Voynich manuscript deciphered again

[Zju]

This time it's a medieval Romance language and the script is a fancy Latin calligraphy no less: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 19.1599566

Someone more knowledgable care to weigh on the alledged translations?

[Whimemsz]

First of all I love the fact that it's in a peer-reviewed journal.

I've skimmed parts of it, not gonna bother reading the whole thing, but some fun stuff has included:

"Unbeknown to the scholarly community, the manuscript was written in an extinct and hitherto unrecorded language as well as using an unknown writing system and with no punctuation marks" (Certainly no scholars have considered these possibilities regarding the Voynich Manuscript before)

"The manuscript uses a language that arose from a blend of spoken Latin, or Vulgar Latin, and other languages across the Mediterranean during the early Medieval period following the collapse of the Roman Empire and subsequently evolved into the many Romance languages, including Italian. For that reason it is known as proto-Romance (prototype-Romance). It had long been hypothesized as the logical link between spoken Latin and the Romance languages, but no documented evidence had ever been found before" (Aside from how wrong this is about what "Proto-Romance" was, he places the date of the manuscript's composition in the 1400s which, you know, is a little late for Proto-Romance. [Although later he treats the different Romance varieties spoken at the time as...already quite distinct?]) His thesis, anyway, is that ""Proto-Romance"" was some kind of differentiated and yet NOT differentiated lingua franca throughout the Mediterranean that began to break up into modern Romance languages in "the late Medieval period" (despite, you know, attestations of distinct Romance languages from well before then), though of course he's extremely unclear on this and never explains how this situation leads to the genetic relationships among the various Romance languages.

He keeps using the words "diphthong" and "triphthong" to refer to digraphs and trigraphs (e.g., "epe"), and there are other instances of confusing letters with sound values. Also supposedly the letter for /n/ is borrowed from Arabic (because the Mediterranean was so multicultural you see!) but other letters weren't.

"The alphabet of manuscript MS408 runs from a to z, just as our modern Italic alphabet does" ... except that there's a whole bunch of other letters and oh by the way all of "c, k, h, j, g, y" aren't actually attested. (At least in the list he gives...but later there ARE examples of <y>: "The central word reads ‘yuny’ written in conventional Italics to mean the month of ‘June’,"; "The word beneath the lobsters, written in conventional Italics, reads ‘yulho’, which means the month of ‘July’")

"The spiny lobster['s] ... modern Italian name is ‘I’aragosta’, which is derived from a combination of the words ‘Aragonese’ and ‘locusta’ (Latin for lobster): i.e. the Aragonese-lobster." (Heheh)

There's a few typos that made it past review, e.g., "The image is that of a lion cub, as it has feint spots," "sea holy" instead of "sea holly," etc.

Anyway, for the actual """"translation""""" part, he just gives various random examples of individual words or short phrases paired with individual images, rather than a full translation of the text, and even these individual word-image pairings are ridiculous. He uses this invented alphabet to derive a word, then picks and chooses until he finds some word in some Romance (or even non-Romance -- Slavic still counts [see below]!) language that can vaguely be shoehorned in there, regardless of grammar or anything else:

"Figure 31 shows an illustration of a bearded monk in his washtub, from the monastery where the manuscript was created. The words read: opat a sa (it is abbot). His is one of very few male faces seen in the manuscript. The word opát survives to mean abbot in Polish, Czech and Slovak, demonstrating that proto-Romance reached as far as Eastern Europe. In Western Europe other variants survive: abat (Catalan), abad (Spanish), abbé (French), whilst the Latin is ‘abbas’. This also demonstrates the phonetic overlap between the sounds ‘p’ and ‘b’ in the manuscript alphabet." [he obviously has no comprehension of the basic facts of historical linguistics or loanwords or anything like that...]

"Figure 32 shows a diagrammatic representation of a miscarriage or abortion, as a baby swaddled in bandages and a mass of blood exiting a tube, accompanied by the words ‘omor néna’ (killed/dead baby). The word ‘omor’ survives in Romanian, where it means ‘to murder’. The word ‘néna’ survives in Spanish, where it now means ‘female baby’"

"Figure 35 shows Folio 17 left: Mediterranean Sea holy (Eryngium bourgatii). The first line of the accompanying text reads: ‘pésaut om eos é péor é péia t’ (sorry/apologies people, they have the worst/potent sting). Sea holly has very prickly defences against being eaten by herbivores. The illustration shows the plant both in flower and in seed, where the heads are bluish and reddish-brown respectively. The text words survive in various Romance languages and Latin: pésaut (Old French) om (Romanian) eos (Latin) é péor é péia (Spanish) t [terminus] (Latin)." [note that aside from everything else, "sorry people, they have the worst sting" is not an expected label for a plant in some medieval manuscript]

