[Cryptography] The Voynich Manuscript as a product of a mental health disorder

[Gerard Cheshire]

________________________________
From: cryptography <cryptography-bounces+gerard.cheshire=bristol.ac.uk at metzdowd.com> on behalf of Ben McGinnes <ben at adversary.org>
Sent: 12 February 2019 03:25
To: cryptography at metzdowd.com
Subject: Re: [Cryptography] The Voynich Manuscript as a product of a mental health disorder

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 09:37:07AM +0000, Peter Gutmann wrote:
> The Voynich Manuscript has attracted interest almost entirely from
> cryptographically-inclined people (alongside historians) who are by nature
> inclined to try and interpret it as some form of cipher or code, because they
> want to see a cipher or code there.  I recently tried a different approach, I
> showed it to a psychologist and asked "which type of mental health disorder
> could the creator of this work have?".
>
> The first response was that it was created by a functional schizophrenic, a
> disorder that developed over time where they were seen as deeply spiritual by
> others (perhaps in a monastery) and their work was encouraged.

That's a very sound theory and now my second favourite.  Though it is
more likely to be correct than my favourite theory, I still just
thoroughly enjoy this one:

    https://xkcd.com/593/


Regards,
Ben

______________________________________________________________________________________



Hi Ben/Peter,

I've already told Cryptography list - the Voynich manuscript was written by a Dominican nun in perfectly ordinary language and she was entirely sound of mind. The writing system was solved in May 2017 and a paper will be formally published in 2019. In the meantime, three draft papers are available to freely download from the preprint linguistics website LingBuzz:

The first paper explains the writing system and language: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737
The second paper translates the pictorial map from the manuscript: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808<http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808>
The third paper focuses on volcanological details from the map: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004381

I don't know where such an idea as schizophrenia might come from - most odd, and ironic too. The book is merely a memoire and a compendium of Medieval medical advice. I'm familiar with such fantastical nonsense as aliens, black magic, communist propaganda, conspiracy, hoaxing, practical joking, alchemy and the rest - but schizophrenia? Plain daft!

Regards,
Dr. G. E. Cheshire,

University of Bristol.

https://bristol.academia.edu/GerardCheshire
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