Thread for all discussion about "genuine/meaningless/fake" etc

[bi3mw]

"The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown, possibly meaningless writing system"

Exactly, because there is the word "possibly", the writer in Wikipedia will probably refuse to accept a change of the text.

Writing this as the very first sentence gives it an inappropriate weighting.

[Helmut Winkler]

I hope all of you know the story of Buridan's ass

[bi3mw]

I hope all of you know the story of Buridan's ass

Well, I'm certainly not going to fail with two equally weighted choices. I have made my choice.

[Koen G]

I hope all of you know the story of Buridan's ass

As Rene pointed out here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , it is probably not in our best interest to reduce the possibilities to "completely linguistic" or "complete nonsense". I also hope we don't have to pick a favorite theory before we can make some contribution to the study of the text.

[RenegadeHealer]

I think it's unlikely that there's any text next to the drawings that doesn't say anything.
Accordingly, I agree with bi3mw, not RenegadeHealer.

Fair enough. I'll readily admit that a never-linguistically-meaningful VMs has some good arguments against it. As René pointed out, both this and the linguistically-meaningful VMs each neatly explain certain mysterious features that the other struggles to account for. This is part of what makes the VMs a really, really good mystery. But we need much more information to be able to strongly favor the meaningless VMs over the meaningful VMs, or vice versa.

Just as an aside, my sense of normal business practices in the medieval European book industry might be wholly off the mark and anachronistic, a scribe filling in a pre-illustrated codex with meaningless symbols that look like language, is possible if, for example, a scriptorium had it laying around as an unfinished project from a commissioner who ran out of money or skipped town. but I could see a scriptorium being willing to sell an interested buyer an unfinished book — roughly illustrated but not yet marked up or written in — at a discount rate, for use practicing writing, or as a personal notebook or diary. In such case, the text and its meaning (or conspicuous lack thereof) could have absolutely jack to do with the drawings. But this is special pleading, so I'll stop. 

[Koen G]

Personally, I've never found this line of argument appealing. If you look at the immense ingenuity displayed in fakes and hoaxes over the centuries, the amount of effort devoted to them is the least surprising thing. 

Are you sure we are not dealing with an outlier in terms of text size? Do you know of anything pre-1500 that comes close?

[Stephen Carlson]

Personally, I've never found this line of argument appealing. If you look at the immense ingenuity displayed in fakes and hoaxes over the centuries, the amount of effort devoted to them is the least surprising thing. 

Are you sure we are not dealing with an outlier in terms of text size? Do you know of anything pre-1500 that comes close?

I was a teenager when the Hitler diaries came out. One of the defenses was that no forger would forge 60 volumes of such banal material. This turned out to be wrong, very wrong.

There are examples of earlier large-scale forgeries.

In 1492 Annius of Viterbo published Antiquitatum Variarum, which his forgery of Greek and Latin historians in a momental volume running more than 400 pages.

There's also the case of Dictys the Cretan, a forged "translation" of a Greek work that never existed. This thing was huge. From Wikipedia: "In the 4th century AD a certain Q. Septimius brought out Dictys Cretensis Ephemeris belli Trojani ("Dictys of Crete, chronicle of the Trojan War") in six books, a work that professed to be a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. translation of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. version."

Another 4th or 5th century forgery is the Historia Augusta, which purported to give 30 contemporary lives of the emperors but was written much later. From Wikipedia: "A peculiarity of the work is its inclusion of a large number of purportedly authentic documents such as extracts from Senate proceedings and letters written by imperial personages. In all it contains around 150 alleged documents, including 68 letters, 60 speeches and proposals to the people or the senate, and 20 senatorial decrees and acclamations." All these are fake, containing anachronisms.

In Christian literature, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, denounced by Tertullian as a second-century forgery from an Asian presbyter, was the size of a full literary work.

The VM is an outlier on almost every theory for it. But to so easily dismiss it as can't-be-fake simply based on the effort required strikes me as naive.

[ReneZ]

Well, Rich Santacoloma could complain that his theory is not adequately addressed, and so could Gordon Rugg. How much space should every paper reserve for addressing the possible theories that it is contradicting?
Should it try to disprove them rather than bring arguments in favour of its own topic?

I find calling the paper unscientific for that reason over the top and unjustified.

[Stephen Carlson]

Well, Rich Santacoloma could complain that his theory is not adequately addressed, and so could Gordon Rugg. How much space should every paper reserve for addressing the possible theories that it is contradicting?
Should it try to disprove them rather than bring arguments in favour of its own topic?

It is in the end, a judgment call. Not every possible theory should be addressed, of course, but the stronger ones should not be ignored at the expense of the weaker ones, which is how I classify Rugg's.

As for Santacoluma's theory, I didn't remember it, so I found his blog and read the about page and I am still mystified as to what his theory is supposed to be. Not a promising avenue for a serious theory.

At any rate, the authors have promised on twitter to address T&S's theory in their next revision and I look forward to what they have to say.

[Koen G]

The VM is an outlier on almost every theory for it. But to so easily dismiss it as can't-be-fake simply based on the effort required strikes me as naive.

Right, but we are blending two different things here. It is easy to think of reasons why someone would put lots of effort into forging a document. 

The "too much effort" argument applies to a scenario where the text is meaningless, but the intention of the makers is not to forge a likeness of an existing or imagined document.