Voynich manuscript decoded?

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

As you say, if it has been partially decoded, it would seem rather a lot of effort for a fake. Using old vellum would have been perfectly understandable, even if it was a 19th Century fake as that way one doesn't need to resort to chemical methods to age it, and those probably could have been detectable in the 19th century.

Just for clarity: I never stated that I believed the Voynich manuscript has been "partially decoded", in fact I believe there's nothing there to decode, I'll explain further on.

But first, I have now taken the time to listen to the BBC podcast, and the text on the website is indeed, as I expected, an almost exact transcript. In other words: it contains absolutely nothing that links Voynich to other proven forgeries of old documents, just an allegation, a personal hypothesis by the author Simon Worrall, with guilt by association as the only argument advanced. Yes, Voynich moved in some odd circles, he was after all a political exile in London because of his underground revolutionary activities in Russia. No doubt some of the people he knew were involved in forging contemporary identity documents, that went with the territory. But evidence for forgery in his career as a rare book dealer isn't mentioned in the piece, and I can't recall reading about such allegations earlier. (You have to forgive me for being a bit vague: I had a brief spell of interest in the Voynich manuscript a few years back, and spent quite a bit of time reading anything I could find on the net on the subject, but I have no cites at my fingertips anymore and am relying on memory.) The author also seems to think iron-gall ink can be carbon-dated, which, as a layman in the field, I seriously doubt, at the very least not without destroying a significant portion of the manuscript

To me, there is really only one question about the Voynich manuscript. It's obviously a fake, intended to create the impression of containing mysterious, secret knowledge (the illustrations tell us that). But was it an intentionally mysterious-looking fake created in the late Middle Ages, as the carbon dating of the vellum suggests, or a much later fake, intended to be sold as a mysterious late Middle Ages manuscript? (That it was created as purely a work of art, a sort of medieval Codex Seraphinianus, doesn't fit with the period, IMO.)

That the text surrounding the illustrations carries any meaningful information, I strongly (as in 99%) doubt. Here, my sole academic qualification, in linguistics, kicks in again. I hate for this to sound like an argument from authority, by I did do a specialisation in computational linguistics. And the statistical analyses that have been done of the VM are pretty damning. To summarize very succinctly: it has the statistical fingerprint of something very close to randomly generated noise, rather than that of a real text in whatever language.

 

[marplots]

FromBelgiumWithLove,
Wiki has quite a bit of provenance for the manuscript listed before Voynich. I have no idea how solid it is and would like to solicit your opinion.

 

[Aepervius]

In order for the found phonetic correspondences between pictured plant names to have arisen from a trick, the nature of the truck must have been phonetic substitution using a made-up alphabet to spell real names/words, in which case there still is really a phonetic system to work out and meaningful content to read anyway, even if the alphabet has never been used elsewhere.

Not necessaraly. You could "vary" the trick from name to name (to take a modern equivalent with password , a salt) so that nobody even trying with substitution could easily find it.

 

[Craig B]

That the text surrounding the illustrations carries any meaningful information, I strongly (as in 99%) doubt. Here, my sole academic qualification, in linguistics, kicks in again. I hate for this to sound like an argument from authority, by I did do a specialisation in computational linguistics. And the statistical analyses that have been done of the VM are pretty damning. To summarize very succinctly: it has the statistical fingerprint of something very close to randomly generated noise, rather than that of a real text in whatever language.

I don't believe in its authenticity, but from what you've written, could it be a cipher? These are designed to have the appearance of random symbols, and achieve this by disguising the regularities and repetitions characteristic of plaintext writing.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

FromBelgiumWithLove,
Wiki has quite a bit of provenance for the manuscript listed before Voynich. I have no idea how solid it is and would like to solicit your opinion.

