The most compelling hypothesis I saw for the language explanation was that it was Manchu with an unusual romanization. It’s such a rare language (basically dead language at this point) that it would make sense why the statistics line up for a real language, but people haven’t managed to decode it. Then add to that the fact that it’s not super clear what glyphs are stylistic differences and which ones are alternate glyphs, and it’s not even clear where to split the forms into different glyphs because they’re all connected, and it kind of makes sense.
This video is the most compelling case I’ve seen for it not being a real language. Like I say, it’s kind of sad to think it might not have a real decoding.
I don’t believe Voynichese is any known or unknown natural language, and even unusual Romanisation wouldn’t explain the peculiarities of the manuscript text. In my opinion, there are only two likely scenarios:
1) Voynichese is an unknown constructed language
2) Voynichese is highly structured gibberish, created systematically and with great care to mimic the behaviour of real language.
Even if the second is correct, it would be a remarkable achievement for some early 15th century scribes. The amount of linguistic awareness required to create this language-looking gibberish is impressive in itself.
Yeah, this is interesting. I’m a little skeptical of any analysis that proceeds immediately to statistical analysis of one particular assignment of “letters” with the implied boundaries to the letterforms, without apparently dealing with the nontrivial problem of figuring out how likely it is that any particular shape is a particular “letter” or where the boundaries are. But you could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).
You need the http:// in front of your link, it’s being processed as a relative link compared with this document
Why is Leisure Suit Larry at the top of this paper
showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that wouldn’t exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish. In fact, the highly regular and peculiar (often repetitive) structures of it is part of the problem. Now, that doesn’t mean it contains meaningful information, or indeed that it is a language at all. In fact those rigid and repetitive structures that distinguish it from random noise also make it incompatible with known natural human languages.
It could (and most likely is) simply be highly structured, deliberate and constrained nonsense, devised by a semi-random process following a complex algorithm. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the semi-random part somehow hides encoded information, though with the number of distinguished codebreakers who have had a crack at it I am skeptical. It would also be a highly sophisticated form of cryptography for 15th century Europe.
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish.
Yeah, you’re right, I wrote my language backwards. I just fixed it. “You could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish” is what I meant.
I mean, the statistical properties that set Voynichese apart from natural languages are very widely documented. The very low entropy is perhaps the largest issue, playing into the repetitive nature of it and creating “loops” as per this video (elaborated on in this blog post)
Even then though, we can never prove a negative. It’s impossible to prove it’s not a natural language, we can only demonstrate that it works in ways that are completely different from all other known languages.
The most compelling hypothesis I saw for the language explanation was that it was Manchu with an unusual romanization. It’s such a rare language (basically dead language at this point) that it would make sense why the statistics line up for a real language, but people haven’t managed to decode it. Then add to that the fact that it’s not super clear what glyphs are stylistic differences and which ones are alternate glyphs, and it’s not even clear where to split the forms into different glyphs because they’re all connected, and it kind of makes sense.
This video is the most compelling case I’ve seen for it not being a real language. Like I say, it’s kind of sad to think it might not have a real decoding.
I don’t believe Voynichese is any known or unknown natural language, and even unusual Romanisation wouldn’t explain the peculiarities of the manuscript text. In my opinion, there are only two likely scenarios:
1) Voynichese is an unknown constructed language
2) Voynichese is highly structured gibberish, created systematically and with great care to mimic the behaviour of real language.
Even if the second is correct, it would be a remarkable achievement for some early 15th century scribes. The amount of linguistic awareness required to create this language-looking gibberish is impressive in itself.
You might be interested in this paper
Edit: I backwards
I don’t quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish. In fact, the highly regular and peculiar (often repetitive) structures of it is part of the problem. Now, that doesn’t mean it contains meaningful information, or indeed that it is a language at all. In fact those rigid and repetitive structures that distinguish it from random noise also make it incompatible with known natural human languages.
It could (and most likely is) simply be highly structured, deliberate and constrained nonsense, devised by a semi-random process following a complex algorithm. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that the semi-random part somehow hides encoded information, though with the number of distinguished codebreakers who have had a crack at it I am skeptical. It would also be a highly sophisticated form of cryptography for 15th century Europe.
Ah damn it I’ll fix the link
Isn’t 90s web design just the absolute pinnacle?
Yeah, you’re right, I wrote my language backwards. I just fixed it. “You could certainly disprove that it was a real natural language by showing statistical regularity in it that’s of a type that would only exist if it was statistical random gibberish” is what I meant.
I mean, the statistical properties that set Voynichese apart from natural languages are very widely documented. The very low entropy is perhaps the largest issue, playing into the repetitive nature of it and creating “loops” as per this video (elaborated on in this blog post)
Even then though, we can never prove a negative. It’s impossible to prove it’s not a natural language, we can only demonstrate that it works in ways that are completely different from all other known languages.