Ref: Voynich MS
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To see the ms go to
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/ and search for "voynich".
Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
Article in Wired magazine
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/rugg.html?pg=1
Scientific American:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID ... 414B7F0000
Search the mail archives:
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voyni ... vmail.html
It's nice to see different issues at APOD, but this is one that can probably be dropped.
See:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com and:
http://www.forteantimes.com for further about this document.
Since more than ten years, a new attempt is being done by independent
researchers.
Here is the main Voynich MS mailing list:
http://www.voynich.net/ >
> And here is the most relevant web site:
http://www.voynich.nu/
Posters' questions (followed by partial answer): Qs: "I thought btw that an ink analysis had been done already but I see no reference to it or to a carbon-dating analysis of the composition of either the vellum or the watercolors. Does anyone have info on this - spectrographic analysis would require minute quantities of these items - or on any description of the several pages now missing from the MS?" "PS- The coloring on the various illustrations is very sloppy, indeed. I wonder who did that amateur work and when the coloring was applied?" A: "From a quick grep of the archives carbon dating has not been attempted. There are two main problems for carbon dating:
1. At best the vellum could be dated. This doesn't help date the writing.
2. Carbon dating is difficult for anything between 1600-1950, as there isn't much difference in the decay levels"
One transcription program: "Let me try to explain the purpose of the substitute letter schemes. It's quite easy to write a program to count the most commonly occuring words in a piece of text:
Code:
perl -e '$/=" ";while(<>){$word s{$_}++} foreach(keys %words){push(@freq,sprintf("%06d %s",$words{$_},$_))} print join"\n",sort @freq'
But such a program will only take input from a text file. That means a file written with letters like the ones we have on our keyboards. Since the voynich manuscript isn't written with these letters, my program won't work on it directly. "
Question on program: "have you run your PERL code with any of the transcribed alphabets other than EVA? Several appear here:
http://www.voynich.nu/writing.html "