Which means the welsh flag is automatically one of the best flags in the world. And I prefer a lame dragon over a dog riding rabbit with a hunting snake any way.
I worked in a mental hospital once and there was a man there who had a journal that he carried around everywhere writing in it. He showed it to me once and asked me what I thought. I just smiled and nodded. There were hundreds of pages of jibberish. But, it was so neat, all in block letters. I wonder if in a hunderd years from now, someone will find this journal and spend years trying to decode it.
Oh man I was in rehab for two weeks in my youth because my parents found out I had smoked weed with a friend (which automatically makes me a full-blown addict in the eyes of my highly-conservative extremely-christian parents), and I had to sleep in a room with this elderly homeless guy who would just mutter creepy sh!t about seeing ghosts and demons and he filled a legal pad with beautiful cursive but ALL of it being scribblings about religion, predominantly, with a mix of the supernatural, though I guess they're sorta one in the same. Regardless, very strange and very disturbing to young me who was still too awkward and nervous to even feel comfortable speaking to a random cashier, much less being locked in a building with hardcore drug addicts and gang members for two weeks wtf it's like the goal was to turn me into one, I mean now I can't even go to my former church of 300ish (not that I was religious, but they were a second family since birth) people because my family had to announce that I was in rehab, and even though half the damn church pr more has smoked before, I still got treated as an extreme addict because no explanation was ever given and eventually no explanation was listened to -_- so I lost the church, local community college closed in my first semester, all but immediate family have died off, local mall gone, all friends moved away, and meanwhile everyone in this small town keeps an eye on me while avoiding me and my applications because they don't realize that the extent of my drug history is merely A. a couple times smoking weed and B. years of being forced on high doses of amphetamines throughout elementary-middle school... so yeah everyone around me has destroyed my life and I can't even eat anymore and am now down to 6'1 108lbs and do not know what to do as I am merely waiting to die at this point Dunno why I felt compelled to type all that here
@@variaxi935 damn.... That's rough. Well as one black sheep to another I feel you. Then again I don't think you deserve your black sheep status because that was forced on you
@@variaxi935 survive my friend. You're strong. Channel all those emotions into something positive and succeed. All while holding the middle finger up to those who cast you aside. They don't dictate your story. You do
One of the reasons it took so long to decode the Zodiac killer's cryptic notes is that he often made spelling mistakes or applied the rules of his own cipher incorrectly. Hence, code breakers needed to not only figure out the code but also reverse engineer his mistakes. In the 340 cipher he wrote letters diagonally, down 1 and two to the right. But at one point he fucked up and put a letter in the wrong spot, so if you tried to decipher it using his established rule set you get a message that contains quite a bit of gibberish. (For more details you can search UA-cam for "Let's Crack the Zodiac Episode 5 - The 340 is solved!") Makes me wonder if The Voynich Manuscript is so difficult to decipher for similar reasons.
Curious how chat GPT or something similar would work with this, "Hey chat GPT figure out how the english language alphabet connects with this cipher and include all possible variations containing more than 95% real words." or somthing.
The reason Wikipedia says "usually referred to as words" is because the characters in the Voynich manuscript haven't been deciphered yet, assuming they even can. So it is with an academic level of caution that they will not conclude that it is a written language or code unless it is proven to be so. The characters may not be an actual language, it could be a hoax or even gibberish. The point is no one knows for sure either way.
Also, lorem and ipsum are not words. Lorem ipsum text deliberately contains no actual meaningful words. They're just groups of letters that look very much like words.
@@pjweisberg you're correct in saying "lorem" isn't a word, but "ipsum" is, it's Latin. Most of the words in the lorem ipsum text are real Latin words, but some are cut up ones or latin words with the beginnings or ends chopped off (eg. Lorem is from dolorem) so you're sort of right.
Clearly the Ruthenian Kipaks, its a wetsernize oghuz turkic script very obvious. The Mongols defeated the Alans after convincing the Kipchaks to desert them through pointing at their likeness in language and culture.[28] Nonetheless, the Kipchaks were defeated next.[28] Under khan Köten, Kipchaks fled to the Principality of Kiev (the Ruthenians), where the Kipchaks had several marriage relations, one of which was Köten's son-in-law Mstislav Mstislavich of Galicia.[28] The Ruthenians and Kipchaks forged an alliance against the Mongols, and met at the Dnieper to locate them.[28] After an eight-day pursuit, they met at the Kalka River (1223).[28] The Kipchaks, who were horse archers like the Mongols, served as the vanguard and scouts.[28] The Mongols, who appeared to retreat, tricked the Ruthenian-Kipchak force into a trap after suddenly emerging behind the hills and surrounding them.[28] The fleeing Kipchaks were closely pursued, and the Ruthenian camp was massacred.he nomadic Kipchaks were the main targets of the Mongols when they crossed the Volga in 1236.[29] The defeated Kipchaks mainly entered the Mongol ranks, while others fled westward.[29] Köten led 40,000 families into Hungary, where King Bela IV granted them refuge in return for their Christianization.[29] The refugee Kipchaks fled Hungary after Köten was murdered.[29]
My thought on this: it would have taken someone sooooo long to create this book (even if there were several people working on it, although the style looks consistent to my untrained eye) that leads me to think it wasn’t a hoax. But more importantly, it would have cost SOOOO much to create. Those fold-out sheets of velum are usually sourced from a single animal, and the manuscript has many of them. It would just be an absolutely insane amount of time and money and work to put into something you just did for lols.
I haven’t watch the whole vid, yet, in the book the show andromeda as the spiral galaxy, note how this was probably wrote 1400s, back then they knew andromeda, but they didn’t know it was spiral, how did the creator of this book knew it?
In speech therapy we learned about "idioglossia" or "twin speak". There was a case study of two native American children with very little contact with people other than their grandmother. Would've been interesting to study, but ethically, it was decided to extinguish it in favor of a teaching an established language
I am looking forward to when Simon actually makes an episode for "Decoding the Unknown" about the Vatican Secret Archives that sounds very interesting lol
The issue with the secret archives is they're actually secret. People can apply to research items, but they only get access to the items they request. This makes it hard when the extent isnt known. I don't believe anyone just gets to wander around and look at things. This is from a vague memory of a researcher explanation of his access, and I could very well be wrong. Everything else you hear is supposition and conspiracy theory. I personally believe there a a lot of things I would love to know about, but I don't believe they're keeping vampires in the basement (which seems a pretty common theme jn a lot of fiction now).
I do want to put something out there about the bathing section as an art historian who has studied the fashion of this period and plans on getting her PhD in Medieval Studies. It’s very likely the women depicted are not pregnant because if you look at contemporary depictions of women (clothed and nude) their bodies are shaped to have distended stomachs, you see this in two of Jan Van Eyck’s works the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait where the woman is clothed and the Ghent Altarpiece showing Eve naked. Lucas Cranach also depicted Eve this way. I know it’s a little detail, but as a historian I just want to make sure that people get the right information.
I'm a fan of the Hungarian linguist who says linear A writing is related to extremely old hungarian writing. He's got some videos of presentations he's given, here on youtube!
One thing that comes to mind: the author might also be someone who "shouldn't" have been able to write, let alone write something "scientific", like a woman or a minority at the time. The coding might be to protect the people who might have been in danger if they wrote or read? Many women in history, for example, who were lucky enough to be able to be educated through happening to have the resources and supporting family, but would have written under male name and/or cyphers, especially if it's taboo subjects, like women's health, as suggested in the video? Dunno if that makes sense, but just an idea. Great video! I liked how this take on the manuscript is sensible. Great work, mate.
I agree. It also makes me think of book that has been in my family for generations. It's purpose was "things for my children to know" . It's part Marcus Aurelius type musings, part Samuel Pepys, part recipes and notes on harvests as well as family and local gossip. There are notes about animal husbandry and some remedies. Since it's been written by many hands and annotated over the years, including doodles or art depending on your point of view - it can seem crazy in parts. It also has different hand writing & different language notes at times. Why? Who knows. But it makes me think if my family did things like this, other people did as well. Addition: as a kid I was scandalized by the doodles of penises and animals having sex but my granddad said that people have been doing that as long as they could doodle.
Was just going to say this, it’s very telling that all the suggested authors are male and in positions of wealth… To me it screams that it was a woman or a group of women possibly gathering different cultures menstruation practices, possible ways of terminating pregnancy, or alleviating pain or discomfort. In other parts of the world there are similar coded works that can never be decrypted as all the authors were killed as heretics and the like. reproductive health and women being healers and midwives in general was seen as witchcraft and devil work not to be spoken of. 🤷🏻 I find the theories in this video fascinating as they are so different from what I saw the second I looked at the pages. But who am I to say 😂
@@ninjafoxgamesgeekery there are 2 (that i can think of right now) possibility's why they haven't jet 1 the plants are extinct or 2 the images are drawn vaguely enough that without reading the text or knowing anything about it you can't narrow down which plant's they are.
I REALLY find that idea of a family wisdom book. That has to be a source of incredible wisdom if ya understand it all. How far does it date back, do you know? Also, do you know whos original idea it was?
27:30 -- The theory that it was a hoax perpetrated by Voynich is patently silly. The parchment alone would have been so expensive as to make its sale an absolute necessity. Most "parchment" you can find these days isn't the real thing, just paper that's been treated to behave similarly to parchment when drawn or written on. The real thing is extremely laborious to make and calling for a large amount of animal skin, and is extremely expensive even today. It was so expensive in the old days that it was common for old parchment to be recycled. A book or other manuscript that was no longer useful would have its original writing scraped or washed off and its parchment reused. This is called a palimpsest. This also argues against it being a medieval hoax. This would have been an extraordinary expense for something meant as a sort of joke.
Agreed. I think it's probably the personal notebook or some late medieval polymath/alchemist type trying to protect his ideas if not hide them from whatever reigning orthodoxy at the time. I've looked through the manuscript and I'm almost confident that the colours were added later for several reasons. I think the original author did not use colour but probably a child got their hands on it somewhere during its long history.
