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• This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  dashstofsk > 23-06-2025, 06:47 PM

  (23-06-2025, 05:01 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.garbage

  
  Most people when they watch YouTube prefer to have the topic explained as simply as possible and to have it get straight to the point without unscripted dialog. I think the video did this well. The content was well written, and well presented. This takes time, work and effort. It wasn't 'garbage'.

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  Jorge_Stolfi > 24-06-2025, 01:53 AM

  (23-06-2025, 05:01 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.garbage

  
  They used to be better. The quality dropped a lot since Hank Green [apparently] handed the production over to his assistants.  In this case, I think that the producers were not aware of all the previous "hoax" claims and how difficult it is to prove that something does not contain meaningful information ...

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  Torsten > 24-06-2025, 07:06 AM

  (24-06-2025, 01:53 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They used to be better. The quality dropped a lot since Hank Green [apparently] handed the production over to his assistants.  In this case, I think that the producers were not aware of all the previous "hoax" claims and how difficult it is to prove that something does not contain meaningful information ...

  
  Conclusions should emerge from the evidence — not the other way around.
  
  The text of the Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits consistent internal structure, statistical patterns, and positional rules that can’t be ignored, regardless of personal belief about its meaning or origin. Some of these key observations include:

  • Extreme repetition: Repetition occurs at a scale far beyond that of natural language.
    
  • Low conditional entropy: Lower than any known natural language, indicating high predictability (Bennett, 1976; You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
    
  • Binomial word-length distribution: Unlike the Poisson-like distribution typical of natural languages (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
    
  • Lack of clear word order or repeated phrases: Atypical for meaningful linguistic texts (D'Imperio, 1976).
    
  • Systematic shifts from Currier A to Currier B: Indicating structural rather than purely linguistic variation (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
    
  • Context-dependent self-similarity: In the video referred to as the "Jon Snow effect" — where similar tokens cluster based on context, not meaning (Timm & Schinner, 2019).
    
  • Deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial proximity — suggesting an underlying, systematic process.
    
  • A single network of similar word forms: Rather than distinct semantic word groups (Timm & Schinner, 2019).
    
  • Random walk-like statistical behavior and long-range correlations: Pointing to structural generation processes (Schinner, 2007).
    
  • Lines function as structural units: Indicating layout awareness during writing (Currier, 1976).
    
  • Absence of semantic categories (e.g., nouns vs. verbs): Unlike any known natural language.
    
  • No identifiable function words: There are no evenly distributed common words unlike in natural languages.
    
  • No evidence of word roots: Suggesting tokens were generated without a typical linguistic base.
    
  • No corrections or deleted sequences: Remarkably clean for a document of this complexity.
    
  • Line-endings fit precisely into available space: Strongly implying layout was planned during writing.
    

  
  Given these observations, it's essential to weigh possible explanations:

  • Natural language? The evidence conflicts with this.
    
  • Cipher? The structure and self-similarity raise major doubts.
    
  • A text generated by self-citation? From my viewpoint, the "self-citation" algorithm has the potential to resolve all of these seeming contradictions.
    

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  dashstofsk > 24-06-2025, 09:22 AM

  (24-06-2025, 01:53 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.to prove that something does not contain meaningful information

  
  I believe hoping for proof will get us no-where. We might need instead to decide 'on the balance of probabilities'.
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  Jorge_Stolfi > 24-06-2025, 11:07 AM

  (24-06-2025, 07:06 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The text of the Voynich Manuscript (VMS) exhibits consistent internal structure, statistical patterns, and positional rules that can’t be ignored, regardless of personal belief about its meaning or origin. Some of these key observations include:

  
  Sorry, but all those claims of "unlike any natural language" are wrong. 
  

  • Extreme repetition: A meaningful text in any natural language can be arbitrarily repetitive. 
    
  • Low conditional entropy: Again, the character entropy is a property of the encoding (cypher or spelling system), not of the language.  The word entropy is quite in the normal range. And even that is a property of the particular text, not of the language.
    
