December 17, 2003
VOYNICH'S WAKE:
World's most mysterious book may be a hoax: The Voynich manuscript may be elegant gibberish. (JOHN WHITFIELD, 17 December 2003, Nature)
A strange sixteenth-century book may be cunningly crafted nonsense, says a computer scientist. Gordon Rugg has used the techniques of Elizabethan espionage to recreate the Voynich manuscript, which has stumped code-breakers and linguists for nearly a century."I've shown that a hoax is a feasible explanation," says Rugg, who works at Keele University, UK. "Now it's up to believers in a code to produce evidence to support their ideas." He suspects that English adventurer Edward Kelley produced the Voynich to con Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor and collector of antiquities, out of a fortune in gold. [...]
The Voynich manuscript is often described as the world's most mysterious book. It is hand-written in a unique alphabet, about 250 pages long, and contains pictures of unrecognizable flowers, naked nymphs and astrological symbols.
The manuscript first appeared in the late 1500s, when Rudolph II bought it in Prague from an unknown seller for 600 ducats - about 3.5 kilograms of gold, worth more than US$50,000 today. The book passed from Rudolph to noblemen and scholars, before disappearing in the late 1600s.
It surfaced again around 1912, when US book dealer Wilfrid Voynich bought it. The manuscript was donated to Yale University after Voynich's death.
No one has worked out whether Voynichese is a code, an idiosyncratic translation of a known tongue, or gibberish. The text contains some features that are not seen in any language. The most common words are often repeated two or three times, for example - the equivalent of English using 'and and and' - giving weight to the hoax theory.
On the other hand, some aspects, such as the pattern of word lengths and the ways in which characters and syllables occur with each other, are similar to real languages. "Many people have believed that it is too complicated to be a hoax - that it would have taken some mad alchemist years to get such regularity," says Rugg.
James Joyce used the same code for his novels. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2003 12:38 PM
Ahh! I love the sound of James Joyce bashing in the morning. It sounds like...victory.
Posted by: Brandon at December 17, 2003 12:50 PMDidn't H.D. Miller have a post about this a while back?
Posted by: Chris at December 17, 2003 12:54 PMPoor Joyce,it's not true even he never read his books,he did.It's just that even he didn't know what they meant.
Posted by: M. at December 17, 2003 1:42 PMI read about this in Poundstone's Labyrinths of Reason. His take on it was that it was a synthetic language (as is Esperanto), that was further encrypted, and we probably could not crack it for those reasons.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at December 17, 2003 2:03 PMThink of the implications of a spelling error in 'Finnegan's Wake.' How long would it be before anyone found it? And how would anyone know that it *was* a misspelling? The mind boggles.
Posted by: Henry IX at December 17, 2003 3:23 PMSounds like an idea for post-modern art- a book in which every copy contains a single random typo so as to make every copy unique. If nothing else, it would drive collectors crazy.
Since almost anybody (except me) can learn to spout glossalalia that mimics every aspect of speech except intelligibility, I don't see why it couldn't be done in writing, too.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 17, 2003 4:31 PMThe repetition of the same word is not necessarily meaningless, witness the sentence:
That 'that' that that boy used is correct.
which is intelligible.
Posted by: jd watson at December 17, 2003 5:20 PMSo is:
Smith, where Jones had had 'had', had had 'had had'; 'had had' had had the approval of the examiners.
I love that one.
Posted by: Brit at December 18, 2003 8:03 AMMr. Eager;
It's already been done and documented. It is referred to as automatic writing.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at December 18, 2003 5:02 PMIf gibberish is one of the options, it is probably the correct option. I call this "Robert's Razor".
Posted by: Robert D at December 19, 2003 12:33 AM