- "Touching the Voynich is an experience," Juan Jose Garcia, director of the Spanish publishing house Siloe, told Agence France-Presse. "It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe."
Until now, not a single publishing house in history has been allowed access to the manuscript to make copies, but after 10 years of requesting, Siloe finally got the go-ahead.
Exactly 898 exact replicas of the Voynich will soon be available to the public - at around US$9,000 each - with every stain, hole, and patched-up tear in the original document to be painstakingly reproduced.
I can't believe the Voynich is still a "thing". It's been well established that the content is gibberish, and it was produced during the time when gibberish books of "mystical natural sciences" were rather commonplace. Nobles bought these manuscripts knowing they were phonies, but there was some cachet to having one in your library. The only thing "mysterious" about the Voynich is why anybody still thinks it is interesting as anything more than a rather fine example of a very odd fad.
"scientists" let's be real if there is actually a pattern and language we can decipher we should probably be giving it to coders and programmers. I've always kind of had the idea that the Voynich is some sort of dream journal.
I'm pretty sure they've been hammering on it for a few hundred years. Your idea is delightfully prosaic. here's the most useless font on my computer.
the interesting thing about having that font is that, if it includes all the characters, you could write out the whole thing and plug it into a supercomputer to see if it can decipher any of it. It looks like that font is based on some TrueType by Glenn Claston. I mean, there's a lot of difficulties and things you would need to know about 15th century writing to write a program for it, but it could be done - it would just take years and a lot of money. Thankfully, Yale has a lot of money. It's got a bunch of like, run on words and no periods, right? I haven't looked at it in a long time.
Of course you're right. It would be nice to think it to be one, though. My money is on legit crazy hermit/monk making his own language and writing out the things he sees in his crazy brain - Visions, distortions of reality, dreams, the like. If that's the case, even writing with his own alphabet in a new language, that language is likely going to be heavily influenced by the languages he knows - As a 15th century Italian monk (i say monk because they're the person most likely to know how to read and write), that would be Italian and Latin, with unlikely but possibly a bit of Greek or Hebrew thrown in.
mmm, outsider art generally doesn't group like that. There's a consistency to the Voynich that looks like consistent language and the ramblings of the madman generally don't. I think it was someone good at forgery and cryptography coming up with something to sell a rich rube. Who the forger and who the purchaser was I have no idea. There are several choices.
the linked wiki from University of Adelaide is interesting. this image in particular, about word length is cool. if you look at it, the Voynich has a peak at 5 letter words. The only language that does something similar is Italian, which has a secondary rise at 5. Latin and Hebrew also have some similarities to the Voynich. Considering where it came from and when, that seems consistent to me? spoiler alert I'm not a linguist.