Voynich Manuscript May Have Originated In the New World

bmearns writes "The Voynich Manuscript is most geeks' favorite 'indecipherable' illuminated manuscript. Its bizarre depictions of strange plants and animals, astrological diagrams, and hordes of tiny naked women bathing in a system of interconnected tubs (which bear an uneasy resemblance to the human digestive system), have inspired numerous essays and doctoral theses', plus one XKCD comic. Now a team of botanists (yes, botanists) may have uncovered an important clue as to its origin and content by identifying several of the plants and animals depicted, and linking them to the Spanish territories in Central America."

Comments

I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was easy, common ciphertext.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[femtobyte]

translated: d-r-i-n-k-y-o-u-r-x-o-c-o-l-a-t-l

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[lgw]

I thought it was fairly conclusive that it wasn't a cypher - the symbols simply lack the entropy to represent language. It's just what you'd expect from someone combining a few symbols in nonsense ways as a hoax, and not statistically what cyphertext looks like at all. A bit disappointing, really.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[geekoid]

or it's a teaching tool, specifically teach scribes how to, well, scribe. You see this in other places where the writing is nonsense becasue they are teaching proper locations, or art, or what ever.

We do know it' describes plants.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[SQLGuru]

So you're saying that it's the original Loren ipsum with illustrations?

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[netsavior]

It has entropy that has been widely regarded as too high to be gibberish... roughly equivalent to the Latin Vulgate Bible - 1 Kings
On the subject of it being a hoax... The Voynich is a parchment manuscript with many fold-outs, (center cut pieces of parchment were 10 times more expensive than a single leaf), and many expensive inks/dyes. It would have cost a small fortune to create at the time (several years salary for even a skilled bookmaker). If it is a hoax, it was a very well funded one, with no known purpose.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Dan East]

I've written software specifically to do analysis on this manuscript. There are patterns in the formation of the words that show beyond any doubt that it is not a random collection of letters. There are some very specific rules that would take significant effort to generate the words. For example, Gordon Rugg's theory / technique of generating random words using a grid is absolutely, positively not correct.

I'm certain that "words" in the manuscript do not represent words in the original language. They are merely chunks of ciphered text, which explains the unusually homogeneous word lengths, for one thing. I believe the length of the ciphered words is thus arbitrary and chosen by the person doing the ciphering. That also explains how word length and spacing can be perfectly justified and fit along the varied shape of images (consecutive lines must be different lengths to fit in the available space), yet the rules and patterns of the words still adhere even though the words appear to be of arbitrary length.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[buchner.johannes]

Wikipedia says "The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438)", yet it contains information about Mexico.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[ceoyoyo]

Wait, you're saying that because it has an entropy similar to a book of the bible it's not gibberish?

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikipedia says "The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438)", yet it contains information about Mexico.

This is possibly way more interesting than the text itself. I can think of a few explanations:
1: Native Americans made books before Columbus arrived
2: Knowledge of America existed in Europe before Columbus's first journey
3: somebody predicted the invention of carbon dating and used an old blank book

None of them appears to be very likely. #2 is supported by the vinland map (roughly same age), but that one too is controversial. What we do know is that vikings settled Greenland and the lack of timber made them to go Newfoundland to cut down trees, apparently regularly until the vanished from Greenland in mid 14th century. It's unknown if they had contact with Europe and Greenland is somewhat too far north to provide knowledge of central American plants.

What if people travelled the world earlier than we normally expect. However for some reason the records are lost or never made. The age of exploration might not have been when the people learned of the existence of an outside world, but the time when they realized they were willing to invest in proper exploration. Later we learned stuff like Columbus was the one to figure out the earth is round, which is made up. The resistance to his journey was that he might not find land before reaching Africa (they didn't know the map), in which case the expedition would have starved to death before arriving. This was too great a risk compared to the price of the expedition.

One interesting part of traveling the world is that a roman grave was examined a few years back in Sicily. Despite being around 1800-1900 years old it contained a man born in China. There is no records of the romans having contact with China. However clearly they must have had some sort of contact as the man arrived in Italy somehow. Maybe our history books are too quick to assume based on preserved records alone. Lack of existence of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack of existence.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[mbone]

I thought it was fairly conclusive that it wasn't a cypher - the symbols simply lack the entropy to represent language. It's just what you'd expect from someone combining a few symbols in nonsense ways as a hoax, and not statistically what cyphertext looks like at all. A bit disappointing, really.

That is wrong. The word entropy is similar to English, and, while the second order entropy is low, it is similar to Polynesian languages.

This is a nice nice review of Voynich studies.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[samkass]

There is no records of the romans having contact with China.

There are such records. The Bible discusses silk, and the Romans loved it. The Silk Road was established about 1800-1900 years ago to supply the Roman empire with Chinese silk. Later the Romans attempted to breed their own silkworms.

As for extensive pre-Colombian contact, I would assume based on the exchange of plants, animals, metals, disease, and technology, that such contact would stick out in the historical record. In my opinion it's far more likely that the carbon dating was inaccurate or that the interpretation of the plants as American than that extensive pre-Colombian exchange existed.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

there are many minor languages where adjectives and adverbs are prefixes or suffixes, leading to very long words. Try comparing it our knowledge of remaining centam indigenous languages.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Spy Handler]

Carbon dating proves it was written in the 1400's. Who exactly was the writer trying to hoax? For what purpose?

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Spy Handler]

Vellum is expensive, even today. It's inconceivable that they would've use it to teach kids how to write. I doubt even Bill Gates would teach his kids how to write on vellum.

The standard teaching method back in the day was to have students write on sand or clay surfaces, which could be wiped and used again and again.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[TheloniousToady]

there are many minor languages where adjectives and adverbs are prefixes or suffixes, leading to very long words.

Holy Fahrvergnügen, Batman!

Try comparing it our knowledge of remaining centam indigenous languages.

Or, as Eric Idle once put it, "Ham sandwich, bucket and water plastic duralex rubber McFisheries' underwear." (Or was that from the Voynich Manuscript?)

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[TheloniousToady]

Judging by the technology and the timeline, it can only be the work of Dr. Who.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[angel'o'sphere]

The romans having silk does not mean they had contact with china. You know there is this mysterious ancient gild called 'traders'.
Traders tended to trade between main trading points, e.g. from china to persia from persia to north africa, from africa to rome, or what ever more plausible route you come up with.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[hairyfeet]

Maybe its just me, but when I first saw the thing the first thought that popped into my head was "its an alchemy book" and the more I read about the thing? The more i lean towards that conclusion.

