Wer von euch war das? #Voynich

Skeptoid #252: The Voynich Manuscript by Brian Dunning #voynich #beinecke #freemasons #rogerbacon #SkeptoidPodcast #podcast #bot The true history and meaning of history's most famous undeciphered book.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4252

@thoughtfulnz Just now, twitter shows me a bunch of academics and curators just commenting and joking about it. None seem especially troubled. Some say that it turns out to be 600 per device. A few clever comments like "I will reveal the absolute, definitive solution to the #Voynich manuscript at the end of this thread.
1/601" (That one from an actual Voynich expert.)

Some of those are friends who struck up a parallel existence on Mastodon but gave up when hardy anyone else came here.

The Voynich Manuscript (named after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who bought it in 1912) is a completely unexplained book written in an unknown language, probably in Italy in the early 15th century

#voynich #codex #renaissance #antiquarian #bookstodon #internetarchive

https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript/page/n1/mode/2up

The past few days I've been looking at the Voynich Manuscript from the perspective of Coptic, not because I think it's Coptic, but because I think I could maybe learn some things along the way by proving it isn't Coptic.

So you've got a language picked, what's a good first step? Maybe pick some common words, especially words that serve an important grammatical function since they're likely to show up a lot, and see if there's anything in the text that plausibly feels like that word (if that sounds vague, it's because we're not forming a conclusion yet about whether it's actually the word, just trying to find more hypotheses to test). Not all languages have articles like 'the' or 'a', so I thought I'd start with 'and'. So what is 'and' in Coptic? Well it's not that simple.

When joining sentences, the word is ⲁⲩⲱ, which works like you'd expect it too. When joining nouns though, ⲁⲩⲱ isn't usually used, the prefixes ⲙⲛ̄- or ϩⲓ- are attached to the second noun. That means that while ⲁⲩⲱ should still be pretty common, if you're expecting to see it as often as English 'and', you're gonna be disappointed.

So that's something we need to look out for in the Voynich Manuscript. It might seem like it lacks a lot of the short, common words that sprinkle texts in some other languages, but it's entirely possible that Voynichese, like Coptic, expresses these some other way, like affixes.

So far I haven't found a deadringer for ⲁⲩⲱ, so that's giving more credence to camp "not Coptic" but I'll maybe need to give it a closer look some time in the next few days and try to leave myself more room for different interpretations of the orthography.

#voynich

Derek Vogt's hypothetical Voynich phonology doesn't have /m/, or at least merges it with /n/, which seems unusual, especially in the context of the whole sound inventory. /m/ is the most common phoneme, appearing in 96% of languages (according to PHOIBLE at least), so there's a very high chance Voynichese would have it. It's possible the orthography merges it with /n/, but it seems unusual that it would do that and still distinguish between /p/ and /pʰ/. Not impossible, but definitely unusual.

I'm honestly not sure where /m/ would fit into the orthography though. Derek Vogt argues for certain aspects of the orthography being featural, a claim that on it's own I'm skeptical about since orthographies often aren't all that featural, and that could maybe make a spot for it somewhere. On the other hand, there is obviously something systematic going on with the gallows letters, so I would be surprised if there was a stray /m/ sitting in there somewhere.

There's also the possibility of the underlying sound being /m/, with /n/ turning to /m/ in loanwords. /n/ is in 78% of languages, which is still a lot, but it leaves a more comfortable space for Voynichese to be unusual, without being a complete anomaly.

Lots to think about.

#voynich

Last-RT-related: Habe soeben mein GitHub-Repo zum Talk auf der #Voynich-Konferenz im letzten Dezember geupdatet: https://github.com/hermesj/R_Voynich_Stats

ChatGPT: Theme and Variations

Recent exchanges including #Voynich, #sandhi at Language Log

#ChatGPT

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=58048

What if the #Voynich manuscript is in #BalaIBalan?

@conlang

Keyboard no. 10: Voynich Edition

The Voynich manuscript is very fascinating. Dope deskmat, keycaps are ok-ish. The hues are kinda off.

- Zoom65 Wild Green w/ gold anodised aluminium weight and knob
- SP Star Marble Soda Melon switches
- MW Voynich keycaps

#customkeyboard #zoom65 #spstar #marblesoda #mw #voynich

Unknown history of 600-year-old, coded #Voynich Manuscript revealed by researcher https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/01/13/unknown-history-of-600-year-old-coded-voynich-manuscript-revealed-by-researcher

... SENSATIONELLE ‼️ ENTDECKUNG ...

... NEUIGKEITEN ZUM WOCHENENDE ...

Das #VoynichManuskript ist das erste Buch des ababpöm.

Das #Voynich-Manuskript beinhaltet die Wesensmerkmale des #dadaismus. Es ist ein Vorläufer des #ababpöm.

Diese Lösungsmöglichkeit sollte bitte auch bedacht werden.
© by HerrWortranken

#sdtps Here begins sequentially from the work: “Rich Voy Beinecke’s Dream” #RVBD1 Of A Night

#storytelling #narrative #dialogue #prose #dream #read #reading

#voynich #voynichmanuscript #manuscripts #manuskript #medieval #codex #histodons #mystery

#yale #rarebooks #antiquarian #rarebooks #archives #medievalmanuscripts #bookhistory #libraries #manuscriptstudies

Interested in learning about the script and scribes of the #Voynich manuscript (Beinecke Library MS 408)? Of course you are! Check out my keynote on "Voynich Paleography" from the Voynich2022 conference (https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3313/) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUq5pa5r9sQ&t=2s

Neu entdecktes Supplement zum Voynich-Manuskript entdeckt ... es zeigt Selbstporträts der Verfasser 😜

#voynich #manuskript #aliens

I have published my contribution to the #Voynich Conference on Youtube (as part of the #VSC series). #polygraphia https://youtu.be/DsGjkGvaOsc

RT @lisafdavis@twitter.com

It’s #Voynich day! My annual in-class celebration of All Things Voynich: what we know, what we don't know, and what the internet thinks it knows. With @voynich2022@twitter.com starting tomorrow, looks like it's actually Voynich WEEK!

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/lisafdavis/status/1597568143777738752

Tagging #voynich because I know folks check for it. Look up the thread please! 👆👆👆

RT @lisafdavis@twitter.com

Just discovered GoogleBooks ngrams and of course I had to search "Voynich Manuscript" and then the librarian in me had to explain the hills and valleys. So here comes a #Voynich Manuscript bibliography thread! https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Voynich+Manuscript&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/lisafdavis/status/1594355230627487744

Just discovered GoogleBooks ngrams so of course I had to annotate the history of publications about the #Voynich Manuscript... #medieval #manuscripts