[Typhon]

I am puzzled by your comment.

Do you mean to imply that the Voynich manuscript is "obviously" a joke ?

Do you mean to imply that, in your view, the invention of a new alphabet to write an hitherto unwritten language, which would then have failed to gain widespread acceptance, is a less realistic explanation than your own theory ?

Would you please care to explain it in greater details, then ?

[mitchty]

I think the implication is that a likely explanation of the situation is that if the alphabet is a mish mash of other languages it is also possibly just a made up conglomeration that was used to make up the manuscript.

Basically the xkcd comic would apply, just that the people (or person) that wrote it had a fairly broad linguistic ability.

But I'm just assuming.

[PeterisP]

For pretty much all real smaller languages the alphabet and writing concepts was a mishmash of other, more developed languages that their educated people happened to know. And usually the early versions were horrible, horrible mismatches trying to fit a square peg into a round hole; multiple sounds mapping to a single 'proper' letter, making up new symbols, making up new writing concepts to represent peculiarities of grammar (and then finding out that these concepts don't really work).

There are languages that have tried multiple very different scripts - depending on time period, latin, cyrillic and arabic-style; with different writing styles of the exact same spoken language having almost nothing in common if they were developed in isolation because of differences in location&country.

[mitchty]

Would Korean fall under this category along with Vietnamese?

I ask because while I can't read Korean, I know enough to sound things out based on its character set. Which is really really cool.

I also dated a vietnamese girl and the latin script they use now instead of the hanji/chinese derived script in use prior is so pervasive almost nobody can read older vietnamese outside of scholars.

[aaron695]

Kinda.

Probability one - it's a joke/hoax/fun. Hence it's unique and no one has any idea about it in current day. The small group of people who created it had a laugh and are long dead.

Probability two, it's a bizarre exciting new language we know absolutely nothing about in anything else. It's freely available on the internet for everyone to see, incredibly popular and know around the world and looked at by many experts in many fields for years. And now someone has decoded it! (In a paper yet to pass peer review?)

I'd go with one myself and I think the reason people chose two is because they don't really get how much people in the past and in other cultures are just like us, they like funny, silly and fun things too.

Choosing two doesn't really make sense and I'm just putting my opinion out there why people do.

[Typhon]

Or maybe it's an existing language in a yet unknown script.

they don't really get how much people in the past and in other cultures are just like us, they like funny, silly and fun things too

Thank you for your condescension. Obviously, philologists, linguists and other specialists are stupidly wasting their time while you have it all figured out based on the "obvious" insight of one rather lame XKCD strip.

[aaron695]

Meh, every few months on HN there's a story about how someone has decoded the Voynich differently.

Basically it's a cold reading each time. But people still buy into it.

You're welcome to believe what you want but to a logical person they can't all be correct, so something is going on here other than science.

[mitchty]

Well as an aside, I myself when I was about 14 or so made up my own alphabet based on random glyphs i liked.

I used it to take notes in school and what not, but it was pretty simple. I did things like the thorn for th so it wasn't a direct 1->1 thing. So I could easily see #1 as a possibility. I just hope #2 is true. But its unlikely we'll know in our lifetime given that manuscripts history.