way curious about the women and the tubes. It's just so wierd that I want to know what was going through the writer's head when he was thinking that stuff. I'd even be interested if it was a fake... It looks like it means something to somebody, but what?

                  One of the theories I read was that it is a form of shorthand - Greek, I think. That would make translation very problematical, though, since shorthand - even when one learns it in school - is pretty personal, and hard for anybody but the writier to translate back into common language. But it is a possiblity...

                  It also happens that some words appear two and even three times in a row. This is pretty uncommon in European languages, but, from what I've read, does occur in some Asian languages. There are also no words of more than three syllables, and very few occurances of words made up of one or two letters - this is also a characteristic of some Asian languages. This has led to the theory that it is a constructed alphabet used to signify sounds and words in some (possibly dead) Asian language...
                  Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.

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                    #10
                    Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                    Originally posted by Tylluan Penry View Post
                    No, actually they didn't. Spelling was certainly rather freehand, but writing tended to follow a pattern. The whole point about writing is that you normally want it to be read by someone else, so you might make the effort to create a code (think of Samuel Pepys) but only if you were already literate.

                    And the elite were nearly always literate in that period. Or at least, they liked other people to think that they were!
                    Yeah and also, ink and paper were not as cheap and readily available in those days as they are now. It wasn't something that just anyone had access to. And it wasn't something to be wasted.

                    Which is why I don't think it's a hoax. Doing stuff like that took time and probably money, so why bother? Unless you did it as a distraction to hide something else.

                    It's probably a code. Medieval Europe wasn't a place of tolerance and if you wanted to keep certain practices or scientific research, you had to hide it or you'd be tried for heresy.

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                      #11
                      Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                      Originally posted by DanieMarie View Post
                      Which is why I don't think it's a hoax. Doing stuff like that took time and probably money, so why bother? Unless you did it as a distraction to hide something else.

                      It's probably a code. Medieval Europe wasn't a place of tolerance and if you wanted to keep certain practices or scientific research, you had to hide it or you'd be tried for heresy.
                      It could actually be an antique scam. At the time, there was - amongst the well educated (which frequently also meant wealthy) - a rage for collecting esoteric manuscripts. If somebody wanted to scam an important buyer, this would be the way to do it.

                      The biggest argument against the scam theory comes from the cytologists trying to decipher it. A scam at that time would be a fairly simple affair. People were credulous - they sincerely believed that secret knowledge was in those manuscripts, and the techniques for detecting fraud were pretty primitive.

                      This manuscript, if it is a fraud, is a complex enough fraud to fool modern researchers armed with linguistic knowledge and computers designed to break codes. The writing in this manuscript is (according to the cryptologists. I don't know much about the subject, so I can't comment) too language like to be random - for instance, certain letters are frequently found in pairs (like "th" in English), while other letters are seldom paired (like initial vowels in English). It's just too good to be a fraud of that time period.

                      But then too, there was a huge interest in codes and cyphers which took off shortly after the manuscript was produced. So maybe this was an early use of some particularly complex code. Bacon wrote a book or two about cyphers and codes, and everybody likes to attach things to Bacon (I generally only attach a string to bacon when I want to tease the dog), so Bacon is one of the proposed authors...
                      Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.

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                        #12
                        Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                        Having recently seen an ultrasound of my own, I keep getting stuck on the idea that the woman on the top of the last page looks like she's sitting in a giant ovary.
                        Great Grandmother's Kitchen

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                          #13
                          Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                          Originally posted by B. de Corbin View Post
                          It could actually be an antique scam. At the time, there was - amongst the well educated (which frequently also meant wealthy) - a rage for collecting esoteric manuscripts. If somebody wanted to scam an important buyer, this would be the way to do it.

                          The biggest argument against the scam theory comes from the cytologists trying to decipher it. A scam at that time would be a fairly simple affair. People were credulous - they sincerely believed that secret knowledge was in those manuscripts, and the techniques for detecting fraud were pretty primitive.

                          This manuscript, if it is a fraud, is a complex enough fraud to fool modern researchers armed with linguistic knowledge and computers designed to break codes. The writing in this manuscript is (according to the cryptologists. I don't know much about the subject, so I can't comment) too language like to be random - for instance, certain letters are frequently found in pairs (like "th" in English), while other letters are seldom paired (like initial vowels in English). It's just too good to be a fraud of that time period.

                          But then too, there was a huge interest in codes and cyphers which took off shortly after the manuscript was produced. So maybe this was an early use of some particularly complex code. Bacon wrote a book or two about cyphers and codes, and everybody likes to attach things to Bacon (I generally only attach a string to bacon when I want to tease the dog), so Bacon is one of the proposed authors...

                          That's what I mean though. I think the time and effort and cost of producing it wouldn't have been necessary or worth it. If they wanted to hoax someone it was the middle ages....there were MANY easier ways to do it! I mean this is the era when you could just dig up a bunch of bones, put them in a chest and claim it was a saint and charge money for people to pray over it.

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                            #14
                            Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                            Originally posted by Dez View Post
                            Having recently seen an ultrasound of my own, I keep getting stuck on the idea that the woman on the top of the last page looks like she's sitting in a giant ovary.
                            LOL - they always make me think of intestines...

                            ---------- Post added at 02:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:32 PM ----------

                            Originally posted by DanieMarie View Post
                            That's what I mean though. I think the time and effort and cost of producing it wouldn't have been necessary or worth it. If they wanted to hoax someone it was the middle ages....there were MANY easier ways to do it! I mean this is the era when you could just dig up a bunch of bones, put them in a chest and claim it was a saint and charge money for people to pray over it.
                            Yeah, but what if your fish was REALLY big...

                            Somewhat later the manuscript is believed to have been sold to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg by the John Dee & Edward Kelly team. There's some evidence that this is true (but nothing certain). This would have taken place a hundred or so years after the date of the manuscript, so it isn't what the manuscript was made for, but... there were a lot of big fish back then with deep pockets.

                            But I agree with you - it seems like a lot of work for a fairly simple scam. I think there is something more to it, but I have no idea what that something else is.
                            Every moment of a life is a horrible tragedy, a slapstick comedy, dark nihilism, golden illumination, or nothing at all; depending on how we write the story we tell ourselves.

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                              #15
                              Re: Voynich manuscript - what the heck?

                              I'll examine it more for those nights where I'm bored and have insomnia. It'll go in with those uncracked Zodiac letters.
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