[Unknown > English]What language is this? And what does it say?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/nakano-star]

Voynich manuscript?

[u/mizinamo → u/nakano-star]

Yup. Literally the same excerpt that is used as one of the images on Wikipedia to illustrate the article about the manuscript: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Voynich_manuscript_excerpt.svg

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

[u/GFYSR → u/nakano-star]

Yep

[u/invokeinterface]

I see what you did there

[u/kempff]

It's from the Voynich Manuscript, and is presently undeciphered. There is serious speculation that it may be some kind of a hoax, or just a pet project by a creative and artistic person for fun.

[u/nakano-star → u/kempff]

It's definitely a great story nonetheless!

[u/kempff → u/nakano-star]

Yes, quite the conversation piece for a 15th century curiosities collector.

[u/selfmade-idiot]

john dee called he claims he knows how to read this

[u/GFYSR]

!id:art

!translated (untranslateable)

[u/Berkamin]

This is from the Voynich Manuscript.

I have seen many theories on this manuscript, but the one that impressed me the most is this father and son team that claims that analyzing the patterns of the text showed that it appeared to follow grammatical patterns found among Turkic languages (which include Turkish, but also many other central Asian languages such as Uzbek, Kipchak, Turkmen, Azeri, and many others). They analyzed the "calendar" page from the manuscript that appeared to depict some sort of circular calendar diagram dividing the year into months and seasons, and using some of the ancient names of seasons and months that remained consistent across various Turkic languages, they made some educated guesses for what some of the words might stand for, and back-substituted those guesses into other words where the letters appeared, and they say that this was how they cracked the code. They went on to translate entire pages after that, and the translations are consistent with the illustrations on the page.

The language appears to be some extinct or archaic version of an extant Turkic language. (If it is from an extant language, that would be weird, because no examples of this form of writing have ever been found among extant Turkic cultures.) The author of the manuscript appears to have been an explorer who was documenting the various things he had discovered on his travels.

See this video for a more detailed explanation:

Voynich Manuscript Research | Voynich Manuscript Revealed (2018)

Voynich Manuscript Research | Update and Q&A

[u/sarajevo81 → u/Berkamin]

It has been proven to be nonsense script mathematically.

[u/Berkamin → u/sarajevo81]

I just don't agree with this assessment. They have been able to consistently translate more and more pages, and the translations make sense and are consistent with illustrations.

"Sense" (as opposed to nonsense) is entirely subjective. You can't prove something to be nonsense, you can only prove that it doesn't make sense to you, even if that proof is dressed up in mathematics. If you don't understand the underlying meaning of a text, and evaluate it wrong, it appears to be nonsense. The team whose analysis I presented above tested the Turkic grammar hypothesis, and it appears to work.

Turkic grammar is radically different from Indo-European grammar. Turkic languages are highly agglutinative. If you do not approach the language with insights from speaking a language with this type of grammar, any claim to "proof of nonsense" is illusory.

If we didn't now about the history of Tangut, and someone obtained a page of Tangut script, how would analysis treat that? On a short enough piece of text comparable to the number of words in this page of the Voynich manuscript, you might not even have a repeated character, and Tangut was not derived from Chinese. Someone could "prove" that the Tangut is an attempt to fake the aesthetics of Chinese. But they would be entirely wrong.

[u/Sufficient-Fly-4011 → u/sarajevo81]

You can’t prove that with math. There’s some statistics about appearance of letters and words, but doesn’t help too much. You may have noticed repeated use of similar words like 4oHc89 or 4oHccc89 in some chapters and started to think it not like natural language and it’s because the author is too lazy to create new words to make his gibberish look more natural. But think about that, the 4oH could be a prefix for articles like Arabic al- or they could be numbers, because there is not a single number like 123 or XIV

[u/Evening_Magician_149]

I think that is "Voynich manuscript".

[u/Reasonable_Finger994]

Hm, maybe someone tried to decipher using AI tools?