The "hoax" would be to sell it for a large amount of money as a book of ancient secrets. Though we don't know its early history, so there's no way to be sure. It would have taken a lot of work, to be sure. And involved multiple people. Book creation was not a solo activity. Preparation of the parchment, formatting of the text and illustrations, art, calligraphy and binding all involved different specialists for most manuscripts. It's possible someone did both calligraphy and art, but it would still need craftsmen to make it a book. The creation of a fake code and language would also need some work to be passed off as the real thing.
@@greghenrikson952 Yes, that would be the plan, but it's a risky venture considering the investment of money and time. Also, given the quality of the illustrations, I'd be perfectly prepared to believe the same person did both the text and art. Binding may well have involved a specialist, but they wouldn't have carried much about the content.
@@ThatWriterKevin Sorry if that seemed redundant. I tended to comment as the video progresses, as a kind of reaction, and sometimes I bring up things that are mentioned later.
I've seen dozens of breakdowns on the Voynich Manuscript over the years. This one is by far the most honest and critical one, and that's refreshing as hell. I didn't even know that it's 90% consistent.
For just over 30 years, I've had a feeling that bit in the Simpsons where Kang (or maybe Kodos) blows the dust of the book "How to Cook Humans" to read "How to Cook FOR Humans", then Lisa blows off more dust to reveal "How to Cook FORTY Humans", and so on and so forth, had to be referencing something! And it looks like Fact Beard (and co.) found it for me. Legends! ❤
My personal theory? It was written about women's health, by women, possibly Jewish women (which is new based on Kevin's points). I find it darkly hilarious that the two major authors about a book that appears to be a medical book for women are two men. Voynichese could be something like Nüshu, the Chinese writing system developed by peasant women and passed down in secret for centuries. The writing system was unknown outside its native province until the 1980s, despite being in use for at least a thousand years. Also, now I want some reactions from Simon to the drawings done in other medieval manuscripts. The art is very simplistic to modern eyes and gets straight-up weird at times. The Voynich manuscript would fit right in!
yeah, a lot of those plants appear to be medicinal (or previously thought to be medicinal) plants (many of them used historically to induce abortions, as contraceptives, to help alleviate menopause symptoms, etc)
“To Serve Man” is based off a short story by the same name. The short story make a little more sense since the translator that cracked the code took a job at the alien embassy because he did not trust the aliens and stole the book and a dictionary to translate it. Still a little cheesy but a lot less clumsy than that episode. A rare time where the twilight zone did not do the source material justice
The cost of paper, ink and pigments, the ammount of time it would take to make, and the meticulousness of the calligraphy all point to not being just a random prank.
Have you ever been to or seen pictures of Burning Man? It's a massively expensive art festival with no discernable point. No reason to think people haven't been the same for ages.
@MeanBeanComedy I didn't say it's a prank, I'm saying it's a creative outlet. For all we know, it's actually the first DnD type supplementary guide for another game lost to time.
@timtheskeptic1147 I think the burning man and manuscript are different. See, since burning man is still alive and well as a cultural gathering, we know and will continue to know in the coming future it's just a symbol for a festival. If you left one unburned in the middle of a field undiscovered for hundreds of years, nobody would know what it means. The amount of wood wouldn't say what it was for as woods cheap enough, so it could appear to be religious, aliens, etc. The manuscript though, in a time with no typewriters or computers, to contain that much paper, neat looking writing, the cost of the material, there is no way it's just the ramblings of a random man. It could be ramblings or nonsense by a rich man, but it is likely to have some meaning in it. One theory of the manuscript being written in a language of folklore or as a companion piece to fiction in a constructed language (if jrr tolkien wrote an elvish book) is fascinating, as it points out the lack of context we're missing on it. It could be a cryptic message, a contructed language book, or ramblings of a rich man. And since we don't know who wrote it, it could be any of those or more.
I believe it could be a recipe/ healing book (aka grimoire) that was a generational/collaborative effort of many women. It's common for family recipe books to be written in multiple languages and handwriting and to contain everything from foraging instructions to healing rituals or instructions on treating ailments. That's your doctor when you live in the medieval rural countryside. I can show you at least 4 recipes that look like ciphers but it's just great grandma's shaky handwriting and use of informal measurements.
I was thinking something similar. Like a midwives compendium. So much knowledge was lost when the church was punishing women for their healing, especially childbirth and such.
yes, but wasn't it established it was actually a travelling merchant book compeding plants to sell and their used (imagined or true) in medieval medecine or for ritual and ornementation?...
I also believe the author/s were female. They probably did their best to write things down in a written language that was known to the family or community but not known to outsiders. They also probably didn’t like how edits looked so they just didn’t make them. Probably was passed down in a family and then at some point it gets stored and forgotten about and continues changing hands without it’s knowledge
Growing up we used farmer almanacs for signs of incoming temperate or harsh seasons. Such as when caterpillars would show up or where squirrels build nests. Caterpillars giving signs of when and how much rain to expect. If the majority of squirrel nests were near the trunk of tree of away from trunk. Near trunk would mean a harsh and cold winter, while away from trunk meaning a milder winter. If lots of nests you could expect the acorn drop to be less and if nests were few and far between a bumper crop of acorns would drop. Research has shown that oak trees are cyclical and will drop a lot of nuts one or two years then not be as fruitful for the next couple. Squirrels would be plentiful the year after a bumper crop and less populous after a small crop. Expecting a bumper crop you could look forward to having more deer around for harvesting or maybe not have to buy as much grain for pigs as they could forage acorns for that time of year. Not saying all information in an almanac is true, just saying it does have some merit as an observational journal of some natural occurrences.
3 hours offline? Poor baby. I just spent 5 weeks offline plus no phone, which depended on internet. I’m rural but have had internet for 20 years, so when I went in to report outage, they blamed it on that. I could describe 5 weeks of my rage, their incompetence and prevarication and repeated useless service calls, but nobody really cares. My son-in-law drove from Denver to Texas. He fixed it in 15 minutes. For my weeks of outage Optimum gave me a credit of $11.47 US. I did become reacquainted with the public library, various restaurants’ free wi-fi, and sitting in big-box stores’ parking lots to use internet and answer voicemail. Really opened my eyes to how dependent on connectivity we are. Voynich manuscript is one of my favorite topics-enjoyed this analysis. Stay healthy Simon.
6:00 Bravo, Kevin! On that note, here's a joke I heard at a local Irish (music) session: Q: As the saying goes, "the sun never sets on the British Empire." Why is this true? A: Because even God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark.
Thats awesome. What is their reasoning? Im unfamiliar with the voynich manuscript but i have a dwarf from the dm's guide tattooed on me so... im game for some weirdness.
35:14 the transition between Simon talking about waiting for his son to take over his UA-cam Empire and "He lived in Prague where he was far more interested in scholarly pursuits with his friends" had me thinking we were still talking about Simon's son for a sec 😂
Thanks for the script Kevin! We love TTZ in my family. My great? aunt wrote the Time Enough At Last episode. Lyn Venable. My daddy looked up to her, always so proud of that episode, lol. And yes Simon, you SHOULD trust Kevin, lol. Hes a big brain!!!!
That episode mad me so sad when I saw it as a young teenager that it still comes to mind and hurts my heart even now in my 50’s. I’ve only ever seen it the one time. That’s good writing, in my opinion.
31:50 -- Fun fact: from 98-180 AD the Roman Empire was ruled by a succession of emperors now known as "The Five Good Emperors". And they _were_ good, both in the morally and in terms of competence. The offices that collectively provided the emperors with their power were inherited under established Roman law, but none of the Five Good Emperors (until the last) allowed one of their natural children to inherit. Instead, they'd identify a good, competent man who they felt would do a good job as emperor and legally adopt him, then will all his titles to him. This worked out wonderfully until the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, spoiled it all by allowing his natural son Commodus to inherit.
@@the_once-and-future_king. Sadly, he did not. The historical Commodus was assassinated in his bath, strangled by a wrestler sent there for the purpose. It would have been better doing it Crowe's way. Commodus loved to fight as a gladiator, but all his opponents just let him win. If someone had actually fought and killed him it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Commodus was truly nuts, and in his case we have first-hand accounts and epigraphical evidence, unlike Caligula. For example, he eventually took 12 names for himself (Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius) and then renamed everything after himself, including the months of the year (1 of his names for each month) and the city of Rome itself, among many other institutions. His full 12 names were literally carved in stone all across the Empire.
When I saw it I immediately assumed it was a medical manual like the Tacuinum Sanitatis. It looks like the early 15th century to me but that may just be because the only similar manuscripts I've seen were copied about that time. (edit. checks out) I looked it up and it turns out it HAS been translated and is not a new language or code, it's a form of Latin shorthand based on a system of Latin epigraphy abbreviations. The text itself is actually copied from sections of many other health guides. This was a common practice. (edit. spoke too soon. the Latin epigraphy angle is disputed)
39:25 for clarification, that table (probably) isn't some attempt to map any _meaningful_ connection between Voynich and roman character sets, just a simple transliteration to a computer friendly character set that can be used for programmatic analysis of the text, as Voynich characters have no standard Unicode definition, any of those characters could be mapped to whatever standardised Unicode character you desired, but the ASCII Latin block is typically preferred for ease of use and comparability, and that table specifically seems to be an ad-hoc standard roughly mapping each to their most visually similar counterpart for the sake of our human brains more than the computers
Hey I've got an interesting topic you guys might want to do a video on! There was a black man who died in 1929 in Sabina, Ohio. A white funeral home (you know, with Jim Crow and everything going on then the race is definitely relevant) embalmed the body and waited for someone to claim it... For MANY years. Over that time the man became a tourist attraction and the funeral home would rent him out to events, he was stolen a few times, and other horrific things were done with him. The poor guy was on display until he received a proper burial in the 1960s. Since nobody ever claimed the body his real identity was never revealed. So who was "Eugene the mummy" really? It remains to be a mystery! I saw a video on Ask a Mortician that briefly covered this and became really curious. Would be interesting to see the writer's input on this as well as Simon's opinions. I think what happened to him was truly disrespectful and a video like this could spark some speculation that might lead to his identity finally being known.
