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What if a letter becomes an all new letter depending on where it is? So for example, let's say that we have made up alphabet nr. 1 with this word: addidaasa So let's assume that in this made up alphabet, a symbol can represent multiple letters, based on where it is. So in our made up example, let's say that the symbol "a" can be either of 3 letter, depending on whether it's at the beginning, end, or somewhere in the middle, so if we wanted to translate it to our alphabet, it would be like this: cddidxxsy Not sure if this has an actual name, it's similar to how in Spanish there's like 3 letters pronounced as "H" (H, G and J in certain situations), but obviously this would be more extreme, and the same symbol would literally mean different letters. Also not sure if anybody would have ever used this, since it seems incredibly obnoxious to use, and you would just add more symbols instead of going with this, but hey, we don't know if the writers had some sort of constraint on the number of letters they can use. Maybe they had a bet going xD

Maybe the author was dyslexic and just wrote how words sounded to him ;P

This video like almost all videos fails to explore the real issue with the manuscript. THE WRITING!! A deep analysis of the writing needs to be done.

imagine if people are just trying to decode medieval lorem ipsum

Is it too rigid and predictable have been written as a form of speaking in tongues?

Just to play devils advocate a bit: would it be possible that the whole manuscript is legitimate and from the 1410-1425 period… but that the lettering was somehow altered to make the thing unintelligible for whatever reason? Or would ink analysis have picked up on that? Love the fashion break down! Dates the document very firmly!

The original troll

Could it be a fifteenth century fake

This is a very clear, highly informative and entertaining video! I can only recommend it to everyone who wants to know more about this manuscript.

there’s no basis for pronouncing the V in Voynich as an F

ads every TWO MINUTES. Better make sure you got paid for all that.

Yay entropy! Also one of the reasons that biocomputing would be such a huge breakthrough, DNA has two times the entropy than binary iirc, whereas each character in binary can carry one of two meaningful values, in DNA you have four different bases meaning you could encode the same data using fewer physical bits of memory. My ears always perk up when I hear 'entropy' next to 'linguistics' because there are so many interesting statistical complexities that reveal things about our nature. Great video!

It's nice that some of the wonderful mysteries in the world aren't made up and sensationalized

Very impressive video. Also a great demonstration of the importance of digital humanities.

Medieval lorem ipsum perhaps?

20:06 I need a tattoo of this

@41:33 this is a brilliant idea! Having been written by doctors would perfectly explain why nobody can read it.

If you ask me it was made in that time and it wasnt a scam Or better It wasnt made to scam one guy It was made to scam multiple ppl With this book you can Show up at a village and pretend to be who ever you want and see fit to pull off scams Only a few folks could read or write You dont need a legit book just something that looks like one And the chapters in this book are telling aswell Medecin, Herbs , Stars, ect

Alchemists, like modern scientific researchers, require funding. They find these funds by running a scam on their patrons. I could see this as the product of such a scam.

My guess is that it was just an art project to practice using the pen and drawing...

Watch the whole thing be a really weirdly laid out logbook of abbreviations.

11:19 -- Vellum can be "recycled". There are a handful of extant manuscripts where the original underlying text was erased (well, scraped off) and new text applied to the surface.

Great video on a very exciting subject - thanks a lot!

I watched a random documentary about two guys who were able to decipher it. Apparently it was written by somebody who was illiterate, writing an ancient form of an old Turkish language. Maybe not illiterate, but not very good at spelling.

11:49 is there a reason you presume the vellum to be unused at the time of a possible forgery? could it not have been palimpsest?

Really Voynich manuscript day is on my birthday? This is a sign hahae.

Some notes - 1. Good point that efforts to represent other scripts might be hopelessly inaccurate 'Pseudo-Kufic' - etc., doesn't imply dishonest intentions. 2. On the point of 'intention' - the term is commonly used in iconographic analysis, where it is near-synonymous with purpose. It bothers some amateurs, but as you rightly say when speaking about the painting by Mantegna, a person who has done their background research *can* discuss the maker's intentions - it's not to be called 'speculation' unless there's nothing more to it than guesswork. 3.The same goes for informed opinions about dating a manuscript. It all depends on how good the scholar is whose opinion is sought. Amateurs often forget that we have literally tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts, and still more paintings, all of which have been accurately dated by specialists - even as long ago as the 1800s without use of destructive tests such as radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon dating was seriously flawed - biased by the patron's unconscious biases. Also affected tests of pigments - only a very small number were selected; the palette is still much larger and mostly still undefined. 4. About titanium. A big difference between titanium in black ink, and titanium white paint. It is said that titanium was found in ink from one of Gutenberg's Bibles. The amount of research needed to address this question is huge - natural deposits, comparative analytical studies of inks, investigation of imported materials, history of 'india ink' and much more. HUGE research topic before any opinion possible. 5. Pigments have to be assumed added at, or later than, the time the manuscript was made so the clothing argument is dubious. Beside that, the investigations only looked at a very narrow range of a very few regions in Europe, so affected by a substantial bias in the fashions sampling. Sorry. 6. It's important not to fall into the trap of conflating information about a manuscript's manufacture, and the origin or date of what it contains. Showing that a copy of the Bible was made in fifteenth-century Italy doesn't make the Bible a fifteenth-century Italian composition, does it? That's why, I think, Fagin Davis specifies "fifteenth-century *object* 7. Also, ,I dispute your claiming that the book-dealer and scholar who gave the ms to Yale is a greater specialist in medieval art than Erwin Panofsky, who had correctly dated it (1410-1420-1430) in 1932 when everyone else still believed the 'Bacon' story.

