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Post by palliard on Apr 29, 2006 10:44:18 GMT -5
Shifting gears again, because I have the attention span of a gnat. ;D The Voynich Manuscript is a book that appears to have been written in the late 1400s, in a language that either has yet to be deciphered, or isn't really a language at all: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscriptwww.voynich.nu/A recent, relatively popular theory, is that the Voynich Manuscript was simply a fraud perpetrated on the Emperor of Austria by a good con-man (possibly Edward Kelly), using a cryptographic device called a Cardan Grille to create something that looks meaningful but actually is just meaningful-looking gibberish. However, it turns out that a statistical analysis of document doesn't give you random gibberish... it points, rather, to a non-European language. Which is hardly impossible if it's written in a non-standard alphabet. Now for those of you unfamiliar with such things, here's a practical example: in the not-distant past before computers, stenographers wrote things down in a script called "Shorthand": www.omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm... prior to transcribing them in more conventional Latin characters. You could probably still take courses in shorthand if you had a mind to, though I doubt many would. But if you're of a mind to make stuff up, it's a short leap to something like Vine script, which is directly based on the Latin alphabet and doesn't look like it: www.omniglot.com/writing/vine.htmSo, what do you think? Real? Fake? Why?
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Post by kinkykingkal on May 2, 2006 1:40:45 GMT -5
Frankly, I think a better question than "is it real or is it fake" would be "who wrote it if its real" and "who wrote it if its fake".
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Post by palliard on May 3, 2006 20:43:22 GMT -5
Well, if it's FAKE, the evidence would seem to point to Edward Kelly or a similar "astrologer" on the basis of motive and opportunity: the Emperor of Austria was widely known to collect rare manuscripts, and something with intriguing pictures, an indecipherable script, and a set organization would have certainly been salable to said Emperor for enough money to retire on. It likely fetched the modern equivalent of a quarter-million-dollars when the Emperor acquired it.
The only thing missing there is the other M: Method. If it's fake, no one has yet determined with certainty how it was faked.
If it's real... the pictures would lead most to believe that it's some sort of magical/alchemic guide, as there are pictures of plants, things that look like astrological charts, and pictures of naked women bathing in tubs connected by a series of pipes in what might presently be called a "spa". So the subject matter would appear to be relatively-contemporary Qabalah or alchemic lore.
IF that's the case, it may have been written down in a "secret" form of, say, Hebrew, because the authored feared being branded as a heretic.
Lotta "ifs" there. Interesting to speculate, though.
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