"The illustration in Figure 40 shows the emergence and flow of magma from Vulcanello crater. There are nine annotations, top to bottom, that describe the process as witnessed. They read: o’péna (of rock: Old Spanish) o’qunas [cunas] asa (the cradle/birth it is: Spanish, Latin) amena sa (its lead/start: French) rolen æt (turning fire: Spanish, Latin) o’monas (of unity: Latin) amenaus (amazing/threatening: Spanish, Catalan) o’lena (of energy: Italian) formena (forming/shaping/create: Catalan, Spanish) o’péna sa (of rock it is: Old Spanish)." [again, aside from everything else, note that there's no requirement for the phrase to be "grammatical": "the cradle is of rock its start turning fire of threatening unity of forming energy it is of rock"??? or something? SOLID description of a volcanic eruption if you ask me!]



Anyway long story short it's hilarious bullshit just like all the other decipherments, but it's EXTRA hilarious that this made it past peer-review in a journal entitled Romance Studies!!!! They may want to consider looking for new peer reviewers.

[zompist]

Dammit, we have to reset the sign:

IT HAS BEEN
[0] DAYS
SINCE LAST
VOYNICH TRANSLATION

As Whim shows, it's delusional claptrap. I'd just note that there's a reason justifiable decipherments of unknown texts are usually of long texts, preferably multilingual. "Translating" 1 to 3 word fragments is an invitation to fool oneself. And even with that advantage, the dude proceeds to make a fool of himself. Mostly the words he claims are a particular language aren't; and the translations make no damn sense.

E.g. an annotation said to refer to "conditions in the water" is given as

o’quo nana (of where small: Latin, Italian)

o' is not Romance for '"of"; quo is not Latin for "where"; nana is not Italian for "small." And "of where small" makes no sense, and isn't a condition in the water. (A nana could be a female dwarf, but that doesn't improve anything.) It's just Edo Nyland with more dictionaries.

[Zaarin]

This made my day. TIL Polish, Czech, and Slovak are Romance languages; Old French, Old Spanish, Old Catalan, and all the other Romance languages attested before 1400 were figments of my imagination; the "proto" in proto-language is short for "prototype"; and languages are formed by randomly cobbling words together from sundry other languages and stringing them together. Flott hodvatsy sa Voynich dorëshkrim.

[alice]

I always thought it was written in a clever cipher of Basque, and turned out merely to be another translation of the Bible.

[Pabappa]

Come on guys, it was peer reviewed. Peer review means it's right. Besides, he checked his work. It took him an entire two weeks, even. Theres no question about it..... the elusive Voynich manuscript has been finally really truly definitely absolutely positively deciphered, and we are among the very first people on earth to know about it. All we need now is a research grant so he can translate the other 99.5% of the book.

[WeepingElf]

I agree that the new "decipherment" is bogus. So far, we can only guess what language it is written in. A clue to the contents comes from the illustrations, which seem to imply that the manuscript was a repository of magical/esoteric knowledge, involving such things as alchemy and astrology. This may say something about the language it is written in. The thing was quite certainly produced in Europe; some architectural details in the illustrations hint at northern Italy. The vellum has been C14-dated to the early 15th century.

So we have a book of magical knowledge from early 15th century northern Italy. What language would someone writing such a thing have used? The most likely candidate is of course Latin - Medieval Latin (but certainly not Vulgar Latin or Proto-Romance, a language that was unknown at that time such that nobody could compose a text in it), probably encrypted. This, however, does not seem to be the case. The ciphers in use in the 15th century are mostly quite easy to break with modern means; their security often relied on the secrecy of the algorithm rather than the key, which is a hallmark of a weak cryptosystem. If it was encrypted Medieval Latin, the cipher most likely would have been broken today.

It is also not random gibberish. Most of the text resembles actual meaningful text in a real language; there are some passages, though, which consist of a few words repeated in identical or slightly altered forms - these, however, may just be magical incantations of the familiar "hocus pocus locus focus" type. We are probably dealing with a meaningful text in an unexpected language. Pete's notion that it is in a conlang is actually quite plausible; we know that magical, mystical and religious writers invented conlangs at an early time. Bala-i-balan is not much younger, if not contemporaneous or even slightly older, than the Voynich Manuscript; Enochian is considerably younger, but if someone could come up with such a conlang in the late 16th century, the idea that someone else could come up with one in the early 15th century is not really such a big stretch. And then we have the 12th-century Lingua Ignota of Hildegard of Bingen, which is several centuries older (though not a self-contained conlang).

