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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."
translated: d-r-i-n-k-y-o-u-r-x-o-c-o-l-a-t-l
A series of tubes? With naked women in it?
How could that be anything but the net?
So you're saying that it's the original Loren ipsum with illustrations?
The original "lorem ipsum" was De finibus by Roman philosopher M. T. Cicero. Lipsum.com has a translation of the famous passage into English.
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.
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.
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.
Better known as 318230.
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.
Wait, you're saying that because it has an entropy similar to a book of the bible it's not gibberish?
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.
E pluribus unum
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.