@@ThatWriterKevin and to add to my previous comment, if there's not enough info about poor Eugene for a full episode you could also include some other notable unidentified bodies from throughout history.
The saddest thing is, they could have easily worked their own Rosetta Stone into that Twilight episode. The aliens were diplomats, after all, so it would make perfect sense for them to give humanity some tablet to commemorate their alliance, which said something like "Peace between worlds" in both their language and English. Then they get the cookbook from some skeptical human who snuck into one of their ships and grabbed something that looked important, compare it to the tablet, and then decode it. Anyway yeah, I work near Beinecke and I've seen the Voynich a bunch of times. It's often on display. It is a big weird book, and people claim they cracked it all the time, but there's no way it contains anything important.
Sorry, Simon, but "lorem" isn't a word (though "ipsum" is)! The lorem ipsum placeholder text is a rough and ungrammatical transcription of a Latin passage from the Roman author Cicero, and the first word of the quote in the original is "dolorem". It's thought that the text was swiped from a 1914 book that printed the speech with the word "dolorem" split between two pages as "do-lorem". Because the swipe began on the second page, the text leaves out the "do-" and begins with "lorem", which is only part of a word in its source language. It's like quoting the Gettysburg Address, only instead of beginning with "Fourscore and seven years ago," you start with "ven years ago". "Ven" might be a word in some languages, but not in common English, and it makes no sense in this context.
@@InertiaCreeps I thought about using that example, but "score" is a word in English, and so is "go", so the only workable second syllable in the sentence was "ven".
Voynich manuscript inspired Czech painter Klara Sedlo to create series of paintings depicting several plants from Herbological section of the Manuscript
Honestly I feel like if/when it is finally deciphered and translated, if it does turn out to be a guide to 15th century herbal medicine and stuff, that would still be really interesting. Is it just me? Like that kind of stuff is fascinating to read. It's a unique little window into another time, a bygone way of life and worldview.
I had that exact frustrating rant regarding Comcast three weeks ago! I ended up screaming at their automated system for an hour before they finally transferred me to a guy in India who told me “you don’t need us to send out a technician to fix your internet.” Then he hung up.
Some letters in Greek, notably sigma, have different forms depending on where they appear in the word. Last I heard, Greek is an Indo-European language.
One letter* in Greek. Sigma is the only one. And the only variations it has are the "end of word" form and the "anywhere else" form. Having one letter with an "end" form and an "other" form is quite notably different from having many letters with a beginning form, a middle form, and an end form. This is a distinct feature of Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic-with, I believe, Arabic actually running with this a fair bit more than Hebrew-and is, indeed, not found in any Indo-European languages. Semitic languages, however, are not the only languages to exhibit this behaviour. For instance, the traditional writing system of pre-Soviet Mongolian, as well as Manchu, a now-endangered Tungusic language of Manchuria in Northeastern China, which uses an adapted form of the traditional Mongolian alphabet, display this same feature. In this orthography (writing system), very few letters do not have separate forms for all three positions. It also dates to circa 1204, so it's theoretically possible to have played some kind of influence on Voynichese, but I wouldn't exactly bet money on it.
Yeah but those are the kinds of strange things that appear in languages over hundreds of years of change. Not something someone would sit down and design.
I been watching this guy for a while (quite a while) and would think" though I subscribed " /" why do I keep getting unsub'd " come to find out he has a dozen channels. BRAVO
Considering the funds required to make this, the geography, as well as the education level required to be able to write absolutely anything, I would bet that part of why no one has deciphered this is because the writer probably didn't stick to one language. Adding a Cypher or Shor hand to something written in multiple languages would make it complete gibberish to someone who didn't speak all of those languages. If the writer was a jew, it would make even more sense, because they already were predisposed to speak multiple languages, and be on the outs with the catholic church. I don't think writing something in multiple languages would be that difficult either since when you're in areas where multiple languages are spoken you'll often hear people mashing words from various languages or dialects into one sentence. I mean, it happened often enough that Creole became it's own language...
I was just thinking about this theory! Not to mention, having knowledge of another language while making a cipher means not only can you switch between languages, but you could also use words from one while taking grammatical structures and writing patterns from another to make an odd amalgamation of constructed language and ciphered writing. That alone would make it difficult to translate, yet alone understand if it ever was deciphered.
Nice episode Kevin. Please don't dissappear like Callum did...I'm not sure I could handle it. Also, how about an episode on CC about Visalia Marauder/East Area Rapist/GSK,?
@@ThatWriterKevin how much to do GSK? I'm not above bribery. In my very humble opinion you would do it the best.not to offend the other writers, all are awesome. But you dig deep. I always learn something I didn't know from your research. I'm not a serial killer freak,, but grew up with Manson, Richard Trenton Chase, and GSK in my backyard. Covid was boring so I learned a bit about the Voynich Manuscript. Do you write for anyone else on UA-cam?
@@ThatWriterKevin Wow, thank you! I think I've been bugging Simon for around a year now though he probably does not realize it. Where shall I send the bribe? Lol
Joseph DeAngelo's 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch home in Citrus Heights was sold for $320,000, a price near the bottom of the market for three-bedroom homes in that area, the Sacramento Bee reported Tuesday.Dec 17, 2019
15:04 I'm guessing that the weather prediction in the farmers almanac refers to when a season would start as opposed to what's the weather going to be on a certain day. Hence the star charts. When planting crops it's good to know when you need to harvest them etc.
The book appears to be a medical book with a combination of herbs , astrology, etc. I think the book was written by several women. At the time women had to be very careful, otherwise they could be accused as witches. Is this forbidden knowledge that a group of women tried to write down? This information was written by uneducated women who probably struggled with the written language therefore there are many mistakes in creating the sentences. The reason there is no consistency in the writing? Another reason why it was ignored for so long? A health book for women, who would really care about that? Maybe the book was confiscated by clergy. If it was Jewish , the Catholics would have thought it was nonsense?
Just a minor point, but at the time and place, more men would have been accused of witchcraft than women. The shift to target women more and more predominantly came later, and most strongly in anglophone countries.
The book is written in a pidgen language based on the Manchu language. About 40% of the words are manchu, 25% are Hindi, with the rest believed to come from unknown languages from the Tibetian plateau. It is a school boys note book, believed to belong to a son of a merchant who was brought along to "learn the ropes". It contains random stuff from accounting tables to botanical info, to love poetry. It was cracked in 2008, by a bunch of computer scientist who did word matches based on obscure languages.
@@BillThanis I’m not finding this information in my search. Could you elaborate on who any of the computer scientists are, or perhaps where you read an article about this?
22:53 SCREAM-laughing over here. This Gollum v. Smeagol argument over whether it was wrong of Voynich to sell the book ...... that's really 50% Simon being his freak-ass self, and 50% Jen being the most brilliant editor on UA-cam.
💗💖💓 Great to listen to as always, Simon! Some recent scholarship and translation shows that this manuscript might be written in medieval Turkish - missed at first because so many were expecting it to be written or coded in An Indo-European language or a Semitic one.
You'd figure in that time period, most people were illiterate and would write out things they heard guessing about what it was, and so a lot of it is gibberish too, so someone added pictures. That actually is a very clever way to go. He's saying, well I can't write it out correct, so I will draw an illustration.
Antibiotics are so good man. My father in law suffered with lung cancer and unfortunately has passed away now. But through his treatment his immune system was so low he was susceptible to so many things. The answer was Antibiotics and they prolonged his life so much so we were able to have such precious more time with him before he went.
I was literally dying from an intestinal blockage and they gave me tons of pain meds which did nothing but the massive amounts of IV antibiotics worked their magic and kept me alive long enough for the swelling to go down and the blockage to clear. They also couldn't have operated without antibiotics so I would have died in my mid 20's without them. I think about that all the time. I'd have been one of those people who didn't live long enough to even think about old age.
38:58 Sounds like these letters are used to elude to verb tense, adjective/adverb alterations (think "cheeky" vs "cheekily" as an example), and the like. As I understand it, and as an example, Japanese doesn't conjugate verbs at all. It relies on the words around it to convey tense, time, etc. Some of what may be considered "letters" might actually be full words, or used to express language tense.
I love this! Just one thing tho. When you read the script it gets hard to understand quite often when you read it fast, and go from quite/loud. You change your reading speed (which is mostly fast), and dynamics very frequently. Reading it more clear and constant volume I think would help a lot. Maybe you've already heard/read it before but this is our first time hearing it so it takes a bit longer to get it the first time. Easy fix tho, other than that awesome vid.
Hey Simon can you do a video on one of your channels about the process of coming up with your stories and the process involved in writing and creating them? You punch out an insane amount of material. I am sure you have a team working for you, but it would be interesting to see what the process is.
Simon has a “How It’s Made: A TIFO Story” from 2017 on Today I Found Out. Since it’s years old I’m sure the process has changed some (or maybe a lot; time for a 2022 edition?)
I feel your pain for internet issues. My favorite is when they tell you to check their website for your internet outage issue. Just immediately assuming that you have a smartphone or other way of accessing their website. "Thanks guys, I'll check out your website for outages as soon as I have internet to check it"
You didn't mention Bax's work where he managed to decode some of the phonemic values of the script. He couldn't get far enough before he died though to decipher all of it.
I would LOVE to see Simon read a script by Kevin about the theories around the Legend of Zelda timeline. I feel like that would drive Simon to go into a ton of tangents…
Kevin should write this but only at the end is it revealed it was legend of Zelda. Or something like "Is this actual real life folklore or video game lore"
Isn't the timeline confirmed at this point? Like fans came up with the timeline including branching paths, and Nintendo looked at it and was like "yeah, that sounds good." I thought that was what happened anyway
This was made by an uneducated rural person that taught themselves an alphabet whilst gaining a reputation as a powerful healer. They were then accused of being g a witch and the book was taken to discover the pagan's secret. That could make a cool book actually...