I mean lets take a look at what we DO know from that time period, 1.- Alchemy was practiced by many court magicians at the time, 2.- Alchemy was also dangerous as its link with science made it awful close to heresy in the eyes of many of the clergy, also 3.- Competition was fierce, with many believing that lead into gold was possible the one who found that "method" would become legend, so because of this 4.- Secrecy was SOP for the alchemist, with the man that supposedly made the first air conditioning, Cornelius Drebbel, refusing to write down his method for doing so. Finally 5.- The court alchemist would be one of the few who would have the funds to afford such a book while also having both the knowledge of the natural world AND a reason to keep such knowledge secret.

Given this and without any proof that would lead one to believe it was something else I still lean towards an "alchemist recipe book", written using a cipher now long forgotten. Given what we know about the times and about the level of detail (as well as the cost as you pointed out) I would say it would be the most likely source of the book.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Will.Woodhull]

Carbon dating proves it was written in the 1400's.

I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that carbon dating of the parchment and ink can only say that the materials are from the 1400s, but cannot say anything about how long they were in storage before the ink was put on the parchment.

Could writing materials that had been in storage for a couple of centuries have been sent to the New World on some of the Spanish ships? If the owner of a stationary shop got a government contract to supply parchment and ink to an expedition going half way around the world, maybe that would seem like a good opportunity to get rid of all that old stock in the back room that he could not sell.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[FatLittleMonkey]

3: somebody predicted the invention of carbon dating and used an old blank book

You jest. But paper was expensive, scraping or cleaning and reusing paper, even whole books, wasn't uncommon.

[More recent analogy is the BBC recording over classic TV shows to save money on video tape; now madly trying to find copies, even fragments, forgotten in old archives and basements at TV stations around in the world.]

[[Or the current Canadian government's attitude to science libraries.]]

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[cusco]

There was pre-Colombian contact, although perhaps not extensive. Central American and Alaskan jade show up in Chinese tombs of the 13th and early 14th centuries, and peppers from the Americas have been grown in Szechuan since ancient times.. IIRC, the Piri Reis map mentions Portuguese sailors visiting the territories shown on that map. A mummy in Paracas had TB, and another (in Tumbes?) had syphilis, both European diseases. Of course if you want to go further back the round stone heads of the Olmec show what are very clearly African faces, and black peoples were mentioned by Europeans when they arrived in Central America. Even further back the bottle gourd was cultivated in tropical South America apparently as soon as humans arrived in the area, and it has been an exclusively domesticated (as in, can't reproduce naturally) since at least 9,000 years ago.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[cusco]

Just to pick nits, the goal of alchemy was to produce the Philosopher's Stone, which granted eternal life to imbibers. Turning lead (or other base metals) to gold was simply the test of whether the Philosopher's Stone had been successfully produced or not.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[ArbitraryName]

There is no records of the romans having contact with China.

Yes there are.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[cusco]

Unlikely. Vellum and parchment were expensive, and bookworms and moths were likely to infest stock that was just shoved in a corner and forgotten for 5 or 10 generations. If they had extra they just wouldn't have bought more, it's not like monasteries and publishers had warehouses full of excess stock.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[FatLittleMonkey]

Human dissection was also forbidden by the church. I've always thought that the images look like deliberately abstracted versions of magnified anatomical images, disguised as botanical drawings. But the manuscript is way too decorative and formal for a mere coded notebook. [Ditto for an alchemist's secret work.]

Much more likely to be an expensive hoax for a wealthy collector. Any resemblance to blah blah, is strictly coincidental.

That said, the hoax may have well been sold as a super-secret forbidden alchemy text. "...and it is said that whoever shall decode the secret of the book..."

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[tehdaemon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices

The Maya had books. Lots of them. (granted, it is obvious that this isn't a maya book....we can read maya these days)

T

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[cusco]

Oh, and I forgot the nicotine and cocaine found in Egyptian mummies, produced by plant which ONLY existed in the Americas.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations

Re: I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is all very incoherent, also, syphilis was an American continent disease transported to Europe after Columbus.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Darinbob]

4. Carbon dating is very inaccurate for something that recent.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Darinbob]

It could have been a fake book by a fake alchemist used to fool the king into continuing the funding.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[VortexCortex]

Chemistry, Material Sciences, Quantum Physics, and all other Science is essentially the same thing. The only thing (and really the most important thing) they have over Alchemy is that the procedures are openly presented for testing (thus requiring sharing and propagation). Their ideas become immortal. Life itself follows the same pattern of self improvement. DNA is a recipe for an organism. Mutations to it cause different trial and errors and through this experimentation the better solutions are naturally kept and adapted as better information about how to survive forever is encoded into the DNA. The Philosopher's Stone is now called "the singularity".

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Sique]

There are even major languages which lead to very long words: Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft. (In the article is a link to an even longer word which is too long for slashcode to display, because the coders of slashcode never imagined that those words might be possible).

Re: I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

that just means it is good cypher text. Most modern encryption is by design impossible to distinguish from random data.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[idunham]

That's not quite a sensible response: he said that the words were unusually homogenous in length, not that they were unusually long.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[findoutmoretoday]

Yeah, and the aim of cars is to break speed records or at least win a race.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[findoutmoretoday]

Dissection is still forbidden today, no free ride to the graveyard to get some corpses.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[teslar]

I'm certain that "words" in the manuscript do not represent words in the original language. They are merely chunks of ciphered text, which explains the unusually homogeneous word lengths, for one thing. I believe the length of the ciphered words is thus arbitrary and chosen by the person doing the ciphering. That also explains how word length and spacing can be perfectly justified and fit along the varied shape of images

Now that you mention it... it's obviously an early entry to the IOCCC.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

You also forgot to mention that those 'discoveries' are subject to serious criticism (e.g. contamination) and are not as yet accepted science.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Philosopher's Stone is now called "the singularity"

As in: Both are equally fiction.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[RabidReindeer]

The romans having silk does not mean they had contact with china. You know there is this mysterious ancient gild called 'traders'.
Traders tended to trade between main trading points, e.g. from china to persia from persia to north africa, from africa to rome, or what ever more plausible route you come up with.