Another possibility, though perhaps less likely, is that it is written in an obscure natlang. We can't rule out that some lost linguistic lineage survived just long enough in a remote valley in the Alps or the Appenines or wherever, such as a descendant of Etruscan or a Paleo-European language (i.e., a residual language of the linguistic landscape of Europe before the spread of Indo-European). This doesn't seem very likely, but stranger things happened, and we know that these languages once existed.

And if the manuscript is in a conlang or an obscure natlang, it may actually be unencrypted, as the language itself makes it harder to crack than any kind of cryptographic algorithm existing in that time could!

[Vlürch]

The claim that it's "Proto-Romance" is even more hilarious than the claim that it's Turkish, since at least Turkish nationalists wanting everything to be Turkish is expected crackpottery.

I've had my own ridiculous theories regarding what the Voynich manuscript is (and still have some), but why is it that people keep coming up with theories that are even more ridiculous every time and then declaring them confirmed facts within two seconds? I mean, soon it'll be "deciphered" as a Sumero-Atlantean creole spoken by the descendants of Sumerian and Atlantean nobles who organised medieval fashion shows in Milan just like people now do or something.

In all seriousness, though, I wouldn't be surprised if it had some similarities to Romance languages regardless of whether it's in a conlang or a natural language, considering it originated from Italy. It's obviously not a Romance language, but it could well have been influenced by one or more of them. That's not to say it couldn't have been influenced by Turkish, too, through Ottoman merchants or whatever, but...

If it's a natural language, it probably isn't closely related to any language spoken in Europe today since logically it'd already have been translated if that was the case. Still, if it is a natural language, it may be ultimately translatable. If it's a conlang, it's probably influenced by languages spoken in Europe in the middle ages, but in that case it'd be untranslatable for obvious reasons, and that's why at least I kind of hope it's a natural language.

Although, to be honest, I'm still holding a 0.001% possibility that it was made by Dante (or rather, because he was already dead, a copy of a book he wrote (0.0001% likely) or based on notes left behind by him (0.01% likely)), or a 0.1% possibility that it was made by a "fan" of his. I mean, Dante was a conlanger judging by those weird lines in Inferno; if he conlanged two lines, he probably conlanged a lot more behind closed doors. Did I just make conlanging sound like cocaine. Maybe he was a kind of... Proto-Tolkien...

But I really do believe Dante at least dabbled in the art of conlanging, even if he probably didn't create a full-fledged fully functional conlang. Actually, the "constructed language" article on Wikipedia even links to this, although that was just about honing his dialect rather than creating a new language from scratch or anything. Also, he apparently thought Hungarian and Slavic languages were Germanic, but that doesn't really have any implications on his conlanging abilities since he could've just made up some cool shit. I hope someone sooner or later told him that Hungarian and Slavic languages are in fact not Germanic, though.

Oops, sorry for the tangent about Dante...

"sorry people, they have the worst sting" is not an expected label for a plant in some medieval manuscript

You have no idea how hard this has made me laugh already five times. Every time I read it, I start laughing uncontrollably. Yeah, I'm easily amused.

there are some passages, though, which consist of a few words repeated in identical or slightly altered forms - these, however, may just be magical incantations of the familiar "hocus pocus locus focus" type.

They could also be similar to Japanese adverbs like ぐるぐる and ぬるぬる, which can be repeated up to an infinite number of times. Finnish, too, has some onomatopoeic things like koppotikoppoti and kipikipi, which also could in theory be repeated infinitely. Even English has boing boing and bang bang, etc. which, once again, could be repeated infinitely. IIRC the maximum number of times any word in the Voynich manuscript is repeated is three, which would be within reason for all the Japanese, Finnish and English terms. So, maybe the language of the Voynich manuscript has similar onomatopoeic things.

The only "problem" would be that in none of those three languages those types of words are used in formal scientific texts or such and can be perceived negatively as childish or whatever, and presumably the Voynich manuscript isn't someone's proto-blog or anything but rather a serious book... but considering it's the only example of the language, it probably didn't have an influential governing body that would tell the author "eww, don't use these childish onomatopoeia in your work!" or a literate enough community to care.

But yeah, you're more likely to be right. I just like to suggest this every time the issue of the repeated words comes up because it makes sense to me...

We can't rule out that some lost linguistic lineage survived just long enough in a remote valley in the Alps or the Appenines or wherever, such as a descendant of Etruscan

Was that a reference to this, or a serious theory? If the former, heh. If the latter, yeah.