Well, I'm no great fan of Wikipedia in general, but the article on the VM seems decent, and references solid sources. I'm glad you pointed me to it, since clearly some New Stuff has emerged since I did my reading years ago. It does indeed seem that the dating of the manuscript to the 15th century can no longer be reasonably disputed, and that additional solid evidence of its provenance before Voynich bought it in 1912 has surfaced, information Voynich couldn't possibly have known about at the time. So the BBC correspondent's Voynich-as-the-forger theory goes out of the window even further. So, IMO, it's definitely a late medieval fraud of some kind, not a later forgery of a late medieval fraud. (It had also completely slipped my mind that a countryman of mine is involved in the provenance: the manuscript still carries the ex libris of the General of the Order of Jesuits in 1870, Petrus Beckx SJ.)

Also, it showed me I was wrong on terminology. I used "vellum" before because someone used that earlier in the thread, but it's actually written on less expensive parchment. It has a vellum cover, but that was added much later.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

I don't believe in its authenticity, but from what you've written, could it be a cipher? These are designed to have the appearance of random symbols, and achieve this by disguising the regularities and repetitions characteristic of plaintext writing.

That's what you get for trying to be very succinct and summarize something in just one short sentence: you end up saying something entirely different from what you intended to say (this is why I am positive Twitter was created by the Dark Lord himself).

The statistical problem actually isn't that the text looks, statistically, like random noise, the problem is the level of redundancy. It's the sheer repetitiveness, with the same limited number of clusters of characters reappearing over and over again, to a degree incompatible with any language or writing system, that precludes it from containing much real information. There is a story (apparently genuine) that when William Faulkner left Hollywood after his frustrating stint as a screenwriter, he left a notepad in his abandoned desk at the studio that was entirely filled with just the phrases: "Boy meets girl", "Boy loses girl", "Boy wins girl", page after page. One wouldn't need to know English, or even the Latin alphabet, to be able to determine that notepad contained little or no meaningful information. That's about the statistical case with the VM.

What's more, if it's a cipher, and if the VM was indeed produced in the 15th century, it could realistically only be a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, or at best a homophonic substitution cipher (those were around in the early 15th century, according to a very quick check of Bruce Schneier's book), used on a text in some known European language, and probably Latin or Italian at that. Even polyalphabetic substitution ciphers didn't come around until the late 16th century. And all of those still produce ciphertext that is statistically easily distinguishable from just junk, and are trivially easy to crack with computers (and doable without them). If that was what it was, it would have been decoded ages ago. (Even polyalphabetic ciphers could be cracked with pencil and paper methods before the outbreak of WW1, and the Polish intelligence service managed to crack the German army Enigma codes with pencil and paper methods just before WW2.)

 

[jimbob]

Well, I'm no great fan of Wikipedia in general, but the article on the VM seems decent, and references solid sources. I'm glad you pointed me to it, since clearly some New Stuff has emerged since I did my reading years ago. It does indeed seem that the dating of the manuscript to the 15th century can no longer be reasonably disputed, and that additional solid evidence of its provenance before Voynich bought it in 1912 has surfaced, information Voynich couldn't possibly have known about at the time. So the BBC correspondent's Voynich-as-the-forger theory goes out of the window even further. So, IMO, it's definitely a late medieval fraud of some kind, not a later forgery of a late medieval fraud. (It had also completely slipped my mind that a countryman of mine is involved in the provenance: the manuscript still carries the ex libris of the General of the Order of Jesuits in 1870, Petrus Beckx SJ.)

Also, it showed me I was wrong on terminology. I used "vellum" before because someone used that earlier in the thread, but it's actually written on less expensive parchment. It has a vellum cover, but that was added much later.

Thanks for your analysis

 

[Delvo]

A bit of an update on this ongoing project...

It turns out that gleaning letters' sounds from plant names was just one of two good ideas Professor Bax had about how to proceed on the Voynich manuscript, and the other was opening it up for contributions from anyone else who could contribute something for others to discuss and critique and build on. His website now includes a significant amount of stuff written by other people, suggesting plant identifications, discussing how to interpret the possible distortions of the drawings of plants, and looking into other words and distributions of letters and groups of letters and contextual stuff about the pages & drawings. He's turned it into a collaboration, and more progress has been made since he published his own work just earlier this year, in both plant identification and letter phoneticization.

