Voynich manuscript: the solution?

But we don't have to imagine a random alphabet which Voynich might have been written in. We can look at the actual language in the manuscript. It often shows three or four Latin-like glyphs repeated. Unless you have access to some special way these symbols are differentiated or otherwise convey information, a way that all other would-be interpreters have missed, you really don't have an argument.

And as far as European thinking goes - there's no evidence I know of a non-European origin to the manuscript.

Edit: and the languages you cite have a larger, not smaller information content than European languages, see;

https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6167/most-su...

> changes it's letter

changes its letter

> changes it's meaning

changes its meaning

The punch line of one of his stories came while he was discussing the history of attempts to interpret it. One character had a dense theory that involved, as a step in the middle, involved the text being an anagram. The problem being that anagramming destroys information and, given a large enough text, is impossible to reverse. (Interestingly, this is why some 17th-18th century scientists who were obsessed with both secrecy and precedence published their results in anagram form---if someone later came along and published the same result, they could say, "See, I was first; here's what that gibberish means.")

My point being that if you're going to posit an "out-there" theory, you have to make sure your theory can get you back here.

For a short text, you may have a point, but for a text as large as the Voynich, information content is a pretty reasonable way to examine what's going on. The number of characters (as far as I know (http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html)) is within the range of alphabetic writing. (Alphabets have <100 characters, syllabaries typically have a few hundred (Note: English has something like 5000 syllables.), and "morpho-syllabic" languages like Chinese (Thank you, John DeFrancis!) have a few thousand.)

To have more bits per character, the document would have to have more different characters. To pack more bits in via position, for example, would be possible, but you can't go crazy with the idea because you still need to be able to decrypt it. (Hangul is a neat example; it's alphabetic, but written with the letters arranged into blocks representing syllables. Neat!)

It is not at all, you misunderstand the point.

It is the technique that codebreakers used to check whether something is linguistic or not. And it is rather consistent across all languages. The 'Alphabet size' of a string might vary (i.e. logographic languages have much higher symbolic vocabulary sizes, so different per-symbol information content), but that doesn't affect the overall information density, because those symbols also take more information to encode. I haven't done the analysis myself, but as I understand it, Voynich is way way outside the range of normal human languages, European or otherwise.

And raising the issue of logographic or syllabic systems, is a point I made (did you not understand they are your examples). Even if one argued (as some have done) that the symbols in Voynich are logographic or syllabic, that would make it even lower information density, even further from human language.

I'm sorry I wasn't clear, but this stuff is very well-established in the Voynich literature. It puts genuine constraints over what the language can contain. It doesn't mean it's gibberish, but it is very unlikely to be 'real writing' derived from any known language, extant or extinct. Crucially, if it is real writing, it is of a form so dramatically different to anything we've ever seen before (i.e. fundamentally different syntactic and semantic structures), that one suspects the kind of correspondence translation techniques in the videos will be futile.

> In particular, MINIX was chosen as the basis for the operating system (previously, ThreadX RTOS had been used). Now ME firmware includes a full-fledged operating system [...]

Woah, did I read that correctly? That there is a version of MINIX running inside of the Intel processors of presumably almost every modern computer with an Intel CPU that has Intel ME in it? If so then that's insanely cool! I mean I still dislike Intel ME itself and wish I could disable it easily and without risking damage/destruction but the idea of there being a version of MINIX running on my computer right now is quite cool.

Whee! It's like a slip-n-slide greased with butter.

Seems a bit of a gamble if that was the plan, and the scribes were presumably either well-to-do or trusted by someone well-to-do if they could get their hands on the raw materials. That makes the prank/con/crazy spirit writing theory seem less likely to me but certainly doesn't rule either out.