Gordon Rugg, at the School of Computing and Mathematics at Keele University, has an nice article on the Voynich MS in this month’s Scientific American. In it he investigates whether a Cardan grille, an early cryptological technology, could have been used to generate a text like the Voynich’s. (He also has an article in the January 2004 issue of Cryptologia, 28.1.) Anyway you look at it, and lots have, the Voynich MS is just one of those things you keep coming back to or running across in strange contexts. Whether it’s stereo instructions in Martian or Edward Kelley’s hoax to bilk Rudolf II out of some ducats, it’s always be something extra especial to me. [via Erling Wold; note an earlier entry at Language Log on the Economist’s notice of Dr Rugg’s theory; and unfortunately I did not find anything at Languagehat’s]
Posted by jim at June 23, 2004 12:29 PM | TrackBackFor some reason I've never been able to work up much interest in Weird Manuscripts; they can be quite attractive esthetically, but there's not much for my linguistic hooks to fasten on. Ditto for, eg, the Phaistos Disk. I like languages, not gibberish.
Posted by: language hat on June 23, 2004 01:53 PMHow do you feel about the Indus Valley script seals? Or the Zagreb mummy?
Posted by: jim on June 23, 2004 02:02 PMsomeone should apply that base26 3D thing to the Voynich...
Posted by: etaoin on June 23, 2004 08:49 PMThe Indus Valley stuff is too exiguous to be of much interest linguistically; in fact, I've seen a suggestion that it's not even the written form of a language. I hadn't known about the Zagreb mummy (aka Liber Linteus), so thanks for bringing that to my attention; Etruscan is more interesting, since we know something about it, but still it's more frustrating than not. I like languages I can sink my teeth into, not ones I have to nibble around at remnants of.
Posted by: language hat on June 26, 2004 12:34 PM