[náʼoolkiłí]

Where on the spectrum of crackpottery/trollery is this decipherment attempt?

[Whimemsz]

Come on guys, it was peer reviewed. Peer review means it's right. Besides, he checked his work. It took him an entire two weeks, even. Theres no question about it..... the elusive Voynich manuscript has been finally really truly definitely absolutely positively deciphered, and we are among the very first people on earth to know about it. All we need now is a research grant so he can translate the other 99.5% of the book.

Predictably of course I see it's been picked up unhesitatingly by the press, and the author does defend himself against the five seconds of dissenting voices that that (some of the) press offers with "BUT PEER REVIEW!" (e.g., The Guardian: "Asked for his response to those who were unconvinced by his interpretation, Cheshire was bullish. “The journal paper has been blind peer-reviewed and verified by other scholars – that is standard confirmation in the scientific arena. ...”" Good to see he also has a solid understanding of how scientific research works in general...) (Some of the press stories don't even give any dissenting voices at all, it's just "ACADEMIC CRACKS ANCIENT CODE." Shout out to Ars Technica for being the only place I found so far that treats the claim as highly dubious and extensively quotes someone explaining why Cheshire is wrong.)

"sorry people, they have the worst sting" is not an expected label for a plant in some medieval manuscript

You have no idea how hard this has made me laugh already five times. :lol: Every time I read it, I start laughing uncontrollably. Yeah, I'm easily amused.

Glad to be of service :). For my part I appreciated Zomp's sign and "Edo Nyland with more dictionaries."

[Whimemsz]

Where on the spectrum of crackpottery/trollery is this decipherment attempt?

Don't you mean, how high on the spectrum?

[WeepingElf]

We can't rule out that some lost linguistic lineage survived just long enough in a remote valley in the Alps or the Appenines or wherever, such as a descendant of Etruscan

Was that a reference to this, or a serious theory? If the former, heh. If the latter, yeah.

I wasn't even aware of that one! It was just a suggestion what kind of language it could be.

[Travis B.]

We can't rule out that some lost linguistic lineage survived just long enough in a remote valley in the Alps or the Appenines or wherever, such as a descendant of Etruscan

Was that a reference to this, or a serious theory? If the former, heh. If the latter, yeah.

I wasn't even aware of that one! It was just a suggestion what kind of language it could be.

The thing is then wouldn't it most likely be written in Latin, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, or Greek scripts, or some script closely related to one of those?

[Vlürch]

I wasn't even aware of that one! It was just a suggestion what kind of language it could be.

Well, even though at least I can't find anything where it's been seriously suggested that it could be related to Etruscan, apparently it has been since this site has a quick mention about the script having been compared to the Etruscan one. Presumably, if the Voynich script was related to the Etruscan script, the language could be as well (or at least influenced by Etruscan). But considering how similar the Etruscan alphabet is to the Latin alphabet, I'm pretty sure the Voynich manuscript would've been at least romanised in its entirety and probably even translated more or less confidently a long time ago if that was the case... but of course, it being related to Etruscan without the writing system being related to that of the Etruscans is another possibility.

The thing is then wouldn't it most likely be written in Latin, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, or Greek scripts, or some script closely related to one of those?

Probably, but the simplest explanation for why that isn't the case would be the same as with any other language: they either used a cipher or devised a new writing system. Just because the language of the Voynich manuscript is probably not (closely related to) any language spoken in Europe today doesn't mean the speakers themselves saw their language as super special or anything; logically they would've known that it wasn't related to Latin or whatever, but considering that even today, with what some argue to be the best education in the world, there are Finns who think that Finnish is a Germanic or Slavic language... well, you know.

So, the starting rationale behind the authors of the Voynich manuscript either using a cipher or having devised a new orthography could be that the language had enough speakers at the time that they didn't expect it to go extinct. If that was the case, the reasoning for the use of a cipher could be the same as with any language, as in they didn't want everyone to be able to read it. In the case of it being an orthographic reform (or the first time the language was written down at all), maybe the authors expected it to be adopted by the rest of the community but for whatever reason wasn't, and as such the Voynich manuscript remains the only example of that fancy new script.

It's also possible that they did know their language was going extinct and they made the Voynich manuscript as a kind of "archive" of their culture. That they'd do it in a script nobody but they themselves can read seems at first like a stupid decision, but maybe they wanted to preserve the writing system as well if it wasn't invented for the Voynich manuscript.

