Comment by glimshe
1 day ago
I strongly believe the manuscript is undecipherable in the sense thats it's all gibberish. I can't prove it, but at this point I think it's more likely than not to be hoax.
1 day ago
I strongly believe the manuscript is undecipherable in the sense thats it's all gibberish. I can't prove it, but at this point I think it's more likely than not to be hoax.
Statistical analyses such as this one consistently find patterns that are consistent with a proper language and would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page. To get the kinds of patterns these turn up someone would have had to go a large part of the way towards building a full constructed language, which is interesting in its own right.
Personally, I have no preference to any theory about the book; whichever it turns out to be, I'll take it as is.
That said, I just watched a video about the practice of "speaking in tongues" that some christian congregations practice. From what I understand, it's a practice where believers speak in gibberish for certain rituals.
Studying these "speeches", researches found patterns and rhythms that the speakers followed without even being aware they exist.
I'm not saying that's what's happening here, but maybe if this was a hoax (or a prank), maybe these patterns emerged just because they were inscribed by a human brain? At best, these patterns can be thought of as shadows of the patterns found in the writers mother tongue?
> would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page
People often assert this, but I'm unsure of any evidence. If I wrote a manuscript in a pretend language, I would expect it to end up with language-like patterns, some automatically and some intentionally.
Humans aren't random number generators, and they aren't stupid. Therefore, the implicit claim that a human could not create a manuscript containing gibberish that exhibits many language-like patterns seems unlikely to be true.
So we have two options:
1. This is either a real language or an encoded real language that we've never seen before and can't decrypt, even after many years of attempts
2. Or it is gibberish that exhibits features of a real language
I can't help but feel that option 2 is now the more likely choice.
For some reason your comment reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisencolinensinainciusol - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU-wH8SrFro
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Creating gibberish with the statistical properties of a natural language is a very hard task if you do this hundreds of years before the discovery of said statistical properties.
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> consistent with a proper language
There's certainly a system to the madness, but it exhibits rather different statistical properties from "proper" languages. Look at section 2.4: https://www.voynich.nu/a2_char.html At the moment, any apparently linguistic patterns are happenstance; the cypher fundamentally obscures its actual distribution (if a "proper" language.)
Could still be gibberish.
Shud less kee chicken souls do be gooby good? Mus hess to my rooby roo!
This reads like bayou-louisanian or possibly Ozark (source: family)
If you're going to make a hoax for fun or for profit, wouldn't it be the best first step to make it seem legitimate, by coming up with a fake language? Klingon is fake, but has standard conventions. This isn't really a difficult proposition compared to all of the illustrations and what-not, I would think.
If you come up with a fake language, then by definition the text has some meaning in said language.
Even before we consider the cipher, there's a huge difference between a constructed language and a stochastic process to generate language-like text.
A stochastic pattern to generate language-like text in the early 1400s is a lot more interesting than gibberish.
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The book is obviously a hoax (either voluntary or not), the question is if the text is a cypher, a transliteration, a fake language, or just gibberish.
As far as I know it's just gibberish since it doesn't follow the statistics of the known languages or cyphers of the time.
There are many aspects that point to the text not being completely random or clumsily written. In particular it doesn't fall into many faults you'd expect from some non-expert trying to come up with a fake text.
The age of the document can be estimated through various methods that all point to it being ~500 year old. The vellum parchment, the ink, the pictures (particularly clothes and architecture) are perfectly congruent with that.
The weirdest part is that the script has a very low number of different signs, fewer than any known language. That's about the only clue that could point to a hoax afaik.