(13-03-2026, 02:33 PM)oshfdk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(13-03-2026, 12:57 PM)dexdex wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The reason I'm wondering is we're putting a lot of stock into this being an extreme amount of effort...
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This has some implications for whether it would be worth writing it as a hoax or for sale.
The amount of work put into making the Voynich Manuscript (I'm not talking about the design or the underlying text, just the implementation), doesn't seem to exceed the amount of work many modern hobbyists put into their pet projects that they don't even show to many people besides friends and family. I'm sure that the amount of time spent by some of the VMS researches exceeds the amount of time put into making the manuscript itself. So, I don't think we can exclude any purpose of the manuscript by just the amount of time and effort it would have taken to produce it and I don't think most of the popular theories actually depend much on the amount of effort by the author or the scribe.
While I agree that it can't be used as a definitive way to exclude a purpose - indeed, it might even be purposeless, people are weird and you are right that some people spend months and years on a hobby (including some of the posters here on the topic of the manuscript!) - the assessment of motive does have impact on how likely a hypothesis should be judged to be. For instance, a hoax made for monetary gain you can knock out in a month needs to be far less lucrative in the mind of the forger than one that takes you years.