(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:As for the ink there is fairly good evidence that it's original in that in the text there are very few places in the manuscript where different strokes are overwritten on one another.Not "few", but hundreds. Name any page.
I'm only aware of two occasions at the beginning of a line, both consistent with the scribe starting a line low on ink, and fixing immediately thereafter. Both brought up by Bluetoes101, if I'm not mistaken. When some real retouching happens, it's quite obvious at the magnification provided by the scans.
(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:I'm not sure what's so exceptional here. New alphabet? An encryption scheme? Anticlerical doctors?
Well, name an example of such a community that actually existed and actually created something like Voynichese and the VMS.
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Could you name one manuscript written in a made up alphabet to represent the sounds of a foreign language? +100 points if this manuscript wouldn't contain any notes in the original language of the author.
(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But there are many cases where these explanations don't work. Like when the retraced glyph is clearly a misreading of the original.
This argument would totally work if you somehow produced the original of the Voynich Manuscript, in its unretraced glory, to compare to. Up until then it's just an interpretation of which glyphs are "good" and which ones are "bad", and our interpretations of this clearly differ.
(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But anything that is puzzing in the VMS can then be explained by "reasons unknown" -- and then there is nothing more to investigate, is there?
But I have no intention of "explaining" it. Either there is some verifiable way to uncover the meaning from the manuscript, if it is there at all, or not. The "explanations" for me are only as good as they are able to advance us on our way of achieving this. The explanation that maybe a considerable portion of the manuscript are some doodles and scribbles unrelated to the original text is not helping here, unless it bears some strong evidence. Which for me is not there. At least not yet.
(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Could you please name one testable prediction of the "All Ink Is Original" theory? Or "The Language is Not Chinese" theory? Or "The Contents is Random Gibberish" theory?
No, but for the first two there is some good evidence: visible total lack of retracing in the text and clearly European background of the manuscripts, both images and provenance.
As I said before, a theory to be useful to me should either have some specific evidence or make some easy to test predictions.
(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One testable prediction of the MRT is that the artifacts that would be created by retracing (extremely faded traces, faint mousetail tails emerging from under thicker strokes, plumes traced with thick strokes in the wrong direction, "wrong" glyphs and figure details, etc.) , can be found on every page of the VMS. So far I have looked for those signs in only a fraction of the pages, and aways find them.
Has this been independently confirmed/verified?
(09-12-2025, 02:55 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One testable prediction of the COT is that the words will have limited length and a fairly rigid structure with at most half a dozen slots, each of which can be filled with a specific set of alternatives. A consequence of that prediction is that Sukhotin's algorithm would fail. The COT also predicts that there are no words in Voynichese that seem to work like articles or prepositions. It also predicts the rough size of the Voynichese lexicon, and that Voynichese will obey Zipf's law; and therefore it predicts the entropy per word.
I'm not sure these are specific enough. Certainly not in a way to unequivocally confirm the Chinese origin of the text. I was talking about predictions that can reasonably quickly let us identify if a theory is correct or definitely not.

