The Voynich Manuscript

[Kacen]

My friend just sent me this today...shocked I have never heard of it.


The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious, undeciphered illustrated book. It is thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century.[1] The author, script, and language of the manuscript remain unknown.

Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word). This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax—a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book-dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. As of 2005, the Voynich manuscript is item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript - Read full article.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Voynich.png

For some reason, this creeps the hell out of me.

You can see every page here: http://www.voynich.com/folios/

Tell me...

http://www.voynich.com/folios/f68v3.jpg

Does this not vaguely look like mitochondrial cell walls? Or something of the like? Ugh the entire book is full of bizarre imagery. And they have not decrypted a single word.


http://www.voynich.com/folios/f77r.jpg

Pregnant women coming out of plants...ooookaaaay....


http://www.voynich.com/folios/f102r1.jpg

Mutant Carrots...wow.


http://www.voynich.com/folios/f90v1.jpg

No comment... :|

[Heike]

After briefly studying the material you've presented, it looks like a genuine language to me. Someone would have had to practice for months, or longer, to achieve the semblance of writing characters in such a way that they are identifiable but not always identical. For example, when you are writing or printing, some of your F's or E's may look slightly different from each other, but they are (usually) always identifiable. Remember how many hours (years?) of practice it took to achieve that? This looks like someone writing in a fairly neat hand, using a set of characters they've been using for a long time.

Just because "we" can't figure out the language doesn't mean it isn't a language. And you can't "de-code" something that isn't in code, just in a different language.

My .02.

[GeneralStriker]

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/SetsSearchExecXC.asp?srchtype=ITEM

[mojo]

last decent white paper i read on it proclaimed it a hoax.

[torbjon]

BE/GS: that link be broken, bub.

try this one:

http://webtext.library.yale.edu/beinflat/pre1600.ms408.htm



Scientific or magical text in an unidentified language, in cipher, apparently
based on Roman minuscule characters; the text is believed by some scholars
to be the work of Roger Bacon since the themes of the illustrations
seem to represent topics known to have interested Bacon (see also Provenance
below.) A history of the numerous attempts to decipher the manuscript can be
found in a volume edited by R. S. Brumbaugh, The Most Mysterious Manuscript:
The Voynich "Roger Bacon" Cipher Manuscript (Carbondale, Illinois, 1978).
Although several scholars have claimed decipherments of the manuscript,
for the most part the text remains an unsolved puzzle. R. S. Brumbaugh has,
however, suggested a decipherment that establishes readings for the
star names and plant labels; see his "Botany and the Voynich 'Roger Bacon'
Manuscript Once More," Speculum 49 (1974) pp. 546-48; "The Solution
of the Voynich 'Roger Bacon' Cipher," Gazette 49 (1975) pp. 347-55;
"The Voynich 'Roger Bacon' Cipher Manuscript: Deciphered Maps of
Stars," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976)
pp. 139-50.......

[torbjon]

last decent white paper i read on it proclaimed it a hoax.

um.... care to ad a who, what, where, and when to that?

[GeneralStriker]

had to have been a medieval Lewis Carroll

[torbjon]

fixed BE/GS link...

Click here to see the pics in Color (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/getSETS.asp?ITEM=2002046)

[GeneralStriker]

good work

[torbjon]

BBCodes, gotta love 'em

[Alessandra]

last decent white paper i read on it proclaimed it a hoax.

This is what I found too.

[Cogburn]

Nam sed nunc urna. Ut urna massa, varius quis fringilla id, dapibus ac sem. Donec urna velit, luctus ac varius quis, bibendum nec diam. Ut faucibus, turpis in facilisis facilisis, nunc quam dictum ipsum, vitae hendrerit sem odio in purus. Praesent nunc ligula, scelerisque vel auctor ac, molestie accumsan lacus. Cras dui augue, dictum eu euismod non, aliquet et lacus.

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Nullam iaculis volutpat egestas. Sed sed ipsum sed augue sollicitudin sollicitudin. Mauris et massa lectus. Donec semper, nunc non aliquet condimentum, enim neque mattis sapien, id semper ante mi eu mauris. Mauris sit amet interdum sapien. Praesent ut elit non nunc ultrices suscipit quis ut nulla. Donec imperdiet imperdiet nibh, eget vestibulum erat ullamcorper eget.

[Kacen]

The bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its illustrations (such as the chimeric plants) and its lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is really a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place.

The argument for authenticity, on the other hand, is that the manuscript appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. While hoaxes of the period tended to be quite crude, the Voynich manuscript exhibits many subtle characteristics which only show up after careful statistical analysis. These fine touches require much more work than would have been necessary for a simple forgery, and some of the complexities are only visible with modern tools (like the prose's obedience to Zipf's law). The question then arises: why would the author employ such a complex and laborious forging algorithm in the creation of a simplistic hoax, if no one in the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries) could tell the difference?

Various hoax theories have been proposed over time:

In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay.[17][18] The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, slightly after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.[19]

In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis.[20] Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. However, this comparison is valid only for plain text in European languages, or text enciphered with a simple substitution cipher, while analysis suggests a much more complex enciphering method and/or non-European origin of the underlying text of the Voynich manuscript (see "Letter-based cipher" and "Exotic natural language" above).

In late 2007, Claude Martin claimed that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax based on a convoluted anagramming algorithm for numbers. For example, the sequence 345678 would be retranscribed into 643875. While such a method would produce text somewhat similar to that of the Voynich manuscript, it's hard to explain why such a difficult and time-consuming procedure would be used for a hoax. In Martin's own words:

"...the ciphering method that we have just analyzed does not seem in accordance with those used in the Middle Ages, at the time of Trithème [sic], Vigenère, Cardan or Roger Bacon."[21]

However, Martin does not explain how he arrived at this conclusion.
Seems to be inconclusive to me.

[Cogburn]

Is it a copy of something older taken totally out of time and place?

Medieval lorem ipsum?

A 14th Century Tolkien?

Just because it looks like language doesn't mean it's anything more than someone's personal fantasy.

[Kacen]

Key word: Inconclusive.

[mojo]

last decent white paper i read on it proclaimed it a hoax.

um.... care to ad a who, what, where, and when to that?

the schinner paper which kacen posted/quoted was what i had last read regarding the documents authenticity.
i haven't reached a conclusion personally yet, not enough information.

[Ducky]

I heard about this manuscript about 5 years ago or more.

Didn't think anything of it, other than it was un-deciferable. Never heard that it was de-bunked TOTALLY.

Got bored one day and played around with a few copied pages, to the point of taking a mirror and holding it against the writing - UPSIDE DOWN.

Upside down and backwards writing.

There was a few Italian words that I could make out. Used an Italian to English translator at the time.

Why would someone go through all the trouble to scribe something such as this?

Didn't Leonardo Da Vinci write backwards as well?