/lit/ - Literature

>>15906189
Probably not. My favored theory is that it’s a fake encyclopedia written to make an apothecary seem more learned.

Also possible that it’s a non-indo-european language written in a made-up script. I doubt we will ever know the answer.

>>15906189
I think some guy from India named Sukhwant Singh already cracked it but modern academia hasn't paid too much attention to that theory. Its plausible tho, my personal belief is that it was written by a small group of scholars from China and Arabia. They must've met and set their efforts upon creating a document that would benefit both parties without having any of their secrets being leaked out. However that doesn't quite explain why there is only one copy of the Manuscript. If this document was so important, multiple copies must've been stored someplace important.

>>15906379
>china and arabia
Yet the artstyle of the drawings is clearly european international gothic. Why would an European copy and illustrate something from that far away with no apparent pursuit?

>>15906189
Looks like my diary desu

>>15906189
I think it's just an elaborate shitpost. If that guy were alive today he'd definitely be browsing /lit/

It's most likely just an apothecary manual written in a language that only his peers would have been in on though, to protect trade secrets

It's probably magically "encrypted", you wouldn't be able to read it unless you knew the specific magickal technique of the alchemist who wrote it.

>>15906189
It was decrypted and it was disappointingly some Turkish variant or something like that. Was unironically just about gardens and shieet.

It's already being deciphered. iirc it's written in a phonetic old turkic dialect. There's a good video about it on YouTube if you have a look.

>>15906189
Can't we just give it to some turbo autist who probably browses this very website to decrypt it?

>>15906465
Wasn't that disproved? I remember reading about that a while ago

>>15906189
Op see>>15906465
>>15906467

Some sort of Turkish.

>>15906448
Alchemists didn’t become ‘magical’ or part of the occult until the 1800’s when a bunch of Victorians thought that the occult was cool and were like “yo I figured out alchemy it was really about transmuting the /soul/“. Most alchemists were just chemists. Sure there was some religious belief involved in what they were doing, as religious belief was tied into ideas of natural philosophy and how matter worked, but they were literally dudes just trying to make gold.

>>15906465
>>15906467
>>15906476
False. It has never been deciphered.

>>15906469
>magical 4chan negro

>>15906189
I'm writing an algorithm that will produce one. Give me a few more months.

>>15906503
they exist. we have our fair share of retards, but i unironically believe that there is a high concentration of geniuses on this website

>>15906537
It's at least better than leddit. I've never seen such a high concentration of dunning-krugers anywhere else

>>15906405
I see little difference between the drawings present in the Voynich Manuscript and the Arabic manuscripts. The only thing separating them is that the manuscript feels like hackwork, which is why I won't disqualify it being a fake manuscript. Take a look at the other ones and tell me if you see a difference,
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Botanical_Arabic_manuscripts
I'm not being glib or anything, I don't have my reading glasses on me so I'm prone to making mistakes.
Regarding the second point, I honestly couldn't tell ya. The Islamic Golden Age was massive but who's to say that some aspiring apothecary wouldn't be interested in alternative medicine?
The apparent pursuit being knowledge

>>15906580
It has no apparent pursuit because it appears to us as something we cant decodify. Hence my expression. Once we find what it is then we will have our appearances matched. And the style is clearly northern european late gothic-early renaissance, just look at how the women are being archetipically drawn.

>>15906492
It literally has, but people just like the story which has a life of its own.

>>15906537
>>15906553
I'm one of those geniuses. AMA.

>>15906753
Stop believing scam artists and clickbait articles. It has never been deciphered.

>>15906580
There are some similarities between the botanical depictions. But the drawings of people in the manuscript differs greatly from any Arabic or Chinese style and is 100% European or European inspired.

>>15906794
Source?

>>15906794
IT'S TURKISH BRO.

>>15906189
if the characters of the script were allocated to a block in unicode, you could analyze and possibly crack the thing with regex.
All it takes is time and interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk

It seems to have been decoded, and old form of Turkish.
>>15907341

>>15907341
>>15909500
It's not Turkish you fucking moron.

>>15906189
>be some bored scholar from ancient times
>scribble up some drawings and a bullshit language for fun
>people debate its meaning in a serious manner for years
>laughing silently from the grave

>>15909852
Prove it.

>>15906189
I thought they found out it was a compendium of writings on botany or am I misremembering?

>>15906189
Scythians

>>15906763
Even if you are, by merit of thst being your entry point, you're not the type people have interest in.

Terence McKenna said it was cracked.
https://medium.com/@Ayahuasca_yage/lectures-on-alchemy-with-terence-mckenna-e7a81430aae7

