The Voynich Ninja

The weakness of the hoax theory is that its proponents rarely provide examples of such "fake books". 
It's worth wondering if there's any hoax "VMS spirit" at all. For example, it could be written in a made-up, nonsensical language, or filled with nonsensical illustrations, or misleading, etc.

The only person who comes to mind is Samuel Literati Nemesh, and no one else...

(23-07-2026, 10:36 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The weakness of the hoax theory is that its proponents rarely provide examples of such "fake books". 
It's worth wondering if there's any hoax "VMS spirit" at all. For example, it could be written in a made-up, nonsensical language, or filled with nonsensical illustrations, or misleading, etc.

The only person who comes to mind is Samuel Literati Nemesh, and no one else...

There are many moderns ones, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I'm not sure there are any examples of the Voynich MS age. I'm also not sure you can call either of my examples "a hoax", they are works of art. In a sense they are not meaningless, even if no-one knows what they say, their whole point is to show the unknowable, I think.

George Psalmanazar, an 18th-century European con artist became a celebrity in London by pretending to be the first person from Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) to visit England. He fooled high society by inventing an entire culture, writing system, and made-up language.

Psalmanazar's book also described the Formosan language, an early example of a constructed language. His efforts in this regard were so convincing that German grammarians included samples of his so-called "Formosan alphabet", in books about language, well into the 19th century, even after his larger imposture had been exposed.

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So it's a conlang, not a nonsensical language, but made-up nonetheless.

(24-07-2026, 12:10 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.George Psalmanazar, an 18th-century European con artist became a celebrity in London by pretending to be the first person from Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) to visit England. He fooled high society by inventing an entire culture, writing system, and made-up language. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Fascinating! 

But he did not produce any substantial text in that language and script, did he?  Only samples like the Lord's Prayer?

Not surprisingly, his "Formosan" alphabet looks a lot like the Latin alphabet, with hints of the Greek and Hebrew one: five vowels (with "vomera" being both [v], [w], [u], with "epsi" being both open [ε] and closed [η], with "omda" being both [o] and [ω]), use of dot to distinguish similar consonants, etc.  Like Edward Kelley's "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view." alphabet.   Showing once again that one's imagination will hardly extend much beyond one's experience...

All the best, --stolfi

As a pure example of a hoax, I like to refer to the Oera Linda book: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Again, much later than the VM. And the language is made-up, but understandable.

The word “hoax” is always hard to understand for me.

Some cases of probably-non-linguistic medieval/early-modern “texts” (in a very broad sense) are:

• The Book of Soyga (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). “The Book of Soyga contains thirty-six tables; each table is a square grid of 36 rows and columns; each grid cell contains a letter of the Latin alphabet. These tables turn out to be formed by a completely deterministic calculation method, or algorithm, starting from an arbitrary ‘code word’ for each table.” (36*36*36=46656 characters, almost one fourth of Voynichese).
  
• The two You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Dee and Kelley. The first language was presented in tabular form, and Dee was likely inspired by Soyga (of which he owned a copy which greatly puzzled him). The second language comes with an English translation, but the general consensus is that the English cannot correspond to the original, which could be a meaningless pseudo-language.
  

I don't think that these manuscripts count as hoaxes, because we are not sure that intentional deception was involved in their creation. We understand little of the nature of these works and their significance for their authors.

Quite a lot of stuff to discuss.

First I would say things like Codex Seraphinianus aren't hoaxes because the author, Luigi Serafini, from the very beginning openly claimed that the text is meaningless. So it is an artistic project, not supposed to deceive anyone.

On the other hand we had a lot of hoax manuscripts, documents and books in the history. Most forgeries are contemporary like forging someone's last will but some of them are forgeries of supposed ancient sources made much later like:

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Such works have to be be written in a language that nobody speaks anymore so the forger in practice "invents" his own language, his own version of Old Frisian or medieval Czech. Such texts are still understood to the people, however. And the forger usually has limited historical and linguistic knowledge so the experts who know real medieval Czech and Old Frisian are able to recognize that the text is fake.

Please notice that if VM is a hoax then we don't know if it was supposed to be a modern hoax or ancient hoax.
It was done in the 1400s and the image style and content is typical for the 1400s. But it may be the result of limited knowledge of the creator. They could claim for example that it was written by King Solomon in 1000 BC. The people whom they were tricking had even smaller knowledge so they could believe any crazy story.

Notice also that all these hoaxes aren't gibberish, they have a meaning and were created so people could read them and get the meaning.

