The Curse of the VMS (Re: The Bible codes nonsense - Jardim's message)

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Jupiter rend fous ceux qu'il veut perdre"

The Voynich Manuscript addles the brains of those
who would decipher it. Its victims? Newbold of course,
and, closer to us, Levitov. And, even closer to us...
take your pick; we have seen a few. So does the
Phaistos Disk, so do the Easter Island tablets.

Seriously now, let me repeat here what I told
the girl from New Scientist. Our (and their)
failure to decipher the VMS is but a dreadful
indictment on the awful state of what calls itself
linguistics (cryptography, on the contrary, seems
to me a very mature field). The purpose  is not so
much the decipherment of the VMS, as the painful,
groping, slow discovery of the properties of
language. For the past ten, no, eleven years,
we have argued here back and forth, and again
and again and again. I have floated some pretty
silly hypotheses, and some have found a degree
of believability to my own astonishment (I am
thinking here of the "Chinese hypothesis" and
of Jorge Stolfi's statistical analysis, which
really does support it -- and I meant it as a
joke). It sounds a bit disheartening.

But let us look at the bright side of it: the
VMS is now available in EVA, for all  to cut
their teeth on it. With a bit of luck, it may
soon be available in a high-quality reproduction.
This is quite something, and I wish that the same
were true of the Easter Island tablets.

And one more thing: in the process, not all of
us have gone insane. Or have I?

Frogguy