The Voynich Manuscript

McC · Post by **McC** » 2005-05-09 02:52pm

Anyone heard about this? I found out about it when browsing APOD, and then stumbled across more stuff, such as the actual website.

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2005-05-09 04:13pm

Omniglot has a bit of information on it and other manuscripts. It says it's probably a 13th century manuscript from a Franciscan friar and has another link for more information.

The link is here, if you want.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2005-05-09 04:43pm

I just skimmed the short introduction, but if anyone's claiming that Athanasius Kircher had any special insight into it, they're as full of shit as Kircher was.

(Athanasius Kircher composed a "translation" of an Egyptian obelisk in Rome that is pure, unadulterated fantasy of the worst kind.)

Absolutely fascinating thing, though. Roger Bacon is one of my favorite big brains in history, but I doubt much if anything will ever be learned about this without even knowing what language the cypher was written in. No way proving it was Bacon's, but a nifty idea.

McC · Post by **McC** » 2005-05-09 04:55pm

Call me ludicrous, but I think it's extra-terrestrial in influence, if not origin

No, I'm actually not being sarcastic.

McC · Post by **McC** » 2005-05-09 05:41pm

To not come off as a total whack with my previous post:

"Cosmological: more circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has fold-outs; one of them spans six pages and contains some sort of map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and possibly a volcano." Nine islands = nine planets? The ninth planet wasn't even discovered until 1930, and only postulated about in the 1850s.
"The first section of the book is almost certainly an herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty." Plants that can't be identified at all?
A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a picture of a galaxy, which could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin.

And so on. *shrug* As good an explanation as any at this point.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2005-05-09 06:22pm

Could just be a fake McC, wouldn't be the first time (although i am hardpressed to think of any of the top of my head right now

)

McC · Post by **McC** » 2005-05-09 06:24pm

Zac Naloen wrote:Could just be a fake McC, wouldn't be the first time (although i am hardpressed to think of any of the top of my head right now )

Yeah, but there's a lot of evidence against that idea. Dozens of specialties have concluded that it has little evidence of a typical fake, including the very way it was written (flowing, consistent script indicating that the author knew exactly about what he was writing).

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2005-05-09 06:32pm

Each "letter" could represent a vowel-consonant combination, the way Japanese kanji, Maya and Egyptian hieroglyphics do. That could account for the repetitiveness and lack of syntax apparent in it.

Damned thing's facsinating as hell, I'm hooked.

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2005-05-09 07:54pm

It's either a) A modern hoax, not unlikely...
b) Written by some forgotten visionary, who had access to futurtech, magic, or both...
c) Written by some very early sci-fi writer, who created a world in their head and jotted it down...
d) Just random scribbles by someone with way too much time on their hands...
e) Written by some nutcase (see possibility C)...
or
f) Written with extraterrestrial help or inspiration.

Which one's true? Damned if I know.

McC · Post by **McC** » 2005-05-09 08:01pm

Molyneux wrote:It's either a) A modern hoax, not unlikely...

There are too many corroborating record sources for this to be true.

b) Written by some forgotten visionary, who had access to futurtech, magic, or both...

Unverifiable at present.

c) Written by some very early sci-fi writer, who created a world in their head and jotted it down...

Possible, but unlikely, as the language would likely be decipherable in that case.

d) Just random scribbles by someone with way too much time on their hands...

Unlikely, as the script is too consistent with someone who was confident in what they were writing for this to be the case.

e) Written by some nutcase (see possibility C)...

See above points

f) Written with extraterrestrial help or inspiration.

Again, not verifiable.

The only "rational" explanations don't fit the facts well at all, leaving the "irrational" ones.

Molyneux · Post by **Molyneux** » 2005-05-09 08:29pm

McC wrote:
Molyneux wrote:It's either a) A modern hoax, not unlikely...
There are too many corroborating record sources for this to be true.

b) Written by some forgotten visionary, who had access to futurtech, magic, or both...
Unverifiable at present.

c) Written by some very early sci-fi writer, who created a world in their head and jotted it down...
Possible, but unlikely, as the language would likely be decipherable in that case.

d) Just random scribbles by someone with way too much time on their hands...
Unlikely, as the script is too consistent with someone who was confident in what they were writing for this to be the case.

e) Written by some nutcase (see possibility C)...
See above points

f) Written with extraterrestrial help or inspiration.
Again, not verifiable.

