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Comment by us-merul | Hacker News Reader

I’ve found this to be one of the most interesting hypotheses: http://voynichproject.org/

The author made an assumption that Voynichese is a Germanic language, and it looks like he was able to make some progress with it.

I’ve also come across accounts that it might be an Uralic or Finno-Ugric language. I think your approach is great, and I wonder if tweaking it for specific language families could go even further.

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This thread discusses the many purported "solutions": https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-4341.html While Bernholz' site is nice, Child's work doesn't shed much light on actually deciphering the MS.

Thanks for this! I had come across Child’s hypothesis after doing a search related to Old Prussian and Slavic languages, so I don’t have much context for this solution, and this is helpful to see.

With how undecipherable the manuscript is, my personal theory is that it's the work of a naive artist and that there's no language behind it. Just someone aping language without knowing the rules about language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_art

It's not a mental issue, it's just a rare thing that happens. Voynich fits the whole bill for the work of a naive artist.

You're not alone. Many have hypothesized this is just made up gibberish given the unusual distribution of glyphs.

Not a recent hoax/scam, but an ancient one.

It's not like there weren't a ton of fake documents in the middle age and renaissance, from the donation of Constantine to Preserve John's letter.

The way you describe it is why it’s not readily accepted. It’s misunderstood. You called it a hoax/scam and a fake. It’s not!

Whoever made the document was sincere in making up something that doesn’t exist. They had no intention to mislead. You wouldn’t call a D&D campaign a hoax because it features nonexistent things?

So you're saying it's a prop or a rulebook? (an old xkcd comic mentioned this).

I doubt it's a rulebook cause it's not a real language.

If it's a prop, it would be extremely expensive.

Just to get the parchment you'd have to slaughter a herd of ovines, then you'd have to process it, then you'd have to pay a skilled professional or more for months of work to draw and write.

So I think the profit motive is more likely, and given we know of a ton of scams like this from this period, it seems the most plausible.

But I'll be happy to be proven wrong if someone finds more info in the future.

And that naïve artist somehow managed to create a work that follows Zipf's law, 4 centuries before it was discovered?

Why would it not ?

Random Texts Exhibit Zipf’s-Law-Like Word Frequency Distribution: https://www.nslij-genetics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ie...

It also applies to a range of natural phenomena, e.g. lunar craters and earthquakes: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6241/2019sp/readings/Ne...

So the fact that word frequencies in the Voynich Manuscript follow Zipf's law doesn't prove it's written in a natural language.

Edward Kelly[1] was in the right place at the right time, and I recall reading many years ago (though I cannot now find the source) some evidence that he was familiar with the Cardan grille[2], which was sufficient to convince me that he was mostly likely the author, and that the book was intended as a hoax or fraud.

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Kelley

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardan_grille

These days the manuscript is quite conclusively dated to the first half of the 15th century; the parchment it's written on is definitely from that period, since it's been carbon dated to 1404–1438 with 95% confidence. The general style is also consistent with that dating. For example, medievalist Lisa Fagin Davis writes in a recent paper: "[t]he humanistic tendencies of the glyphset, the color palette, and style of the illustrations suggest an origin in the early fifteenth century" [0].

Edward Kelly was born over a hundred years later, so him "being at the right time" seems to be a bit of a stretch.

[0]: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/keynote2.pdf

I think it's entirely possible the inks are much later. Possibly Kelly erased whatever was on the parchment previously. In fact the drawings might have made liberal use of the original, just to hide that fact.

Which is worse actually. Kelly may have semi-erased an existing valuable manuscript.

The hypothesis that the manuscript is a palimpsest (that is, written on an old parchment that was scraped clean of a previous text; such recycling was common because parchment was expensive) has been thoroughly rejected. That sort of thing is detectable, in fact there's an entire field of research dedicated to recovering lost texts from palimpsests, but the Voynich manuscript shows absolutely no signs of that.

You're right. I have just read a bit about this[0] and agree. I do still believe that it's possible for the expensive parchment to have been obtained by someone uneducated or "naive", or quack and used by them.

[0] https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispe...

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