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• Just a hoax?

• Just a hoax?

  Tessa9 > 2 hours ago

  Is there a possibility that the Voynich manuscript is all one big hoax? I've been researching this topic for almost a year now, and I've heard countless theories, and I feel as though it would make sense, especially for the time period it was made in, as at that time many royals collected rare texts, so maybe a con artist did so very well with this text. But I'm open to being proven wrong, so if you know anything, please reach out! 

• RE: Just a hoax?

  magnesium > 2 hours ago

  In fact, the hoax hypothesis is one of the most discussed hypotheses on the nature of the manuscript. The variant of this hypothesis considered the most plausible is that during the early 1400s, someone or a group of people created a gibberish medicinal manuscript in order to sell it at a high price to a gullible, wealthy book collector. There is a vocal minority that argues Wilfrid Voynich himself forged the manuscript in the early 1900s, writing on blank medieval parchment.
  
  The best quantitative studies of the hoax hypothesis are by Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner, who have documented large-scale statistical properties of the manuscript that are straightforwardly explained if the text is iteratively generated gibberish. In 2019-2020, Timm and Schinner even outlined a “self-citation algorithm” that can generate Voynichese-like text.
  
  Importantly, there is a distinction between whether the manuscript is meaningless and whether the manuscript is a “hoax” created to deceive. Glossolalia, also known as speaking in tongues, also would generate what we would classify as gibberish, but the initial purpose of generating that text would have been very different than running a 15th-century scam. 
  
  I should also note here that there is no consensus on any one hypothesis on the nature of the manuscript. Other ideas include that it’s an artificial language, a one-off attempt to develop a writing system for a language, or a complex and unusually advanced cipher.
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