The Voynich Manuscript is a unique document. We also have examples of people inventing new written languages for spoken languages that didn't have a (known) written form, so I think Occam's Razor would support the hypothesis that this is what happened with the VM.
How likely is it that someone (or even some group) trying to perpetrate a hoax would come up with a method which was not only undetectable by analytical tools available at the time but also by tools that wouldn't be invented even centuries later? I suppose we should compare it to the invention of the Vigenère cipher, in the 16th century, which was only broken in the 19th century.Ĭonversely, we have examples of texts written in forgotten languages which were later translated / remain untranslated, and we don't / didn't assume them to be hoaxes (assuming they obey Zipf's Law).
It's not unthinkable that it could be the result of a hoax, and I admit that there aren't a lot of examples of documents even remotely like the VM, but I still think that an Occam's Razor approach would rule out a hoax. The hypothesis was met with cold reception on the VMs mailing list and I never cared about it too much but I still find it more credible than the reading in this article. * What would you write on a book you have investigated? AFAIK, "sa" is a dialectal variation of "se". * The accents are exactly where they are supposed to be in Czech. It may have belonged to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) or to his physician Jakub Horčický (1575–1622), both living in Prague. * The manuscript has been traced back to the library of Georg Baresch (1590–1622) from Prague. In 2003, I posited that a Mr Tichý, an early researcher of the Voynich Manuscript scribbled this Czech "cipher" on its last page. Both mean "was investigated by 'no' Tichý" in Early Modern Czech. You get "sabádalo notichím" or "notichím sabádalo". Now reverse it, treating "ch" as one letter, like in Czech spelling.
So let us read it as "míchiton oladábas". If you look closer at "michiton oladabas", you will notice a smudge above the first "i" and a spot above the middle "a".
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