Here's a quick description of a theory of mine, based on Bax's initial phonetic findings, which could help quicken the process of phoneticizing the remainder of the Voynich alphabet, and which has already made some accurate predictions. It contains text, but making it all one image was a simple way to deal with the amount of other little images within it. (Some, you can see in the image already; another that happened after the final step shown here, and could have been attached to the bottom of the image, is that reading plant names using the latest predictions led to possible identification of a plant whose name includes not only the "h" letter I predicted earlier but also the "g" letter I'm predicting more recently, both right where cognates would say they should be...)

 

[marplots]

So... what does the manuscript say?

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

So... what does the manuscript say?

That's what I'm wondering too. If somebody claims the Voynich manuscript contains understandable information, could they please tell us what it is? And why would anybody assume that the "text" (if you can use that term for the wall of characters in a non-alphabet, with statistical properties incompatible with any known language) contains any information that is more sensible or interesting than the copious and obviously nonsensical illustrations? (in the front half or so of the book that is, the guy who made it couldn't keep up the sham for the whole book).

 

[Blue Mountain]

That the text surrounding the illustrations carries any meaningful information, I strongly (as in 99%) doubt. Here, my sole academic qualification, in linguistics, kicks in again. I hate for this to sound like an argument from authority, by I did do a specialisation in computational linguistics. And the statistical analyses that have been done of the VM are pretty damning. To summarize very succinctly: it has the statistical fingerprint of something very close to randomly generated noise, rather than that of a real text in whatever language.

Technically, an "argument from authority" is an argument from a misplaced authority; that is, someone speaking outside the field of his or her expertise. If I quote Neil deGrasse Tyson on astrophysics, it's not necessarily an argument from authority precisely because his speciality is astrophysics. But if I quote him in a discussion about the offside rule in ice hockey (provided he's ever said anything about!), that would be an argument from authority. Sure, he's an authority--in astrophysics. Not necessarily ice hockey.

The statistical problem actually isn't that the text looks, statistically, like random noise, the problem is the level of redundancy. It's the sheer repetitiveness, with the same limited number of clusters of characters reappearing over and over again, to a degree incompatible with any language or writing system, that precludes it from containing much real information...

This is the first time I've heard that the manuscript contains the same clusters of characters appearing over and over again. I looked (briefly) on the internet for a transliteration of the manuscript so I could write a program to determine if that was indeed the case, and if so, what the longest set of repeated characters was. But I've been unable to find such a thing. Do you know of any?

 

[Delvo]

If somebody claims the Voynich manuscript contains understandable information, could they please tell us what it is?

You know perfectly well that nobody here has claimed that the meaning has been figured out, so why act as if anybody had?

And why would anybody assume that the "text"... contains any information that is... sensible or interesting...

You know perfectly well that nobody here has assumed that, so why act as if anybody had?

Those were rhetorical questions; don't bother answering. It would presumably have about the same underwhelming level of honesty as the above quotes demonstrate anyway (...and the claim that statistical analyses of the manuscript have agreed with each other and only ever had one conclusion about it... and the one about it being "obvious" that the plants aren't really plants even though botanists have confidently identified several of them and written analyses of the kinds of differences that are to be expected between a real plant and a drawing in any of the multiple Medieval herbal manuscripts out there...).

I looked (briefly) on the internet for a transliteration of the manuscript so I could write a program to determine if that was indeed the case, and if so, what the longest set of repeated characters was. But I've been unable to find such a thing. Do you know of any?

