Is the Voynich manuscript an elaborate hoax ?

[UM-Bot]

Cryptographers have been attempting to decipher the text's mysterious symbols and diagrams for decades.

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/299189/is-the-voynich-manuscript-an-elaborate-hoax

[b0wn]

That seems like a ton of trouble to go through, to be honest. It must have taken a considerable amount of time to draw and paint all those plants, then to write the words.

I think some things are just best unknown.

[Ell]

In my opinion the manuscript is not a hoax.

[quiXilver]

Well to me, that question is irrelevant, it's utterly fascinating and well worth the time I've spent admiring it.

[oneshot_me]

I don't think they ever will find what the meanings are for it. This is a very vage report on this book!! I have heard and watched a program on it a few years ago. And it was handed down for healer to healer and meant for no one else to know what it was and what the plants were so someone else couldn't just come along and use their years of knowledge.

Edited September 25, 2016 by oneshot_me

[oneshot_me]

2 minutes ago, oneshot_me said:

 

 

Edited September 25, 2016 by oneshot_me

[badeskov]

6 hours ago, Ell said:

In my opinion the manuscript is not a hoax.

May I ask why you do not think it is a hoax?

 

[Nnicolette]

I cant imagine why somebody would go through all that trouble just for the satisfaction of writing some gibberish. It is pretty silly to think it is nonsensical just because it doesnt correlate with any known language also. It is a possibility, but also a pretty assumptive proposition based on ones own inability to comprehend the other possibilities.

[HandsomeGorilla]

I don't understand why we always assume that anything made in the past must have some deep, mysterious meaning. Maybe it's not supposed to mean anything at all? Maybe a schizophrenic created it just to amuse themselves?

I've kept journals where I write or draw the most random things imaginable. Anyone who reads them would dismiss it as pure gibberish. I can picture someone finding them five hundred years from now and spending the rest of their career trying to decipher them thinking they'd found some great treasure or secret code! LOL

[Glacknor]

Maybe it's not a hoax, but rather a forgery of an ancient artifact. What I mean is; what if some bookmaker needed money, and thought "Hey, if I make this important looking book using an undecipherable text, I can sell it as an ancient mysterious artifact for tons of cash!"

Or, maybe the text just a version of Lorem Ipsum, space filler for general design of the book.

[Likely Guy]

After reading just these replies, the possibilities are numerous and part of me wants, in a way, for this to remain a mystery.

It's different than a photo of a lens flare where some claim ORB! Or shadowy smudge where some claim BIGFOOT. This is an  unexplained mystery that one could actually hold in their hands and let their imaginations run wild.

R.I.P.: Antikythera mechanism.

[+DieChecker]

Medieval nobles ordered all kinds of weird stuff from the artists of the era. I've come to the conclusion over the years that the Manuscript is a folio of artwork, and not an actual book at all.

[Ozfactor]

I love it , the illustrations, the theories, conspiracies and the ongoing debate , I hope it never ends.

 better to be in the mystery than in the know 

[paperdyer]

11 hours ago, DieChecker said:

Medieval nobles ordered all kinds of weird stuff from the artists of the era. I've come to the conclusion over the years that the Manuscript is a folio of artwork, and not an actual book at all.

As good of an explanation as any.  I wonder what people in the distant future would think if they found a sketch book of comic characters a collector amassed over the years by going to different shows and cons.  The sketches wouldn't make any sense when taken as a whole by one page at a time they would  make sense to a person who knew what they were.

[paperdyer]

4 hours ago, Ozfactor said:

I love it , the illustrations, the theories, conspiracies and the ongoing debate , I hope it never ends.

 better to be in the mystery than in the know 

I see a Tom Hanks movie coming out of this.

[Golden Duck]

18 hours ago, Nnicolette said:

I cant imagine why somebody would go through all that trouble just for the satisfaction of writing some gibberish. It is pretty silly to think it is nonsensical just because it doesnt correlate with any known language also. It is a possibility, but also a pretty assumptive proposition based on ones own inability to comprehend the other possibilities.

Possibly for the same reason somone would forge qualifications.