If Voynich Manuscript is a meaningless hoax then it is indeed rare and we don't have similar examples from medieval ages. The closest thing seems to be Liber Loageth from Dee and Kelley which is 200 years later, is written in normal Latin script but seems to have meaningless, nonsense text:
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But in all other cases Voynich Manuscript will still remain very strange and rare like:
- mega cipher that 21st century experts cannot broke
- book in European style but containing exotic language written with invented script
- nomenclator of 8000 entries
- schoolboy writing excercise on 200 pages of parchment
- creation of angels/aliens/fairies

So yes, VM is rare and unique, not fitting to how we imagine things.

But rare, strage, unique things which change our understanding of history do happen, like:
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(24-07-2026, 09:42 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The Book of Soyga (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). “The Book of Soyga contains thirty-six tables; each table is a square grid of 36 rows and columns; each grid cell contains a letter of the Latin alphabet. These tables turn out to be formed by a completely deterministic calculation method, or algorithm, starting from an arbitrary ‘code word’ for each table.” (36*36*36=46656 characters, almost one fourth of Voynichese).

Given its contents and size, I don't think this was a hoax.  My understanding is that the author invented an algorithm (which we now could call "cellular automaton") that,  from a single 6-letter "seed" word, would generate row by row some intriguing patterns of letters -- some repeating, some converging to a fixed string, some apparently random.  It would seem that he was so intrigued by the results that he filled a book with 36 runs of this algorithm. 

Stephen Wolfram, creator of the algebraic computatioal tool Mathematica, wrote a ~1200-page book modestly called A New Kind of Science that can be described as an expanded version of the Book of Soyga.  Critics say that its contribution to human knowledge has been about the same as that of the original version. 

Quote:The two You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Dee and Kelley. The first language was presented in tabular form, and Dee was likely inspired by Soyga (of which he owned a copy which greatly puzzled him). The second language comes with an English translation, but the general consensus is that the English cannot correspond to the original, which could be a meaningless pseudo-language.

I always understood that these were definitely hoaxes, created by Kelley to fool Dee, as part of his running scam of pretending to see and converse with "angels" through Dee's crystal ball -- while Dee himself, to his great disappointment, was never able to see anything in it.  Dee had hoped that the "angels" would reveal to him the secret of the Book of Soyga, but the "angels" (guess why) always said that Dee was not "yet" spiritually prepared for it.  

Dee's account of the Conversations with Angels that he had through Kelley is available online (sorry but I cannot find a good link now) and makes a great read.  From his telling of their dealings, especially of the last episode that resulted in Dee breaking their society, it is very clear that the doctor totally believed Kelley to the end.

All the best, --stolfi

(24-07-2026, 11:48 AM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.First I would say things like Codex Seraphinianus aren't hoaxes because the author, Luigi Serafini, from the very beginning openly claimed that the text is meaningless. So it is an artistic project, not supposed to deceive anyone.

Well, in general, it has more to do with VMS, because it practically fits the description - a mysterious (at first glance) book written in an unknown language and containing incomprehensible illustrations. After all, Serafini was inspired by the VMS...
But, @Rafal, apart from the Book of Veles, your examples surprised me, and I didn't know about them before. But they all parody other languages or rely on some well-known controversial idea (Slavic neo-paganism, Vikings and America, etc.). 
The idea of VMS is unclear in this case. It looks like a medical guide that provides information about herbs, astrology, recipes, etc. And it doesn't seem to be a "hack job".
If the author had enough knowledge to draw such illustrations, why didn't he write a regular herbal?

(24-07-2026, 09:42 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The two You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Dee and Kelley. The first language was presented in tabular form, and Dee was likely inspired by Soyga (of which he owned a copy which greatly puzzled him). The second language comes with an English translation, but the general consensus is that the English cannot correspond to the original, which could be a meaningless pseudo-language.

All such pseudo-languages are a posteriori, but Voynichese, if it is a hoax, is most likely a priori, and is completely meaningless and simple.

Quote:Well, in general, it has more to do with VMS, because it practically fits the description - a mysterious (at first glance) book written in an unknown language and containing incomprehensible illustrations. After all, Serafini was inspired by the VMS...

By the way, very recently another modern work clearly inspired by Voynich manuscript appeared:

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It seems to be meaningful though, if we believe one commentator from Nick's Pelling blog, it has already been cracked:

Ruslan Kolosenko on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. said:

Actually the text is relatively easy to read. Here is my transcription of the first four lines of page p5 from the scans above (the page written in black letters with a frame):
centinaia di persone vorrebbero questo libro dei misteri ma la copia e unico in tutto il
mondo per cui solo una persona lo avra nella sua libreria segreta e questa persona lo deve poi
custodire perche contiene segreti non divulgabili scritti in questo codice segreto indecifrabile
inventato dal sottoscritto per custodire segreti terribili in mio possesso *****