21 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
  2. Aug 2022
  3. Jan 2022
  4. Mar 2021
  5. Oct 2020
    1. a roughly 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language, brimming with bizarre drawings of esoteric plants, naked women, and astrological symbols. Known as the Voynich manuscript, it defies classification, much less comprehension.

      Something I hadn't thought of before, but which could be highly likely given the contents: What if the manuscript is a personal memory palace? Without supporting materials, it's entirely likely that what's left on the page is a substrate to which the author attached the actual content and not having the other half, the entire enterprise is now worthless?

    2. All we know for certain, through forensic testing, is that the manuscript likely dates to the 15th century, when books were handmade and rare.

      This may provide some additional proof that it's a memory aid in the potential form of a notebook or commonplace book. What were the likelihoods of these being more common that other books/texts? What other codes were used at the time? Was the major system or a variant in use at the time?

  6. Aug 2018
    1. This text analysis that it contains words written in hebrew and deciphering of the first sentence of the text using hebrew translation seems to align with what this author is saying about the text being passed down through the family.

      She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.

      [Source] (https://hyp.is/GB7sZKjvEeidoGeGo8L6jA/www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mysterious-manuscript-decoded-computer-scientists-ai-a8180951.html)

    1. Comments, questions, suggestions? Your feedback is welcome.

      Sukhwant Singh's analysis here seems to fit with a lot of other's partial analysis/observations such as multiple characters representing the same character, certain characters only appearing at the end of words etc. It seems quite compelling. The dates however, are a century too early although that does not necessarily dispel his theory that it is written in Landa Khojki.

    2. Many "words" differ by only one character and are found in each other's vicinity

      This might suggest the same thing as Tiltman's analysis in that a single character may take several forms.

    3. Tiltman treats f as a variant form of k and p as a variant form of t

      When learning that there were over 100 characters used in the manuscript my first thought was that perhaps variations of a character were used to represent the same character.

    4. Speaking generally, each character behaves as if it has its own place in an 'order of precedence' within words; some symbols such as o and y seem to be able to occupy two functionally different places.

      This is very interesting. It seems to suggest that each word may be scrambled based on the characters used.

    1. Here is a copy of the full manuscript.

    2. The text seems to be split into four parts (based on the drawings); botanicals, astrological charts, women bathing, and what appears to be recipes. For this reason it's theorized that the Voynich Manuscript is an encoded medical book.

    3. Both the mineral pigments used in the paint as well as the large and consistent quality of the parchment indicates the text would have cost quite a bit of money to produce.

    4. The Voynich Manuscript has not been deciphered despite people dedicating their entire lives to the challenge. Even modern deciphering computerized methods have not picked up a pattern.

    5. Interestingly, the drawings of some of the plants seem to show cellular level detail. The first microscope didn't exist until centuries later.

    6. The Voynich Manuscript was carbon dated to 1404-1430. The dovetail wall in one of the drawings given the time period indicates the author probably lived in Italy as that's the only known place during that time period with that style of architecture.