Voynich manuscript: the solution? (opens in new tab)

There are many crank analyses of the Voynich manuscript floating around out there. The only thing I've seen that has any believability (I'm a former linguist) is this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4cRlqE3D3RQ

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8nHbImkFKE4

tl;dr: it's probably real writing, likely related to Roma/Syriac

Other than declaring that the solution is obvious to a self-declared expert such as himself, the author (Nicholas Gibbs) doesn't appear to give any proof of his theory.

So far I can can find online, this piece is the only thing he has ever published about the Voynich manuscript: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22nicholas+gibbs%22+voynich

Who is Nicholas Gibbs? Does anyone besides Nicholas Gibbs trust his opinion on these matters? And how did he convince the TLS to publish this drivel?

(to avoid being entirely negative, here's a link to a blog that shows what some better Voynich research looks like: https://stephenbax.net)

Where's the actual solution? I feel like I'm missing something because what I see is some plausible commentary about it and some interesting discussion of Latin and ligatures but where's the actual decoding of the writing?

Rather convenient "solution".

The solution is the heading and index...which are missing.

Author might be right, but that is essentially an un-provable statement and doesn't really amount to a solution. But rather a statement that it can't be solved.

The idea that the Voynich manuscript is a medical text seems plausible, but the theory that it uses a logographic representation (one symbol per word) rather than an alphabetic or even a syllabaric (one symbol per syllable) one seems less likely to me. A cursory examination of the manuscript (http://www.voynich.nu/folios.html) reveals that the lexicography looks much more like an alphabetic encoding than a logographic one like Chinese. The symbols are collected into word-like groups separated by white space. Also, it appears that there are too many repeated symbols and insufficiently many distinct symbols for a logographic language.

What if it is just Lorem Ipsum by someone who could draw but not actually write?

A sample translation is the key thing I wanted to read in this article, and all they gave was an illegible low-resolution snippet without an English translation -- very annoying.

As best as I can read, the purported Latin translation in the image at the top of the article says:

Folia de oz et en de aqua et de radicts de aromaticus ana 3 de seminis ana 2 et de radicis semenis ana 1 etium abonenticus confundo. Folia et cum folia et confundo etiam de eius decocole adigo aromaticus decocque de decoctio adigo aromaticus et confundo et de radicis seminis ana 3.

Feeding the above to Google Translate gives:

The leaves of Oz and added to the water and the aromatic radicts semen Ana ana 3 2 seed and the roots ana 1 etium abonenticus the mix. The leaves, when the leaves are decocole adigo and the mix of the aromatic decocque of the cooking adigo an aromatic mix of roots and seeds Ana 3.

Yes, I realize that the author's translation might be completely mistaken, but I'm curious to read what he thinks it says. If someone can make out the words better, please do so.

So the whole thing is written in a form of shorthand and the core index/naming that define what the individual pieces are is missing. I wonder if this wasn't meant as a "production" manuscript but as a reference document for the replication of a larger work?

I see a theory, not a translation, am I alone in this?

My theory: it is music, not writing. I wonder if that is even possible?

Like, is everyone ignoring the picture at the top of the article? That looks like a pretty believable direct translation of the ligatures to me. I know its not the whole thing, but it is plausibly consistent.

That image is titled p16_Gibbs1.jpg. To me that hints that the author is serious and is planning to release a detailed paper.

His final statement at the end of the article is really bold. "Not only is the manuscript incomplete, but its folios are in the wrong order – and all for the want of an index."

Perhaps the author is going to provide the index, and the correct order for the folios while providing what he believes to be the missing pieces from other texts from that time period?

This article looks like a teaser to me for something significant. Let's hope anyway.

I see comments suggesting that it wouldn't be worth the effort to translate this based on the author's hypotheses, but there has been a substantial community around trying to do just that for a long time. FWIW The NSA appears to have published a book around 1978, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma [1], and a couple of the things from this article jump out at me after having read that book that raise red flags about the article's interpretation. The idea that there were multiple artists is far from being universally accepted, and experts who have studied this in the past have not been able to conclusively state that there were more than one or two authors or artists, although the possibility does remain open. Secondly, the suggestion that each glyph represents a full word in latin has also been studied - see the link for more information, but the frequency distributions and vocabulary size do not seem to make sense if that is the case (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

In all I am surprised more progress has not been made since the advent of the internet and its crowd-sourcing potential. There is definitely no shortage of interpretations all over the internet, and in headlines from time to time. The last one I recall from a couple of months ago suggested that there was a specific Jewish birthing practice being illustrated on one of the pages that suggested a certain origin of the text. [2]

[1]https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage/historical-fi...

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/05/author-of-myst...

Fascinating, if accurate - and I rather hope it is. If it is, it would make the whole thing a rather instructive example of how siloing knowledge can hide truth; the author's domain knowledge has given him the tools to identify the manuscript, but it's generally been in the domain of conspiracists and 'hidden knowledge of the ancients' types.

It would be good to see a thorough study of it to test the author's hypothesis, of course.

As Czech myself, I prefer to believe the theory of several clever guys tricking someone important to buy a nonsense book of secrets, splitting the spoils, having a good laugh. Resonates well... Heidrich called us the Laughing beasts for a reason.

"I have a brilliant proof, but not only is the margin too small to hold it, it has been hacked off".

This guy started with a hypothesis and then set out to prove it by looking for evidence. He then said the evidence was missing (hacked off) but his hypothesis was still true. Really, it is not very persuasive.

I don't see a lot of "why" in this supposed solution. If what the author says is true, it sounds like an incredibly painstaking process to encode all of this, especially when it was something so tedious (it would make more sense if the source material were interesting or salacious!). I can sort of understand abbreviating the long plant names to individual symbols, referenced from an index, and I can understand ligatures for things like "etiam", but why make each and every single character represent a whole word? Surely the end result is that the manuscript, even with the index, becomes very, very hard to read?

And is there a good explanation for why this document apparently stands alone in history as the only manuscript written in this way? Were there others, and we just lost them? Was this just a particularly egregious example of this forgotten art, and others written in this manner were easier to decipher? Lastly, there's a whole Wikipedia page about "scribal abbreviations" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation - if decoding the Voynich manuscript were so easy as the author makes out ("It became obvious...") then why has some other medieval expert not already figured it out in the near-century people have been studying this manuscript?

Don't have time to read this properly but have been reading about the VM lately, most interesting researchers I've found are Stephen Bax[1] and this YouTuber[2]

[1] https://stephenbax.net/?cat=5

[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ

Some really interesting analyses in there.

He doesn't address any of the central mysteries of the manuscript, including that none of the plants in the herbarium don't actually exist in nature and the "tubes" that the women in the bath section travel through, not to mention their odd skin coloration. Plus his exploration is convenient in that he doesn't have to actually decipher anything.

Other people have also suggested Latin as the most likely base language. A better discussion is provided here: http://www.science20.com/patrick_lockerby/patterns_of_latin_...

A fascinating analysis, half done. If the whole text were decoded and the indices rebuilt, would be more convincing.

There is a good general synopsis of the Voynich manuscript on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Interesting stuff!

Interesting. Noticed youtube pushing Voynich in suggestions out of the blue last week, now there's an article posted up here days later.

tldr;

    By now, it was more or less clear what the Voynich 
    manuscript is: a reference book of selected remedies 
    lifted from the standard treatises of the medieval 
    period, an instruction manual for the health and 
    well being of the more well to do women in society, 
    which was quite possibly tailored to a single 
    individual.

Betteridge's law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

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