Voynich Manuscript

It will be interesting to see whether the academic journal this nonsense was published in, Romance Studies, retracts the paper.

The depressing thing is how eager journalists are to lap up stuff like this. Perhaps it's only to be exprected from the tabloids, but supposedly quality papers like The Independent have also done so in this case. Though The Independent at least revised its article today. Previously it had reported Gerard Cheshire's claims as fact. Now it has inserted the word "claim" at strategic points in its article - though still without reporting any of the criticisms made by genuine scholars.

It's also interesting to see that a couple of online news sources that also displayed due scepticism about the recent bogus Jack the Ripper claims, are also sceptical about this latest Voynich rubbish:
https://www.livescience.com/65481-voynic...guage.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressa...en-solved/

If journalists really have to work by copying and pasting stuff from the Internet, perhaps the quality of their work could be improved by copying and pasting from Live Science and Forbes!

It will be interesting to see whether the academic journal this nonsense was published in, Romance Studies, retracts the paper.

The depressing thing is how eager journalists are to lap up stuff like this. Perhaps it's only to be exprected from the tabloids, but supposedly quality papers like The Independent have also done so in this case. Though The Independent at least revised its article today. Previously it had reported Gerard Cheshire's claims as fact. Now it has inserted the word "claim" at strategic points in its article - though still without reporting any of the criticisms made by genuine scholars.

The press have finally caught on now, and are highlighting the university's "embarrassment" about this. No embarrassment for the journalists, of course, and no suggestion that it might be their job to do some research, rather than just copying and pasting stuff from the Internet.

Lisa Fagin Davis asks, "Why do people keep convincing themselves they’ve solved this medieval mystery?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2...l-mystery/

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - here is a blog post by Peter Bakker setting out in a very clear and accessible way the arguments that the Voynich manuscript is simply a hoax rather than a text in an unknown script or language, or in a code.
http://www.lingoblog.dk/en/the-voynich-m...of-ms-408/

He refers in passing to Gerard Cheshire's claimed decipherment, though without naming him, because Bakker feels he is not worth any attention. (Incidentally, four and a half months on, Cheshire's paper in the journal Romance Studies still hasn't been retracted.)

Here's an article by Jillian Foley on "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code" at Undark:
https://undark.org/2020/02/12/decoding-b...anuscript/

Among other things, quoting Lisa Fagin Davis, it tries to suggest some reasons for the appearance of an awful but still peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal last year:
"Although his paper was peer reviewed — ordinarily the gold standard of scholarly rigor — the reviewers were most likely specialists in Romance languages, since the paper was published in a journal of Romance Studies. And peer review is an often opaque process, even for topics far less obscure than a 600-year-old manuscript.paper on the manuscript by Gerard Cheshire in an academic journal last year."

But I think that fails to take account of just how bad the paper was, and how apparent the problems should have been even to those specialists. What the problem was with the original reviewers I can't imagine, but based on my experience in another area there is a real problem of academic journals refusing to admit that they have made serious mistakes.

I have never paid any attention to the Voynich Manuscript, but documents about it are available through NSA

I remembered this when I came across an episode of Yale Press Podcast about the Voynich Manuscript.