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Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #4 If not Latin, then what? Please see the links at...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #3 Plants and the moon. For thousands of years, people...

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #2 An i for an i ? Not nymphs: women! There are...

Understanding The Voynich Manuscript #1

Understanding the Voynich Manuscript #1 Tom, Dick and Harry explain a statistical method. ...

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Patrick LockerbyRSS Feed of this column.

Retired engineer, 73 years young. Computer builder and programmer. Linguist specialising in language acquisition and computational linguistics. Interested in every human endeavour except the scrooge... Read More »

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The Voynich Manuscript - Speech Notes for a Presentation?





What is this image for, what is it about and what language is that?

Sing a Song of Politics

I was testing my memory, trying to remember things that I learned way back when I was a small kid, and I realised that my most intense memories are of or related to poems and songs.

I seem to remember it was Ogden Nash who wrote this little ditty during the early years of the cold war:

Rock of ages, cleft for me
 Let me hide myself in thee.
When the bombers thunder past,
 Shelter me from fire and blast.
And, though they say all men are brothers
  Let the fallout fall on others.


How many songs can you remember from your childhood?
The Voynich Wikiwars - Episode 2

This is a follow-on to my previous article about an opinion piece in the Times Literary Supplement which news media at first accepted uncritically as fact.
Gibbs, Voynich, Wikiwars and the Times Illiteracy Supplement

Declaration of interest: I have been an independent researcher of the Voynich Manuscript since it was made available on the web by the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.  This article contains no sour grapes whatsoever, but you may wish to check at the foot of this web page.

The media has been all abuzz recently about how Nicholas Gibbs has solved the puzzle of the Voynich manuscript, according to the Times Literary Supplement.
Hurricane Information Updates

A site which has been providing potentially life-saving updates about the hurricanes, Neven Curlin's Arctic Sea Ice Forum appears to have been hacked.  If so, it is an act of an evil mind.  The hack may cost lives.

[edit]

Neven's site is back up again.  For regular hurricane updates please go to -

Hurricane Season 2017

Until the site is up and running again I am inviting the contributors to the hurricane thread to post comments here.
Patterns of Latin in the Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript, more properly identified as Beinecke MS 408, has been a puzzle to many researchers for a few hundred years.  The first evidence of attempts to understand it consists of letters between owners and decryption experts.  There have been very many efforts made by linguists and cryptographers since the manuscript was brought to public attention in 1912.