u/geosunsetmoth

Since the witch claimed that the reason why it hasn't been cracked was because it was "all those male historians and linguists" who couldn't see what was "obvious" to any woman, he also made sure to list and shoutout all the many, many, many, many female Voynich scholars who've been studying the manuscript for over a century, including the current two biggest authorities on the subject

He additionally points out that a lot of the pages she uses as "arguments" for her hypothesis that the Voynich was a period tracker for botanist witches come from a whole different document that has nothing to do with the manuscript, some of them are AI, and some of the detail she claims exists simply is not in any image and she's just making it up.

For the record: I am not implying Voynich is just like Chinese, or that it derives from Hanzi. I'm just using Hanzi as an analogy/example of a writing system where meaning is not encoded through phonemes, but in the visual representation as a whole. Please don't get too hung up on the "Chinese"-ness of it all.

Just a musing thought I had the other day. What if the letters in the Voynichese alphabet don't represent the individual sounds in a word (ie, J - U - L - I - A -> /ˈdʒuːliə/), as is common for most western languages, but instead are part of a logograph similar to the Chinese Hanzi or the Japanese Kanji (象 -> "Elephant"). However, with the clear difference that Voynichese (unlike Kanji or Hanzi) would "bundle" different glyphs together to form one morphological unit.

In this theory, what makes Voynichese special, is that unlike Kanji or Hanzi, there would not be a "clean" mapping of one-word-to-one-morpheme. I'm considering a group-based morpheme approach. Here's a pseudo-logograph I just made in English to illustrate my point:

▧◒◷◷◷◒ -> Julia
◷◷◒▧◒▧◒ -> Garner
◈◒◒ -> Is
◺◺◺◒ -> Me (My)
▧ -> Celebrity Crush

The individual glyphs don't have independently recoverable meanings, the structure as a whole does. This way, you can produce a highly complex sentence that may appear nonsensical when trying to "map" to known western language patterns:

▧◒◷◷◷◒ ◷◷◒▧◒▧◒ ◈◒◒ ◺◺◺◒ ▧ -> Julia Garner is my celebrity crush.

With some off-the-top-of-my-head mathematics, a 37 glyph logograph following this compound system could accommodate a language with nearly 2 million words before they even reach 5-symbol words. This accounts for the extreme predictability of Voynichese: Longer words are extremely specific combinations. The alphabet comports languages much, much bigger than the amount of words expected to be encoded in a codex like the manuscript. Because of that, almost every long word will be a repeat of a familiar pattern that "explodes" in possibilities rather than following traditional phoneme-based logic (well, after a P it's usually a vowel...), and paradoxically, makes it less likely that two words will have a similar pattern. In simple terms: A system like this has a number of possible words much bigger than the actual words a language would have, in a much higher ratio than an alphabet would have, which leads to more "specific patterns are getting repeated way more often than we'd expect".

Something interesting to consider: Look how short "celebrity crush" is. A single glyph! Nothing dictates complex, phonetically longer or more niche terms need a longer visual representation.

Speakers of said language would not learn what each symbol means, but instead, like a Chinese speaker, they would memorize what the word looks like. They would not see ◺◺◺◒ and think, in their heads, "◺ - ◺ - ◺ - ◒... oh, it's Me." Instead, they have already memorized that ◺◺◺◒ is what the word "Me" looks like, in the same way that a Chinese speaker looks at 象 and they have already memorized that this is what the word "Elephant" looks like.

Now, I am not a linguist and I may have just babbled a bunch of easily disprovable bullshit, but thought I'd contribute to the conversation with my own take on it!

I remember when the first reviews came out and the MC was at a 59 or something and we were like…… well shit …..

But as more reviews came out, the score steadily rose with it. Now, 80 is not the best score on the planet. But is it really all that low? Low enough to discredit WH9’s chances at BTL awards outside of Malkovitch?

Ps, I think “this feels more like In Bruges than Banshees” is not a very apt comparison when it comes to Oscar chances. Bruges underperformed, yes; but it was a different academy, McDonagh had a smaller space in the industry, and most importantly, Focus ditched its campaign to favor Milk in almost every category it was competitive in