I just saw a nice little online article courtesy of Clara Chow of the Straits Times, riffing on a whole load of different unreadable books.
The trigger for her article is Iterating Grace, a short-story-sized illustrated bookette stunt clearly designed to mystify idiot tech startup thought leaders, particularly those with foolishly high opinions of themselves. (Errrm… that didn’t narrow it down half as much as I hoped. But never mind.)
Of course, this being the Internet and all, you only have to blink once before more stuff gets pulled unwillingly from the shadows into the light, in this case an alleged connection between “Iterating Grace” and an artist called Curtis Schreier, who long ago was part of a stunt-liking art collective called “Ant Farm”. And so it goes on.
Chow goes on to mention various vanity books (A. M. Monius’ philosophy book, a book by “Joe K” who is probably Swede Petter Nordlund), as well as Robin Sloan’s (2013) novel “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore”, which I haven’t yet read (but sounds entertaining).
She has the Book of Soyga wrong, though: Jim Reeds famously worked out its algorithmic workings a decade ago. And as for a certain academic linguist’s I-can-read-nine-Voynich-words-all-of-them-‘meh’ self-asserted decryption… the less said the better.
Chow had fun joining all the dots together: but I don’t think she really understands that we are deep into the Freemium decade, and that blogs and social meedja posts are often just famebait, trying to dig over some virtual field-shaped community to plant a carefully crafted fame seed in. Ultimately, is “Iterating Grace” any less vain than the preening dotcom vanity it lightly satirizes? I don’t think so, but feel free to have your own opinion.
As for the poor old Voynich Manuscript, people deliberately misgrasp that at every turn to serve their own ends, to the point that their misgraspingness isn’t even funny any more. It’s hard not to conclude that His Royal Baxness and even Baron Ruggish have far less interest in the Voynich Manuscript itself than in what they think the Voynich Manuscript can do for their marvellous Middle England academic career vectors. In that respect, I think they both come across as just as shallow, despicable, meaningless, and indeed sickeningly modern as that most Freemium of casual games: Goat Evolution.
I kid you not.
You know, it makes me think: would it even be possible to decode just nine words of the Voynich Manuscript? If you believe–like Bax (and myself)–that the manuscript is written in the plain, you can’t really read more a few words or characters without pretty much the whole lot becoming swiftly readable.
Any substantial selection of the fifteen to twenty most common characters would soon reveal numerous full words and many more partial words, and these in turn would reveal the language. The rest would come by stages as every iteration fed back into the solution–assuming the first characters were right–with more characters revealing more words and a better understanding of the script and the language. All but the most obscure bits would soon have at least a working solution, even if the details still needed work.
I think, and this is a serious allegation, Bax cannot have believed when he revealed his initial results that they were right. He had values for 10-12 letters–over half the script–yet could produce no serious readings of continuous text. I struggle to think of a decipherment where such a result was true, especially for such a small and homogenous script as in the Voynich Manuscript. Maybe Grotefend with Old Persian cuneiform, but really only Grotefend’s theory was sounds, not his assignments.
In short, you either got it or you ain’t, and he ain’t close.
Dear Nick, No comment. Cross my heart (at least on this page). Instead, a big sm-i-i-i-le !
😉
“people deliberately misgrasp that at every turn to serve their own ends” – true.
What I appreciate is that so far I’ve not noticed that Gordon Rugg or Stephen Bax (or you, for that matter) – indulge in that nastiest sort of back-fence gossip sort of sabotage as a way to maintain a position, whether or not valid.
You know the sort of thing: “Oh, dear, poor little [x] you know they do try, but I wouldn’t bother reading them; waste of time” – with the unspoken implication that anyone who does read them is less intelligent, or of a lesser social standing than the speaker had thought.
Nick, I’ve seen people sell others out as the price of a three-second sound-bite that would make it to television!
But less dramatically, who exept the retirees and some of your columns’ anyonymous or pseudonymous commenters isn’t really involved in this area for reasons that others could label mere ambition or pure ego?
Put it this way: represent the written part of the text with a figure for the mind of the Almighty. OK – some people say it’s reality is obvious, from the phenomena; others argue that the phenomena prove it’s non-reality. People produce lots of logic and very little reason, and the whole thing devolves into sects and their diverse theologies, which one may differ from only at penalty of being badly burned, burned out or “flamed forever”.
Once you realise the religious character of Voynich studies, then it may be easier to avoid some of the usual follies.
Good work, nick. May the fogey-man never get you.
Obviously written by Nick Bantock and delivered by Trystero potsage.
Emma: thank you so much for this post, which has brightened up my morning.
If the text of the Voynich Manuscript were a natural language (known or unknown) written in an unfamiliar script, then identifying nine words and values for half of the characters should be enough to make further progress in the manner you describe. The same would also apply for breaking a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. You are absolutely, completely, totally right.
I have no idea whether Prof. Bax genuinely believes his findings or not – I don’t know the man and can’t comment on that. But the history of decipherment of ancient scripts and languages is littered with stories of highly-regarded and very talented academics who have got things spectacularly wrong. I wonder if it is the determination (bloody-mindedness?) which means that they keep working with intractable material when lesser mortals might give up, but which also convinces them to persist with a flawed approach in the face of what others might consider compelling evidence?
And just to prove the rule, we have Hisperica famina; each letter perfectly legible and yet unintelligible for centuries.
Don: 🙂
ll cg Pl — “Voynich characters for the word ‘ill-eg-i-ble’
P tl i tl 1 d S —-“Voynich” characters and (tapped d or t)
for my online name: B d i d 1 dr : d or t always combine with l to make a tapped R sound. Backward facing S is ‘R’. Ampersand figure is syllable ‘aes’.
Nick knows the rest of the characters for ‘m’ and ‘n’. He can present them better on these pages because he can create half slashes to combine with full parenthesis to create Voynich alphabet letters “m” and “n”.
beady-eyed wonder-er (note the extra er)
Nick: does this make me wonderful or “full-of-it”?
bead ier-eyed than ever………..
😀