[HN Gopher] Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
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Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
Author : Luc
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-09-10 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com)
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Unrelated: So what are the leading theories on Voynich?
| coldpie wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, there really aren't any firm theories,
| it's just a completely baffling artifact. Based on dating, it's
| (probably) not a forgery. It's an _incredible_ amount of effort
| for the time to be just some person 's fancy. There just
| doesn't seem to be even a theory that fits all the evidence.
| It's truly bizarre. I love it.
| xeonmc wrote:
| My theory that it was created by Terry Davis in his previous
| birth.
|
| Either that, or https://xkcd.com/593/
| TillE wrote:
| It's a lot of work, but not particularly more work than a
| scribe would usually do.
|
| People have always been people, we've always been creative
| and intelligent, and I really think the best explanation is
| that this is just an odd creative work. We'll never know the
| exact details.
| throwaway48540 wrote:
| My own theory: it's a product of mental illness, or long term
| extreme boredom - maybe a person bound to their bed?
| artem_dev wrote:
| It could be a medieval D&D game https://xkcd.com/593/
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Nobody has solved it. There are no leading theories.
|
| The theories various people have had fall into three
| categories: it's in an unknown language, it's enciphered, or
| it's meaningless gibberish.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| A very plausible argument I read a while back was: it is a
| manual of exercise and herbology and related things. The
| symbols in the book aren't in any language. They are like rough
| music notation; XXX, YY, XX etc. They are custom for the client
| of whoever wrote it, meaning "stretch, stretch..., bend,
| bend..." or something similar.
|
| The theory isn't popular because it doesn't reveal anything but
| once you look at the book it seems likely. The notably thing is
| the symbols don't have the variation of a language - they are
| less complex and more locally repetitive.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The leading theory seems to be that it's meaningless gibberish,
| in part because asserting that it isn't requires some degree of
| specificity as to what it could be, and there's little
| agreement on that aspect. Which is to say, it's the plurality
| theory but far from the majority theory.
|
| It's also known that the text makes no sense as an encipherment
| known in the 17th century of any known natural language.
| Statistical analysis of features suggests it's not random
| gibberish... but also distinguish it from natural language.
| It's also prone to a high degree of repetition or near-
| repetition (think phrases like "burgle bugle bugie", with one-
| letter changes between successive words).
|
| Personally, I think it's gibberish that was constructed to have
| some degree of plausibility for a would-be cryptanalyst. Or
| maybe even something as prosaically simple as calligraphy
| practice, given the unnaturally repetitive nature of a lot of
| the text.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| The last papers I read on the subject clearly stated that it
| appears to be a real language given the word and character
| distributions but it can only be a tonal language, like Sino-
| Tibetan or Meso-American.
|
| Which in my opinion makes the old Marco Polo delegate theories
| the most probable, but all through the lenses of European
| culture.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Everything about this manuscript is so mysterious, the origins,
| the language, the plants and other drawings; still not mysterious
| enough that you would that it would be impossible to find a
| solution to all of this, I can understand the passion some
| researchers have for this manuscript, is there anything close to
| the Voynich manuscript?
| gnatman wrote:
| There's some interesting examples in the "See Also" section on
| Wikipedia, e.g. the Rohonc Codex
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#See_also
| GaggiX wrote:
| I read about the Rohonc Codex and it seems that most people
| agree that it's a hoax, the language itself doesn't seem to
| share the statistical property of a real language it seems,
| Rohonc Codex is the level of sophistication that I would
| expect from a hoax, the Voynich manuscript is much more than
| that.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| for shorter form lore, known to have a sol'n, there's always
| the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendian_problem
|
| Lagniappe:
| https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/zendiaproblem-call...
| neaden wrote:
| There are a bunch of ancient languages that no one can read yet
| like Linear A or Cretan and the different documents we have
| written in them. That represents a whole society whose writing
| we can't read though, not a (as far as we can tell) one off
| item.
| sgnelson wrote:
| FYI: the author of this blog was just featured in an article in
| The Atlantic about the Voynich Manuscript.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/09/decodin...
| fatbird wrote:
| It's a good article, and proper scholarly study by this woman
| is revealing a lot that legions of amateurs never figured out
| before--such as the strong case that there are five different
| scribes involved (based on handwriting analysis). That strongly
| suggests it's not one delusional fanatic's work, but a project
| of an organization, like a monastery.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| I'm surprised that only 10 pages were treated. Given the level of
| interest to this book I was sure that all the possible scans (UV,
| x-ray MRI etc) were performed long ago.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I love the plants that are based on sea creatures.
| nyc_pizzadev wrote:
| Someone was able to translate portions of the Voynich Manuscript
| but has unfortunately removed his videos. I found a bit more info
| here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/voynich/comments/ev9h5v/does_anyone...
|
| This gist is that nomadic Romani people settled around Syria and
| wrote it. The language and writing is a blend of several
| languages and cultures. The evidence in the videos backs this up
| pretty well.
|
| Edit, found the videos here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/voynich/comments/ev9h5v/comment/joy...
| joshlemer wrote:
| Any idea why they removed the videos? Even the reddit thread
| you link to is deleted...
| nyc_pizzadev wrote:
| A lot of people were speculating he would make his findings
| official and didn't want to over share. I do see a comment
| about his theory being debunked. That would be expected, the
| language used was a mashup of several existing languages, so
| it's possible a lot of what was written is copy-pasta
| gibberish. However, the video points out of a lot of cultural
| aspects of the book which support a Romani origin.
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