You could say "that's a lot of ifs", and sure, but at least to me that's much more likely than it being closely related to any language spoken today by millions of Europeans or something. Maybe the Romani theory turns out to be true, a lot of people seem to have been 100% convinced by that. At the very least it's more likely than it being "Proto-Romance" or Turkish, of course... I don't remember what the arguments were, or whether he even touched on the reduplications and retriplications (and I don't have enough time to watch the videos again right now because I'm about to go see my dad), so please tell me if he actually said the exact same thing I'm about to suggest: maybe they could be honorifics similar to Sanskrit श्री-, since that can be repeated even more than three times. I still like the idea that they're onomatopoeia more, but...

Another possibility (if it's possible) would be that the Val Camonica carvings are somehow related? According to Wikipedia, some of them were made/altered in the middle ages in an attempt to Christianise the place, which could indicate that at least a part of the culture that made them hadn't been Christianised until then (or that Christians came and were like "eww, pagan symbols? in my backyard? HELL NO!" and vandalised them). There's also the possibility (which at least is actually possible) that whoever made the Voynich manuscript had seen the carvings... but that seems unnecessary since the similarities aren't that big AFAICT.

I know literally nothing about the Camunic culture, though, other than that they carved on cliffs and may have been related to Etruscans (although I quickly read the Wikipedia article and it seems to imply that they were already assimilated into Romans by the first century CE, and a minority keeping their distinct culture alive for over a thousand years seems pretty unlikely), so take this with less than a grain of salt. And someone else has probably already suggested this too, just like the Dante thing that I thought was a super original unheard of theory back in 2012, right?

PS: It's impossible to find actually relevant results on Google searching "honorifics in Romani"; I tried to look up if any variety of Romani even has honorifics but without quotes the majority of the results are about Romanian ( ) and some Latin, and with quotes the majority of the results are about Latin. Obviously because of the genitive form of romanus, but still...

PPS: It still looks like a wall of text even though it's broken into paragraphs. Sorry about that, and if I had any brain farts or lapses into Time Cubism. I tried my best but slept like shit and tried to type it all pretty fast. Also sorry for the excuses...

[WeepingElf]

Was that a reference to this, or a serious theory? If the former, heh. If the latter, yeah.

I wasn't even aware of that one! It was just a suggestion what kind of language it could be.

The thing is then wouldn't it most likely be written in Latin, Cyrillic, Glagolitic, or Greek scripts, or some script closely related to one of those?

If the Voynich Manuscript is in a lost natlang, the script could descend from one of the alphabets of ancient Italy, or it may be a conscript. If the language is a conlang, it is most likely a conscript. The writer may have chosen a conscript to make it even harder to read for the uninitiated than it would already be by means of the language itself if it was written in Latin; also, any scholar in 15th-century Italy would have known that different languages often have different alphabets (e.g., Greek, Hebrew and Arabic all have their own scripts), so it would seem quite ordinary to him that a conlang or an exotic natlang would likewise have its own alphabet.

At any rate, the script is clearly alphabetic, and the letters are quite similar to those of the Latin alphabet. There are 36 letters, 11 of which seem to be modifications of other letters. It is apparently even possible to distinguish vowels from consonants, and while the sound values are not yet known, one can at least guess at them. The European Voynich Alphabet uses such a guess to transcribe the letters; it seems as if the letters which may bear "diacritics" fall into two classes: vowels (A, E, I, O, Y) and voiceless obstruents (P, T, K, F, S, H). Whatever that may mean.

[Vijay]

the Romani theory

Wait, what?

[mèþru]

My favourite theory: http://xkcd.com/593/

[Nortaneous]

Where on the spectrum of crackpottery/trollery is this decipherment attempt?

Nope, doesn't take into account the known statistical properties of the letters. You have to be able to explain those.

http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynic ... d-grammar/
https://briancham1994.com/2014/12/17/curve-line-system/
http://inamidst.com/voynich/stacks

[Vlürch]

Wait, what?

This is the guy's last video on that theory, he made two others before it. Someone on Reddit posted that he'd died and there are obituaries with his name (Derek Vogt), so I guess the theory may no longer be being worked on in spite of its promisingness... The entire Voynich manuscript could be romanised with those values (manually, since apparently the alphabet isn't 100% phonemic so an automated process could mess it up) and that'd go a long way into enabling translation for anyone, but I don't think anyone has done it. It would be a huge and boring undertaking, so I can see why, but considering how dedicated and obsessed some people get over it, it's still kinda surprising that no one has done it.

What is it with people who seriously work on deciphering the Voynich manuscript dying? Not saying it's cursed or anything, but like...

[Vijay]

He thought Romani formed as a separate language in India centuries before the Roma's ancestors left it? That in itself is already...bizarre.