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Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

I think this approach has a lot of potential, and I wonder what a statistical comparison of character co-occurrences between the Voynich manuscript and other writing systems would reveal. For anyone curious, here is Stephen Bax's video on his 2014 findings.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?index=1&v=fpZD_3D8_WQ&list=LLATc...

He believes he has translated about 10 words in the manuscript, which is huge, and he thinks the script may have been invented to express a language once spoken between the near east and the Himalayas, maybe Turkic or Caucasian...

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It blows me away how many conflicting but semi-convincing theories there are about this manuscript (I read one fairly recently that argued for a New World origin of many of the plants, for instance). Which gets me thinking, has anyone analyzed the actual paper it's made out of to get any clues about where it originated? I know that spectroscopy can sometimes be used to make a guess at geographic origins of biological material but I haven't heard anything about it being used on the Voynich MS.

I've seen nothing that persuades me even a little bit away from the most common theory, which is that it's basically a hoax. It's a pseudo-occult book produced by some creative individual for fun and/or profit.

There are some contemporary alchemical manuscripts which are written at least partly in code, for example, but the illustrations strongly suggest that Voynich is pure fantasy.

It obeys statistical models of natural language that "fake text" would not at all. This sort of statistical modelling of language would almost certainly be unknown at the time it was produced. I find the hoax theory to be pretty unsatisfactory.

Even if the overall goal was some kind of hoax, the text itself almost certainly carries semantic meaning, and that in itself is fascinating due to its apparent indecipherability.

Any links to the "statistical" proof the that the text is not fake? I've seen just the opposite, that the statistics are really too weird, compared to anything we know. Which, to me, is a bit too much.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Thanks.

Still, for me, if the text produced with the Cardan grille wouldn't have such statistics, that would be a proof for me that the "language" is real. That's what I hoped to find. If the Cardan grille generated text would pass the statistics too, I'd still more believe the text to be a kind of hoax.

The game isn't "lets find which statistics Voynich passes" but "let's disprove the hypothesis it is a hoax" by finding a test which all claimed hoaxes schemes obviously fail.

1. Cardan grille was invented in 1550. Voynish manuscript is almost 100 year older by carbon dating

3. Why do you give hoax higher prior probability?

EDIT: I was wrong about the possible distributions so there's no point 2.

1. Technically, the velum seems to be older, we don't know when the manuscript is written.

3. Because nothing else "fits" with anything else we know of. When we find first text in an unknown language, typically it's some religious thing. The illustrations are at best "dream" constructs when not intentional attempt to make an "original" hoax. Otherwise, it's obvious that it's not something out of some non-western culture.

Yes it's definitely a real language that has been written down, and not one that we know of. So the only question is if it's a made up language, or a real language that has been lost. A made up language is possible, but seems less likely. There are thousands of real languages that have been lost to the world.

The vellum was carbon dated not too long ago, indicating that the book dated back to the 15th century: http://phys.org/news/2011-02-experts-age.html

I'd seen that, but I'm wondering if there's any way to use spectroscopy or some other technique to determine roughly what part of the world the vellum came from. It's been shown to be possible with wine:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23682581

And (I think this one is really fascinating) some researchers at the Louvre awhile back even used spectroscopic analysis on a painting by Murillo to determine that the obsidian he painted on began its life in a 14th century Aztec obsidian mine!

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005NIMPB.240..576C

Thanks for the feedback, I also believe that this approach has a lot of potential, especially after the work of Stephen Bax, a few word translations can help us to figure out transformations that could allow translation in vector space.

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