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[conuly]

Poll #25433 Voynich manuscript

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 79

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Some part of me is always thinking about the Voynich Manuscript

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Same
11 (13.9%)

Not so much
55 (69.6%)

The whatish whatnow?
13 (16.5%)

So...

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Hoax
11 (15.9%)

Aliens
3 (4.3%)

Nothing more than some elaborate cipher
46 (66.7%)

Other (explain)
9 (13.0%)

Ticky?

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Ticky
68 (100.0%)

Comments

[deird1]

I've seen someone posit that it's a code written by women of the semi-witchy variety, in an attempt to disguise their medicine work from men who might be suspicious and burny. I like that explanation the best. :)

[readerjane]

Seems like men who are inclined to get burny would find an untranslatable herbal as much justification as a readable one.

Except, if they had got burny on the strength of it, they probably would have burned the manuscript as well. So the fact that the manuscript wasn't destroyed suggests it wasn't found by anyone hostile to its writer(s).

[steorra]

I'm sure it's not aliens but I'm unsure whether it's a hoax or a cipher or something old that's more complicated than a cipher.

Speaking of aliens, though, have you read this short story?

[conuly]

I have!

[brokenallbroken]

It looks like an herbal, possibly in Linear B.

[conuly]

Linear B would just raise many, many more questions than it answers.

[wpadmirer]

Perhaps a madman? I'm curious about it. I'm going to read more.

[kengr]

"Insufficient data for meaningful response"

That is I don't know what it is, and I don't think any of theories I've read have enough evidence.

[malada]

Ticky!

[melannen]

Based on stuff I've read on ciphermysteries_feed , it seems to *look*, stylistically and content and format-wise, a lot like other manuscripts from the 14th century Alps that were made and used by astrologers/herbalists/medicine workers, partly as actual research notes, but partly to impress illiterate customers who thought that just having a book at all was magic. And the physical dating, materials, and what we know of the provenance also match that time, place and history.

None of the other similar extant books are encrypted, though some of them are written in bad late Latin that is highly abbreviated into almost a shorthand, or are written in hard-to-decipher mixes of Latin and a very local vernacular. And most of the letter shapes match Latin shorthand of that time and place, but we can't make them work as words.

So my current theory (I give it, like, 60%?) is that the Voynich was originally a copy made of one of those herbalist/astrology books, probably in a Latin shorthand, (possibly an illicit copy), in order to either steal the magic or to impress their own customers, by someone who was themself illiterate (at least in cursive Latin) and was copying the "text" in a way to make it look writing-y without really understanding how the letters worked.

I haven't ever seen anyone test it statistically against writing produced by an adult who has very little experience with writing but is trying to copy it; I don't even know how you'd get the stats. But it does have some visual similarities with what little kids make when they try to write "cursive" (is this entire theory based on Ch. 1 of Beezus and Ramona? Maybe.)

So sort of a hoax, but not in the scenarios that are usually outlined.

...Alternatively, it's a cipher manuscript created by Francis Bacon that explains all the secrets of Oak Island, which was secretly deciphered by Elizebeth Friedman while she was working on the case of the Schooner I'm Alone (out of Lunenburg) for the U.S. Government, and she secretly retrieved the hidden original Baconian Shakespeare manuscripts from there during WWII and spent the rest of her life deliberately obfuscating the true decipherment. (I give this one <1% but I enjoy it more because it's got way more evidence than any other Oak Island theory.)

[conuly]

Oh, god, Oak Island is another one that I think about entirely disproportionately to the amount I (or anybody) knows about it. Thanks for reminding me.

[melannen]

I read a bunch of the pre-TV-show Oak Island books last summer when I needed something to deaden my brain. It's mostly just really frustrating because so much of the possible evidence is just destroyed, and so much of the real basic foundation research is just not done. I spent WAY too long during slow periods at work last summer reading old shipping manifests to try to find out if coconut coir was even ever used as packing material on pre-19th century ships.

Breaking out the Elizebeth Friedman/Voynich theory in detail is a great way to stop discussion about other theories dead, though. :D

[steorra]

I would have a hard time believing that it was made by someone who didn't know how to write because I think the pen strokes and the texture of the writing look like they were produced by someone with calligraphic training.

