Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

Re:Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to t... by cookiengineer on Sunday May 18, 2025 @05:53PM (#44024566)

Sorry to burst your bubble:

It's not a cipher, it was written by an Egyptian Hebrew speaking traveller, and Rainer Hannig and his wife were able to build up a fairly good grammar before he died two years ago. [1] the general issue of the manuscript itself is that it's evolving in its grammar and ethymological use of words, as the traveller picked up various words and transferred meanings along the way.

But, given that your attempt tries to find similarities between proto languages that were mixed together, this could be a great thing to study/analyze the evolution of languages over time, given that you're able to preserve bayesian inference on top.

[1] https://www.rainer-hannig.com/voynich/

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Re:Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to t... by brig90 on Sunday May 18, 2025 @06:03PM (#44024621)

This doesn’t burst my bubble at all — if anything, it’s great to hear that others have been able to make meaningful progress using different methods. I wasn’t trying to crack the manuscript or stake a claim on the origin; this project was more about exploring how modern tools like NLP and clustering could model structure in unknown languages.

My main goal was to learn and see if the manuscript behaved like a real language, not necessarily to translate it. Appreciate the link — I’ll check it out (once I get my German up to speed!).

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Re:Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to t... by Nursie on Sunday May 18, 2025 @10:27PM (#44026087)

Their theories appear not to be incredibly well accepted amongs people who take an interest, and appears (like other 'translations') to grant the translator so many degrees of freedom as to be effecitvely unfalsifiable.

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Re:Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to t... by 0points on Monday May 19, 2025 @02:07AM (#44026875)

There's been a large amount of claims of decipherment, but so far none of them have stood up to scrutiny.

So, sorry but you are not busting any bubbles today.

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Re:Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to t... by cookiengineer on Monday May 19, 2025 @12:37PM (#44031612)

Please link evidence to said scrutiny then?

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