The document has a lot of images analogs found with descriptions found in alchemical texts (and some of those were just crazy). A lot of people in the periphery of alchemy were persecuted and tried to share knowledge in secrecy, though if that's what this is it goes beyond my personal wildest imagination. Also I don't know why, but all the text seems closer to roman numerals to me than lettering. It's possible the symbols are numerical, which translates to lettering after? See now I have to learn more about this. Thank you for this video
I gotta say- dude when do you sleep!? You are EVERYWHERE on YT!!! I keep stumbling across you adorable face!! Don’t forget to sit back, relax and enjoy your successes!!!
I loved the outer limits. I used to watch it with my dad as a kid. When it would go to commercial and ask us to "please stand by" we'd stiffen up on the couch arms to our sides and legs outstretched and as soon as the first commercial came on we'd relax and giggle.
41:17 I think what you are looking at is a "bridge" type book. One that has "alchemical" origins, but will end up containing a number of principles of organic chemistry, with some possible additional work with regards to astronomy. Here's one other thing to note: it's not likely that any part of this book originated in China, or Eastern Asia, as they used a completely different astrological system: Western astrology is month-based, while Chinese Astrology is year-based. Further, based on this video, none of the astrological symbols shown are Chinese in nature. I won't discount the use of "Romanized-Mandarin" as a source language, but I wouldn't go much further east than India in trying to detect the necessary "destination language" to translate into.
Okay, but building off of the theory presented, if we remove repeating words or words that are two-fifths repeated under the assumption they're errors and we feed it through a cryptographically artificial intelligence program, what happens? Remember a few years ago when two universities with highly developed AI text bots put them together and within 13 seconds developed a secret language? We could tell it was a secret language because of the patterns of speech. So, if we remove anything probable to be an error from the input text, will a pattern emerge? With that pattern, would we not be able to figure out grammar and syntax, and, use the most tried and tested method, take common phrases/idioms from the 15th and 16th centuries and run them through the text to crack the code?
I am specializing in medieval manuscripts and their art. The art in this manscript is spot on for the age. Yes, within a couple of decades or so you'd get the likes of Donatello and Michelangelo, but art was still in that "weird" medieval style. Look at any image in a medieval manuscript, and the Voynich manuscript's drawings are similar.
From the first time I’ve heard about this, I thought that this is a created language. Fantasy stories to this day do that. I feel like this might’ve been the early working of a fantasy universe
Oh man, Simon, I feel you on the addiction of cigarettes. I tried my mom’s Marlboros lights and it took five months for me to stop craving it. And I’d only had, like, three or four puffs!
So I see you have no idea that’s not how addiction works. As a recovering drug addict and past alcoholic, a cigarette smoker, of 24 years. Give me a break. Unreal, But you weren’t even doing it properly they call it, bum puffing. Where you’re not actually inhaling the smoke into your lungs but only breathing it into your mouth.
@@kerrynicholls6683 I wish you luck in your recovery, but this is my experience. I have a lot of family with addiction, so I am familiar. Please be aware that everyone has different experiences with life. Good luck, and I hope everything goes well for you!
@@HavianEla Exactly. I hope you do well. I’m not trying to be a bitch or maybe I was either weigh I’ve been to hell and back and I have brain damage so yeah I’m not great. But I am glad 😀 for you.
@@HavianEla If your story is true then I assume you have a problem with controlling your weight glucose levels and caffeine intake unless you’ve managed to call your entire life without ever eating fat sugar or caffeine which are all addictive Along with many others that you’d be exposed to every day. God forbid you ever need narcotics in the hospital or take cough syrup with alcohol in it your life would be over
A few years back, a team announced the manuscript was in cyphered Turkish, and they were translating it. I'm guessing it didn't pan out, but does anyone know what happened to this theory?
It was never a serious theory. The father (Ahmet Ardic) and son made some fundamental errors in even their initial guesses (the form of the letter 7, for instance, looked more like ^ at the time), so assumed connections that simply weren't reasonable. It was rejected from every journal they submitted it to, and don't seem to have made any updates since 2019. The consensus is that it was a very impressive theory for amateurs, but without substance nonetheless.
Future people: “Leela, please decipher the Voynich Manuscript.” “Well that wasn’t so hard. People couldn’t do this before?” “Yeah, the past was the worst.”
I watched a video years ago (that I unfortunately can't remember enough about to find) that had a theory I find very believable. They proposed this was written by a wealthy but illiterate person making up the language as they went over the course of several years. At the time the parchment dates from literacy was rather spotty and money was no guarantee of it. There were many who gained wealth or power and could not read. Women especially were not always well educated. The theory is that the proposed author didn't know how to read but had seen books and art in the houses of other wealthy people and proceeded to make up her own language/art to write down things she was learning about, family stories, and folk wisdom. The reason there are no other books like this could be that she learned to actually write, or that she married into another household that didn't indulge her in her pursuits.
I think the problem with this theory is that the writing is too patterned for it to be something someone illiterate scribbled or made up as they went along. There are around about 24 characters and words repeat far too many times. Also the writing is far too neat for someone who had never been shown how to hold a quill. I think conlang or maybe forgotten language or dialect?
Some years ago I had a problem with Vodafone. Eventually I got to speak with someone in the "Retentions Department". This was where they would sort out your problem, once you tell them you're moving to another provider.
Could they get DNA from the animal skin pages and at least know the region the skins came from? Then they could narrow down the area or looks at trade routes from that area.
"its a pretty lame dragon too, but a lame dragon is cooler than no dragon" made me burst out laughing, we love dragons here on decoding the unknown
You're goddamn right we do!
Komodo or Fairytale? 🙃
@@kellyscott6361 all of the above
@@katiewatie2458 🤣🤣🤣Keep the content coming - love this channel and the others you all do 💕
Which means the welsh flag is automatically one of the best flags in the world.
And I prefer a lame dragon over a dog riding rabbit with a hunting snake any way.
I worked in a mental hospital once and there was a man there who had a journal that he carried around everywhere writing in it. He showed it to me once and asked me what I thought. I just smiled and nodded. There were hundreds of pages of jibberish. But, it was so neat, all in block letters. I wonder if in a hunderd years from now, someone will find this journal and spend years trying to decode it.
Did you react beyond smiling and nodding? I may have asked if it was in code
Oh man I was in rehab for two weeks in my youth because my parents found out I had smoked weed with a friend (which automatically makes me a full-blown addict in the eyes of my highly-conservative extremely-christian parents), and I had to sleep in a room with this elderly homeless guy who would just mutter creepy sh!t about seeing ghosts and demons and he filled a legal pad with beautiful cursive but ALL of it being scribblings about religion, predominantly, with a mix of the supernatural, though I guess they're sorta one in the same. Regardless, very strange and very disturbing to young me who was still too awkward and nervous to even feel comfortable speaking to a random cashier, much less being locked in a building with hardcore drug addicts and gang members for two weeks wtf it's like the goal was to turn me into one, I mean now I can't even go to my former church of 300ish (not that I was religious, but they were a second family since birth) people because my family had to announce that I was in rehab, and even though half the damn church pr more has smoked before, I still got treated as an extreme addict because no explanation was ever given and eventually no explanation was listened to -_- so I lost the church, local community college closed in my first semester, all but immediate family have died off, local mall gone, all friends moved away, and meanwhile everyone in this small town keeps an eye on me while avoiding me and my applications because they don't realize that the extent of my drug history is merely A. a couple times smoking weed and B. years of being forced on high doses of amphetamines throughout elementary-middle school... so yeah everyone around me has destroyed my life and I can't even eat anymore and am now down to 6'1 108lbs and do not know what to do as I am merely waiting to die at this point
Dunno why I felt compelled to type all that here
@@alexc2265 definitely do not ask them that
@@variaxi935 damn.... That's rough. Well as one black sheep to another I feel you. Then again I don't think you deserve your black sheep status because that was forced on you
@@variaxi935 survive my friend. You're strong. Channel all those emotions into something positive and succeed. All while holding the middle finger up to those who cast you aside. They don't dictate your story. You do
One of the reasons it took so long to decode the Zodiac killer's cryptic notes is that he often made spelling mistakes or applied the rules of his own cipher incorrectly. Hence, code breakers needed to not only figure out the code but also reverse engineer his mistakes. In the 340 cipher he wrote letters diagonally, down 1 and two to the right. But at one point he fucked up and put a letter in the wrong spot, so if you tried to decipher it using his established rule set you get a message that contains quite a bit of gibberish. (For more details you can search UA-cam for "Let's Crack the Zodiac Episode 5 - The 340 is solved!") Makes me wonder if The Voynich Manuscript is so difficult to decipher for similar reasons.
Curious how chat GPT or something similar would work with this, "Hey chat GPT figure out how the english language alphabet connects with this cipher and include all possible variations containing more than 95% real words." or somthing.
The reason Wikipedia says "usually referred to as words" is because the characters in the Voynich manuscript haven't been deciphered yet, assuming they even can. So it is with an academic level of caution that they will not conclude that it is a written language or code unless it is proven to be so. The characters may not be an actual language, it could be a hoax or even gibberish. The point is no one knows for sure either way.
Also, lorem and ipsum are not words. Lorem ipsum text deliberately contains no actual meaningful words. They're just groups of letters that look very much like words.
@@pjweisberg you're correct in saying "lorem" isn't a word, but "ipsum" is, it's Latin. Most of the words in the lorem ipsum text are real Latin words, but some are cut up ones or latin words with the beginnings or ends chopped off (eg. Lorem is from dolorem) so you're sort of right.