"Knows how to write but can't read cursive Latin" could do it, though.

[melannen]

Maybe, I would definitely buy that option. Or even "can read cursive but not shorthand, and therefore thought the text they were copying was also nonsense".

But one of the weirdest things about it, in my eyes, is how neat the writing seems to be compared to the art (which is sloppy as hell.) Have you ever seen it in person? The two main things that struck me when I did was a) it's quite small, pocketsized, only a little bigger than a tankobon manga, most scans and reproductions actually come out bigger than life; and b) the art looks even more amateurish in RL. The size especially can be deceptive when you think about how the writing was done. The text is in maybe the equivalent of a twelve-point font, which is pretty small for handwriting!

I don't think it would take that much calligraphic training, though, if you're writing small letters with a good quill pen it just kind of looks like fancy calligraphy by itself, and the writing isn't neat on the level of, like, an expensive monastically produced book. And there's actually evidence of, IIRC, at least three hands, though it's unclear if it's actually three separate people or one person who did it with long gaps in between where their handwriting changed.

It was definitely someone who'd had some experience using a pen, though, because you don't see a lot of the mistakes that you get with a beginner with a quill, although after doing a few dozen pages you'd probably mostly stop making those, so maybe this is just the second try.

[spikethemuffin]

"But one of the weirdest things about it, in my eyes, is how neat the writing seems to be compared to the art (which is sloppy as hell.)"

I feel like this could be a clue, at least origin wise. Islamic?

Then again, art and handwriting have less correlation than one might think. [personal anecdata redacted]

[melannen]

People have theorized it's Arabic (people have theorized *everything*) but the evidence based on the illustrations, materials, and handwriting seem to point pretty directly at the culture of the region around the Italian and Austrian alps, and I don't think there was much Islamic influence there at the time? Not till you get a bit further east, anyway.

And doodles of naked ladies in the margin doesn't really scream medieval Islam to me, but maybe I'm overgeneralizing!

The writing isn't all that neat anyway - the lines aren't particularly straight, and some of the pages have sloppier lettering than other, and they were constantly not dipping the pen until they were almost out of ink, etc. But it's much better than the art, and especially the colors, which look like a five-year-old with their first set of paints.

[hamimi_fk]

Oh no, now I’m partially convinced the Voynich Manuscript is a like one of those Chinese knockoff products with broken or just wrong English written on it, lol. I find this an interesting take on it thought. Personally, I’ve always wondered if it was perhaps written by someone who was self-taught in reading/writing and tried their best to mimic what little of writing they had seen or someone who was illiterate so they created their own writing system. The latter explanation always made more sense to me but it’s interesting to see others ideas about it.

[silveradept]

Don't think it's ET or a hoax, but can't really say it's a cipher, either, because it seems like a cipher would at least have some amount of progress or false progress on it with enough thwacks at it. So it might very well be nonsense, genuinely created.

[conuly]

I can think of several ways to do an extremely elaborate cipher that would be opaque to all but the reader - mostly involving some combination of multiple glyphs per letter, interchanged randomly, with multiple null glyphs, and wor dspac ingdoneinc onsisten ly and perhaps phonetically writing in some foreign language words as well and incorporating a separate set of ciphered glyphs for common function words (or skipping them). If I could come up with this without much knowledge of modern cryptography (which the VM predates, which is one reason many people reject "cipher" out of hand, because pre-modern ciphers aren't very hard to crack) then a very dedicated person of that era could've done the same. If there's nothing really credible to hang a translation on, it's just all so much randomness.

But there's a level of effort there that really outweighs the benefit. Other than as a pure expression of passion, what could one person want to keep so secret that justifies this sort of thing?

Also, honestly, anybody going to that trouble would've done it more than once. Okay, maybe we haven't found their notebook that explains the code - but where's their other private memorabilia? Did they burn it all before death, missing only this? Fits the general secrecy theme, I guess, but still. Still.

[offcntr]

I always liked the notion that it was some medieval DM's rpg notes...