And sometimes what they traded were slaves.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Jesus_666]

If you want absurdly long nouns, German legalese is your friend. German lawmakers [i]love[/i] to take reasonable names (e.g. "Gesetz über die Illustration langer Namen"; "law for the illustration of long names") and just cram everything into a single noun ("Langnamensillustrationsgesetz"). Then they abbreviate it because nobody is going to write the long name (e.g. "LNIlluG").

Thanks to this, from 2003 to 2007 Germany had an actual law with a name a whopping 67 characters long. That name was "Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung" ("estate commerce approval jurisdiction assignment act").

(I wonder if Slashcode will butcher that name...)

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, that always sounded like a half understood metaphor taken too literally by alchemists of the time.

Imagine some ancient, serious research alchemist messing around with various substances, trying to find ways to purify them, just like he knows that you can purify some stuff by calcining them with extreme heat. He speculates that there's some universal process of purification, and perhaps tries to explain this by a philosophical example of a grindstone that grinds things so fine that you can sift through the fundamental elements.

One generation later, an idiot who reads the argument starts thinking "Oh wow! There's a rock that can purify anything into gold! It can purify the age out of people too!" and sets out to make it.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[danlip]

Syphilis is probably an American disease transported to Europe via Columbus. There is no written record of it in Europe before Columbus. Of course it could have been there already but not recognized, but the leading theory is it came from the new world.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[ruir]

There are records of Portuguese, vikings and even chinese reaching the new world. North America and Brasil (and even Australia) were discovered by Portuguese much earlier on than the official dates. There are rather obscure theories of the Portuguese themselves having in their power old Chinese maps. It was just due to the Tordesillas treaty and lack of man power that the Portuguese had no interest in revealing it to the world at large. Speaking about the Tordesillas treaty, where Portugal and Spain divided the world In half, it was no coincidence when officially the Brasil was not discovered yet that Portugal insisted in moving the coordinates to get Brasil. However they underestimated the sheer size of the new continent, and the rest is history.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

bookworms and moths were likely to infest stock that was just shoved in a corner and forgotten for 5 or 10 generations

The manuscript survived in reasonable condition for about six centuries, as have many other vellum manuscripts from that era. Certainly, various forms of decay can destroy improperly stored materials; but people have been reasonably successful at assuring very long shelf-lives for book materials.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[potpie]

It's not entirely obvious. Sure the script is completely different, but there's a chance it could be an alphabetical representation of a Mayan language.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

The singularity will come and go and people will wake up the next day just like the one before.

Just like how we went to bed 12/31/1999 and woke up 1/1/19100 and there were no major disasters.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[operagost]

1 Corinthians 1:18

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[SleazyRidr]

I'm not sure what you think contact means, or what you think traders are, but traders are a good example of contact.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[ceoyoyo]

I was unaware of that verse. Thank you. Should make an interesting discussion point next time some poor Jehovah's Witness wanders across my doorstep.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

gild = apply gold to something

guild = group of people

Just FYI

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[cusco]

No contamination source has been found so far. Cocaine is not a popular drug among tomb excavators to my knowledge, and smuggling drugs in cadavers is normally only done with fresh corpses. In order for nicotine to have contaminated the inner tissues the mummies would have to have been stored in a humidor for a couple of years, and one would think the stench would be noticeable. The "serious criticism" so far seems to have its roots in the whole "ancient peoples were primitive semi-savages" bigotry.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[cusco]

Interesting. It was not common in the Americas until the European arrival, when it became one of the great scourges (along with influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis), so I always assumed it was imported. Maybe it just became widespread by the Spanish soldiers' habit of raping everything with two feet.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[V for Vendetta]

Also, enjoy Mark Twain's The Awful German Language. A brilliant take on my native language.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[angel'o'sphere]

The parent implied that "roman people" met with "chinese people" directly. Which might have happend as we have chinese reports that support that. However there are no roman/latin reports about this. Roman traders regularily trading with china and vice versa chinese traders comming to italy is very unlikely. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Re: I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

You DO realize that it was Christian philosophy that led to the development of the scientific method and the church itself funded a large portion of that research.

The only thing people like you can cite about the church being anti science is Galileo. Except Galileo wasn't tried for teaching heliocentric theory. He was tried for teaching heliocentric theory as being true without answering the two fatal objections to it that had yet to be answered at the time. (lack of stellar parallax and lack if perceived motion of the earth.) galileo could answer neither. Then to add to it he openly mocked the pope, who was his friend and employer, for siding with the mainstream science of the day AND trying to reinterpret certian ambiguous paddages in scripture to fit with a heliocentric world and DEMAND they be adopted by the church. THAT is what got him in trouble.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[ruir]

About moderating down a comment of mine about the portuguese discovering north america, brasil and australia long before the official dates: "Gasper Corte Real made trips to the north west in 1500 and 1501, visiting Greenland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. He disappeared on the last voyage, and his elder brother Miguel set out with an expedition to find him in the following year, but he also disappeared. King Manuel sent out a further expedition to find the two brothers, but without success, and at this point abandoned exploration of the north west. Newfoundland was long considered a Portuguese possession but the Corte Real brothers were forgotten by historians until an archaeologist discovered an inscription on a boulder on the shore of the Taunton River near Cape Cod. The letters seem to read Miguel Corte Real, and it has even been possible to imagine the date: 1511, which would indicate that Corte Real must have survived for at least ten years among the indians." "15th- and early-16th-century manuscripts indicate Portugal had already known about Brazil. Why would the Portuguese know about Brazil but keep it secret? The answer lies in the Portuguese and Spanish race to find India at the end of the 15th century. While the Portuguese concentrated on searching for India by sailing the Atlantic around South Africa, the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus chose to look in the Caribbean. To understand why Portugal reached Brazil and hid it, one must delve into a secret Portuguese plan to keep Spain from beating Portugal to India." " second Portuguese author also described sailing to Brazil before its official discovery. In 1514 the Portuguese mariner Estevam Fróis was sailing along the northern coast of South America when Spaniards captured him. They accused the Portuguese mariner of sailing in Spanish territory, or on the western side of the boundary established by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Spaniards imprisoned Fróis in Hispaniola. Writing from his prison cell, Fróis claimed that he had been sailing along the Brazilian coast for twenty years. [24] His chronology placed Fróis in Brazil in 1494, the very year when King João II was negotiating the Treaty of Tordesillas with the Spanish monarchs, some six years before the Portuguese officially discovered Brazil" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Anonymous Coward]

"What if people travelled the world earlier than we normally expect"

This is not difficult. Polynesian travel was helped enormously by the coincidence that Arcturus and Sirius are the zenith stars of Hawaii and Tahiti, a route also coincidentally free of hazards except within sight of Tetiaroa and east of Mataiva. There are other plausible zenith stars scattered across the Pacific and the Atlantic, while north Atlantic navigation was dominated by Polaris and relatively full of hazards...

