Talk:Voynich manuscript

Tang Gengxiu: A Modern Counterpart of Voynich Manuscript?

As early as 2007, it was reported that an illiterate lady named Tang Gengxiu (唐庚秀，1939? - ), of Daba Village, Luocheng Township, Shaoyang County, Hunan Province, China, had schizophrenia 20 years earlier. After treatment in 1990, she had been in stable condition and been able to take care of herself and to work in farm fields; meanwhile, she started writing in a script that nobody knows, and had been spending several hours a day on writing it; although a few of the characters are indeed Chinese characters, the majority are constructions that even linguists and experts on ancient scripts do not recognize; but she herself could read the text loudly and fluently. In 17 years, she had written 108 volumes and a total of more than 1 million characters, and interspersed in the text are intriguing, painting-like drawings. I am wondering if the mysterious Voynich Manuscript could have been produced through the same mechanism. Or could both be instances of graphomania? Youtube now has a couple of videos about her story and her manuscript, and here is one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3qL-Vr_u5Q&t=629s --Roland (talk) 05:55, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

The cost of the materials (vellum, inks etc) of the manuscript and their preparation would be a counter-argument to this. Jackiespeel (talk) 11:06, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Not so much as you might think. Glossolalia and/or Outsider art can come from the wealthy and/or educated as much as they can anybody else. It's often a symptom of Schizophrenia, and that effects all walks of life. It's not tough to imagine that a merchant or otherwise wealthy family who had a schizophrenic family member might be relieved if all it took to keep him quiet and out of trouble was a pile of parchment. It wasn't that expensive.

ApLundell (talk) 15:43, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

This is idea is roughly covered in the article here: Voynich manuscript#Glossolalia, but if you can find sources that describe Glossolalia or Outsider art in the context of the VM I'd be interested in reading them, and adding their insight to the article. ApLundell (talk) 15:43, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

Is there any evidence of other similar examples of outsider art/glossolalia of the period? Would not 'such a person' at the time be treated as 'being possessed'/heretical? (Using the viewpoint of the time, rather than the present.) Jackiespeel (talk)

Kunizo Matsumoto: Another Living Example?

Just noticed that Kunizo Matsumoto (1962 - ), of Osaka, Japan, has been doing similar things. Terms like graphomania, hypergraphia and outsider art have been applied to him and he has been discussed along with the Voynich manuscript as in http://worldwithwords.blogspot.com/2008/10/hypergraphia-graphomania-and-voynich.html. And Youtube has videos about him as well, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC0bpSVe4Is --Roland (talk) 23:22, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

If we had a good source that mentioned VM and hypergraphia it would be a good addition to the "Glossolalia" section.

I'll admit, i haven't read the book referenced in that section, does it bring up contemporary hypergraphia cases? ApLundell (talk) 16:32, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

New decipherment claim

Probably as fruitless as the others, but should we add a section on this new decipherment claim by Greg Kondrak? http://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/computer-scientist-claims-clues-to-deciphering-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-2 Drabkikker (talk) 13:05, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Ugh, another decipherment claim by someone who is not an expert in manuscripts ...

And they're using the old "The letters in each word, they found, had been reordered. Vowels had been dropped." excuse. A favorite of kooks the world over. That's one of those techniques that feels like decipherment, but really you could use it to turn anything into anything. (Nostradamus fans produce astonishing results with this same technique.) I'd bet money that actual manuscript experts will laugh at this. Too bad he didn't listen to them before he talked to the media.

If this gets a lot of press coverage beyond a single article, then it should get a brief mention, but honestly there's nothing new here.

I wonder if the "Languages" section of the article should also have a brief section on the unscientific techniques various people have tried to shoe-horn languages into the text. That might be interesting at least.

ApLundell (talk) 16:06, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Using my 'simple check' - does the translation make sense and does the 'transformation and translation process' operate over a long passage - applies here as in other cases. The manuscript #looks# like a smooth running text (rather than written a few words at a time, so it should "work" that way as well.) Simplistic, yes, but not necessary wrong. Jackiespeel (talk) 23:39, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Are they going to translate more other than the first sentence? If they have found an algorithm, they can translate more. --Roland (talk) 23:21, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

Someone credulously put this in the lede of the article. I've toned it down and moved it to the decipherment claims section with all the other ones. ApLundell (talk) 23:59, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

"In 2018, a team of computer scientists led by Professor Greg Kondrak of the University of Alberta analyzed the manuscript"... The article in which the analysis was described was published in the Volume 4 of Transactions of ACL (2016), and presented in August 2017 in the ACL Conference in Vancouver. Thus, it is incorrect to state that they analyzed the manuscript in 2018. It seems that after an article was published some days ago in the University of Alberta website talking about it (here), all news sites started to blindly reproduce it as some 2018 research... --Beto (talk) 13:56, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

• Soon we can make a list article List of Voynich decpherment claims first hyped as the long awaited solution then quickly forgotten.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 14:59, 31 January 2018 (UTC)

What is 'a reasonable minimum length of text translated' before the claim can be considered in this article? The text should also be a reasonable fit for the manuscript's when and where created. Allowance should be made for the possibility that the various sections are in different languages (and the writer was sufficiently fluent in each to write smoothly) or that parts serve the same function as a commonplace book. Jackiespeel (talk) 10:32, 1 February 2018 (UTC)

That would be WP:SYNTH. The measure is how seriously the popular press and/or scholarly work take it. ApLundell (talk) 21:09, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Female authorship of the VM

As this has been suggested in various contexts (eg [1], and an edit on the article page, should there be a mention of the idea? (Note - female literacy among certain strata of the Medieval population was probably higher than some of the websites appear to suggest.) Jackiespeel (talk) 22:54, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Latest decipherment claim

A claim has been made by Ahmet Ardic, "an electrical engineer by trade who also studies the Turkish language in his spare time" and his sons. Supposedly the language is Old Turkic. Claims to have translated Folio 33-V. They've submitted a paper to "a scholarly journal at John Hopkins University."

source: Brodie Thomas (Feb 27, 2018). "Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript". Metro Calgary. Retrieved 28 February 2018.

--Auric talk 12:53, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Pollen?

This to me looks like various pollens as viewed under a microscope:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Voynich_Manuscript_%28158%29.jpg/220px-Voynich_Manuscript_%28158%29.jpg 139.138.69.196 (talk) 07:51, 4 March 2018 (UTC)