Making The Case That Voynich Is A Hoax

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Making The Case That Voynich Is A Hoax

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 30, 2003 @07:23PM from the exercise-for-the-reader dept.

DeadVulcan writes "The Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious book of uncertain age, is widely believed to be written either in an unknown language or a long-lost encryption scheme. Nature reports that computer scientist Gordon Rugg has demonstrated that it's possible to generate a text like the Voynich manuscript -- containing language-like regularities, despite being potentially meaningless -- using cryptographic techniques of the time. This lends some support to those who claim that the book is a hoax."

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Re:It's one thing to say something is a hoax... by cpeikert · 2003-12-30 20:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

Remember, even though TLF has been proved, we still don't have the "simple proof" that Fermat himself discovered.

That's because he almost certainly didn't discover one.

Fermat was known for making some pretty bone-headed mistakes. Also, in his future writings he posed challenges to prove FLT for the case of n=3 or n=4, but never for general n>2. If he had found a truly elegant proof of the general case, and believed it was true, why not pose the general challenge?
Re:Missing the fact.... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-12-30 20:08 · Score: 5, Insightful

actually very few people could write on any known topic (such as a topic for which we have a contemporaneous book in a known language) in a consistent but made-up language without being easily decipherable. We couoldn't figure out ancient egyptian because we had no idea what topic they were even talking about.... ALL it took to figure out ancient egyptian was being told (in ancient Greek, which we knew) what topic a couple of sentences of egyptian were talking about...we had no idea, having almost NO idea what various examples of the writing could POSSIBLY have stood for.
Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... by Professor+D · 2003-12-30 20:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

But, a volume of self consistent language (even a made up one) of over a hundred pages of text with accompanying pictures should fall to statistical and linguistic analysis.
Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.
The 'true' examples of lost written languages/cyphers (do a google search) are mysteries because there exist few examples of brief length usually bereft of context (of grammar, history, linguistic evolution etc.).
The sheer volume of the Voynich manuscript, plus its origin in relatively modern Europe is what makes it so interesting to amateur cryptographers.
The Nature Paper is too brief to know how good Rugg's analysis is (and the Cryptologia site has been slashdotted), but if it holds up it is an interesting result, even if it is a conclusion that many "very smart cryptographers"(TM) have suspected for a long time
1. Re: Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... by Black+Parrot · 2003-12-30 22:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  > But, a volume of self consistent language (even a made up one) of over a hundred pages of text with accompanying pictures should fall to statistical and linguistic analysis.
  
  I doubt it. How many possible mappings are there between strings of characters and meanings? And even with plausible interpretations of the pictures (e.g., a herbarium), the number of things that might be said in that context is for all purposes unbounded:
  xyz =?= "this soothes the throbbing toe"
  xyz =?= "this is very poisonous"
  xyz =?= "this grows only in Ys"
  xyz =?= "I learned this from my grandmother" ...
  Surely it will never be deciphered if it is in an unknown language.
  
  > Champolion cracked the Rosetta stone with much much less.
  
  Actually, he had the benefit of a parallel text.
  
  In the absence of a parallel text, this will only be decyphered the way Linear B was: after a rigorous analysis of the patterns in the text, and a much tighter context (essentially lists of <picture,name,number> tuples), it was noticed that some very obvious translations ("man" and "woman", or such) fit the inflectional pattern of a language historically spoken in the region where the texts were found, and that simple mapping could be extended to other obvious <picture,name> pairs without introducing inconsistencies.
  
  I suppose it's possible that something similar could be done with the manuscript, but IMO only if there are some clearly labeled images that give tight enough a context to guess the specific word being used. And then some luck, because somebody has to recognize some language-specific patterns (such as the Greek masculine/feminine inflectional suffixes). And of course, more luck in what language it happens to be: Linear B might never have been deciphered if Greek didn't use gender-based patterns in its noun declensions.
  
  If it happens to be written in some unknown language, IMO it will never be deciphered.
  
  --
  Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Re:Ridiculous by shaitand · 2003-12-30 20:43 · Score: 4, Insightful

No actually "evidence" THIS broad lends no weight whatsoever. I saw this wholeheartedly as someone who has never even heard of the particular manuscript in question.

Here is what I know, partly assuming what you've said is accurate. Nobody knows when the manuscript was produced, the only evidence that indicates it's existance at a particular point may be suspect (although this is the case with much of the dates we've fixed for events in history and even the basis for several things we believe happened to the degree we call and teach them as facts). Yet this discovery claims at the time the manuscript was produced it was possible to produce fake meaningless gibberish that appears to have meaning.

Am I the only one who finds a problem with that in itself? How can you claim something was possible at the creation date when you don't know the creation date?

Next, giving that magically the date looked into did happen to coincide with the creation date that nobody knows. How exactly does a process being theoretically possible at a date get considered as evidence that is what was done in a particular instance?

Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.

I wouldn't even call that circumstantial evidence. That isn't EVIDENCE at all. Hell if there were two sticks in the lawn right under the tree, then it would become the most ridiculous circumstantial evidence that should obviously be tossed aside. But it would be the sticks that are the evidence there, not the fact that it's possible to create fire by rubbing two sticks together and the technology existed at the time. However there isn't even that much here.
repeats by 1u3hr · 2003-12-30 20:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

The Nature story says:
The text contains some features that are not seen in any language. The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory.
Indonesian pluralises words by duplicating them (anak = child, anak anak = children). And many languages, including English ("he was really, really stupid") intensify by repetition, so this point is not at all conclusive.
Re:Missing the fact.... by 1u3hr · 2003-12-30 20:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

if someone really wanted to make a hoax book, they could simply translate any other book (even the bible) into a made up language.
Making up a language, that isn't just a scrambled version of an existing one, is very, very hard. It takes someone like Tolkien (a professor of Old English who could translate Norse on the fly) to do that convincingly, and I doubt that anyone in the period could have done it in a way that would still defy detection.