Here is a cutout from one particular section that's particularly densely packed with the manusccript's most common word, which is highlighted. That word is common enough that some suspect it's used to mark where ideas begin & end, like our "and" or maybe more like the "stop" at the ends of sentences in telegrams, since there seems to be a shortage of other punctuation. It's much less frequent in some other parts of the manuscript, so it would seem to be a convention that not all of the scribes involved used equally consistently. There's also a character that looks sort of like a "4" (and is transcribed as "4" in at least one transcription system, although it's "q" in I think the most common one) and seems to only appear at the beginnings of words, which can also be taken as a sign that it also might be a punctuator/idea-separator. It's not among the letters for which sound values have been worked out yet.

There are a few different transcription methods for the VM just so people can use conventional keyboards to write about it. This page lists the major ones and discusses the text a bit. The one I've seen used the most is called "EVA", which is the one used at this site, which has some nifty tools that might get you what you're after, although I don't think you can just download a transcription of the whole thing. This is the place to go for a closer look at the pages in a zoomable, panable format.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

Technically, an "argument from authority" is an argument from a misplaced authority;

I learnt a long time ago, back when Usenet was a viable discussion medium, that whenever someone introduces a statement with "technically, ", what follows is almost always complete bollocks. Your statement is no exception

This is the first time I've heard that the manuscript contains the same clusters of characters appearing over and over again. I looked (briefly) on the internet for a transliteration of the manuscript so I could write a program to determine if that was indeed the case, and if so, what the longest set of repeated characters was. But I've been unable to find such a thing. Do you know of any?

I learnt a long time ago, back when Usenet was a viable discussion medium, that the standard respons to this question is: "do your own homework".

 

[mike3]

I learnt a long time ago, back when Usenet was a viable discussion medium, that whenever someone introduces a statement with "technically, ", what follows is almost always complete bollocks. Your statement is no exception

However, I thought what he said was right, too: it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy. Where do I have this wrong?

I learnt a long time ago, back when Usenet was a viable discussion medium, that the standard respons to this question is: "do your own homework".

So does this mean you should never get help for anything? When can/should you get help or aid? Though in this case it seems easy enough (I got the transcript on my very first Google search page), in other cases it isn't necessarily so easy.

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

You know perfectly well that nobody here has claimed that the meaning has been figured out, so why act as if anybody had?

You mean, except for what is referenced in the OP, which refers to a website with the headline: "600 year old mystery manuscript decoded by University of Bedfordshire professor", and goes on to state: "Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics, has just become the first professional linguist to crack the code of the Voynich manuscript using an analytical approach."

"Decoding" and "crack the code" mean the same thing: figuring out the meaning. Obviously, professor Bax has done no such thing. But it certainly seems he's claimed to have done so. Unless the website of the university where he teaches is completely outside of his control.

Those were rhetorical questions; don't bother answering.

That's not how discussion works, dear. You don't get to decide which things other people in a discussion answer. And "rhetorical question" doesn't mean "something I want to pass off as undisputed fact, by phrasing it as a question".

It would presumably have about the same underwhelming level of honesty as the above quotes demonstrate anyway (...and the claim that statistical analyses of the manuscript have agreed with each other and only ever had one conclusion about it...

While we're on the subject of "underwhelming level of honesty", pray tell, who made that claim?

manusccript's most common word, which is highlighted. That word is common enough that some suspect it's used to mark where ideas begin & end, like our "and" or maybe more like the "stop" at the ends of sentences in telegrams, since there seems to be a shortage of other punctuation.

Ah, "some suspect", now there's a solid argument if I ever saw one. Much better than my own unsubstantiated claims about my personal opinions about the VM. I'm curious, though: since you don't know the language, if any, the manuscript is written in, how can you know it's a "word"? It's a constantly recurring string of characters, nothing more. And the "stop" in telegrams was, of course, punctuation. Perhaps you're American and don't realize this, but "stop" is simply the British term for the punctuation symbol Americans call "period". And since you have no idea about the language, if any, in question, why do you assume that language would be written with punctuation at all? Most written languages got along fine without punctuation until not that long ago (in the broad historical sweep of things).

