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A post at Language Log explains how multispectral imaging from ten years ago (which was just recently released due to the efforts of a determined blogger) reveal that the Voynich Manuscript, an illustrated vaguely alchemical and astrological handwritten tome in an indecipherable code, probably written around 1425 CE, is not a hoax or fake.
Claimed efforts to decipher it have likewise flopped.
6 comments:
do you have a theory ? I think it's the results of voice in the head from schizophrenia or hallucinations from mushrooms. so not a hoax but probably not intelligible
I think that it is essentially an early renaissance idea journal in a personal code that the proto-scientific polymath who wrote it, probably in Northern Italy, probably concocted personally, but not a mere cypher, really more of a constructed language in a way that probably follows more rigid and regular grammar and phoneme construction rules than a natural language. The author was probably not a famous historically attested person, but may have had connections to an elite Northern Italian renaissance merchant family of some kind.
Probably not a dead or dying European language such as one related to Basque or Etruscan, although possibly with a non-Romance source language (perhaps from a foreign mother or father or nanny).
Probably a mix of speculation and imagination and factual accounts. More like a writer's concepts journal than a scientific log book (given that, e.g., many of the plants depicted are fictional), something like the D&D Monster Manual or Lore books recounting an imaginary constructed world in a constructed language (the world building working papers of Tolkien, many of which were never published also comes to mind as an analogy, as does the analogy of the people who created Free masonic lore). Could be a man or a woman, or even a couple of close friends or siblings or cousins. It could have been a "phase" or involved project and mostly written in a few years, although perhaps the embryonic components of the script, the constructed language, and the illustration style could be older and developed in scribbles that are now lost.
It is probably mostly phonetic, although possibly with some non-phonetic grammatical pre-fixes and suffixes. Voynich A which appears in the herbal and pharmaceutical parts of the manuscript may relate more directly to a natural language and contain a large share of coded proper names for herbs and medicines, while Voynich B in the medicinal bathing section, some parts of the medicinal and herbal sections, and the astrological section may be the true constructed language. Probably not a Semitic language (due to the use of what appears to be vowel-consonant structures). I give a lot of weight to the similarity to the Khojiki script, possibly encountered via merchants to Italian ports in long distance trade with Iran or South Asia, and applied to the constructed language (a bit like Urdu which is Hindi written in an Arabic script, or Maltese which is a Semitic language written in the Roman alphabet). The author was probably not a clergyman or a Christian nun, but was fairly well educated, perhaps from rich merchant family or from a family of herbalists or spa operators in close association with one somehow. Ismaili Muslim ties and Sufi influences from at least one parent or grandparent would make sense. Perhaps from a family with a member of the Bektashi Order (a Sufi Shi'ite order existing in Central Europe at about the right time that is a close cousin of the Alevi people), but probably not a full fledged member of the order personally (the work is too secular for that). Maybe the natural language was related to Turkish, with the conlanguage drawing on Turkish, Italian, German, Iranian, and other loans from a variety of sources.
interesting. D&D Monster Manual -- so did you play D&D?
the astrology section is arguably pattern on the Zodiac
I was a big D&D enthusiast for many years.
Only recently I learnt that this Voynich was son-in-law of Boole.
Fascinating. I had no idea either.
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