The Voynich manuscript - Another twist in the tale (((Democrat play book I'd guess)))

The Economist print edition ^ | Jan 8th 2004 | staff

[Phil V.]

The Voynich manuscript

Another twist in the tale

Jan 8th 2004
From The Economist print edition

A possible explanation for the world's most enigmatic book

Worth 600 ducats of anybody's money!

THE Voynich manuscript, once owned by Emperor Rudolph II in 16th-century Bohemia, is filled with drawings of fantastic plants, zodiacal symbols and naked ladies. Far more intriguing than its illustrations, however, is the accompanying text: 234 pages of beautifully formed, yet completely unintelligible script.

Modern scholars have pored over the book since 1912, when Wilfrid Voynich, an American antiquarian, bought the manuscript and started circulating copies in the hope of having it translated. Some 90 years later, the book still defies deciphering. It now resides at Yale University.

The manuscript is written in “Voynichese”, which consists of strange characters, some of which look like normal Latin letters and Roman numerals. Some analysts have suggested that Voynichese is a modified form of Chinese. Others think it may be Ukrainian with the vowels taken out. But Voynichese words do not resemble those of any known language. Nor is the text a simple transliteration into fanciful symbols: the internal structure of Voynichese words, and how they fit together in sentences, is unlike patterns seen in other languages.

Another possibility is that the text is written in code. But the best efforts of cryptographers over the past 30 years have failed to crack it. This resilience is unusual, given that other ciphers from the period have yielded their secrets.

On the other hand, the text could just be gibberish and the book—which may have been passed off to Emperor Rudolph as the work of Roger Bacon, a 13th-century natural philosopher, in exchange for the princely sum of 600 gold ducats—a grand hoax. But Gabriel Landini, a Voynichese enthusiast at the University of Birmingham, in England, argues against this theory. Given the complex structure of Voynichese words, writing hundreds of pages of internally consistent gibberish would be a tough task for a fraudster to pull off.

But perhaps not an impossible one. Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist at Keele University, in England, thinks he may be one step closer to an explanation of how the text might have been created. In a paper published in the January issue of Cryptologia, he uses low-tech 16th-century methods, rather than 20th-century computing, to generate text resembling that in the book.

If the Voynich manuscript is a fraud, then one plausible suspect is Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan con-artist. So Dr Rugg borrowed one of Kelley's techniques. He used a grid of 40 rows and 39 columns to create a table which he filled in with Voynichese syllables. He then placed a grille—a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal pattern—on top of the table, and started forming words by reading off the syllables as he moved the grille across columns and down rows. The result was words with the same internal patterns as Voynichese. Dr Rugg and his team are now writing software to create dozens of tables and grilles in an attempt to reproduce other linguistic patterns in the manuscript. If their findings hold up, it would mean that the regularity of Voynichese is no longer an argument against the manuscript being an elaborate hoax.

Of course, this does not prove that the manuscript is nonsense—an impossible thing to demonstrate, in any case, since failure to find meaning in the text does not make it meaningless, but simply beyond current methods of decoding. Indeed, Dr Landini believes that the Voynich manuscript might yet yield to massive computing power. If it does, most people expect to find a work of modest historical interest, rather than the secret of life. As with most puzzles, the thrill of solution lies in the process, rather than the product.

[WackyKat]

Since the Voynich "code" has failed to yield to modern cyptography(which cracked other Renaissance codes easily) I have believed for years that it was a hoax, probably meant to fool a rich buyer into believing that it was a book of alchemical secrets

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[Phil V.]

YOUR ANSWER:







reasonableness = 9.9!

creativity = 1.7

[prion]

Medieval schizophrenic word salad. Not a hoax, a symptom.

My theory, anyhoo.

[gcruse]

But when you look at it, it screams out to be translated, as though one were on the very verge of resolving meaning with just a little more looking. It is diabolically attractive.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The manuscript is available on the net in various places.

[gcruse]

Some interesting new insights into the manuscript were provided in the 70's by Prescott Currier, presenting some of his results at an informal Voynich manuscript symposium at the National Security Agency in Washington (D'Imperio, 1978). Basing his findings on the statistical properties of the text, he showed that the manuscript is written in two distinct "languages" which he simply called A and B. Each bifolio was written in one of the two, and bifolios in the same "language" were generally grouped together. Only in the herbal section there is a mixture of A and B folios. Based on the characteristics of the writing, he showed that the manuscript seems to have been written in two distinct "hands", and he even suggested there could be as much as five or even eight different hands. A significant feature is that the hand and language used on each folio are fully correlated. Currier's conclusion was that at least two people were involved in writing the Voynich manuscript, (which he considered a point against the "hoax theory" summarised below), although alternatively, the manuscript could have been written by one person, in two distinct periods.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]