Polynesian/Hawaiian navigation was likely pretty common fairly early. The issue is not plausibility, but rather that there aren't many records, because DURABLE RECORDS ARE HARD. If someone in the pre-Columbian Americas had solved the durable -- and portable (cf. petroglyphs) -- records problem it would provoke a search for more examples, since it's unlikely to have been an isolated one-off. Humans have tended to share their inventions and discoveries with one another, but unfortunately hand-written or hand-drawn records in the Americas tended to be either non-portable or non-robust (fragile or perishable). That is also true of many records in the west of the Africeurasia land mass.

Re:I deciphered it last month.

[Half-pint HAL]

Later we learned stuff like Columbus was the one to figure out the earth is round, which is made up. The resistance to his journey was that he might not find land before reaching Africa (they didn't know the map), in which case the expedition would have starved to death before arriving. This was too great a risk compared to the price of the expedition.

It was more than that -- we had known the circumference of the Earth to a surprising degree of accuracy for almost two millenia before Columbus set off. We know that this hadn't been forgotten as there are pre-Columban maps that depict the known lands as a projection from a globe, and the area of the globe missing for them takes up the angle you would expect the western Atlantic, America and the eastern Pacific to fill up.

In light of all that, I find it almost impossible to believe that Columbus didn't know America was there -- he did not have enough food and water to cross all the way to China in one go, so even if he was looking for a passage to India, he must have been expecting to make landfall on the way to restock.

A lot of the historical confusion may well come from nomenclature. They keep saying that Columbus sailed for "India", but the talk was of "The Indies", which was originally anything from India eastwards. Was the term used geographically at the time, or was it a socio-political term for a territory deemed ripe for colonisation?

Re: I deciphered it last month.

[Half-pint HAL]

Then to add to it he openly mocked the pope,

I don't think that's the "add to it" bit -- he called the most powerful man on the planet an idiot, and got locked up for it. Even the Catholic church itself tacitly acknowledges that the Holy Roman Empire was a disaster, and that it shouldn't be directly involved in government or politics. To this day, members of the clergy aren't allowed to stand for political office or join politically active societies.

Of course botanaists

[geekoid]

it's full of plant descriptions. Sheeesh.

Think I've almost got it...

[pushing-robot]

hordes of tiny naked women bathing in a system of interconnected tubs (which bear an uneasy resemblance to the human digestive system)

Are there little wooly mammoths as well?

Re:Think I've almost got it...

[bickerdyke]

What does this tell us about your digestive system?

Botanists did a thing

[immaterial]

I don't believe this. Botanists, really? And here I thought they were only good for fertilizing my plants. I'll have to stop composting them when I catch them prowling outside.

If we find out they can do other sapient stuff, like make fire and use Facebook, I may start feeling guilty about the whole composting thing.

Re:Botanists did a thing

[game kid]

I will doubt your repentance until you also stop eating Girl Scouts without baking them into Girl Scout cookies first.

Re:Botanists did a thing

[Bugamn]

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider using Facebook as sapient stuff.

Re:Botanists did a thing

[Anonymous Coward]

They study plants so you don't have to.

tiny naked women

[turkeydance]

safe search slashdot oxymoron

Clearly obvious...

[ackthpt]

It's 500 pages, right?

They needed a thick enough book to reach the cookie jar.

Re:Clearly obvious...

[VortexCortex]

Textbooks in Academia are very often subject to the now normalized purposeful practice of being embiggened with useless redundancy and other such non essential and pointless filler to give them a high "thud factor", id est, a physical quality exhibited by a bound set of printed manuscript as its conversion of potential to kinetic energy -- most commonly expressed as free-fall -- ends abruptly upon colliding with the approximately parallel planar surface of a coffee table, desk or other such platform, such that the humanoid observer will cromulently valuate the manuscript as having a higher value due to this property being associated with other well respected volumes of physical information conveyance.

Yes, this from your 'best and brightest'. Your race is doomed.

Re:Clearly obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

Science is compression of information. Our accreditation system is now directly opposed to science.

Re:Clearly obvious...

[idunham]

Oh for mod points!
+1, Hilarious.

Re:Clearly obvious...

[The Iso]

Printed books are not manuscripts! Say monograph instead.

Interesting as it points to how to decipher it....

[KingOfBLASH]

According to TFA, plant names in Nahuatl (the language of the aztecs) have been identified.

If indeed people who wrote it were writing in Nahuatl, and perhaps in a dialect, they may have needed to make their own script (since there was none around).

So given time, perhaps it can be deciphered...

buy a copy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know where can I find a good hardcover version of Voynich? Like a coffee table book?

Re:buy a copy?

[Toe, The]

Well, from the linked resource, you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:buy a copy?

[hax4bux]

I got mine (years ago) from Aegean Park Press, P.O. Box 2120, Walnut Creek, CA 94595

Re:buy a copy?

[Psychotria]

http://ambushprinting.com/voyn...

Re:buy a copy?

[lister king of smeg]

Well, from the linked resource, you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

archive.org has several different formats as well.

https://archive.org/details/Th...

Predicts the internet

[Toe, The]

A series of tubes? With naked women in it?

How could that be anything but the net?

Re:Predicts the internet

[Mashdar]

At least it's not some truck that the women were dumped on.

Re:Predicts the internet

[Tablizer]

But it's lacking trolls and spam

Re:Predicts the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, truck dumps women!

Is there an Ebook

[rossdee]

Is it available as an Ebook?

Re:Is there an Ebook

[Spiridios]

Is it available as an Ebook?

Yale has digital scans and you can download the whole thing as a PDF.

Re:Is there an Ebook

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until Disney makes it into a movie and claims copyright?

