Voynich, Hill, Crumb: A Hitherto Vexing Codex | Hacker News Reader

Voynich, Hill, Crumb: A Hitherto Vexing Codex

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52 pointsarexxbifs26 comments

I also suspect it's indecipherable. I think it's someone's sample piece: meant to showcase the creator's talent for producing such books without giving away real or false alchemical or botanical knowledge. Lorem Ipsum wasn't popular yet, and the author was kind of quirky, so we get... this. It has statistical properties consistent with natural language because humans suck at randomness, not because there's anything there.

Two hundred and seventy two pages is a pretty excessive amount of "sample material" to showcase skills though.

Well, maybe that gives it the general shape that it has, and you make more than you need to convince the client, because it doubles as practice,

I think in modern terms it's hard to appreciate how expensive that book would have been to make back then.

The parchment is calfskin. In the medieval era, it was uncommon for noblemen to slaughter their livestock for anything, even food, unless exceedingly special occasions. That book would have probably cost at least as much as one or two small farms, which is money only noblemen had, and far more than a lord or even a king would have afforded save for some extreme circumstances or investment.

Yes, it would be like spending $750,000 to make a portfolio. Or building an entire castle to show that you can do brickwork.

Wow, that's definitely something I hadn't considered in my hypothesis. Thanks for pointing that out. The sheer expense makes the book's existence much more intriguing.

Linguistic analysis performed on the Voynich Manuscript seems to be consistent with it having some meaning. See e.g. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The example of the schizophrenic writer devolves into nonsense. It looks as though the writer took to repeating the cursive letter "M" over and over. The Voynich Manuscript is clearly different. That it follows the statistical patterns of language suggests to me that it is not the product of madness.

The painter examples don't seem compelling to me either. The Voynich Manuscript is illustrated in a style that is reminiscent (to me) of old texts. There are lots of naked women, but not so many that I'd describe it as pathological.

I suspect it is a clever cipher, a constructed language, or a forgotten language.

There are more options than "makes sense" and "nonsense" here. To draw a parallel to a work much discussed on HN, TempleOS is both a functioning operating system and a product of madness, and yet a future archaeologist would have a very hard time extracting a meaning or purpose out of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

There is a difference between a work being driven by madness and a work that is madness. A schizophrenic programmer who builds an OS by pressing the "m" key a million times is different than a schizophrenic programmer who produces an OS that actually works driven by schizophrenic motivations. In other words, the future archaeologists might be confused by TempleOS, but they would be wrong to think it is meaningless.

It had meaning to its creator, but not to others. That's kind of what madness is, a break from consensus reality, and why some art can veer into the uncomfortable territory between the two.

It's a program, it will compile and run. Some people can "understand" it, not in the sense that its creator did, but in the sense that a wikipedia article can be written about it and its purpose, and we understand why he wrote in a broad sense (schizophrenia).

It's possible the Voynich Manuscript is the ramblings of an insane person but I don't think that is particularly likely. If my guess is right, and the statistical properties of the characters in the book indicate that it is part of a language or language-like system somehow, then we would have no more reason to suspect it was authored by a crazy person than any other random book.

The fact that the program runs is no more meaningful than the fact that the ink forms distinct lines and figures on the page.

In both cases it just means the author started out knowing how to use some tool contemporary to them. It doesn't prove or disprove either meaningfulness or nonsense.

And the TempleOS example specifically illustrates that we're not talking a out a binary state.

The fact that the program runs, and is an operating system, proves it has meaning. It's not a random collection of scribbles or incoherent scrawls. The computer can run it. We can interact with the program, understand it, and evaluate it. None of that is true with meaningless scribbles on a page.

In my view the TempleOS example is an example of sense versus non-sense. This is the difference between someone explaining that they have to take out their own teeth because they think the CIA hid radios in there and someone just making incoherent sound. The former is crazy, sure, but it's crazy made out of words that convey intent. If a schizophrenic told you they needed to remove their teeth to silence the radios in them you'd have a good guess about what the schizophrenic person was about to do. Again, not true for the person making incoherent noises.

And the crazy scribbles include recognizable human beings. So what?

And, again, not binary.

The "so what" is that I don't expect incoherent gibberish to have similar statistical properties to actual language. If the book is written in a language (or constructed language or cipher) then we have no more reason to expect its author was mad than we have to suspect any random author of any text we can't read is mad.

And maybe coherence isn't binary (not that I ever wrote it was) but TempleOS is clearly an example of something that is coherent though done by mentally ill person for an irrational purpose.

The example of the schizophrenic writer devolves into nonsense.

That process happened over a period of time and many different writings. A single document might well seem consistent.

It's an interesting idea. There is a museum in Switzerland collecting outsider art, much of it produced by people diagnosed with mental illnesses, and some of the artists exhibited there did create rather elaborate works, e.g. Adolf Wölfli: https://www.artbrut.ch/en_GB/authors/the-collection-de-l-art...

I think I found it. It was made by spa owner to lure in rich clients. Spa owner would say they have ancient secret book, written by alchemist monk, of how to treat any disease. They may even show the book to them, saying only their workers know how to read it.

I favour the hoax hypothesis... except that the letters and syllable distribution bear a strong similarity to natural languages. A XVth century forger could not possibly have known about this.

Recently a Turkish scholar has found indications that it is old Turkish.

https://www.openculture.com/2019/02/has-the-voynich-manuscri...

Recently a Turkish scholar has found indications that it is old Turkish.

They certainly make the claim, but I haven't found any evidence that their approach is being given much credence.

Here is a brief video of Amet Ardic, who believes the manuscript contains “shapes meaning prefixes and suffixes in distinctive letters, resembling the Turkish language used in his home country.” https://youtu.be/p6keMgLmFEk

> except that the letters and syllable distribution bear a strong similarity to natural languages. A XVth century forger could not possibly have known about this.

A XVth century schizophrenic would have had at least one natural language, and could therefore have, consciously or less so, made up another one.

EDIT: If successful it may perhaps still be deciphered; if the descent into illness had gone too far it may not actually make any sense to be decoded out of it -- but still look like a "real" language.

If it is indecipherable, I've always subscribed to the theory that it was a scam.

Someone crafted the book to make it seem mystical, which they could then use to influence someone somehow.

Probably not for money. It seems like it was created by a wealthy educated individual who didn't need money. More likely for political reasons; to manipulate and gain power.

> Voynich, Hill, Crumb: A Hitherto Vexing Codex

The author is evidently a fan of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid ...

Also interesting, yet much less enigmatic, is the Codex Seraphinianus [0][1], an illustrated manuscript with a known author (Luigi Serafini) and a known purpose (art). Maybe the Voynich Manuscript was something similar.

I'm also partial to xkcd's explaination: https://xkcd.com/593/

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

1: https://blog.kolesnik.info/pictures/files/Codex_Seraphinianu...

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