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The Voynich Manuscript Has Been Solved.

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 11:50am

No, not clickbait, but not guaranteed either, I suspect.

Boing Boing today had this headline
The Voynich Manuscript appears to be a fairly routine anthology of ancient women's health advice at this link:
https://boingboing.net/2017/09/09/fizzle.html#more-545113

The Boing Boing article leads in to some material from another source as follows:

Nicholas Gibbs, a history researcher, says that he has decoded the Voynich Manuscript, a legendarily mysterious 15th century text whose curious illustrations and script have baffled cryptographers, historians, and amateur sleuths for decades.

According to Gibbs, the Voynich Manuscript is a cobbled together compendium of largely plagiarized women's medical advice and treatments, and the odd script is just an idiosyncratic version of a widely used system of Latin abbreviations.

This is followed by what appears to be a blockquote from this article: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/

The whole Boing Boing article is a somewehat short and quick read that provides enough information on the contents of the tls article to both titillate and perhaps satisfy one's curiosity regarding this fabled 15th century mystery. The full tls article linked therein looks like it will be a somewhat substantial read, and I have not yet dived in. One cannot help but wonder if the fact that this was such an uncrackable mystery for so long may have been in part due to the fact that it concerned women's affairs, but that would be idle speculation. The relatively recent digitization, with the resultant increased exposure of the full text to a much wider audience was likely an important factor in its solution.

fb image from national archive on flickr is public domain

Tags:

Voynich Manuscript

mysteries

women

women's health

cryptography

Vote

Comments

Submitted by Lookout on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 12:25pm

Citizen projects

Amazing what the people can solve when they are given the information.

Crowd sourcing investigative projects makes a great deal of sense.

—

“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 12:48pm

I dabble in citizen science and hence note such projects.

@Lookout
A lot of discoveries have been made in ornithology, ecology, astronomy and more by using "citizen science", either in gathering or interpreting data, and also by people simply making idle time on their home computers available to research number crunching.

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by lotlizard on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 1:04pm

Crowd-sourcing has brought down several German politicians

@Lookout
In the cases I’m thinking of, crowd-sourced investigations of those politicians’ Ph.D. theses were able to reveal significant and blatant plagiarism, forcing the university involved to rescind the degree.

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 12:45pm

There is also a September 8 article in Ars Technica

here:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscrip...

One paragraph from that article highlights the beginnings of the discovery

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by UntimelyRippd on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 9:44pm

it annoys me that the

@enhydra lutris
the ars technica article confuses the concept of a code, with the concept of an encryption cipher. it most certainly was a code -- it just wasn't a secret code intended to obscure and conceal the information.

—

The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Mon, 09/11/2017 - 8:48am

Good mornng, UR. That seems to be pretty common, so

@UntimelyRippd
one sees complaints that the deciphering algorithm hasn't been applied to the whole thing in a replicable fashion as if it were a simple substitution cypher.

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by enhydra lutris on Sun, 09/10/2017 - 4:15pm

The Atlantic, however, thinks it's bunk

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/has-the-voynich-manu...

—

That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

Submitted by eyo on Mon, 09/11/2017 - 9:48am

"unknown outsider" means popcorn!

@enhydra lutris thanks I really enjoyed reading the link at boingboing, thought it was interesting. Now higher up the food chain it is "magical thinking" and must prove a negative or something to make sense? Perhaps a future book ... OIC. Nah, but I'll keep eating healthy quantities of popcorn as it is decided. TYVM

...
His explanation is that the index laying out which illnesses and which plants these recipes correspond to have been lost. To Davis, this represents a kind of magical thinking. “This is the piece that really killed it for me,” she says. Yes, there is evidence that the Voynich manuscript is missing pages and has been trimmed as it’s been rebound, but there is no evidence of an index. If Gibbs can present his theory in greater detail, like in a future book, Davis says she’d be open to it.

Some of the skepticism of Gibbs’s theory likely has to do with him being an outsider. He does not seem to be known to professional scholars or the amateur Voynich community. In an interview with the TLS podcast, Gibbs mentioned that he worked with the British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who is an expert in cuneiform but not of medieval manuscripts. Outsiders can make beginner mistakes, but they can also bring fresh perspectives, which the Voynich manuscript could certainly use.