Clearly the Ruthenian Kipaks, its a wetsernize oghuz turkic script very obvious. The Mongols defeated the Alans after convincing the Kipchaks to desert them through pointing at their likeness in language and culture.[28] Nonetheless, the Kipchaks were defeated next.[28] Under khan Köten, Kipchaks fled to the Principality of Kiev (the Ruthenians), where the Kipchaks had several marriage relations, one of which was Köten's son-in-law Mstislav Mstislavich of Galicia.[28] The Ruthenians and Kipchaks forged an alliance against the Mongols, and met at the Dnieper to locate them.[28] After an eight-day pursuit, they met at the Kalka River (1223).[28] The Kipchaks, who were horse archers like the Mongols, served as the vanguard and scouts.[28] The Mongols, who appeared to retreat, tricked the Ruthenian-Kipchak force into a trap after suddenly emerging behind the hills and surrounding them.[28] The fleeing Kipchaks were closely pursued, and the Ruthenian camp was massacred.he nomadic Kipchaks were the main targets of the Mongols when they crossed the Volga in 1236.[29] The defeated Kipchaks mainly entered the Mongol ranks, while others fled westward.[29] Köten led 40,000 families into Hungary, where King Bela IV granted them refuge in return for their Christianization.[29] The refugee Kipchaks fled Hungary after Köten was murdered.[29]
Does anyone else want a whole series of Simon reacting to the plots and reveals of old Twilight Zone episodes or is it just me?
Watching him react to To Serve Man was hilarious. I'd watch more.
Just as long as he says "inside baseball" in every episode
It's not just you...😁
yes, but... in which channel?
@@miragaiamaia8966 The Science of Science Fiction, maybe...?🤔
My thought on this: it would have taken someone sooooo long to create this book (even if there were several people working on it, although the style looks consistent to my untrained eye) that leads me to think it wasn’t a hoax. But more importantly, it would have cost SOOOO much to create. Those fold-out sheets of velum are usually sourced from a single animal, and the manuscript has many of them. It would just be an absolutely insane amount of time and money and work to put into something you just did for lols.
I haven’t watch the whole vid, yet, in the book the show andromeda as the spiral galaxy, note how this was probably wrote 1400s, back then they knew andromeda, but they didn’t know it was spiral, how did the creator of this book knew it?
7:40 - Chapter 1 - The book
16:05 - Chapter 2 - Meet Wilfred Voynich
23:40 - Chapter 3 - 6 degrees of roger bacon
28:00 - Chapter 4 - Proof of provenance
34:30 - Chapter 5 - She blinded me with science
38:00 - Chapter 6 - Words, words, words
41:40 - Chapter 7 - But why ?
45:30 - Chapter 8 - Authorship theories
52:10 - Chapter 9 - Language theories
57:35 - Wrap up
PS: Yawn, it's 10PM in France...see ya tomorrow !!!
Booo
№7
For when/if you come back and decide to update this:
52:07 Chapter 9: Language Theories
57:38 Chapter 10: Wrap Up
0:00 Vodafone rant
@@starsoffyre
the vodafone rant is important for the channel lore. thanks
In speech therapy we learned about "idioglossia" or "twin speak". There was a case study of two native American children with very little contact with people other than their grandmother. Would've been interesting to study, but ethically, it was decided to extinguish it in favor of a teaching an established language
I am looking forward to when Simon actually makes an episode for "Decoding the Unknown" about the Vatican Secret Archives that sounds very interesting lol
That would probably just be a rehash of Wikipedia and existing articles claiming nobody really knows.
The issue with the secret archives is they're actually secret. People can apply to research items, but they only get access to the items they request. This makes it hard when the extent isnt known. I don't believe anyone just gets to wander around and look at things.
This is from a vague memory of a researcher explanation of his access, and I could very well be wrong.
Everything else you hear is supposition and conspiracy theory.
I personally believe there a a lot of things I would love to know about, but I don't believe they're keeping vampires in the basement (which seems a pretty common theme jn a lot of fiction now).
He has done episodes on his other channels about it bud
ua-cam.com/video/HT32MH8eEoU/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/WWRTZ8IHFg4/v-deo.html
I do want to put something out there about the bathing section as an art historian who has studied the fashion of this period and plans on getting her PhD in Medieval Studies. It’s very likely the women depicted are not pregnant because if you look at contemporary depictions of women (clothed and nude) their bodies are shaped to have distended stomachs, you see this in two of Jan Van Eyck’s works the Arnolfini Wedding Portrait where the woman is clothed and the Ghent Altarpiece showing Eve naked. Lucas Cranach also depicted Eve this way.
I know it’s a little detail, but as a historian I just want to make sure that people get the right information.
A video on (as yet) undeciphered languages such as Linear A and Rongorongo would be cool
I'm a fan of the Hungarian linguist who says linear A writing is related to extremely old hungarian writing. He's got some videos of presentations he's given, here on youtube!
One thing that comes to mind: the author might also be someone who "shouldn't" have been able to write, let alone write something "scientific", like a woman or a minority at the time.
The coding might be to protect the people who might have been in danger if they wrote or read?
Many women in history, for example, who were lucky enough to be able to be educated through happening to have the resources and supporting family, but would have written under male name and/or cyphers, especially if it's taboo subjects, like women's health, as suggested in the video?
Dunno if that makes sense, but just an idea.
Great video!
I liked how this take on the manuscript is sensible.
Great work, mate.
I agree.
It also makes me think of book that has been in my family for generations. It's purpose was "things for my children to know" . It's part Marcus Aurelius type musings, part Samuel Pepys, part recipes and notes on harvests as well as family and local gossip. There are notes about animal husbandry and some remedies. Since it's been written by many hands and annotated over the years, including doodles or art depending on your point of view - it can seem crazy in parts.
It also has different hand writing & different language notes at times. Why? Who knows.
But it makes me think if my family did things like this, other people did as well.
Addition: as a kid I was scandalized by the doodles of penises and animals having sex but my granddad said that people have been doing that as long as they could doodle.
Was just going to say this, it’s very telling that all the suggested authors are male and in positions of wealth… To me it screams that it was a woman or a group of women possibly gathering different cultures menstruation practices, possible ways of terminating pregnancy, or alleviating pain or discomfort. In other parts of the world there are similar coded works that can never be decrypted as all the authors were killed as heretics and the like. reproductive health and women being healers and midwives in general was seen as witchcraft and devil work not to be spoken of. 🤷🏻 I find the theories in this video fascinating as they are so different from what I saw the second I looked at the pages. But who am I to say 😂
If that were the case, researchers should still have been able to narrow down, if not identify, the plants that are depicted in drawings.
@@ninjafoxgamesgeekery there are 2 (that i can think of right now) possibility's why they haven't jet 1 the plants are extinct or 2 the images are drawn vaguely enough that without reading the text or knowing anything about it you can't narrow down which plant's they are.
I REALLY find that idea of a family wisdom book. That has to be a source of incredible wisdom if ya understand it all. How far does it date back, do you know? Also, do you know whos original idea it was?
27:30 -- The theory that it was a hoax perpetrated by Voynich is patently silly. The parchment alone would have been so expensive as to make its sale an absolute necessity. Most "parchment" you can find these days isn't the real thing, just paper that's been treated to behave similarly to parchment when drawn or written on. The real thing is extremely laborious to make and calling for a large amount of animal skin, and is extremely expensive even today. It was so expensive in the old days that it was common for old parchment to be recycled. A book or other manuscript that was no longer useful would have its original writing scraped or washed off and its parchment reused. This is called a palimpsest.
This also argues against it being a medieval hoax. This would have been an extraordinary expense for something meant as a sort of joke.
Agreed. I think it's probably the personal notebook or some late medieval polymath/alchemist type trying to protect his ideas if not hide them from whatever reigning orthodoxy at the time. I've looked through the manuscript and I'm almost confident that the colours were added later for several reasons. I think the original author did not use colour but probably a child got their hands on it somewhere during its long history.
The "hoax" would be to sell it for a large amount of money as a book of ancient secrets. Though we don't know its early history, so there's no way to be sure. It would have taken a lot of work, to be sure. And involved multiple people. Book creation was not a solo activity. Preparation of the parchment, formatting of the text and illustrations, art, calligraphy and binding all involved different specialists for most manuscripts. It's possible someone did both calligraphy and art, but it would still need craftsmen to make it a book. The creation of a fake code and language would also need some work to be passed off as the real thing.
That's probably why we (and everyone else) dismissed the theory
@@greghenrikson952 Yes, that would be the plan, but it's a risky venture considering the investment of money and time. Also, given the quality of the illustrations, I'd be perfectly prepared to believe the same person did both the text and art. Binding may well have involved a specialist, but they wouldn't have carried much about the content.
@@ThatWriterKevin Sorry if that seemed redundant. I tended to comment as the video progresses, as a kind of reaction, and sometimes I bring up things that are mentioned later.
I've seen dozens of breakdowns on the Voynich Manuscript over the years. This one is by far the most honest and critical one, and that's refreshing as hell.
I didn't even know that it's 90% consistent.
Is anyone else unsurprised that Simon's wife calls him "Fact Boy"?
And not Fact Daddy?
@@theConquerersMama that's only when he's giving her all the facts
@@lealta1481 I think she says it ironically. 😂
Nice job op. Admidt all you do is comment bs on the internet without ever having had a personal relationship without saying that outright. 👏
*Fact man*
For just over 30 years, I've had a feeling that bit in the Simpsons where Kang (or maybe Kodos) blows the dust of the book "How to Cook Humans" to read "How to Cook FOR Humans", then Lisa blows off more dust to reveal "How to Cook FORTY Humans", and so on and so forth, had to be referencing something! And it looks like Fact Beard (and co.) found it for me. Legends! ❤
I thought of that episode the moment "to serve man" was mentioned 😂
@@lexwithbub The Twilight Zone?
I saw that episode as a kid (I'm 27). Twilight Zone episodes are a little dated but some are very good.
I loved the part where it took two beams to pull Homer up 😄
My personal theory? It was written about women's health, by women, possibly Jewish women (which is new based on Kevin's points). I find it darkly hilarious that the two major authors about a book that appears to be a medical book for women are two men.
