Melissa Is Crazy

Computer Science Senior Project

I have a bunch of insane ideas, all of which are going to make my professor want to kill me. When we settle on which one will torture him the least (probably one about linguistics) I'll post info on it here.

Crackpot Voynich Theories

The Voynich Manuscript has been driving me absolutely insane since that XKCD comic went up. But (as has been proven before, though I don't have the links for the case I'm thinking of-- crypto on Slashdot) the most effective way to solve a problem is to attract the Internet's attention. Boy, it sure has my attention.

So here's my contribution to the general crackpottery. I was greatly intrigued by Robert Teague's "Cracks in the Ice" papers centering around identifying the Aldebaran star. Please make sure you've read at least the first two before continuing. Also I take no responsibility for being correct, plausible or even sensible- maybe all of this is based on a wildly incorrect premise :)

I follow Teague's theory right up to the part where he pulls country names out of thin air: Holland, England, Poland, and Lapland, plus the English words Global and Cobbled. (Mind you, this is in the same list as "Aldebaran", "Alcyone", "Algol" and "Algenib", which all have something in common...) I have two problems with this: a) I seriously doubt that the VM is written in modern English with perfectly modern spelling (even if it's a hoax) and b) Lapland in-particular is about the most far away, arbitrary place in the known world of yesteryear, about a zillion miles from those other three. Instead, I think the "-land" could be interpretted as a differnt common word-component that would result in something a lot more sensible, like... more star names.

Using the alternate-letter anagram system presented in the papers, I jotted down a few rearrangements of the "land" solution and hit upon "danb", which looks suspiciously like "Deneb". Indeed, the proper Arabic spelling is dhaneb per the Wiki, which also states that there are seven other stars with "deneb" as a component of their name. I tracked down three of them on this list, and one of them, Denebola, spotlights on the Wiki as "portending misfortune and disgrace", so it has astrological significance. Here is what I worked out on paper (it'd take too long to HTML up):

So I propose that, if the Teague system has any merit to it, then the "Holland" and "Poland" labels are Denebola and Deneb Algedi respectively. The first blank after "Poland" may be Algorab (or Algol?). I don't have proposed solutions for the others, but nor have I tried every single star name ever, just yet :) I need to do more research on the astrological significance, positions in the sky, etc, of these stars... but I think I've got a good start. So, there you have it... my first solution for the Voynich... 8)