 

[FromBelgiumWithLove]

However, I thought what he said was right, too: it's not an argument-from-authority fallacy. Where do I have this wrong?

What I was responding to was the statement:

Technically, an "argument from authority" is an argument from a misplaced authority;

which is just plain wrong. An argument from authority is not a fallacy. Starting out a statement äbout something medical with "As a medical doctor, I think that ...", or a statement about legal matters with "As a lawyer, I think that ...", or "According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word [X] was first recorded in 1630", is not a fallacy, if those qualifications are genuine. It's just pointing out that your view might carry a bit more weight than that of someone who is a complete layman in the field you're talking about. It doesn't mean what you go on to say is necessarily true, of course, it's not a strong argument, and it's often abused, but it's still a valid argument.

 

[Sherman Bay]

For those who argue that a hoax or hobby is unreasonable because of the extreme time and effort needed, consider this, from another thread:

2) I get maybe one hard-copy crackpot mailing a year. The last one was a nicely printed two-volume set outlining some sort of omni-cosmology/Kabbalah unification.

Some people will go to elaborate efforts out of crackpottery, extreme beliefs, or just plain crazyness.

Here's another example. Each one of our 21 County Board members found a 968 page, hardbound book on their desk recently. The title was "Jesus Christ, Message to All Nations, Second Edition." The author is given as "Jesus Christ," but there is no publication credit, no name or address of the distributor. It looks and reads much like a Christian Bible, that is, incomprehensible. One Board member told me they get a copy of this book every year, free, and they end up in the trash.

It's obviously a Mormon work, but the Mormon Church isn't directly credited. Some googling turns up the name Warren Jeffs, currently serving a life prison sentence for fraud.

So yes, hoaxes and frauds are not stopped by mere costs. The human mind is boundless.

 

[pakeha]

Most impressive, Sherman Bay.
My own personal favourite example are the wash-wash frauds, amazingly elaborate set-ups involving chemical 'firms'.
http://netpatrol.org/online-fraud-types_black-money-fraud-wash-wash-scams_324.html

 

[mike3]

For those who argue that a hoax or hobby is unreasonable because of the extreme time and effort needed, consider this, from another thread:Some people will go to elaborate efforts out of crackpottery, extreme beliefs, or just plain crazyness.

Here's another example. Each one of our 21 County Board members found a 968 page, hardbound book on their desk recently. The title was "Jesus Christ, Message to All Nations, Second Edition." The author is given as "Jesus Christ," but there is no publication credit, no name or address of the distributor. It looks and reads much like a Christian Bible, that is, incomprehensible. One Board member told me they get a copy of this book every year, free, and they end up in the trash.

It's obviously a Mormon work, but the Mormon Church isn't directly credited. Some googling turns up the name Warren Jeffs, currently serving a life prison sentence for fraud.

So yes, hoaxes and frauds are not stopped by mere costs. The human mind is boundless.

I'd agree that time is probably not a limiting factor: note that even if you can put down only 1 page per hour, then at just 1 hour a day you can finish the entire book in under a year.

However, what about money? Where did they get the money from? You mention about Mozart being "dedicated and obsessed", implying that can magically make all the money you need appear, yet if that's the case why are there so many poor people in the world? What, they're all lazy? Seems like how rich you can get is also affected by factors like the kind of society you grew up in. How would the conditions of Medieval European societies have affected this?

Though it is possible the hoaxer was born into wealth. There's nothing that says the rich can't be eccentric or even fraudsters (look at how much it happens now).

 

[Sherman Bay]

However, what about money? Where did they get the money from? You mention about Mozart being "dedicated and obsessed", implying that can magically make all the money you need appear, yet if that's the case why are there so many poor people in the world? What, they're all lazy? Seems like how rich you can get is also affected by factors like the kind of society you grew up in. How would the conditions of Medieval European societies have affected this?

Just how much money do you think is needed for paper, pen and ink, even a few hundred years ago, to create one art book?