Voynichese could be something like Nüshu, the Chinese writing system developed by peasant women and passed down in secret for centuries. The writing system was unknown outside its native province until the 1980s, despite being in use for at least a thousand years.
Also, now I want some reactions from Simon to the drawings done in other medieval manuscripts. The art is very simplistic to modern eyes and gets straight-up weird at times. The Voynich manuscript would fit right in!
I would appear that there was a scourge of giant snails.
That's going to be another channel lol
No
yeah, a lot of those plants appear to be medicinal (or previously thought to be medicinal) plants (many of them used historically to induce abortions, as contraceptives, to help alleviate menopause symptoms, etc)
youre a genius
“To Serve Man” is based off a short story by the same name. The short story make a little more sense since the translator that cracked the code took a job at the alien embassy because he did not trust the aliens and stole the book and a dictionary to translate it. Still a little cheesy but a lot less clumsy than that episode. A rare time where the twilight zone did not do the source material justice
Thanks, I knew I'd read that story! It's in one of my old science magazines that I got from my mom.
You come for Kevin's content, you stay for Simon's rants.
The cost of paper, ink and pigments, the ammount of time it would take to make, and the meticulousness of the calligraphy all point to not being just a random prank.
Have you ever been to or seen pictures of Burning Man? It's a massively expensive art festival with no discernable point.
No reason to think people haven't been the same for ages.
"thou hath been pranked!"
@@timtheskeptic1147That's for leisure, not a prank.
@MeanBeanComedy I didn't say it's a prank, I'm saying it's a creative outlet. For all we know, it's actually the first DnD type supplementary guide for another game lost to time.
@timtheskeptic1147 I think the burning man and manuscript are different. See, since burning man is still alive and well as a cultural gathering, we know and will continue to know in the coming future it's just a symbol for a festival. If you left one unburned in the middle of a field undiscovered for hundreds of years, nobody would know what it means. The amount of wood wouldn't say what it was for as woods cheap enough, so it could appear to be religious, aliens, etc.
The manuscript though, in a time with no typewriters or computers, to contain that much paper, neat looking writing, the cost of the material, there is no way it's just the ramblings of a random man. It could be ramblings or nonsense by a rich man, but it is likely to have some meaning in it. One theory of the manuscript being written in a language of folklore or as a companion piece to fiction in a constructed language (if jrr tolkien wrote an elvish book) is fascinating, as it points out the lack of context we're missing on it. It could be a cryptic message, a contructed language book, or ramblings of a rich man. And since we don't know who wrote it, it could be any of those or more.
I believe it could be a recipe/ healing book (aka grimoire) that was a generational/collaborative effort of many women. It's common for family recipe books to be written in multiple languages and handwriting and to contain everything from foraging instructions to healing rituals or instructions on treating ailments. That's your doctor when you live in the medieval rural countryside. I can show you at least 4 recipes that look like ciphers but it's just great grandma's shaky handwriting and use of informal measurements.
I was thinking something similar. Like a midwives compendium. So much knowledge was lost when the church was punishing women for their healing, especially childbirth and such.
yes, but wasn't it established it was actually a travelling merchant book compeding plants to sell and their used (imagined or true) in medieval medecine or for ritual and ornementation?...
I also believe the author/s were female. They probably did their best to write things down in a written language that was known to the family or community but not known to outsiders. They also probably didn’t like how edits looked so they just didn’t make them. Probably was passed down in a family and then at some point it gets stored and forgotten about and continues changing hands without it’s knowledge
I’m also in the “multiple female authors” camp. Stupid inquisition.
It certainly could be, but is there any reason to believe that it is?
Growing up we used farmer almanacs for signs of incoming temperate or harsh seasons. Such as when caterpillars would show up or where squirrels build nests. Caterpillars giving signs of when and how much rain to expect. If the majority of squirrel nests were near the trunk of tree of away from trunk. Near trunk would mean a harsh and cold winter, while away from trunk meaning a milder winter. If lots of nests you could expect the acorn drop to be less and if nests were few and far between a bumper crop of acorns would drop. Research has shown that oak trees are cyclical and will drop a lot of nuts one or two years then not be as fruitful for the next couple. Squirrels would be plentiful the year after a bumper crop and less populous after a small crop. Expecting a bumper crop you could look forward to having more deer around for harvesting or maybe not have to buy as much grain for pigs as they could forage acorns for that time of year. Not saying all information in an almanac is true, just saying it does have some merit as an observational journal of some natural occurrences.
Facts. 💯
Honestly, I gave this video a thumbs up simply because of the Vodafone rant :D Keep being you, Simon
3 hours offline? Poor baby. I just spent 5 weeks offline plus no phone, which depended on internet. I’m rural but have had internet for 20 years, so when I went in to report outage, they blamed it on that. I could describe 5 weeks of my rage, their incompetence and prevarication and repeated useless service calls, but nobody really cares. My son-in-law drove from Denver to Texas. He fixed it in 15 minutes. For my weeks of outage Optimum gave me a credit of $11.47 US. I did become reacquainted with the public library, various restaurants’ free wi-fi, and sitting in big-box stores’ parking lots to use internet and answer voicemail. Really opened my eyes to how dependent on connectivity we are.
Voynich manuscript is one of my favorite topics-enjoyed this analysis. Stay healthy Simon.
6:00 Bravo, Kevin! On that note, here's a joke I heard at a local Irish (music) session: Q: As the saying goes, "the sun never sets on the British Empire." Why is this true? A: Because even God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark.
This is fucking brilliant (I say as I gaze across the room at the British Coat of Arms belonging to one very long branch of my family tree)!
We should all answer," I'm far too busy and important " , to all questions. Lol.
I have a friend who is firmly convinced that this is the very first Dungeons and Dragons guide.
I guess that theory comes from a web comic. I'm hoping your friend is joking
Thats awesome. What is their reasoning? Im unfamiliar with the voynich manuscript but i have a dwarf from the dm's guide tattooed on me so... im game for some weirdness.
So am I.
@@ThatWriterKevin thank you Kevin for making me laugh.
It would be hilarious if it's something like that, bedtime stories for children, or kitchen rules from an anal-retentive chef.
35:14 the transition between Simon talking about waiting for his son to take over his UA-cam Empire and "He lived in Prague where he was far more interested in scholarly pursuits with his friends" had me thinking we were still talking about Simon's son for a sec 😂
The unfoldable map at the back of the voynich always reminds me of the nine worlds of Norse mythology
Thanks for the script Kevin! We love TTZ in my family. My great? aunt wrote the Time Enough At Last episode. Lyn Venable. My daddy looked up to her, always so proud of that episode, lol. And yes Simon, you SHOULD trust Kevin, lol. Hes a big brain!!!!
That episode mad me so sad when I saw it as a young teenager that it still comes to mind and hurts my heart even now in my 50’s. I’ve only ever seen it the one time. That’s good writing, in my opinion.
@@oneminuteofmyday thanks on her behalf. We always thought she was pretty good
That's so cool! I think that's one of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes. It is sad though. I'm 27 and I like Twilight Zone.
31:50 -- Fun fact: from 98-180 AD the Roman Empire was ruled by a succession of emperors now known as "The Five Good Emperors". And they _were_ good, both in the morally and in terms of competence. The offices that collectively provided the emperors with their power were inherited under established Roman law, but none of the Five Good Emperors (until the last) allowed one of their natural children to inherit. Instead, they'd identify a good, competent man who they felt would do a good job as emperor and legally adopt him, then will all his titles to him.
This worked out wonderfully until the last of the Five Good Emperors, Marcus Aurelius, spoiled it all by allowing his natural son Commodus to inherit.
Yeah but Russell Crowe sorted that out eventually.
@@the_once-and-future_king. Sadly, he did not. The historical Commodus was assassinated in his bath, strangled by a wrestler sent there for the purpose.
It would have been better doing it Crowe's way. Commodus loved to fight as a gladiator, but all his opponents just let him win. If someone had actually fought and killed him it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.
Commodus was truly nuts, and in his case we have first-hand accounts and epigraphical evidence, unlike Caligula. For example, he eventually took 12 names for himself (Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius) and then renamed everything after himself, including the months of the year (1 of his names for each month) and the city of Rome itself, among many other institutions. His full 12 names were literally carved in stone all across the Empire.
When I saw it I immediately assumed it was a medical manual like the Tacuinum Sanitatis. It looks like the early 15th century to me but that may just be because the only similar manuscripts I've seen were copied about that time. (edit. checks out)
I looked it up and it turns out it HAS been translated and is not a new language or code, it's a form of Latin shorthand based on a system of Latin epigraphy abbreviations. The text itself is actually copied from sections of many other health guides. This was a common practice. (edit. spoke too soon. the Latin epigraphy angle is disputed)
So glad you made a video about this! The Voynich Manuscript has always been my favorite mystery book!
39:25 for clarification, that table (probably) isn't some attempt to map any _meaningful_ connection between Voynich and roman character sets, just a simple transliteration to a computer friendly character set that can be used for programmatic analysis of the text, as Voynich characters have no standard Unicode definition, any of those characters could be mapped to whatever standardised Unicode character you desired, but the ASCII Latin block is typically preferred for ease of use and comparability, and that table specifically seems to be an ad-hoc standard roughly mapping each to their most visually similar counterpart for the sake of our human brains more than the computers
Hey I've got an interesting topic you guys might want to do a video on! There was a black man who died in 1929 in Sabina, Ohio. A white funeral home (you know, with Jim Crow and everything going on then the race is definitely relevant) embalmed the body and waited for someone to claim it... For MANY years. Over that time the man became a tourist attraction and the funeral home would rent him out to events, he was stolen a few times, and other horrific things were done with him. The poor guy was on display until he received a proper burial in the 1960s. Since nobody ever claimed the body his real identity was never revealed. So who was "Eugene the mummy" really? It remains to be a mystery!