Re:Is there an Ebook

[walter_f]

Is it available as an Ebook?

An ebook. Pah.

I'd rather like to have an audiobook edition... ;-)

Re:Is there an Ebook

[Anonymous Coward]

"Twas bryllyg, and ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gymble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe."

Re:Is there an Ebook

[aix tom]

You solved the mystery!!

Someone wanted to write a great book, but wanted to prevent Disney from getting it in his grubby hands, so they ciphered it.

For those curious about the tiny naked women...

[QilessQi]

Second image down:

http://www.midorisnyder.com/th...

Man, but medieval porn was tame.... :-)

Re:For those curious about the tiny naked women...

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to know if the girls depicted in this manuscript were underage. If they were I demand that we give these girls or decedents a generous compensation package. Also we should go and kill all these child pornographers or their decedents. Ohh. it is the aztecs. Good. Mission accomplished. However why are there no black people depicted in this obviously racist manuscript. Fucking Europeans always holding blacks down. Also women down too. We need to destroy this manuscript before it is deciphered and potentially destroys our carefully thought out ideas of political correctness.

Re:For those curious about the tiny naked women...

[ceoyoyo]

Somebody has a weird idea of what the human digestive system looks like.

Re:For those curious about the tiny naked women...

[Anonymous Coward]

The second image down makes me think of the female reproductive system. ovaries to the left and right, fallopian tubes up top, uterus in the middle, and naked women at all the important spots just so you won't miss the hint.

Re:For those curious about the tiny naked women...

[bombman]

Yeah I thought that some of these tubing represented human
digestive system and the female reproductive system as well,
i second your conclusions.

HerbalGram?

[Kaenneth]

What an unfortunate name for a (I presume) 'legit' botanical journal.

Re:HerbalGram?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not legit. It's for "herbal enthusiasts," not academics. Seriously, "real" journals don't announce articles through PR Newswire.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Sabbatic]

That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight. The first and only thing surviving the invention of a writing system certainly wouldn't be a large codex. Such a work would also not be produced in a vacuum. Writing systems are developed with a future reading community in mind. They record things for posterity and allow for certain sort of communication that either need to be recorded or which are directed at people who are accustomed to writing. It's not plausible that everyone capable of reading the thing just died off without telling anyone, and the book floated itself into the hands of Westerners. Moreover, if you look at the examples of writing systems developed relatively late in history, they are derived from existing writing systems for other languages. You don't just invent such things from scratch, unless it's a personal system, in which case it's really a cipher. Moreover, if the system weren't derived from that of another language, it would have to be inspired to some degree by native iconography. If either case were true, the thing would have been easy to decipher. If people claim that they have identified Nahuatl, that identification is only possible if the system is derived from earlier Nahuatl iconography, which as noted, would have made the interpretation quite easy long since, or it's some sort of phonemic transcription, which is something they could only have learned from another language community with a writing system in so short a space. In the latter case, the system would certainly have been adapted from that system.

Codex Seraphinianus - a modern-day Voynich analog

[cjellibebi]

Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world published in 1981 and written in a similar style to Voynich, but the illustrations are much more surreal.

Why is this so hard to decipher?

[Spy Handler]

I would've thought surely NSA could crack it by now....

Re:Why is this so hard to decipher?

[srmalloy]

After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.

Re:Why is this so hard to decipher?

[jomama717]

Looks like they took a crack at it, interesting read:

The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma

Re:Why is this so hard to decipher?

[myowntrueself]

After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.

Everyone underestimates the Illuminati...

Re:Why is this so hard to decipher?

[RivenAleem]

They weren't around back then to install a backdoor into the manuscript, or to pay off the writer to weaken the encryption.

"Dolorem ipsum" means "pain itself"

[tepples]

The original "lorem ipsum" was De finibus by Roman philosopher M. T. Cicero. Lipsum.com has a translation of the famous passage into English.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that some of your points are valid, but not this bit: "It's not plausible that everyone capable of reading the thing just died off without telling anyone." Given the impact of the Spanish conquest, I would say thay is perfectly plausible, morover it could have happened in a single generation. People don't seem to understand the impact of disease and slavery on the native American populations. Even educated people aren't going to have much time for reading between shifts in the salt mines, and when you're dead from smallpox you don't read much of anything. This thing could have been written for a tiny surviving readership, for posterity.

Not an original idea

[braindrainbahrain]

I'm pretty sure that at least one plant was previously identified as American , and that would be the sunflower. These botanists have taken the idea a lot further though. Their paper is well researched, but I will leave it to the peer review process to ultimately determine its veracity. The identification of Nahuatl words in the script seems a bit of a stretch IMHO.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[icebike]

That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.

Well not over night, but it doesn't take that long.

A Phonetic equivalence seems quite plausible, and you can whip up a phonetic equivalence chart for your private
use, or the use of a small group in a few hours.
And that might be the natural course of action for someone trying to document knowledge from an oral tradition.

That this book didn't contain the key to the symbols is also not that unusual. Maybe this scribe needed to retain
it for subsequent work.

Western letters drawn with a quill certainly speaks to the possibility of early Spanish origins deliberately trying to
encode information to be sent home such that it couldn't be used by just anyone. There may never have been more
than a dozen who knew the key or the symbology. Maybe they and the key went down with a subsequent ship,
even thought this book or perhaps a few others weren't on that boat.

Cannabis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it only me or the plant at page 16r (32 of 210) looks like a cannabis plant?

Not new

[Dan East]

It isn't a new theory that the Voynich Manuscript is Nahuatl. Here's a book from 2001 positing that very thing:
Keys for the Voynich Scholar: Necessary Clues for Tahe Decipherment and Reading of the World's Most Mysterious Manuscript which is a Medical Text in Nahuatl Attributable to Francisco Hernández and His Aztec Ticiti Collaborators

The botany side seems to further reinforce this existing theory, as opposed to originating it.

Re:Not new

[Chalnoth]

Interesting, but if it were from South America, shouldn't there be physical evidence in the manuscript itself, such as the makeup of the paper, that would identify it as originating there? After all, the manuscript has been dated to before Columbus' voyage, so it couldn't very well be a copy of New World writing. It had to either originate in Europe, and have no influence from the New World, or originate in the New World.

