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Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past
serutan writes: "Today there is a really unusual Astronomy Picture of the Day that talks about a centuries-old book, written in an unknown language that is undeciphered to this date. The 265-page book, with its curly script and weird illustrations, reminds me a lot of a bizarre modern book called the Codex Seraphinus, but for real. Any crypto experts care to take a whack at this?" Update: The image was transitioned and the entry can be found Here - cd
It seems to me that analyzing the script used to write the text would be well suited to a distributed computing architecture. It's great to be doing setiathome, but how about cracking the cipher? I'd love to know what this is all about. It could be very illuminating.
...this quote:
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Your average slashdotter is probably above average.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Wow. They have been working on Perl 6 for a long time.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's that strange books in dead languages with lots of Astronomy illustrations are best left UNDECIPHERED!
I can see it, three weeks from now, a new article:
Well Meaning Hackers Awaken The Great Cthulhu
best web host ever
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
...that no one has deciphered it yet if it is not in any language but is in someone's own personal code (which would then have to be deciphered into whatever their language was, living or dead, and then translated). What if the person who coded it couldn't spell? What if the book is a decoy or ruse written by someone to draw attention away from a truly important book that they possessed? Maybe it was made up by some shyster and sold to an unsuspecting scholar or emperor as a "lost" treatise on the stars that tells all if only *you* can figure it out. You don't need to know how to spell or even write to make up a book like that (in fact it probably helps if you can't do any of those things!) This doesn't mean that it isn't from the 15th century. There were just as many con artists then (if not more) as there are now.
:::Horrendous Experiences Make Amusing Anecdotes:::
"It is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system."
/th/ sound, although I may be confusing that with the eth and thorn characters (other archaic northern European characters which still survive in Icelandic and a few other places).
The alphabet looks rather obviously European-based. First off, much of what I can make out, looks vaguely reminiscent of letters like g, d, m, n, w, and a.
Secondly, that 3-like character near the end of the first line that sticks out like a sore thumb. Around the time this book was written, that character was a part of many northern European languages, including old English. I believe it stood for a
The very first character (which you can see in several places throughout) also caught my eye. It looks like a slightly-modified version of the "feature key" you see on Apple keyboards, which is a symbol of Viking origin.
Liberty in your lifetime
I would be interested in trying to decipher this. Anynone know where I can find some more pages (or the whole book)?
Actually quite intresting. I did a bit of searching:
Pictures of The Voynich Manuscript
Seems a running theroy is this man Roger Bacon may have written the book.
-You must not change the past! Don't do anything that effects anything. Unless you were suppose too, then for the love of God don't not do it.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data.
This book has some interesting implications. If we can't decipher an annotated manuscript that is but a few hundred years removed from our time, how could we ever possibly hope to decipher a message form an alien race?
Your average slashdotter is probably above average.
Pfeh. Anybody with a UID as low as yours ought to know better.
That's one professor that never learned his lesson during his gaming sessions of Call of Cthulu.
...the idea it could've been written by a Autistic Savant? Back then, people who could instantaneously locate patterns and translate languages without even realizing it was looked at as a form of genius, despite the other effects Autism would have.
I'm thinking it could just as easily be a numerical star chart done in a base-8 or base-16 numbering system, which would throw off most regular attempts to decrypt it, especially if they're looking for words, rather than numbers.
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
I reckon the average mindless slashdot addict is definitely an above average asshole.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.
The Voynich Manuscript was discussed in David Kahn's 1967 grand history The Codebreakers. IMHO, this is an essential book; it gives historical scope to cryptographic activities in an era in which we must understand these issues.
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
here :
http://voynich.no-ip.com/folios/
This is a permanent link to the APoD highlighting the Voynich Manuscript, for those reading the story after the rollover.
If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.
:-)
:-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .
Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?
The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry
but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.
However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.
Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were
Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.
*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland.
from: http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html
"Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. he was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.
The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which, translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have been highly impressed by it."
Wow, if this guy had lived 400 years later he'd probably have founded a dot.com, run the stock up to million$, and then vanished.
Let's see, gullible king with lots of money, known for being eccentric....
I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
-Styopa
Maybe I missed it but they should start off
by analyzing the inks used and the paper used.
That should give them a great starting point.
The analysis should include some form of dating.
I was really surprised to hear of this manuscript
and that it has not been deciphered.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236