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Comment by moftz | Hacker News Reader

Why not just copy sections of the Bible if it's just a sample of work? Why go through the extra effort of creating a new script and possibly a new language just to show how well you can write? Latin would have been the predominate language for manuscripts at this time so writing in Latin would have been a better example of the writer's skills. These kinds of manuscripts took a lot of effort and resources to put together so if someone was just trying to make a portfolio of their work, do you think they would need to produce such a large volume when several pages would have sufficed?

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We use Latin in "Lorem Ipsum" because most people are unable to read it today. This makes sure that the viewer focus on the page layout and images and not the text itself.

If it was written in Latin during an era where everyone could read Latin, it wouldn't be the same concept.

You are not wrong, but bear in mind that Lorem Ipsum is not latin, is latin-looking gibberish.

It's ultimately a corrupted version of Cicero's "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum".

> Why not just copy sections of the Bible if it's just a sample of work?

It would probably be a bad idea to juxtapose religious text with the borderline alchemical pictures in the manuscript. People are/were a superstitious lot. Also, you wouldn't want to risk angering the church. Aesthetically it would also be a bad fit, because this (probably?) isn't a Bible. For the type of content on display here, it probably wouldn't do to remind the client of Sin during the pitch.

> [why] produce such a large volume when several pages would have sufficed?

Here's a similar volume of pages with no meaning but to showcase the capability for presenting a particular type of content: https://www.squarespace.com/templates Only instead of Photography, Online Stores, Blogs the categories are Herbal, Astronomical, Balneological, etc.

> Why?

I think we can be fairly certain that whoever produced the Voynich Manuscript was at least a little hmmm... eccentric? We should probably be moderate about how much sense we expect to make from it.

Maybe they were feeling creative? AFAIK many of not all of the plants shown are fictional, so the document being the product of a creative mind seems likely.

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