Apologies if this has already been covered. I'm just wondering if such a thing would even be possible to prove. For example, lets assume that a few scribes from the 15th century knew that a local ruler is willing to pay a lot of money for obscure/occult books and they decided to make one in a script that visually has some resemblance to a real language but has no meaning.
We know that certain symbols are almost exclusively used as suffixes or prefixes so they must have had some algorithm/method for generating the text. If someone finds a convincing method for generating voynichese words (maybe that's already been done, idk) would that be enough evidence to conclude it's a medieval hoax? Or what other evidence would be needed?
The problems with this theory are that there was probably no need for the makers of VM to bother with a method for generating words for a meaningless text that they wanted to sell to someone - they could have just arranged the letters totally randomly. Also, there are some words that are concentrated in parts of the book that cover similar topics which could suggest that the text actually has meaning - or it could suggest that the scribe who worked on the herbal parts maybe had one method for generating words and the scribe who worked on the cosmological part had a slightly different method.
You should read Torsten's You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. on how Voynichese could have been generated (self-citation method). It includes a potential explanation of similar glyph clusters/rigid glyph positions, and it also sets out a spectrum of changes across the scribal sections for certain common word types. You can find discussion of one of the key papers on the forum You are not allowed to view links.
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Short of finding a contemporaneous instructions manual, rough draft, or confession note, it's not possible to
prove it was a medieval hoax.
So perhaps the question is better phrased as: what would it take for consensus to form around it being a medieval hoax? This is difficult. A correct decipherment ought to get consensus relatively quickly, especially given how much written material there is in the VM to make the case with. But I think consensus would take much longer for the hoax hypothesis.
You can see on Koen's State of the Voynich You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. from earlier this year and other polls that there is not currently any such consensus. If anything, Koen's poll shows belief in it being any kind of hoax has decreased, although there may be representation issues here: it wouldn't surprise me if people who believe it is a hoax generated by a method like Torsten's are probably less likely to stick around the forum, since it may mean the mystery is solved in their eyes.
I think for such a consensus to form, you'd need:
- a method that fully explains the range of extremely odd behaviours in Voynichese. I don't think we're there yet. For example, the Voynich Day presentation I gave looked at "vertical impact" behaviour where sometimes a glyph starting one line may influence the glyph immediately below it according to certain rules. I'm writing an article on this with more detail, but it sounds very unlanguage-like to me. Yet it also sounds like a really oddly specific rule to have when producing gibberish! Neither is completely inconceivable, but nor does either sound very plausible. So, I don't yet feel comfortable that any of the standard paradigms fully captures Voynichese behaviour. Even if there is a method that provides a full explanation, though, it likely still wouldn't be sufficient for consensus, and so we would need:
- general hope to be given up that there is an (enciphered and obscured) natural language beneath it all. There's no signs of hope being lost any time soon. People would also have to abandon hope that AI will one day get sophisticated enough to be able to decipher it.
In other words, I think if the medieval hoax hypothesis is to win out and gain consensus, it will have to be very, very patient!
Did they make a 'hoax'? What they made was a book. Is the written content contemporary with the parchment C-14? Yeah, probably. A determination of chronological dating from certain illustrations reveals a familiarity with information and events of first half of the 15th C. So, it seems likely to be a C-14 contemporary creation. The VMs cosmos, the sleeves and the hat are all part of that era.
There are, however, a few unresolved issues in the art department. One involves the VMs Zodiac sequence and the potential use of heraldic hatching lines in the patterns on some of the tubs of the nymphs on the Pisces and Aries pages. Perta Sancta was c. 1600. Was the VMs artist precocious?
The astronomical investigation regarding the Leipzig cosmos seems to date to the 1490s. And where does Shirakatsi's wheel come from - besides Armenia? Not everything fits together so well, that all problems are resolved.
Would a post-1600 "copy" of a c. 1430 alchemical herbal be of interest to anyone?