Jacob Collard, a sophomore at Big Walnut High School (in Delaware County, Ohio), put together a Science Fair project entitled “Comparison of Grapheme Frequencies and Locations in Undeciphered Voynich Script and Geographically Similar Languages“. This so impressed the judges that he was asked to take it forward to the Central District Science Day at Columbus State Community College, where he won the “Best Linguistics Project for a High School Student Award” (according to this page). Congratulations to him!
Jacob now has four weeks before the “60th Annual State Science Day […] on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University” – if he’d like someone to cast a Voynichological eye over his work and perhaps suggest some fixes or improvements before May 9th, I’m sure I could find a ready volunteer. 🙂
Hmmm… how long before teachers start using the Voynich Manuscript in junior school to teach children how not to do history? It can be more valuable to know what to avoid, wouldn’t you say? 😮
You have some syntactic ambiguity here. Is it comparison between grapheme frequencies and locations in undeciphered Voynich script and languages that are geographically similar (to Voynichese,) or in undeciphered Voynich script and languages that are geographically similar (to each other)? The latter makes more sense, but, alas, is not guaranteed.
I agree, it would be best to teach students how not to do history. However, at that stage it’s a challenge just to teach them history, period.
In the US, high school is usually from ages 16-18. I don’t know how junior school in the UK works.
Cheers,
Dennis
Hi Dennis,
Given that I haven’t seen the project myself, I’m not (yet) in a position to say what its title means. 🙂
To me, the ultimate point of learning history is to enable people to integrate historical research thinking in their lives – and so teaching them what to avoid when doing this is no more than cutting to the chase, in my opinion! And the younger the better! 🙂
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
Well, you and I might think that way! However, I think the intent of teaching kids about history is to inform them of their heritage. Any society wants to do that.
I do believe that school and certainly college should teach people to think, which would include regarding what they were taught of their own history and heritage a bit critically. All too often it never happens, even in college. 🙁
Off my soapbox,
Dennis
Hello, I’m the author of the project. The title meant a comparison of the frequencies in the script and languages that are geographically similar to the Voynich manuscript. I suppose I could have made that less ambiguous. Thanks for the tips, though.
I am his dad. Just had to let you know that Jacob’s Voynich project got all perfect scores at the State Science Fair and Jacob won a big scholarship too.
— Proud Poppa
Hi Jacob,
I’m not really sure what tips you’re referring to here – if my, errrm, not-so-secret informant is correct, it seems that you did perfectly well without any outside help. Congratulations! 🙂
Anyway, if you ever happen to want ideas for follow-up Voynich-related science-fair-style projects that are both interesting and worthwhile doing, please drop me a line, I’d be delighted to suggest a few! 🙂
Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….
Hello.
Science fair is coming up again and I haven’t been able to come up with any ideas on my own it seems. Therefore I would be quite appreciative if you could give me some of the ideas that you mentioned. I would be very interested – at the very least – to hear them. Thank you very much.
Jacob
I’m not sure what is meant by ‘geographically similar’. Jacob, could you explain?