  • Binomial word-length distribution: Since you cited my 2002 webpage, you should know that East Asian monosyllabic languages do have a binomial word-length distribution.
    
  • Lack of clear word order or repeated phrases: Again, this is a property of the text, not of the language.  But East Asian languages do give the impression of having no fixed word order.
    
  • Systematic shifts from Currier A to Currier B: Those "language shifts" are perfectly compatible with each section having been copied or summarized from a different book on a different topic -- even if the books were all in the same natural language.
    
  • Context-dependent self-similarity: Again, it is quite possible that a meaningful text in any language would have this feature.
    
  • Deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial proximity What do you mean, precisely?  Those terms can describe normal features of texts in natural languages.
    
  • A single network of similar word forms: Monosyllabic languages have such "networks of similar forms" because of the fixed structure of the syllables.
    
  • Random walk-like statistical behavior and long-range correlations: What do you mean, precisely? Texts in natural languages generally have "random-walk like behavior" and "long-range correlations".
    
  • Lines function as structural units: There are simple explanations for why the Scribe could have created such patterns.  Like stretching, squeezing, or abbreviating the text to get line breaks falling on sentence boundaries when possible.
    
  • Absence of semantic categories (e.g., nouns vs. verbs): Like most East Asian languages.
    
  • No identifiable function words: Like most East Asian languages.
    
  • No evidence of word roots: Like most East Asian languages.
    
  • No corrections or deleted sequences: Surely it was not written directly on vellum, even if it was a hoax.  The Author wrote a final draft on paper and recruited a Scribe to copy it onto vellum. But in fact there are many instances of corrections and uncorrected errors made by the Scribe.
    
  • Line-endings fit precisely into available space: Again, a normal product of a minimally competent Scribe.
    

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  tavie > 24-06-2025, 01:44 PM

  (24-06-2025, 11:07 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sorry, but all those claims of "unlike any natural language" are wrong. 
  
  [*]Systematic shifts from Currier A to Currier B: Those "language shifts" are perfectly compatible with each section having been copied or summarized from a different book on a different topic -- even if the books were all in the same natural language.
  
  [*]Lines function as structural units: There are simple explanations for why the Scribe could have created such patterns.  Like stretching, squeezing, or abbreviating the text to get line breaks falling on sentence boundaries when possible.

  
  On systematic shifts between A and B:
  The differences between Currier A and B (or indeed Lisa's top three scribes) are surely far too extensive to ascribe to only subject matter.  
  
  On simple explanations for Line Patterns/LAAFU:
  I cannot see how line patterns are like any natural language.  This is for the reasons I gave in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in your thread here, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.at Voynich Day last year.  The problem Torsten is citing here is bigger than simply abbreviations at line end, and even then the patterns do not look like natural language.

  • Line Start:  Word types are different at line start than elsewhere in the line.  It is more than simply adding a new initial glyph onto a word type for whatever reason.  Both middle glyphs and final glyphs can be different.  And I cannot think of any natural-language reason for how scribes avoid certain glyphs appearing under other ones.
    
  • Line End:  Word types are different at line start than elsewhere in the line.  It is more than simply a final glyph cluster being abbreviated into final m.  We often see different initials as well.  Glyphs pop up in common line end words in ways that aren't common in mid-line words.
    
  • Top Row:  Word types are different at paragraph start, at the line end of top row, and importantly in the middle of top row.  It is more than simply a matter of exchanging gallows.  Other glyphs appear unusually predominantly or rarely.  
    

  Taken all together, I cannot see how this is like a natural language.  There are two overlapping questions that I take from it:  
  

  1. How can these patterns be compatible with meaning and 
     
  2. How were these patterns produced?  
     

  I am drawing a blank for how a natural language plaintext could answer these questions.  We would surely have to find "natural" linguistic or subject matter/stylistic reasons for all of the above effects, and this does not seem viable to me.  
  
