<story><title>Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds</title><url>http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/20/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Renaud</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure why we only consider that this manuscript is either a hoax or a forgotten language. Why can&amp;#x27;t it be an expression of whimsical fantasy?&lt;p&gt;When I was 12, as an introvert kid with too much imagination, I started inventing my own language. I would make up words, sometimes based off various other languages, sometime simply based on how they sounded.&lt;p&gt;It had a couple of different writing systems, one was a slightly modified version of Greek alphabet, another, more complex, was made of dots and small squiggles that were fast to write (I was fascinated with the Arabic writing system at the time and took inspiration from it even though it didn&amp;#x27;t look anything like that).&lt;p&gt;I would write pages of nonsense in that writing system, just to see how it would flow or change over time, just to find patterns, just to have fun.&lt;p&gt;I even invented my own calendar, using the 88 day revolution of Mercury around the Sun as the year.&lt;p&gt;When I look at the Voynich Manuscript, all I see is the product of a fertile imagination that went a lot farther than my early teenage attempts at building a coherent world for myself.&lt;p&gt;I believe that these unconvincing attempts at finding meaning elsewhere -or degrading the object by calling it a hoax- are distracting us from the real beauty of this work of love and imagination.</text></comment>
<story><title>Voynich Manuscript partially decoded, text is not a hoax, scholar finds</title><url>http://www.medievalists.net/2014/02/20/voynich-manuscript-partially-decoded-text-hoax-scholar-finds/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bencollier49</author><text>The combination of the Voynich Manuscript&amp;#x27;s history of translation claims, taken together with the origin of this work (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/3326436/Is-this-the-worst-university-in-Britain.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.telegraph.co.uk&amp;#x2F;education&amp;#x2F;educationnews&amp;#x2F;3326436&amp;#x2F;I...&lt;/a&gt;), leads me to view this with at least something of an air of caution.</text></comment>