In the wake of Voynich Manuscript Day, I've shared a You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. of all decipherment/language claims that the forum has discussed since its creation. Please do PM me about any missing ones or mistakes. So far we have
51, which is quite remarkable since 2016. I'm guessing the real number of solutions out there beyond the forum must be over a hundred.
It's interesting to count the number of solutions for each language. So far:
- Olympic gold medal goes to Latin. We have 15 ones for this, almost 1/3 of the total.
- Trailing in the dust for joint silver are English and Hebrew with 4 each
- And bronze goes to Turkic with three.
Curiously, despite German often being suggested as a candidate language, I haven't yet found a single German solution recorded on the forum.
I can see how there are two types of solutions, and why some might not appear on the list.
An example is a solution that I have received from the US in letters sent by post.
The author distrusted all on-line electronic media, but that's not the point.
Based on the appearance of the MS he came up with a detailed proposal of its origin, which group of people wrote it, when and why and IIRC also where. He even had a proposal what the text would be about.
However, he never attempted to translate any word, at least not in his letters, and he also never gave any hint that he was doing that.
I guess such solutions do not need to make it to the list. (It was probably never discussed here either, but I do know that at least one member here was receiving the same communications).
As always, is missed the real solution- old Slavonic in particular Moravian.
Foil 116v is being translated from this language even published in this blog.
Why Slavic languages are being ignored?
Vessy
BessAgritianin (Moravian and German) You are not allowed to view links.
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Eleonora Matarrese (Germanic dialect in the southern Bavarian group) You are not allowed to view links.
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James R. Child (unidentified Germanic dialect) You are not allowed to view links.
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Stephen Bax (unidentified) You are not allowed to view links.
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Gregor Bernhart-Koenigstein (?) You are not allowed to view links.
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Siv Bugge Vatne (Middle English) You are not allowed to view links.
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Katie Tucker (Middle English) You are not allowed to view links.
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Claudette Cohen (Finno-Ugric or Estonian?) You are not allowed to view links.
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Giannhs Kenanidhs (Jewish-Arabic) You are not allowed to view links.
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"A group of Czech scientists" ("archaic Latin") You are not allowed to view links.
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Sergey Yurievich Zubenko (conlang?) You are not allowed to view links.
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I find it perplexing that tavie seemed to have made such a massive and exhaustive list, but still missed a dozen of solutions. I had no idea there were so many. And this list is about the forum alone. We would easily get twice as much if off-forum theories were included.
Is BessAgritianin's proposed solution only referring to the You are not allowed to view links.
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If so, then I would not count it.
If it also proposes to translate some of the Voynich text, then it can be counted, IMHO.
Thanks, all. Two of those were already on the list. For the other, there were various reasons why I didn't include them. e.g as Rene noted, I didn't include Bess's because there doesn't seem to be anything on it in the forum, only a thread about her thoughts on 116v. James Child's thread was excluded because there was a request for this to be only an obituary thread rather than discuss what his system may have been.
For the other, they weren't included unless it was clear what their language was. I could revisit this and create an "Unclear/unidentified" category in the list? What do people think? I probably shouldn't have included Nikolai in the original list with his "ancient language" but he did write so much stuff!
On Eleonora, I mentally had her in the unidentified category since there seemed to be confusion at the time of her recent talk around what she is and isn't claiming. And after reading so many threads to do this, I didn't have the patience to go through all the docs again. But if there's consensus she is proposing Voynichese is a German dialect, I am happy to add that to the list.
I think you should go completionist mode and add the unclear/undefined category. It is interesting to see the sheer mass of theories.
This is the link to Nick Pelling's list of Voynich theories. I think it worth including a link to it on the "Solutions" thread:
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Nick lists many theories not in Tavie's list
Tavie's list is specifically about theories discussed at Voynich Ninja, which is why a lot of theories are not present.