  If a plaintext is lurking there, then some set of - potentially diverse - processes has been applied to it.  To me, this would necessitate a cypher to be a part of those processes.  Or - if we do not want to assume intent to conceal - it would need something with the effect of a cypher.  Either way, while we have yet to find a set of processes that answers questions 1 and 2, I don't think it can be ruled out the way we can rule out unaltered natural language.  
  
  The meaningless hypothesis has a big advantage in that the first question is settled. There is no need for these patterns to be compatible with meaning.  So what if word types in various positions are different from mid-line word types?  It doesn't matter.  There is no meaning.  
  
  But the second question is pertinent.  If meaningless text is generated by scribes in systems like Torsten's, how are these patterns generated so consistently?  There would need to be a set of rules that either require these patterns or result in them as a byproduct, or a mixture of the two.  This seems a bigger obstacle, e.g. if the text is meaningless, what system could result in vertical pairs like o-o being anathema when vertical pairs like s-s are just fine?

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  Mauro > 24-06-2025, 01:56 PM

  (24-06-2025, 01:44 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the second question is pertinent.  If meaningless text is generated by scribes in systems like Torsten's, how are these patterns generated so consistently?  There would need to be a set of rules that either require these patterns or result in them as a byproduct, or a mixture of the two.  This seems a bigger obstacle, e.g. if the text is meaningless, what system could result in vertical pairs like o-o being anathema when vertical pairs like s-s are just fine?

  
  I agree on this and I find it to be my main objection to Torsten's mechanism (which is instead attractive from other points of view). How did the scribe mantain the coherence of words structure using a 'copy-and-modify' mechanism along so many pages, and notwithstanding for instance the drastic changes in 'language' between 'Currier A' and 'Currier B'?
  
  What's fascinating with Voynich is that it seems for every hypothesis both evidence in favor and evidence against can be found.

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  bi3mw > 24-06-2025, 02:10 PM

  (24-06-2025, 01:56 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How did the scribe mantained the coherence of words structure using a 'copy-and-modify' mechanism along so many pages,... ?

  
  I think the answer is already in the question: not at all.

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  dashstofsk > 24-06-2025, 02:51 PM

  (24-06-2025, 01:44 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the second question is pertinent.  If meaningless text is generated by scribes in systems like Torsten's, how are these patterns generated so consistently?  There would need to be a set of rules that either require these patterns or result in them as a byproduct, or a mixture of the two.  This seems a bigger obstacle, e.g. if the text is meaningless, what system could result in vertical pairs like o-o being anathema when vertical pairs like s-s are just fine?

  
  
  We can only guess what method the author used to generate the text. But if one section of the manuscript is an artificial fabrication then all of it is going to be so. If it can be shown that at least some part of it is fabricated then the main objective has been achieved. There will be no great need then to try to explain every word, every oddity, nor to attempt to give a precise method of construction.
  
  But also humans never have been good at simulating randomness. And it seems to me that many of the 'vertical impact effects' and Torsten Timm's 'long distance effects' are the sort of things that were observed when Gaskell and Bowern had people participate in an experiment to create meaningless text.
  
  The author isn't an automaton. Mistakes, irregularities, oddities are to be expected. Most likely knowing that the text would be undecypherable he did not feel it important to be precise or to follow any particular writing standard.

• RE: This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

  Mauro > 24-06-2025, 04:03 PM

  (24-06-2025, 02:10 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (24-06-2025, 01:56 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How did the scribe mantained the coherence of words structure using a 'copy-and-modify' mechanism along so many pages,... ?

  
  
  
  I think the answer is already in the question: not at all.

  
  That may be too, admittely. 
  
  I have a question for Torsten, if I'm allowed to ask. If I understood correctly the "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript" paper, you wrote a software which implements your 'copy-and-modify' procedure, defined some parameters (ie.: which characters are 'similar' according to your rule #1), seeded it with some Voynichese sentence and had it write a pseudo-Voynich text which shows concordance with the real VMS in a number of important statistics (which is a good thing, of course!). May I ask you if you calculated the percentage of hapax legomena your method produced? And, is it possible to have a link to one of the pseudo-Voynich texts? I've always been curious to see what it actually looks like.
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