Then there were other efforts at decipherment which I won’t bore you with, but along comes Leo Levitov just four years ago. He wrote a book called Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A Liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis, and his great breakthrough — if you accept his translation, and I do; I know people who don’t but they don’t seem to have read him as carefully as I have, I think the dude has it pretty well nailed to the barn door — his great breakthrough was to realize that it’s not in code. It is not an encrypted manuscript at all. It’s a synthetic alphabet; yes, it’s an alphabet. One of the things that baffled the CIA was that they looted the libraries of Europe and they could never find another example of what is called Voynich script, and this was just baffling. How could there be no other example of this script? It appears that what happened was that someone created a synthetic alphabet, and then in a mixture of medieval polyglot Flemish with a huge number of loan words from Old French, Middle High German and Swedish, wrote down a sacramental manual for the dying in the Cathar sect.
Now, what is the Cathar sect? You’re probably familiar with something called the Albigensian Crusade. This was not a crusade carried on against the infidel for the recovery of Jerusalem but rather a series of military actions carried out by the pope against communities in Southern France in the early 1200s. These people were Cathars as far as we can tell, and we can’t tell much because we only have descriptions of Cathars written by the people who were burning them at the stake. In other words, no original Cathar documents survive, we just have what they screamed out on the rack as they were being put to death by the bishops of the Church. This was a horrific incident in European history. To give you the flavor of it, the second Albigensian Crusade was prosecuted by a general of the pope named Simon de Monfort. Some of you may have visited the city of Carcassonne in Southern France, which is a very beautiful walled medieval city. Simon de Monfort’s lieutenants came to him and they said, “We have cornered the Cathars at Carcassonne, but the problem is that there are 6,000 Catholics within the city walls,” and he said, “Kill everybody; God will recognize his own.” So that was the spirit in which this thing went forth, and they did, they did.

>>15910407
It's not Turkish because there's no evidence that it's in Turkish. The Turkish government gives cranks PhDs in Linguistics and then gives them money to spew out garbage saying that every language ever is derived from Modern Turkish. Chinese? Derived from Modern Turkish. Arabic? A dialect of Modern Turkish. Hebrew? CLEARLY derived from Modern Turkish. English, don't make me laugh it's OBVIOUSLY just a register of Modern Turkish. Ancient Sumerian? Only a retard would say it's not derived from Modern Turkish. Modern Turkish was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden, and it is the language spoken by God in heaven. He only gave the Quran to Muhammad in Arabic because Modern Turkish is too complicated for subhuman Bedouins.

>>15910622
You're emotionally involved with your position lol retard. Quit seething and show me where the dude is wrong in his explanatory video.

>>15906332
>>15906440

I think the first theory is closer to the truth. I think it was just an elaborate way for an apothecary to protect trade secrets while keeping his trade knowledge written in some form. There may have been a cipher at one point, but it has been lost to time and the secrets remain forever hidden. Every other theory sounds like weird crackpot bullshit and doesn't explain much in the way of why it is written the way it is written along with the alchemy symbols that pervade the text. Plus, creating your own writing system is a good way to hide something if you didn't want someone/ some people to see it

>>15910546
>a sacramental manual for the dying in the Cathar sect.
This more or less. Could have been composed for Turkik polysemy as well.

It’s not Turkish. It’s a type of Romantic language that is full of Latin, Old French, Spanish, ect. Essentially, it’s written in Proto-Romantic.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/16/latin-hebrew-proto-romance-new-theory-on-voynich-manuscript

>>15912318
wow cool

>>15911629
Alchemists used a great deal of these kind of things to protect their secrets. Though they used stand in words, allegory, and dispersing information amongst multiple texts. This dude just went hardcore and made a cipher or something.

It's not Turkish and it's not Proto-Romance. The manuscript is "deciphered" by some crank every year, stop falling for it.

>>15909500
>says they're able to fully translate an entire page of the manuscript, and they post it in full
>then they go on to say upon picking a random page from another section of the book they're only able to directly translate 30% of the words
What did they mean by this

>>15912609
That the book is gibberish. The problem is that it's fucking full of hapax legomenons, that is to say swords that only appear once. Some characters only appear once, some words only appear once, there's too many fucking characters, there's too few fucking characters. Sometimes there's entire paragraphs with no vowels, sometimes there's entire paragraphs with only vowels, oh wait we have no fucking idea what's a vowel and what's a consonant, and whatever the fuck this character means it literally only appears on this page. That's part of the problem as a whole: there's no actual structure to it found in a natural language.

It's, in some way, a constructed language, either because there's a code or cipher involved somewhere or because the author is using very specific terminology and systems based on an outside encoding mechanism. Ironically, one of the few things we know for certain is that it's not Turkish (it's not agglutinative, appears to be moderately synthetic or analytic, and of course the book predates Modern Turkish by several centuries).

>>15906189
no rosetta stone, no translation
pretty simple, the other posters here are faggots

>>15910546
>killing heretics is HORRIFYING not the hecken CATHARENOS

>>15906189
>is there any way to decrypt the Voynich Manuscript
If there actually is anything to decrypt, there is a way to decrypt it.
If it's random text then there's no way to decrypt it
>will it remain an enigma forever
It will because the only people interested in this irrelevant nonsense are morons who don't have the brains to decrypt it.

Read it's some sort of cryptic Hebrew, which does kind of make sense because it's a non IE language which was actually used in Europe.

>>15906537
There is at most one genius on /lit/ at any given moment. People being somewhat smart and having controversial opinions don't make them geniuses.
I've been on this site for 8 years (with a 2 years interruption, so 6 years of browsing), I've read at least dozen of thousand of /lit/ post, and I've very rearely seen anything that was worth more than "pretty smart take anon, congrats".

>>15906189
It says that you're gay.

>>15906480
Mysticism was infused with alchemy since its very inception. The Pythagorean and Neoplatonic influence of the Islamic Golden Age and the Renaissance is well documented, and everything from mathematics and geometry to astronomy and alchemy was infused with religious and mystic significance.

>>15911613
>show me where the dude is wrong in his explanatory video.
There are no actual arguments or evidence presented in your "explanatory video".

>>15913801
>I've been on this site for 8 years
heh... who would even spend their time on here for 8 years? absolutely ridiculous thought...