It might have been a prop for a snake-oil salesman of the day.

[Sundew]

1 hour ago, Mangoze said:

Possibly for the same reason somone would forge qualifications.

It might have been a prop for a snake-oil salesman of the day.

Yes, I would imagine alchemists and herbalists were in high demand with the aristocracy and like P.T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute!" Still it could be real, but I do know horticulture and a bit of botany and many of the depicted plants are completely imaginary, so who knows about the text?

Edited September 26, 2016 by Sundew
spelling

[stereologist]

If it is a prop as Mangoze suggests then I could see it being used to explain anything and everything. Who is going to be able to contradict whatever translation is given? It's like all of the channeling hoaxers today giving out advice. You claim the advice comes from a book instead of some made up warrior of the past.

[quiXilver]

I wondered on my first perusal of it, if it weren't written in code at the time to prevent the author and the reader's from ending up at the wrong end of a formal Catholic inquisition...

[unclefred]

It was partially decoded in 2014-

 

http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/20/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/

 

'

 

 

 

 

Edited September 28, 2016 by unclefred
76

[+DieChecker]

16 hours ago, unclefred said:

It was partially decoded in 2014-

 

http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/20/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/

 

'

 

 

 

 

I don't know. Those translations appear to me to be... extreme stretches in assigning names to the plants, and then letters to characters to try to sift names out of the script. All those translations appear to be really if-y to me. The Hellbore for instance looks nothing like hellbore flowers, but looks like some kind of weird open ended poppy to me. Maybe even a thistle.

If the assumption is that the plants and script are stylized due to some micro cultures different outlook, then really this attempt is still just guessing.

[Saitung]

  Let's just leave it a as mystery. Leave it to some stumped ersatz scholar to call the whole thing fake. Plus come up with the most complicated way an ancient person could have created it. Oh yeah, that person would have wasted up expensive ink and lamb skin just to fool someone? Right. That's how idiots today think, not an ancient person with better things to do with their literary skill. I'm going out on a limb here, but why cant the thing just be written in a language that is no longer in existence? I mean sheezch, languages and cultures disappear every year on earth. But no, heaven forbid an ancient person would create something a modern scholar cant figure out.

[stereologist]

10 hours ago, Saitung said:

  Let's just leave it a as mystery. Leave it to some stumped ersatz scholar to call the whole thing fake. Plus come up with the most complicated way an ancient person could have created it. Oh yeah, that person would have wasted up expensive ink and lamb skin just to fool someone? Right. That's how idiots today think, not an ancient person with better things to do with their literary skill. I'm going out on a limb here, but why cant the thing just be written in a language that is no longer in existence? I mean sheezch, languages and cultures disappear every year on earth. But no, heaven forbid an ancient person would create something a modern scholar cant figure out.

So you think that this is the only extant portion of an unknown language? Written languages have properties that can be detected. The evidence is that this is actual language. A lost culture or language? No. A coded document of some sort? Possibly.

[unclefred]

On 9/29/2016 at 1:35 AM, DieChecker said:

I don't know. Those translations appear to me to be... extreme stretches in assigning names to the plants, and then letters to characters to try to sift names out of the script. All those translations appear to be really if-y to me. The Hellbore for instance looks nothing like hellbore flowers, but looks like some kind of weird open ended poppy to me. Maybe even a thistle.

If the assumption is that the plants and script are stylized due to some micro cultures different outlook, then really this attempt is still just guessing.

There are many dicussions of that and other adpects on stephen Bax's website-

 

https://stephenbax.net/?cat=7

[+DieChecker]

15 hours ago, unclefred said:

There are many dicussions of that and other adpects on stephen Bax's website-

 

https://stephenbax.net/?cat=7

Humm.... an author defending his book. Not unexpected.

That doesn't change the fact that several of his "translations" are based off identifications of plants that look only mildly like the plant he says they are. He is trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together and since the pieces aren't doing what he wants, he's shaving them down and rounding them off, so they fit together very, very loosely. Then saying that he's figured out some percentage of the puzzle. But then when you look at it with his percentage, the puzzle still doesn't look like a picture.