The Voynich Ninja

Well, to play the devil's advocate, one might say that so many flowers are blue because the painter didn't care and just slapped on whatever he had on hand.

(25-09-2022, 08:09 AM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Actually, exactly this scenario happened to Athanasius Kircher a few hundred years later. Some of his students thought he was getting cocky, so they forged a letter in invented hieroglyphics, which he happily confirmed was genuine and translated for them. It was all nonsense, and Kircher was roundly shown up for the pompous fool he was.

On the subject of saleability as the motive for a hoax, do we know anything about what prices "real" manuscripts in other locally illegible scripts were fetching in fifteenth-century Europe?  Quoting from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on Kircher's forays into Egyptology:

Quote:Although the Vatican Library had assembled a large collection of Coptic manuscripts over the centuries, almost no one in seventeenth-century Rome was able to read them.

Kircher apparently had a Coptic-Arabic manuscript that he used to begin "unlocking" the language for his compatriots in the 1630s, but for some time before that, wouldn't a Coptic manuscript have been nearly as illegible in Rome as a Voynichese manuscript?  If there was any trade in Coptic manuscripts there during the fifteenth century or so, it might open a window on what people were then willing to pay for writings of exotic origin that were only potentially legible.  Or we could substitute any other language that was little-known in Rome at the time for Coptic.

The Allegory of Merlin, B. M. Sloane 3506, translated from Latin:
"Brother keep Secret this Treatise for it is an imposture amongst ye fools and no imposture amongst wise men."

@pfeaster, post32
Ooh , thats a proper good idea and research avenue, deserves its own thread else it will get buried here.

(26-09-2022, 04:54 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@pfeaster, post32
Ooh , thats a proper good idea and research avenue, deserves its own thread else it will get buried here.

Price colophons could be the subject of a possible research. However, they probably occur only rarely.

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Unfortunately, only with payment ( also with university login ):
Joanne Filippone Overty, "The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300–1483"
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Price lists can sometimes be found as well:
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Rene Zandbergen being awesome, has looked into what Rudolf II paid for other books:  voynich.nu/history.html >>  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
That method of analysing Court ledgers and such could be extended and applied further, though thats serious, blowin'-dust-off-boxes type research.

Anyways,
I was thinking about this last night before i fell asleep ( is that a good or bad sign ?  O_o )

# To reduce your initial capital outlay to create or hoax the VMS , you could just steal the vellum, even the ink and quills.
    The you just need to get renumerated for your time spent creating it.

# bi3mw wrote "The Unique Selling Point of the VMS is the fact that it cannot be read (yet)."
   nablator has covered this point but to add a little to it.
This USP can be used creatively for a spiel, backstory, marketing ploy. For example:

"This text holds the secrets to the philosphers stone,
 Do you want to be the richest person in the world?
 Do you want to live forever?
 If you crack this code then all this can be yours"

# Who would buy the VMS circa 1450ish ?
  well several of the purported authors/sponsors of the vms would have had an interest and were rich
  not to mention all the other candidiates, wealthy patrons of the arts,booklovers,
  they might not have paid Rudolf prices but they could pay well. Some candidates could be :
Barbara of Cilli              (1392-1451)
Nicholas of Cusa              (1401-1464)
Federico da Montefeltro      (1422-1482)
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-1468)

If you could figure out which books one of those actually owned, we could get a better idea of whether the VM would fit in there.

An accompanying question would have to be what the VM looked like to these people in the 15th century. Some would argue that the images would not be seen as overly bizarre. A medicinal compendium based on something like the Dioscorides or a Latin herbal tradition, the Balneis (a poem about Italian baths), maybe some De Sfera (a common schoolbook).

So there you have another problem: if it is meant to look exotic ("Coptic", otherwise Egyptian or just exotic in general), then why the blond nymphs, European castle, European zodiac, references to familiar traditions...?

