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AChurchForAHelmet t1_j4b4scb wrote

Reply to comment by stegu2 in New archival findings on the earliest ownership of the Voynich Manuscript by stegu2

Congratulations, that's really cool!

I've got to ask since you've studied it more than a little I'm assuming, do you think it's a fraud?

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stegu2 OP t1_j4beh5c wrote

No, really a LOT of statistical analysis on the writing has been done in the last year which rule out that the text was just meaningless gibberish. It has properties of a language, but it could either be an an unknown language, an unknown short hand system, an unknown cipher or a mixture of these (the latter impossible to crack).

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AChurchForAHelmet t1_j4bgerc wrote

That's very interesting, I'd basically just dismissed it as a fraud at this point!

I do wonder what the hell it's one about though, you got any good bets?

I always thought it might be some sort of esoteric manual given the waxing and waning fortunes of such material, writing it in code would probably be of use to anyone who knew what it said

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InspectorG-007 t1_j4bl7xr wrote

If none of those, perhaps an Alchemical Manuscript. They used tons of allegory and code.

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[deleted] t1_j4d6yby wrote

[deleted]

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Tiafves t1_j4hn1hj wrote

Problem is they're working backwards. They know Zipfs law is a thing so they know their gibberish producing technique should follow it.

They're going to need to be able to produce known hoaxes from the time period of the Voynich manuscript that have gibberish following Zipfs law when it was unknown for their claim to have any shred of legitimacy.

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stegu2 OP t1_j4hpcr1 wrote

Yes, some papers elaborate on this, but the most recent studies on this (like the ones presented in November on the International Voynich conference) make clear that it is not some man-made gibberish.

It also makes absolutely no sense to spend such amount of time (and parchment) for such a hoax in the early 15th century. Who would be the audience? An early modern hoax made by alchemists to swindle Rudolph? This sounds imaginable, but not for the Voynich Manuscript which is without doubt a product of the early 15th century.

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the_cardfather t1_j4dc886 wrote

I'm surprised with all of our computer technology if that is the case that we couldn't get a computer to do it.

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