Re:Not new

[cusco]

It's written on vellum, which is generally made from calfskin. Cattle of course didn't exist in the Americas prior to the arrival of the Spanish barbarians, so the book's materials have to have originated in Europe. I believe the inks are also of European origin. My guess is that a native of the Americas or a European who had lived for an extended time there was probably the books author, and inaccuracies in plant representations can be attributable in part to working from memory.

Re:Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

No if it was a copy

Re: Not new

[Sigg3.net]

As the only leftover wisdom from a (perceived) dying culture, who wouldn't want a backup?

Gimme

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what happened to my junior high school art project.

Post-contact.

[tpstigers]

They compared the flora to the period of the manuscript's assumed appearance - about a century after contact. Knowledge travels fast (as do people). The manuscript could have been written anywhere Europeans had gotten themselves into.

And we're talking the height of the Age of Exploration here.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[SpectreBlofeld]

That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.

Sequoyah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. This was the only time in recorded history that a member of a non-literate people independently created an effective writing system.[1][4] After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate quickly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.[1]"

  So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

>you can't develop a writing system overnight
It is said that Hangul (the written Korean alphabet) was constructed by one scribe in a single afternoon.
google: how to learn to read korean in 15 minutes
, then click the pictures.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[KingOfBLASH]

That's not even remotely plausible. The first and only thing surviving the invention of a writing system certainly wouldn't be a large codex.

Funny because the fact that such a large codex survives, would seem to indicate that indeed it's possible for it to have happened.

Writing systems based on an alphabet are, by definition, phoenetic. If you were to learn chinese, you'd probably use the roman alphabet to write down notes on how to spell it phoenetically.

Given that there probably are not a whole lot of speakers of Ancient Aztec it stands to reason maybe a phonetic representation of Aztec wasn't something easily figured out. (Remember the Navajo code talkers were unbreakable during world war II).

And, this is consistent with what is known about the manuscript if you check the wikipedia article. Specifically:

The language is quite unlike most European languages.
Between 20-30 glyphs could explain the entire text
The language resembles a natural language.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[angel'o'sphere]

Ofc you can invent a writing system over night.
Tolkien did plenty, and so did I as a child between 8 and 14. And I bet I was not a singular case. After 12 or 14 I however was more into simple encryption and 'secret codes'.
However I get your point ... I was still stuck withe the idea that a single person invented this writing system for his own purpose (regardless of underlying language).
I don't think that it necessarily would need to be an adaption of "one" script. A spanish scholar of that time might have been able to read/write in several scripts (greek / coptic and latin etc.) and like Tolkien be simply very inspirated.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[angel'o'sphere]

Not to forget that the spanish invaders burned everything which looked like scripts or writing believing it was written in 'devils tongue'.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[DerekLyons]

Well not over night, but it doesn't take that long.

A claim completely unsupported by your link.
 

A Phonetic equivalence seems quite plausible, and you can whip up a phonetic equivalence chart for your private use, or the use of a small group in a few hours.

That's probably true for your and me who have grown up with a phonetic system. I wouldn't think it to be true of someone who didn't grow up in a phonetic system and to whom the whole idea is new. The one historic example with which I'm familiar to twelve years to create.

You've been snookered

[Jiro]

Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that
1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine
2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations
3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine".
4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.

I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.

Re:You've been snookered

[nadaou]

just because they may be alternative medicine crackpots does not mean that they are not experts in identifying exotic plant species. one might expect just the opposite actually.

train your brain to avoid the ad hominem.

Re:You've been snookered

[Sockatume]

Turns out it's an enormous long con to sell us all herbal viagra?

Ha, "enormous long con".

Re:You've been snookered

[idunham]

Looks like an herbal product trade group; that said, I'd hesitate to describe this particular one as "crackpots".
I expect the "Botanical" would be better read as "Botanicals", which is very roughly "plants used for non-food purposes".
That disclaimer is virtually mandated by US laws.

Full disclosure:
I'm an ag major who comes down on the side of conventional agriculture. While I was still at the university, I knew some people (professors included) interested in "alternative medicine", partly because of the restrictions related to organic production.
My impression of alternative medicine is that it's a very mixed bag, with too much room for quacks in a field that could include legitimate work.

Re:You've been snookered

[abies]

I think that Tim Minchin has summed up alternative medicine in best way in his Storm poem

By definition", I begin
"Alternative Medicine", I continue
"Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call "alternative medicine"
That's been proved to work?
Medicine."

Watch it if you have not already
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re:You've been snookered

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a nice quote, but he overlooks a third category:
3) 'Medicine' which appears to have a measurable physical effect, but where the mechanism for such an effect is unclear or unknown. A lot of old remedies fit this description, a number of which have only had their mechanisms discovered within the last few decades (thereby transferring them from 'alternative medicine' to 'medicine'.)

Yes, this is often/usually a placebo effect, but not always.

Re:You've been snookered

[TangoMargarine]

4) It works fantastically but the established drug overlords don't want you to have access to it because then you wouldn't buy their drugs.

Re:You've been snookered

[abies]

Really, listen to Tim Minchin. The quote above is a reply to:

Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It's time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives."

I assure you, if 'natural medicine' things would _really_ work miracles, people would realize it. There is nothing drug companies can do to stop some independent researcher in other country finding out that eating unladen swallow droppings will cure all types of cancer.

Pharmacy companies are bit 'evil', because they try to earn serious money to recoup their investments by limiting supply to life-saving treatments. I could even believe that they have found a synthetic cure for something and they are holding it under the wraps to earn more money from treatment drugs rather than one-shot cure drug. But claiming that they are suppressing alternative medicine research to protect their earnings...

Re:You've been snookered

[TangoMargarine]

I'm referring to the "treating the illness with interminable and pricy drugs versus curing it" argument which I find a lot less unlikely than I used to. It's like the oil industry: why the hell would they want consumers to buy more efficient engines?

I'm not a fan of Tim Minchin so much because he's generally sarcastic and smug.

Re:You've been snookered

[Anonymous Coward]

Pharmacy companies are bit 'evil'

Good to see they at least follow RFC 3514, though...

XKCD got it wrong

[Tablizer]

It's the Perl of the dark ages.

