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Making The Case That Voynich Is A Hoax

Posted by timothy on 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."

5 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Missing the fact.... by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  2. Missing a (cryptographic) clue ... by Professor+D · · 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 · · 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
  3. repeats by 1u3hr · · 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.
  4. Re:Missing the fact.... by 1u3hr · · 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.