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+--- Thread: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? (/thread-5166.html)
A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - mesinik - 22-12-2025
Problems with "heavyweight" ciphertext, crypto theories:
- this book seems kind of too smooth and fluent
- too long
- probably too old (or at least has a too plain, simple-minded look and feel).
So, could these stats somehow be possible in a text in a natural language?
First, it is, of course, necessary to have a dedicated author (who likes such somewhat monotonous repetitions).
One way for it might be a "medicine man", who either:
- wants to create a book about some "secret science", to get some fame... and it might create some "placebo effects" for his patients, too .. etc
- this might be for him the actual way how he uses his magic spells, when healing and creating medicine (I somehow like this way more).
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - mesinik - 22-12-2025
This book might come from "untypical" conditions which might help to create these text statistics, possibly:
- Maybe a brand new writing system (with no "official" grammar, so the grammar might be "loose")
- Maybe multiple dialects in same text, none of these "wrong"
- Possibly multiple writers
- A poetical mindset which likes kind of similar repetitions
- Some linguistic "atoms" might use many Latin characters
- More typos than our average manuscripts
- Some characters or linguistic "atoms" might have multiple incarnations
- More synonyms than usual
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - mesinik - 22-12-2025
20+ years ago, there was a lively discussion about that manuscript in a relevant internet chat room. It was then that Jorge Stolfi suggested that it could be close to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Shortly after that, I happened to read in the press a village name Hogglar Chor (in Bangladesh)... which seemed to be from that manuscript. Therefore, I added to Stolfi's hypothesis that perhaps it is worth looking first at the languages of western Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - mesinik - 22-12-2025
IF this book might come from western Indochina, then in these corners it is not too strange to sit down near a holy tree, become enlightened .. & to create a new writing system
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - mesinik - 22-12-2025
So, there might be material in this text where there probably is not much to translate
(in the style "abrakadabra, dabrakafabra, abra, dabra, dabra, rakada") ...
mixed with meaningful strings in some more or less exotic language.
Why the cultural region around the Bay of Bengal might be a good place to check?
Not just "Hogglar Chor" which sounds like Voynichese, there are a lot of languages there + quite many writing systems, too. And a lot (really massive amounts) of herbal, traditional medicine.
Add a long colonial history, where Western writing system came "in touch" with local worldviews.
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - oshfdk - 22-12-2025
Is there any specific evidence linking the manuscript to the East Asia?
I don't think one can make the argument that "Haggler Chor" sounds like Voynichnese, because we have no idea what Voynichese sounds like, if it sounds like anything at all. If you mean "sounds like the EVA transliteration", then I'm not sure this is a good argument, while EVA does appear to make some effort to link the shape and the sound, it's unlikely l was actually meant to sound as L, g as G, h as H, etc. What is more, "Haggler" certainly doesn't look to me like plausible Voynichese.
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - Jorge_Stolfi - 22-12-2025
(22-12-2025, 08:44 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Is there any specific evidence linking the manuscript to the East Asia?
I see some evidence, but many people prefer some other explanation for it.
The strongest evidence is the rigid structure of Voynichese words. A consequence of this structure is a sharp limit on word length, and the increased randomness (entropy) of the characters near the end of each word, even considering the preceding characters. These are features of languages where each word is just one syllable. There are a hundred or more such languages widely spoken in "East Asia", from Tibet to China and Vietnam. Outside of that area, there may be only a few in Central or South Africa, and in the Americas.
If one does not accept "East Asian" as the explanation for those features, one must assume that these are consequences of the encryption scheme. Then it could be a codebook cipher, where each lexeme is replaced by an arbitrary number according to a dictionary, and the number is written in a funky Roman-like notation. IIUC, the Naibbe encoding proposed by @magnesium is a way to do the last step.
However, codebook ciphers are very laborious to write and read. Still, considering the example of the Rohonc Codex, maybe the VMS author was crazy enough to use such a scheme...
All the best, --stolfi
[PS. Why do cryptographers use the word "cipher" without qualification to mean "codebook cipher", but then use "substitution cipher" or "Vigenère cipher" for things that are not "cipher"?
It is like the mathematicians defining "partial order" as something that includes "total order" as a special case. And logicians (and Python) use "lambda" to define a function. Stupid attachment to tradition...]
RE: A medicine man's secret handbook, maybe from Indochina / India? (exotic language)? - RobGea - 22-12-2025
The idea is fine, some evidence would be nice.
This image from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is the only thing that looks indochinese to me. It has that Pagoda flavor.