These are just the sorts of ideas and discussions I’d love to include in the special section of SCRIPT 1.2.

Perhaps you’ll all consider typing something up and sending it over?

script@studiohyperset.com

I’d welcome an article about James Hampton’s asemic writing too, Dennis.

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/hampton/index.html

My correct contact info is here:
http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/index.html

The thing is you can relate to the fact that many great minds and codebreaking heavyweights have tried and failed to decipher the VMs in more than one way. You can focus on the lack of a published success against their demonstrable expertise and say therefore that it is probably unbreakable or probably meaningless. OR you can focus on the fact that they all took it seriously in the first place and in many cases continued trying to break it for a long time. Even those that stopped often considered that it warranted further attempts. So with their skill and experience in codes and ciphers they thought throughout the process that it was still worth working on. That’s my view also, it is still very worth working on as a document with a real plaintext to be revealed.

Clearly the VMs is many things to many people….but I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from thinking that they too can make some headway against understanding or explaining the nature of the text itself. There is a whole lot that can be learnt about it with well chosen experimentation and analysis…so I would lament seeing it become a monolith that people just stare at from afar, I would rather it be a rockface with hundreds of climbers all over it actively trying to get to the top.

What you write in your post, seems to me, a perfectly legitimate historical “reading” of a manuscript that might, at first glance, seem undecipherable. In other words, “undecipherable” is all too often used to mean “non-semantic” when, in fact, such texts can be read in any number of ways.

In short, your ideas are in perfect accord with our own. As are yours, Marke.

I just couldn’t bear it if you all felt SCRIPT to be alienating or small minded. Indeed, you’re the sorts of folks — and these are the sorts of ideas — we’re trying to court!

Warm regards.

It is entirely possible that the VMs’ original text will ultimately turn out to be uncrackable: however, we have a very long way to go before we have fully exhausted the battery of forensic and statistical analytical tests available to us (and we’ve only just had the radiocarbon dating results!), so this does seem fairly premature.

Between the simplistic white of possible and black of impossible there is a rising logarithmic scale of difficulty. Some things are very very difficult. People said that a proof of Fermats last theorum was impossible….and that was unsolved (in the face of concerted efforts) for over three hundred years etc.

Luckily the edge of the possible world is continuously pushed forward by people who are unaware that what they are working on is impossible.

Marke