The only "rational" explanations don't fit the facts well at all, leaving the "irrational" ones.

Are there any other possibilities that I may have missed, though?

McC · Post by **McC** » 2005-05-09 08:36pm

Molyneux wrote:Are there any other possibilities that I may have missed, though?

Probably. The Wikipedia article covers a lot of stuff, and so does the official website.

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-05-10 01:11am

Could've been a Victorian-era Tolkien, who was some linguist that wanted to make up his own language, and wrote (possibly) a dictionary in that script. Tolkein, however, based his language off of Dutch and used the Phonician alphabet. This dude would've had a lot more imagination.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2005-05-10 04:24pm

wolveraptor wrote:Could've been a Victorian-era Tolkien, who was some linguist that wanted to make up his own language, and wrote (possibly) a dictionary in that script. Tolkein, however, based his language off of Dutch and used the Phonician alphabet. This dude would've had a lot more imagination.

It's been confidently dated to have existed at least since the late 1500s, though.

I think that there's a good case for it being Roger Bacon's doing; he was already on thin ice with the Franciscans so he had a motive to be secretive, he was very interested in Arab alchemy, he had an imagination rivaled only by Leonardo Da Vinci's; he was perfectly able to come up with something like this.
The fact that he wrote about unbreakable codes being created arbitrarily gives credit to this being possibly his, too.

Those drawings of nekkid ladies in tubs of water connected by plumbing give me the impression of a person totally unaquainted with "advanced" technology attempting to imagine "advanced" technology (they also remind me of the power plant in The Matrix), and Roger Bacon is a man who wrote about giant powered ships being controlled by a single crewman and aircraft at a time when the most advanced technologies in Europe were primitive mechanical clocks and the most advanced naval architecture was the sternpost rudder.

But again, with the language it was written in being unknown, it will never be deciphered.

Bob the Gunslinger · Post by **Bob the Gunslinger** » 2005-05-10 04:41pm

It's the Necronomicon. Just be glad we can't translate it.

Solauren · Post by **Solauren** » 2005-05-10 05:57pm

It's not the Necronomicron silly

It's a first draft of the Monster Manual

Rye · Post by **Rye** » 2005-05-10 09:26pm

When I look at the images of the writing on the pages of that book, it honestly makes me think that some guy that couldn't read or write, but was a good illustrator tried to make it look like he could write, perhaps to impress some other illiterates.

Zero · Post by **Zero** » 2005-05-10 11:19pm

Except that the text itself exibits many properties of an actual language, and doesn't appear to be random scribles. You'd have to be a smart guy to make random scribbles that appeared to show all of the qualities that a real written language should.

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-05-10 11:21pm

Frank Hipper wrote:
wolveraptor wrote:Could've been a Victorian-era Tolkien, who was some linguist that wanted to make up his own language, and wrote (possibly) a dictionary in that script. Tolkein, however, based his language off of Dutch and used the Phonician alphabet. This dude would've had a lot more imagination.
It's been confidently dated to have existed at least since the late 1500s, though.

I think that there's a good case for it being Roger Bacon's doing; he was already on thin ice with the Franciscans so he had a motive to be secretive, he was very interested in Arab alchemy, he had an imagination rivaled only by Leonardo Da Vinci's; he was perfectly able to come up with something like this.
The fact that he wrote about unbreakable codes being created arbitrarily gives credit to this being possibly his, too.

Those drawings of nekkid ladies in tubs of water connected by plumbing give me the impression of a person totally unaquainted with "advanced" technology attempting to imagine "advanced" technology (they also remind me of the power plant in The Matrix), and Roger Bacon is a man who wrote about giant powered ships being controlled by a single crewman and aircraft at a time when the most advanced technologies in Europe were primitive mechanical clocks and the most advanced naval architecture was the sternpost rudder.

But again, with the language it was written in being unknown, it will never be deciphered.

The point I was trying to make is that I don't think it's a real language spoken by any group of people. I think the dude just made up a language for fun, and wrote some wierd-ass book in it.