This is some impressive research. Thanks for sharing it with those of us who only take a superficial interest in the subject.

18:35 f33r is a bit creepy with these head-roots

I like the idea that one of the churches most important saints randomly created a book filled with gibberish for no reason.

39:44 incredible how simetrical the leaves and overall plant are

WOULD YOU please release that list of manuscripts... I would love to add and check for some of my own I have found throughout the years!!!

I enjoy Koen's deadpan humor.

The text contains no meaning in any known European language, whether or not it was made in the early 1400's.

I personally believe that it's likely that the colors might have been added by someone else at a later time. However, if that is not the case, it’s possible the colors do not represent actual hues. Instead, they could serve as symbolic indicators-for instance, yellow petals or stems might signify that a plant is poisonous, blue might indicate the need for boiling, red could mean drying is required, and so on, following a system akin to herbalist or alchemist symbols. About the purple color - until the 19th century, purple dye was extremely rare and was primarily produced in the Byzantine Empire's specialized dye workshops. The decline of the Byzantine Empire began in the 14th century, and by the 1400s, most of its territory had fallen to the Ottomans, including regions known for producing the Tynian Purple. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the production of this color significantly stopped. It might just be an another clue suggesting that the VMS was really created in the early 1400s. Isn't it possible to carbon date the colors? The dyes could have some organic component - for example Tynian purple is made from aquatic snail's mucus.

Personally, I think your analysis is pretty interesting, but in my review of portions of the manuscript where the author appears to be writing individual symbols separately, one at a time, I count more letters than you suggest. (eg. F57v, F66r, and F76r) I count 24 to 30, though, admittedly, some rarely appear in text. However, many do appear to be composites of common simple structural elements, which could be interpreted as supporting the idea that single phonemes are made of multiple "characters". The trick of identifying what unit constitutes a "character" is not simple, but I think the folios I mentioned are suggestive of how the author viewed them. I've always thought that the clear componentized nature of the symbols was very suggestive of an artificially created system, rather than one that evolved organically. I don't think many would take issue with that as a conclusion. The trouble is that that same componentized nature muddies the issue of what constitutes a single symbol. Love your videos. They keep me thinking and learning. It's amazing how much a so-far-inscrutable problem like this forces us to learn.

So, AI has no idea either.. lol

Terrific video.

It is a product of someone’s colourful imagination.

The monasteries would make a lot of the books by commission from various nobles and well to do citizens. It is not a stretch to think that at some point a monk cranked out nonsense for some illiterate that was buying a book as a status symbol. But this is exactly what these Ai LLM's could solve by comparing word associations and lengths to all known languages in a matter of hours.

"you wouldnt call these paintings fake just because the text is made up" ummm yeah i would have but your intonation made it sound obvious not too so i wont i guess

is it a very old book, completed c1420? yes. is it total nonsense, presenting as found knowledge of a foreign culture to validate travel tales or generate fraudulent income? probably. A lot of effort to no conceivable purpose other than fraud. A person with a wealth of time and creativity would make it less venal, an art project, as it were. But still to be considered a fake from c1420, until a key to translate is determined.

A lot of people claiming it could be a work of a mentally ill person or someone autistic or some example of outsider art in the comments. But it feels the sheer cost of such an endeavor would eliminate that possibility, no?

Fantastic video, as usual. Thank you.

What if it’s just a sketch book?

I've yet to hear any rebuttal to the linguistic analysis highly suggesting its just some algorithmically generated gibberish.

I think the Rohonc Codex is less popular because it doesn't look as good and the text looks much more like obvious gibberish, where the Voynich Manuscript really looks like somebody is fluently writing a proper script. So you think "I SHOULD be able to figure this out", while the Rohonc looks like "this is a big mess!" 😀

I'm going to feed the algorithm before even watching this. A channel with 2k subs, tackling a well-covered and controversial subject, for 31minutes? I am impressed just by the ambition and initiative. The next 31minutes is your chance to win a sub.

A video where you talk about what we can know about the author of the Voynich manuscript would be interesting. Like, is it fair to say he had a lot of disposable income?

Agreed, it's genuine 15th century junk.