I saw a video on Ask a Mortician that briefly covered this and became really curious. Would be interesting to see the writer's input on this as well as Simon's opinions. I think what happened to him was truly disrespectful and a video like this could spark some speculation that might lead to his identity finally being known.
I could take a look!
@@ThatWriterKevin woohoo, you responded to me! 😁
@@ThatWriterKevin and to add to my previous comment, if there's not enough info about poor Eugene for a full episode you could also include some other notable unidentified bodies from throughout history.
Hello fellow Deathling! 💀⚰️🥀
That happened quite a bit back in the day. If someone died while traveling without ID, identifying them could be quite difficult.
The saddest thing is, they could have easily worked their own Rosetta Stone into that Twilight episode. The aliens were diplomats, after all, so it would make perfect sense for them to give humanity some tablet to commemorate their alliance, which said something like "Peace between worlds" in both their language and English. Then they get the cookbook from some skeptical human who snuck into one of their ships and grabbed something that looked important, compare it to the tablet, and then decode it. Anyway yeah, I work near Beinecke and I've seen the Voynich a bunch of times. It's often on display. It is a big weird book, and people claim they cracked it all the time, but there's no way it contains anything important.
Sorry, Simon, but "lorem" isn't a word (though "ipsum" is)! The lorem ipsum placeholder text is a rough and ungrammatical transcription of a Latin passage from the Roman author Cicero, and the first word of the quote in the original is "dolorem". It's thought that the text was swiped from a 1914 book that printed the speech with the word "dolorem" split between two pages as "do-lorem". Because the swipe began on the second page, the text leaves out the "do-" and begins with "lorem", which is only part of a word in its source language. It's like quoting the Gettysburg Address, only instead of beginning with "Fourscore and seven years ago," you start with "ven years ago". "Ven" might be a word in some languages, but not in common English, and it makes no sense in this context.
Or more accurately, “score and seven years ago” IMHO.
@@InertiaCreeps I thought about using that example, but "score" is a word in English, and so is "go", so the only workable second syllable in the sentence was "ven".
@@onbearfeet Either way, your point was a good one and well presented. A rare gem in the internet dregs of UA-cam comments. 🧠🤘🏼
@@InertiaCreeps Aww, thank you. You're pretty lovely yourself.
Oh god i love how close Simon actually came to defending colonialism.
Me too. 😁😁😁🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
Voynich manuscript inspired Czech painter Klara Sedlo to create series of paintings depicting several plants from Herbological section of the Manuscript
Thank you for this information!
I just was looking at her paintings. Quite an impressive artist.
Honestly I feel like if/when it is finally deciphered and translated, if it does turn out to be a guide to 15th century herbal medicine and stuff, that would still be really interesting. Is it just me? Like that kind of stuff is fascinating to read. It's a unique little window into another time, a bygone way of life and worldview.
I had that exact frustrating rant regarding Comcast three weeks ago! I ended up screaming at their automated system for an hour before they finally transferred me to a guy in India who told me “you don’t need us to send out a technician to fix your internet.” Then he hung up.
Holy crap, I used to watch Sliders as a kid too!!! Man i haven't thought about that show for decades....
Some letters in Greek, notably sigma, have different forms depending on where they appear in the word. Last I heard, Greek is an Indo-European language.
One letter* in Greek. Sigma is the only one. And the only variations it has are the "end of word" form and the "anywhere else" form. Having one letter with an "end" form and an "other" form is quite notably different from having many letters with a beginning form, a middle form, and an end form. This is a distinct feature of Semitic languages like Hebrew and Arabic-with, I believe, Arabic actually running with this a fair bit more than Hebrew-and is, indeed, not found in any Indo-European languages. Semitic languages, however, are not the only languages to exhibit this behaviour. For instance, the traditional writing system of pre-Soviet Mongolian, as well as Manchu, a now-endangered Tungusic language of Manchuria in Northeastern China, which uses an adapted form of the traditional Mongolian alphabet, display this same feature. In this orthography (writing system), very few letters do not have separate forms for all three positions. It also dates to circa 1204, so it's theoretically possible to have played some kind of influence on Voynichese, but I wouldn't exactly bet money on it.
Yeah but those are the kinds of strange things that appear in languages over hundreds of years of change. Not something someone would sit down and design.
Just to play devil's advocate...English has upper case and lower case letters...
I been watching this guy for a while (quite a while) and would think" though I subscribed " /" why do I keep getting unsub'd " come to find out he has a dozen channels. BRAVO
Considering the funds required to make this, the geography, as well as the education level required to be able to write absolutely anything, I would bet that part of why no one has deciphered this is because the writer probably didn't stick to one language.
Adding a Cypher or Shor hand to something written in multiple languages would make it complete gibberish to someone who didn't speak all of those languages.
If the writer was a jew, it would make even more sense, because they already were predisposed to speak multiple languages, and be on the outs with the catholic church.
I don't think writing something in multiple languages would be that difficult either since when you're in areas where multiple languages are spoken you'll often hear people mashing words from various languages or dialects into one sentence. I mean, it happened often enough that Creole became it's own language...
I was just thinking about this theory!
Not to mention, having knowledge of another language while making a cipher means not only can you switch between languages, but you could also use words from one while taking grammatical structures and writing patterns from another to make an odd amalgamation of constructed language and ciphered writing. That alone would make it difficult to translate, yet alone understand if it ever was deciphered.
0:33 Adds bleep sound.. swear is still clearly distinguishable lmao I love it 😂
You should make an episode about whether Vodafone are a couple of men held captive by AI using our rage as entertainment
sliders and quantum leap were AWESOME!
Nice episode Kevin. Please don't dissappear like Callum did...I'm not sure I could handle it. Also, how about an episode on CC about Visalia Marauder/East Area Rapist/GSK,?
I'll never disappear
@@ThatWriterKevin how much to do GSK? I'm not above bribery. In my very humble opinion you would do it the best.not to offend the other writers, all are awesome. But you dig deep. I always learn something I didn't know from your research. I'm not a serial killer freak,, but grew up with Manson, Richard Trenton Chase, and GSK in my backyard. Covid was boring so I learned a bit about the Voynich Manuscript. Do you write for anyone else on UA-cam?
@@TheCrone I don't, just for Simon. I'll ask him about GSK, I feel like someone must have claimed it by now, but never know I suppose
@@ThatWriterKevin Wow, thank you! I think I've been bugging Simon for around a year now though he probably does not realize it. Where shall I send the bribe? Lol
Joseph DeAngelo's 1,500-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath ranch home in Citrus Heights was sold for $320,000, a price near the bottom of the market for three-bedroom homes in that area, the Sacramento Bee reported Tuesday.Dec 17, 2019
Some of the best cussing I ever had the pleasure to hear. Love the outrage, the indignation, the blasphemy. Simon at his best❣️
Having dealt with Vodafone constantly for the last 2 months I feel Simons pain.. comment tangent!!
Strangely. I've used Vodafone since 2005 and their deals are always good. As is their connection.
At least in my country
Sounds like Comcast/Xfinity over here in the US. I hate dealing with them so much!
@@AvoidTheCadaver Vodafone has mixed reviews here in India.
15:04 I'm guessing that the weather prediction in the farmers almanac refers to when a season would start as opposed to what's the weather going to be on a certain day. Hence the star charts. When planting crops it's good to know when you need to harvest them etc.
The book appears to be a medical book with a combination of herbs , astrology, etc. I think the book was written by several women. At the time women had to be very careful, otherwise they could be accused as witches. Is this forbidden knowledge that a group of women tried to write down? This information was written by uneducated women who probably struggled with the written language therefore there are many mistakes in creating the sentences. The reason there is no consistency in the writing? Another reason why it was ignored for so long? A health book for women, who would really care about that? Maybe the book was confiscated by clergy. If it was Jewish , the Catholics would have thought it was nonsense?
Just a minor point, but at the time and place, more men would have been accused of witchcraft than women. The shift to target women more and more predominantly came later, and most strongly in anglophone countries.
The book is written in a pidgen language based on the Manchu language. About 40% of the words are manchu, 25% are Hindi, with the rest believed to come from unknown languages from the Tibetian plateau. It is a school boys note book, believed to belong to a son of a merchant who was brought along to "learn the ropes". It contains random stuff from accounting tables to botanical info, to love poetry. It was cracked in 2008, by a bunch of computer scientist who did word matches based on obscure languages.
@@BillThanis I’m not finding this information in my search. Could you elaborate on who any of the computer scientists are, or perhaps where you read an article about this?
Fun fact some think the book of Hebrews in the bible was written by a woman, that's why it's anonymous.
@@BillThanis yeah no
Love the music changes every time he goes off topic!
22:53 SCREAM-laughing over here. This Gollum v. Smeagol argument over whether it was wrong of Voynich to sell the book ...... that's really 50% Simon being his freak-ass self, and 50% Jen being the most brilliant editor on UA-cam.
💗💖💓 Great to listen to as always, Simon! Some recent scholarship and translation shows that this manuscript might be written in medieval Turkish - missed at first because so many were expecting it to be written or coded in An Indo-European language or a Semitic one.
You'd figure in that time period, most people were illiterate and would write out things they heard guessing about what it was, and so a lot of it is gibberish too, so someone added pictures. That actually is a very clever way to go. He's saying, well I can't write it out correct, so I will draw an illustration.
Skip to 7:40 . That's where he finally starts talking about the book.
Antibiotics are so good man. My father in law suffered with lung cancer and unfortunately has passed away now. But through his treatment his immune system was so low he was susceptible to so many things. The answer was Antibiotics and they prolonged his life so much so we were able to have such precious more time with him before he went.
I was literally dying from an intestinal blockage and they gave me tons of pain meds which did nothing but the massive amounts of IV antibiotics worked their magic and kept me alive long enough for the swelling to go down and the blockage to clear. They also couldn't have operated without antibiotics so I would have died in my mid 20's without them. I think about that all the time. I'd have been one of those people who didn't live long enough to even think about old age.