Explanation is simple, really:

[Tablizer]

A botanist was working on a journal, ran out of tobacco, and decided to smoke some of the odd plants he was writing about rather than merely illustrate them.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

And Spaniards didn't grow with a phonetic system? Don't think anyone was suggesting an Aztec independently figured out how to illustrate this is vellum, built a caravel and sailed across the Atlantic right on time to drop this in Europe before anyone else crossed the Atlantic as a prank. The scenario would be closer to a Popol Vuh without the Spanish translation. It is not unlikely the popol vuh also had such an original phonetic manuscript.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[cusco]

The Domincans created a Quechua/Spanish dictionary before Pizarro even reached Cusco, so it's not unreasonable. The dating is problematic though, unless perhaps it was created by the Portuguese or Venetian merchants that were suspected to have been using secret trade routs to bring rare items to Europe before the 'official' discovery of the Americas.

one-time-pad

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the manuscript's text is a one time pad, and the encrypted text belonging with the pictures is in another book.

Gondola, gondola!

[Anonymous Coward]

The manuscript contains a small castle graphic, which displays peculiar dove-tail embattlements. Based on this architectural detail and taking into consideration the recent C-14 dating results, the Voynich book was written somewhere in early renaissance Northern Italy, like Venice or Milan.

Part of the Voynich disease, not part of the cure

[NickPelling3780]

If only the two authors were as good at researching historical mysteries as the American Botanical Council (ha!) is at writing press releases. Gosh, are we supposed to say "Hooray for the two plucky outsiders, disregarding or trashing everything that might possibly stand in the way of their flaky narrative"? Bless 'em, but this is the kind of super-selective nonsense that makes idiot TV history documentary producers go all moist and short of breath. Lord save us from such tosh. Anyway, here's a link to my rather more specific review of their New Spain Nahuatl Voynich theory:- http://www.ciphermysteries.com...

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[khallow]

So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.

And it might even be the same sort of situation as Sequoyah. A native Aztec (or related dialect) speaker who can't read or write, but knows it is possible because the Spaniards could do it. So he or she creates a phonetic script and writes everything they can into the book.

The methodical nature of the book, with its natural division into somewhat identifiable subjects could indicate it is a knowledge dump perhaps for a posterity that might forget the past. Or maybe it's a crazy person with an opinion from some point in the last 500 years.

It is post-Columbian

[Dr La]

The radiocarbon date of 516 +/- 18 yrs bp only dates the time of life of the goats who's skin was used for the parchment. It does not date the construction of the book persé. It was not unusual at that time to use old parchment.

The manuscript contains several depictions that are clearly European: figures in European clothing, European equipment (e.g. a cross-bow) and some pages with Western (not indigenous American) constellations (e.g. Capricorn, the Balance).

So it is very clear, if it indeed shows American plants, that it must be post-Colombian and old parchment was used.

Re:It is post-Columbian

[CrimsonAvenger]

L'Anse aux Meadows.

Just a single example of European knowledge in the Americas that predated Columbus.

Re:It is post-Columbian

[Dr La]

L'Anse aux Meadows.

Just a single example of European knowledge in the Americas that predated Columbus.

Irrelevant. The pictures in the Voynich manuscript are clearly not 11th century Norse but depict 16th century west European clothing and equipment and classic constellations.

Everything points to it being post-Columbian.

Re:It is post-Columbian

[Anonymous Coward]

You claimed that the book must be post-Columbus, because knowledge in the book indicates cross-ocean knowledge, with the implication being that cross-ocean knowledge never occurred pre-Columbus.

CrimsonAvenger provided an example of pre-Columbus cross-ocean knowledge. It does not matter that the book does not contain that specific cross-ocean knowledge that CrimsonAvenger provided, because your claim was that the book must be post-Columbus because there was no cross-ocean transfer of knowledge prior to Columbus.

I'm sorry, but if you want to claim that that is irrelevant, you're going to have to do better than that.

"Dolorem ipsum" means "pain itself"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, (Do)Lorem Ipsum passage is a text defending the right to be a masoquist !

"..Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?"

Nahuatl still exists

[Anonymous Coward]

There are still 1.5M Nahuatl speaking people alive. Why don't they let them read the manuscript and see what happens ?

Interconnected tubs?

[Orp]

Sounds Roman.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[fatphil]

> Writing systems based on an alphabet are, by definition, phoenetic.

Since when has "phonetic" completely changed meaning? Written English is based on an alphabet, but is not a phonetic language at all.

That old book has nothing on my discovery.

[FilmedInNoir]

I bought my house several years ago. At the time the basement had a lot of garbage in it but I was lazy and just left it lying there in the rafters. It wasn't until several years later I actually rented a dumpster and started cleaning. In amongst the old license plates, ancient signer sewing machine, and sheets of plate glass... I found it. A 12"x"12' piece of ancient looking wood. Dark grey in colour and very worn, like it had been sanded down. It was engraved with runic symbols or what I assume to be runes. But that's not the odd thing about it, because in complete darkness, the symbols glow a dark green. Now it could be bioluminescent bacteria or even radium, since that was popular at one time to paint things with radium at one time, but they glow none the less. Now the symbols I've researched and some people have suggested they are actually Freemason alphabet characters. One possible source of the wooden plank would be Oak Island. Oak island has long be associated with the Masonic order. I suppose that would also explain the salty musk the board has. Anyway... I'll take some pictures and post them at some point.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're arrogant and dumb.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/cracking-maya-code.html

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[DerekLyons]

The Domincans created a Quechua/Spanish dictionary before Pizarro even reached Cusco, so it's not unreasonable.

I didn't say it was unreasonable, I said the OP's contention that it could be whipped up in a short time was unreasonable.
 

The dating is problematic though, unless perhaps it was created by the Portuguese or Venetian merchants that were suspected to have been using secret trade routs to bring rare items to Europe before the 'official' discovery of the Americas.

Not believed by anyone not wearing a tinfoil chapeau that I know of.

Option #3 is overblown

[MickLinux]

Printing something on an old blank book is hardly an indication that a forger predicted carbon dating. It rather indicates that one of the best standard starters for creating a forgery is to use original materials.

1) The Gospel of Thomas manuscript is printed on paper from the Middle East dating to about seventy AD, with inks local to the region and time period, but with pollen embedded in the ink that dates to 1100 AD italy. The manuscript upholds Muslim claims about Jesus, at a time when Muslims were moving into Italy.

2) Even the fact that the manuscript is made on old paper doesn't demonstrate that the artist intended a forgery. Suppose the artist were painting on paper he recieved from a friend, who in turn recieved it from his Grandpa's estate?

