The Codex Seraphinianus: Man and woman copulate, turn into alligator | Hacker News Reader

The Codex Seraphinianus: Man and woman copulate, turn into alligator

believermag.com

33 pointssilentbicycle16 comments

I actually bought a copy of the Codex years ago. I found one on Ebay for a few hundred dollars.

It is truly an amazing thing -- it's like an encyclopedia from an alternative universe. The pictures are incredibly detailed.

It's too bad the fake language probably doesn't code for anything.

More pictures here: http://www.io.com/~iareth/codindx.html and http://www.archimedes-lab.org/Serafi/C_serafini.html

Well, the page numbering system is internally consistent. It's in base 20-something, IIRC. Though all I figured out about the writing system was that it has a second (like upper-case) form used for titles. There's a Rosetta Stone-ish page near the end (http://evertype.com/pics/bookpics/RosettaView.jpg), which seems almost mocking by the time you get there.

(Edit: http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html . It's base 21, more details there.)

I had it for a few weeks on university library interloan, once upon a time. Looking at individual scanned pages on the web cannot do justice to immersing yourself in hundreds of pages of this gigantic black silk book.

IIRC the letters in the words repeat way often than one might expect.

Maybe they're syllabic (which would be reasonable, given the number of distinct symbols), and the language uses repetition of a syllable as a case marker, or just as a stylistic flourish? Perhaps it's used for emphasizing standalone nouns: Scis-issors-ors (scissors), vehic-icle-ickle (vehicle), o-sho-cean-shan (ocean). Likewise, if you're carving it in a building, why not write 'museum' as MVSEVM?

I know it's a conlang, and Serafini is probably just putting us on, but the ancient Mayan script does some pretty remarkable calligraphic somersaults, too.

Way too many glyphs to be syllables.

If I were doing something like this, I would assign new glyphs to each letter (as not to break the image of a fantasy world), and then encode the whole thing with a one-time pad. Doing so can give you all sorts of weird-looking words that have actual value.

Does anyone know how many unique glyphs there are in his book? For that matter, how many are there--including both uppercase and lowercase--in French (I don't know how many accented characters there are)?

And if there are still too many to be such an arrangement, it is possible that each letter was assigned multiple sets (a set being uppercase and lowercase) of glyphs and picking a random number between 0 and twice the total number of letters in French, counting accented letters as unique letters (manually picking the proper case).

I'm not saying that he did this, but it's what I would do.

It's been a few years since I saw the book, but the total number of glyphs seemed a lot closer to (for example) the number of hiragana + katakana than the number of kanji.

(Also, I don't know if you picked just French at random, but Serafini is Italian.)

This could be the base of a wacky MMORPG.

It's funny how this story pops up now and then on different sites. It has a 3 year recycle rate, hopping from geek aggregator to geek aggregator. It is a great book though, my wife found ours at a thrift store in palo alto, for somthing like $50.

I'd seen it originally in the mid 80s and was kind not obsessed enough to buy it on ebay but looking it up in rare book rooms to try to find a leather bound edition. Great book to have ,though.

I am reminded of the "Encyclopedia Butlerica":

http://www.weirdart.com/pages/ency.html

Alligator can be seen here: http://the-crime-in-your-coffee.anagkh.net/?p=664

P.S. If you haven't read any Jorge Luis Borges, I'd advise considering that a bug to be fixed a.s.a.p. ;-)

Interesting.

Liberal arts majors still have nothing better to do with their lives.

Wow. Personally, I can't think of anything better to do.

Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.

I meant that in the sense of "spending thousands of dollars and months of one's life to take a course that revels in incomprehensibility and subjectivity, leavened with stereotypical calls to abandon rationality in a manner eerily reminiscent of a random scene from an Ayn Rand book"

It's just that, good lord, who of us would choose a course like that over a real class?

If this were reverse engineering of some obscure long out of use protocol it would be heralded as great hacking/fascinating detective work/interesting puzzle.

I think people are voting you down because they think you're talking about the guy who WROTE the book, not the author of the article. That's what I thought...

That said I think everyone who goes to college has a few humanities requirements, liberal arts major or not. A class with this book in it would have been much cooler than most of the classes I took, humanities or otherwise.

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