(26-09-2022, 07:15 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, I disagree with the conclusion. If I remember the video correctly, Sledge doesn't demonstrate that it cannot be a cipher. He instead argues that it is unlikely to be a cipher done by any of the known medieval methods, which is something I agree with.

There is no need to demonstrate that it cannot be an unknown cipher, an unknown language, an unknown text generation method etc. The burden of proof is on the side that makes a claim. For the cipher hypothesis this would require that a concrete cipher is presented. As long as this is not the case it is enough to argue that it is not a known cipher. Sledge does so and you even agree to his statement as you say.

(Please note that Sledge also refers to text properties like the low entropy value. Ciphers normally increase the entropy or doesn't affect the entropy value. This way it is already possible to exclude most ciphers. Sledge also refers to the observation that the Voynich text is changing from page to page and from Currier A to Currier B. Ciphers normally result in a homogenous text. Therefore you need an additional element, like new cipher keys for every page, in order to explain both kinds of changes. Moreover the word length distribution matches almost perfectly a binomial distribution. This points to some kind of stochastic process. There is also a surprising coincidence between the word length distribution for words in the text and for word types, ignoring their frequencies in the text. This means the words were generated during writing the text, since otherwise we should see two distinct distributions. There exists also a deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial vicinity of tokens within the VMS text. This means word tokens depend on each other. ...)

(26-09-2022, 07:15 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But from this, he infers that it is not a cipher, but something else. However, this something else is also unattested. The VM is novel and unique altogether, so saying "the cipher would be novel" is not a good argument.

Actually Sledge is referring to a concrete method and he argues that this method would reproduce the statistical key properties of the Voynich manuscript. Therefore it is possible to check if this method is able to explain the properties of the Voynich text. See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

(26-09-2022, 07:15 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding Bowern's experiment with her students, I have said before in relation to a similar experiment I did with Marco, that it would be better if participants were not aware of the VM.

What is your argument? Most of them probably never heard of the Voynich manuscript before attending Bowerns class. Therefore the students didn't know much about the Voynich text. Even Claire Bowern didn't even notice the similarities to the Voynich text.

(26-09-2022, 07:15 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Still, the issue remains that if the makers of the VM developed a method of text generation, it would have been something new and unique. Moreover, they didn't invent it as they went along (even though the system evolves). The system stands from the start and immediately produces text with the remarkable properties we all know.

Bowerns students only needed 20 minutes or 100 words to develop such a method. It seems as if not much testing is necessary. Please note that also the development of the glyph set requires some tests.

(26-09-2022, 07:15 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding the manuscript's value, as we have been discussing this is highly dependent on context. We don't know if an unreadable manuscript would have had value in medieval times, or if that value would have been worth the investment of materials. Maybe a copy of the bible would have fetched way more. We simply don't know. Rudolf lived in his own time and context, much later than the makers of the VM.

A copy of the bible would require far more care and effort than just repeating some meaningless words. Anyway it is also possible that it was about gaining reputation by possessing a mysterious book. Even today the Voynich manuscript is able to attract some attention.

(26-09-2022, 10:54 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A copy of the bible would require far more care and effort than just repeating some meaningless words

Well, the Bible would be practically copied ( without comments and such ). It would not have been necessary to create new "text" and the corresponding illustrations. Judging by the very small number of errors in the text of the VMS [1], I would assume that the scribes were quite willing to take some care. Certainly, one would have had to deal with a complete Bible copy with still more text (approx. 800,000 words) but one could have limited oneself to individual books ( for example the Book of Revelation ). A nice and easy job.The result would have been easy to sell.

Quote:[1]  Ever since high-resolution images of the MS have been publicly available, closer scrutiny by many people has revealed a few cases where it appears that the text has been emended. Following are those cases I am aware of, which shows that such corrections are few and minor.

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As an aside, the fact that there are corrections in the VMS at all makes the question of whether it is meaningless text in the VMS moot. In this case, no corrections would be necessary.