A Village in France Will Pay You $2,240 to Decipher a Rock

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I love these mysteries like the Voynich manuscript no one can figure out.

I tried to read it in gaelic but so far didnā€™t make out anything (local claims it could be Breton which is similar to gaelic).

I didnā€™t know you knew Gaelic. Is this something they teach you in school?

Yes but I am far from fluent.
Ar means on in Gaelic. But it could be a coincidence.

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ā‚¬2000? Are they kidding? I charge more than that a month to translate into English from Traditional Chinese.

Is this French village the next candidate for r/choosinbeggars with this lowball offer?

On the other hand, they will definitely award the money to the ā€œmost probableā€ guess.

image

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Me too. Did you know you can buy a beautiful reprint of the Voynich manuscript now? I got a copy a few months ago and itā€™s fascinating.

Hereā€™s where you can order: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300217230/voynich-manuscript

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Really cool. Might have to pick one up. Iā€™ve only seen pictures on the internet of pages. You think it means anything or itā€™s just gibberish?

Intriguing stuff.

My personal opinion is that it does mean something, but it was written in coded script.

The illustrations suggest astrology, herbal medicine, and other therapies. Perhaps it was written in some kind of cipher to prevent ā€œunauthorizedā€ folks from gaining this knowledge. Or, maybe the treatments were mixed with mysticism or the occult and the author didnā€™t want to risk condemnation/punishment?

Just my theories. There are always news stories popping up of people who claim to have solved the manuscript, but so far none of them have withstood scrutiny from linguists and cryptologists. Still waiting on that Rosetta Stone.

If you like this kind of stuff like I do, I highly recommend getting the reprint. The pages are full-color and actual size, and they include all of the multi-fold pages that are in the original. At the end it includes several articles discussing the history of the manuscript and the attempts to solve it, as well as how the original was produced and bound. Yale University Press did a great job with this nice high quality reproduction.

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I looked up Breton and it has some very similar phrases and grammatical construction to Irish (grammer is complex and very different than Romance or Saxon languages ) but it also has some significant difference with Gaelic from the influence of French possibly.

I found out the word Ar in Breton just means The (in Irish it means On). I asked a native Irish speaker if they could read it, while they felt is was likely Breton they also couldnā€™t make out any meaning .
The BH sound is commonly found in Irish ,pronounced V, and itā€™s used a lot in this inscription. Both Breton and Irish didnā€™t have any standardised alphabet until relatively recently, so the writer could just have used his local accented Breton as inspiration.

But I could be seeing patterns that arenā€™t there and itā€™s some sort of code.

The most amazingly enigmatic mystery about all of this has to be how they refer to the ā€˜French Alphabetā€™ what the hell is that? and when was it deciphered?

Its also a mystery as to why they report the reward of 2000 Yoyos as 2,240 Dollars. There is some dark magix involved no doubt.

Also I speak fluent gibberish- which as it happens has similar gramatical complexity with Latvian - and am also at a complete loss!

:thinking:

I donā€™t know man are you trying to be an asshole mocking the Irish language or the Latvian language or am I misunderstanding you ?
You are calling other peoples language gibberish ?

Or you are saying that the rock inscription is likely to be made up gibberish ?

Also there is such a thing as the French alphabet . Almost all languages have their own alphabet. Thatā€™s because they all have their own unique stresses, syllables and tones.

Ha ha, sorry just having a laugh.

I think the French use the little cat A through Z alphabet though

pg62

Sounded like a bit of a dig at Irish to be honest. But you threw in Latvian and French too. Maybe my funny bone isnā€™t working .

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I didnt mean it to come accross as a dig at a langauge. Think about it if I said I speak gibberish then who is the joke on?

By the way, how come you know the unique stresses syllables and tones of the etchings on that rock?

I was wondering if maybe the rock was made by a stone mason practtising his lettering skills using random letters?

Could be random yeah.

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