Actually, I think that this manuscript is not very interesting.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Gavagai80]

More likely the early Spanish simply used the Aztec names for plants, not having their own names for them yet.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should probably re-examine old English before making such a stupid statement. Start with the number of borrows.

early contacts

[tleaf100]

nice to see so many sailors giving advice !!!! people have been making "boats"since we noticed that some trees or branches of some trees float, we have been blown hither and thither for thousandsvof years,but small boats only carry small crews any survivors that turn up else where maybe lucky and the locals keep them alive cos their a new interest,or they may just kill them as some weirdo threat. if lucky they could live a full life but with such a small injection of genes,unless its a very small island population then the new genes probably just get swamped out by numbers. there will have been tens of thousands of folk stranded else where,and unless you have tge luck to turn up in right place and getvtaken into royal court or similar,no notes or items are probably lost

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[cusco]

There were maps of large sections of the coastline of the Americas extant in Europe and China well before the time of Columbus, including a globe (IIRC, from 1492) that showed the west coast of Mexico with Baja California and possibly San Francisco Bay. Interestingly many of the maps were accurate to within a degree or two of longitude. Magellan claimed to have a map showing the straight that bears his name, seemed to know that Tierra del Fuego was an island, and encountered a large shipwreck as he passed through the Straight (no known European voyages of discovery had disappeared anywhere further south than the mouths of the Amazon).

Some of the merchant houses were richer than many of the kingdoms of the time, and not burdened with the expense of continual warfare. Timbuktu possessed an enormous library, some of it supposedly salvaged from the Great Library of Alexandria, and was a trading partner of both Portugal and Venice although it had no sailing fleet of its own. It would actually be surprising if they hadn't carried out their own voyages of exploration.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[DerekLyons]

Timbuktu possessed an enormous library, some of it supposedly salvaged from the Great Library of Alexandria, and was a trading partner of both Portugal and Venice although it had no sailing fleet of its own. It would actually be surprising if they hadn't carried out their own voyages of exploration.

Timbuktu is a landlocked city hundreds of miles from the ocean. No shit it had no trading fleet of it's own.

And you're a clueless moron.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[KingOfBLASH]

If I asked you what the word THREEP sounded like, would you have an answer?

See, it's phoenetic.

Now each letter does not correspond to a phoneme. That's why sometimes we combine letters to make sounds, like in "TH". And there are some words that are not pronounced the way they're spelled for historical reasons (but they used to be!)

But for romance languages (remember they thought the manuscript was spanish or italian) it is quite straightforward, and pronunciations and spellings match (with the exception of a few loan words from the anglais)

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[KingOfBLASH]

Also, a citation for the definition of alphabet (and yes they're phoenetic, unless you're using alphabet in the sense of DNA alphabet):

http://www.oxforddictionaries....

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[cusco]

Reading comprehension fail, or did I just not write clearly? Portuguese and Venetian merchant houses traded with Timbuktu through its ports on the Gulf of Guinea. Maps of unknown origin existed in Europe, some of them claimed by authorities like Gerard Mercator to originate from the Great Library of Alexandria. Some of the merchant houses were enormously wealthy. It would be surprising if the merchant houses hadn't sent some of their ships on voyages of exploration using those maps in the search for new trading routes and rare goods.

Is that clearer?

Well Known

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently these guys played Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag.

Re:Part of the Voynich disease, not part of the cu

[JeanCroix]

I'd give mod points if I had them - thanks for the valuable counterpoint. For those of us who aren't up to date on all the various theories, research, and past work, your take really cuts through the sensationalism of TFA.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, not overnight, but 5 years give or take http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really a made-up script, it's a variant of Latin minuscule. Obviously this was written in colonial time, so there was a script around (apart from the fact that Nahuatl did have a pictographic script). Did you really read TFA? I don't mean the press release, I mean the article they published on herbalgram.org. You have to read the PDF because the Voynichian script was stripped in the HTML version, and compare it to a hires scan of the manuscript. Their proposed decoding relates most letters to Latin letters that are pretty similar in shape, or ligatures ("tl") of them. They even encoded the words "Voynich manuscript" into Voynichian script on the first page, but didn't include a code table or an extrapolated transcription of the rest of the text.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Anonymous Coward]

They did burn a lot, but for example the Popol Vuh was written down (in Latin script) by Mayan scribes in colonial time and it survived.

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[Half-pint HAL]

You should probably re-examine old English before making such a stupid statement. Start with the number of borrows.

The problem with that statement is that "English" and "Old English" are two different languages. The Old English spelling system may have been largely phonetic and/or phonemic, but Modern English suffers badly from an increasing disjunction between written and spoken forms, making many words damn-near ideographic.

The English spelling system is phonemic (NB: not phonetic) in origin, but in its modern form it is the least phonetic and the least phonemic alphabetic orthography I know of. (Except possibly Faroese, which was designed to highlight Old Norse etymology during an era where history and misguided notions of linguistic purity were used by anyone and everyone to justify why their language and people were superior to everyone else.)

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[fatphil]

The existence of a word that's phonetically spelt does not imply that the language is phonetic.

French is romance, and french is far from phonetic. (And much of the reason english is far from phonetic is because of the french influence.)

Gregory

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as the Voynich Manuscript , the vast majority of researchers focused on trying to decipher the code letter. Great respect for them. According to me , the text is intentionally used a hoax aimed to engage readers in a fruitless search for the code of the manuscript just as deliberately scattered like puzzle Centuries of Nostradamus. I am in my searches focused on the symbolic meaning of illustration. For someone who has only a scientific look at the issue of encryption , all suggest it may seem too unreliable , not falsifiable . Therefore, please be patient - larger amount of illustration only confirms my theory that talked about that: Manuscript , namely the part of Herb is , according to me , a compendium of knowledge about the Evolution of Life on Earth - from its cosmological aspect , through Human Evolution (Theory Darwin ) to the Prehistory , History and Contemporary . In the following section, the author Herb encrypted all the important events of our common history with such precision that many a textbook of history might have envied accuracy. For more detailed information I put on the page : http://gloriaolivae.pl/

Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.

[JamieIanMacgregor]

all I hear is 'baaaaa baaaaa' ie. THREesome with sheEP. are you sure threep was the word you were after?