Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Kinda.

Probability one - it's a joke/hoax/fun. Hence it's unique and no one has any idea about it in current day. The small group of people who created it had a laugh and are long dead.

Probability two, it's a bizarre exciting new language we know absolutely nothing about in anything else. It's freely available on the internet for everyone to see, incredibly popular and know around the world and looked at by many experts in many fields for years. And now someone has decoded it! (In a paper yet to pass peer review?)

I'd go with one myself and I think the reason people chose two is because they don't really get how much people in the past and in other cultures are just like us, they like funny, silly and fun things too.

Choosing two doesn't really make sense and I'm just putting my opinion out there why people do.




Or maybe it's an existing language in a yet unknown script.

they don't really get how much people in the past and in other cultures are just like us, they like funny, silly and fun things too

Thank you for your condescension. Obviously, philologists, linguists and other specialists are stupidly wasting their time while you have it all figured out based on the "obvious" insight of one rather lame XKCD strip.


Meh, every few months on HN there's a story about how someone has decoded the Voynich differently.

Basically it's a cold reading each time. But people still buy into it.

You're welcome to believe what you want but to a logical person they can't all be correct, so something is going on here other than science.


Well as an aside, I myself when I was about 14 or so made up my own alphabet based on random glyphs i liked.

I used it to take notes in school and what not, but it was pretty simple. I did things like the thorn for th so it wasn't a direct 1->1 thing. So I could easily see #1 as a possibility. I just hope #2 is true. But its unlikely we'll know in our lifetime given that manuscripts history.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: