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A mysterious 15th-century book written in an unrecognizable language continues to puzzle scholars—its origin, purpose, and meaning remain unknown. (www.utubepublisher.in)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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For further info, if anyone is interested, Stephen Bax claimed a decade ago to partially decode the manuscript; here's a video with his reasoning, as well as the paper he released. Sadly Bax passed away in 2017 (may he rest in peace), so the work was left incomplete.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

If it's a hoax, it's a bloody great job - they started it centuries ago, but it's still trolling us in 2025. It's worth to check how they did it. (@[email protected] posted a video with one way they could've done it.)

And if it's a lost language, my guess is like Bax: Indo-Aryan language, either Romani or related to. That should explain why it's so hard to decode - we're basically looking for your typical European language when it's something way less typical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

One of the big problems with Voynichese is the very peculiar way it behaves structurally, and especially with regards to its characters. Here is a great video about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

This video has some great info, and it's easier to approach than videos talking directly about the entropy issue.

Hypothetically speaking, if there's a language encoded there, the problem of relatively few letters can be still addressed by multiple phonemes sharing the same letter.

For example, not representing VOT distinctions - so pairs like "peat" vs. "bead" are written the same, even if phonemically distinct. It seems the Southwestern Paleohispanic worked like this, so even if it's syllabary-ish you'd see way less symbols than you'd expect for one (only ~30).

That introduces some complexity though - it's the sort of thing you'd expect to see when a language is trying to adapt the writing system of another, and so far we didn't attest the writing system elsewhere. Plus it makes Ockham's Razor scream bloody murder.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

It's also notable for the repetitive strings it produces that is very unlike most (all?) known languages, such as the famous: "qokeedy qokedy shedy tchedy [...] qokal otedy qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy rgam."

It's also possible the manuscript could contain two (or more) different languages, or different encoding methods, depending on what it is. See: https://www.voynich.nu/extra/lang.html