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by frettchen 1967 days ago
I think a large potion of the attention might be for aesthetic reasons - Nova N 176 is interesting, but the artwork throughout Voynich makes it much more interesting to look through for people "just looking."

Nova isn't ugly, but for a non-linguist, there's less to see.

1 comments

The actual text of the Voynich is also much more beguiling to a Western audience. Nova N 176 may be written in an undeciphered language, but, to someone who cannot read any scripts from the Chinese family, it looks completely indistinguishable from any other old Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Mongolian/Vietnamese/etc text, all of which are also completely indistinguishable from each other.

In Voynich, on the other hand, a speaker of an Indo-European language sees a script that is indecipherable, but also looks hauntingly familiar. There's a lot more intrigue in that.