38:58 Sounds like these letters are used to elude to verb tense, adjective/adverb alterations (think "cheeky" vs "cheekily" as an example), and the like. As I understand it, and as an example, Japanese doesn't conjugate verbs at all. It relies on the words around it to convey tense, time, etc. Some of what may be considered "letters" might actually be full words, or used to express language tense.
This video brought me immense amounts of joy and entertainment. Thank you Simon and Kevin.
You're welcome!
I love this! Just one thing tho. When you read the script it gets hard to understand quite often when you read it fast, and go from quite/loud. You change your reading speed (which is mostly fast), and dynamics very frequently. Reading it more clear and constant volume I think would help a lot. Maybe you've already heard/read it before but this is our first time hearing it so it takes a bit longer to get it the first time. Easy fix tho, other than that awesome vid.
You can adjust playback speed by touching the settings icon…
Hey Simon can you do a video on one of your channels about the process of coming up with your stories and the process involved in writing and creating them? You punch out an insane amount of material. I am sure you have a team working for you, but it would be interesting to see what the process is.
Writer writes a script, Simon records it, done
@@dimadobrik4516 it seems like the part before the comma could be the interesting part
@@stevesamson3940 but how interesting would a video about doing research be?
Simon has a “How It’s Made: A TIFO Story” from 2017 on Today I Found Out. Since it’s years old I’m sure the process has changed some (or maybe a lot; time for a 2022 edition?)
I feel your pain for internet issues. My favorite is when they tell you to check their website for your internet outage issue. Just immediately assuming that you have a smartphone or other way of accessing their website. "Thanks guys, I'll check out your website for outages as soon as I have internet to check it"
You didn't mention Bax's work where he managed to decode some of the phonemic values of the script. He couldn't get far enough before he died though to decipher all of it.
No one mentions Bax in their videos. It is kind of an insult to the man.
I'm sorry to say that Stephen Bax's theories and findings (pertaining to the VMS) have been widely demolished/discredited.
@@PoisonMonkey69 citations?
@32:17: Well, now I have to clean my monitor as I spit my soup all over it.
"UA-cam Empire..."
HA!
:)
I would LOVE to see Simon read a script by Kevin about the theories around the Legend of Zelda timeline. I feel like that would drive Simon to go into a ton of tangents…
Kevin should write this but only at the end is it revealed it was legend of Zelda. Or something like "Is this actual real life folklore or video game lore"
@@Fuchswinter for a fact or fiction episode like the anime twists?
@@Fuchswinter oooo that would be great. Actual folklore or video game storyline would be amazing.
@@Religion0 yeah why not? Would be fun
Isn't the timeline confirmed at this point? Like fans came up with the timeline including branching paths, and Nintendo looked at it and was like "yeah, that sounds good." I thought that was what happened anyway
I'd watch a whole series of Simon reading the New York City phonebook.
This was made by an uneducated rural person that taught themselves an alphabet whilst gaining a reputation as a powerful healer. They were then accused of being g a witch and the book was taken to discover the pagan's secret. That could make a cool book actually...
The document has a lot of images analogs found with descriptions found in alchemical texts (and some of those were just crazy). A lot of people in the periphery of alchemy were persecuted and tried to share knowledge in secrecy, though if that's what this is it goes beyond my personal wildest imagination. Also I don't know why, but all the text seems closer to roman numerals to me than lettering. It's possible the symbols are numerical, which translates to lettering after? See now I have to learn more about this. Thank you for this video
as a counterpoint to their last claim, the Somerton man has been identified. Still a cool story
Okay, I just put together Simon's ascension from app-controlled backlighting to legit blue screen goodness. You inspire us all, Mr. Whistler.
If or whenever the Voynich Manuscript is deciphered, I think it'd be cool if Simon and the gang did an update to this video.
I’m curious what ChatGPT thinks about it
I gotta say- dude when do you sleep!? You are EVERYWHERE on YT!!! I keep stumbling across you adorable face!!
Don’t forget to sit back, relax and enjoy your successes!!!
I loved the outer limits. I used to watch it with my dad as a kid. When it would go to commercial and ask us to "please stand by" we'd stiffen up on the couch arms to our sides and legs outstretched and as soon as the first commercial came on we'd relax and giggle.
Content begins at 7:40
Kevin has got to be my favorite writer. I identify with him and his dark humor.
41:17 I think what you are looking at is a "bridge" type book. One that has "alchemical" origins, but will end up containing a number of principles of organic chemistry, with some possible additional work with regards to astronomy.
Here's one other thing to note: it's not likely that any part of this book originated in China, or Eastern Asia, as they used a completely different astrological system: Western astrology is month-based, while Chinese Astrology is year-based. Further, based on this video, none of the astrological symbols shown are Chinese in nature. I won't discount the use of "Romanized-Mandarin" as a source language, but I wouldn't go much further east than India in trying to detect the necessary "destination language" to translate into.
Any day a video with Simon over 30 minutes drops is a good day.
Great video, Simon and team, on a perplexing mystery!
Okay, but building off of the theory presented, if we remove repeating words or words that are two-fifths repeated under the assumption they're errors and we feed it through a cryptographically artificial intelligence program, what happens?
Remember a few years ago when two universities with highly developed AI text bots put them together and within 13 seconds developed a secret language? We could tell it was a secret language because of the patterns of speech. So, if we remove anything probable to be an error from the input text, will a pattern emerge? With that pattern, would we not be able to figure out grammar and syntax, and, use the most tried and tested method, take common phrases/idioms from the 15th and 16th centuries and run them through the text to crack the code?
I completely loved that rant at the start of the video! I didn’t realise I could like you even more 🤣🤣
I am specializing in medieval manuscripts and their art. The art in this manscript is spot on for the age. Yes, within a couple of decades or so you'd get the likes of Donatello and Michelangelo, but art was still in that "weird" medieval style. Look at any image in a medieval manuscript, and the Voynich manuscript's drawings are similar.
9:10 thought this said "JuulTV" for a second. I was going to say tobacco companies advertising to kids is out of control!
Thank you for reminding us that a number of languages would lost to us if not for the Rosetta Stone!
Dude you make a story to funny I love what you’re doing with your content man seriously it’s so good
From the first time I’ve heard about this, I thought that this is a created language. Fantasy stories to this day do that. I feel like this might’ve been the early working of a fantasy universe
The Holy Roman Empire was an elective monarchy, which does somewhat undermine Simon's point about dynasties.
Don't blame me I voted for Kodos.
Thanks for all the information you’ve taught me.
Oh man, Simon, I feel you on the addiction of cigarettes. I tried my mom’s Marlboros lights and it took five months for me to stop craving it. And I’d only had, like, three or four puffs!
So I see you have no idea that’s not how addiction works. As a recovering drug addict and past alcoholic, a cigarette smoker, of 24 years. Give me a break. Unreal, But you weren’t even doing it properly they call it, bum puffing. Where you’re not actually inhaling the smoke into your lungs but only breathing it into your mouth.
@@kerrynicholls6683 I wish you luck in your recovery, but this is my experience. I have a lot of family with addiction, so I am familiar. Please be aware that everyone has different experiences with life. Good luck, and I hope everything goes well for you!
@@HavianEla Exactly. I hope you do well. I’m not trying to be a bitch or maybe I was either weigh I’ve been to hell and back and I have brain damage so yeah I’m not great. But I am glad 😀 for you.
@@HavianEla If your story is true then I assume you have a problem with controlling your weight glucose levels and caffeine intake unless you’ve managed to call your entire life without ever eating fat sugar or caffeine which are all addictive Along with many others that you’d be exposed to every day. God forbid you ever need narcotics in the hospital or take cough syrup with alcohol in it your life would be over
What an episode :) great job Kevin Simon and editors
A few years back, a team announced the manuscript was in cyphered Turkish, and they were translating it.
I'm guessing it didn't pan out, but does anyone know what happened to this theory?
People claim to have deciphered it all the time. None of it has gone anywhere
It was never a serious theory. The father (Ahmet Ardic) and son made some fundamental errors in even their initial guesses (the form of the letter 7, for instance, looked more like ^ at the time), so assumed connections that simply weren't reasonable. It was rejected from every journal they submitted it to, and don't seem to have made any updates since 2019. The consensus is that it was a very impressive theory for amateurs, but without substance nonetheless.
Oh, that rant at the beginning. I love the drop of the character. Very spicy ;)
Future people: “Leela, please decipher the Voynich Manuscript.”
“Well that wasn’t so hard. People couldn’t do this before?”
“Yeah, the past was the worst.”
Aliens: We can solve all of your problems!
Simon: Get in touch with Vodaphone to fix my interest!
Aliens: I'mma head out.
I watched a video years ago (that I unfortunately can't remember enough about to find) that had a theory I find very believable. They proposed this was written by a wealthy but illiterate person making up the language as they went over the course of several years. At the time the parchment dates from literacy was rather spotty and money was no guarantee of it. There were many who gained wealth or power and could not read. Women especially were not always well educated. The theory is that the proposed author didn't know how to read but had seen books and art in the houses of other wealthy people and proceeded to make up her own language/art to write down things she was learning about, family stories, and folk wisdom. The reason there are no other books like this could be that she learned to actually write, or that she married into another household that didn't indulge her in her pursuits.
I think the problem with this theory is that the writing is too patterned for it to be something someone illiterate scribbled or made up as they went along. There are around about 24 characters and words repeat far too many times. Also the writing is far too neat for someone who had never been shown how to hold a quill. I think conlang or maybe forgotten language or dialect?
That makes sense
Some years ago I had a problem with Vodafone. Eventually I got to speak with someone in the "Retentions Department". This was where they would sort out your problem, once you tell them you're moving to another provider.
Could they get DNA from the animal skin pages and at least know the region the skins came from? Then they could narrow down the area or looks at trade routes from that area.
The beginning of the episode just cracked me up. A solid rant. 😂