Posted on 01/26/2018 9:01:47 AM PST by mairdie
For centuries people have tried to decipher the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, and now a computer scientist claims to have cracked it using AI.
The 600-year-old document is described as 'the world's most mysterious medieval text', and is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures.
The 240-page manual's intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.
But even the cryptographers from Bletchley Park, the team that broke the Nazi enigma code, couldn't make sense of the manuscript.
Now a computer scientist says the manuscript is written in ancient Hebrew and the code involves shuffling the order of letters in each word and dropping the vowels.
While his is still to decipher its full meaning, he believes the first sentence of the text says: 'he made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I see I got here a little late. And your reply is more erudite than mine would have been. But, yeah, “dropping the vowels” from Hebrew is a bit problematical.
Bkmrk.
Hmmm, odd. But at least it makes a lot more sense than the Q droppings.
Didn’t see you on the reading list and thought you would be interested.
That’s EXQUISITE! BRILLIANT!
“But, yeah, dropping the vowels from Hebrew is a bit problematical.”
—
I don’t think this guy is right, but I don’t see the problem with dropping the vowels since Aaron ben Moses ben Asher’s invention of “Hebrew vowels” would have been known at the time the Voynich manuscript was written.
PING
“But even the cryptographers from Bletchley Park, the team that broke the Nazi enigma code, couldn’t make sense of the manuscript.”
I would not expect the Nazis to be able to read Old Hebrew.
Good Grief, Charlie Brown! Why does it have to be some wondrous panacea of knowledge just because it doesn’t have a translatable language. It’s probably all the playtime distraction from a dyslexic schizophrenic raised by monks and wanted to do what they do but couldn’t write, so they sat him out in the courtyard with some ink and pastels.
In some of the pictures the ‘tub’ seems suggestive of an alembic-type vessel. I’ve always thought it had something to do with alchemy.
That is more than wonderful. You have an imagination that soars.
PING
The manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438.
According to their research the first complete sentence reads, ‘She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.’
‘It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense’, said Dr Kondrak.
He found more than 80 per cent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but researchers did not know if they made sense together.
After unsuccessfully seeking Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, the scientists turned to Google Translate.
Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich.
The copies will be so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.
The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones - a number which is a palindrome, or a figure that reads the same backwards or forwards.
The publishing house plans to sell the clones, also known as facsimiles, for 7,000 to 8,000 euros (£6,030 to £6,891 or $7,800 to $8,900) apiece once completed - and close to 300 people have already put in pre-orders.
There is a comment posted to the article:
It’s a guide to understanding women. No wonder in undecipherable.
Consulting the Captain Midnight secret decoder to the unitiated .
This mysterious nanuscript looks like a discussion on Jewish dietary laws with an emphasis on pro creation.
What a wonderful company. I’ve always hated that so many wondrous manuscripts are locked away from public view, or situated in locations where I’ll never get to see them. I hope libraries buy many of these reproductions and put them on view.
A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!
I knew a stripper once, and while her powers may not have been magical, they were certainly ... extraordinary.
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