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I just read a somewhat convincing claim that the Voynich manuscript has been translated:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566
...and then a very convincing explanation of how that's not actually true:
@stjohn yeah, I was skimming the original paper, and saw the author misusing linguistic terms and not being particularly clear about how they determined which glyphs are associated with which symbols, but assumed that they would explain it later.
And then the paper just ended, with a side note that the author had "solved" it in just 2 weeks.
@lizardsquid Ahaha, the good old "I'll explain later"! Or "I'll produce a translation when I can find some linguists who are experts in this language I just made up."
I won't lie though, my heart does skip a beat every time I see an article like this. But then I do love a good crackpot theory almost as much as a genuine one, so you can get an endless amount of fun out of this sort of thing. Translations of the Phaistos disc are usually good for a chuckle:
https://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/the-phaistos-disc/
I won't lie though, my heart does skip a beat every time I see an article like this. But then I do love a good crackpot theory almost as much as a genuine one, so you can get an endless amount of fun out of this sort of thing. Translations of the Phaistos disc are usually good for a chuckle:
https://unitedcats.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/the-phaistos-disc/
The kicker for me was "The solution to the codex of MS408 was developed over a 2-week period". Two weeks, you say! Gosh, it really sounds like he labored long and hard over this. Outsider decipherments do occur (Linear B was cracked by an architect), but they still take years of careful work and collaboration with other scholars. Even Champollion (Egyptian Hieroglyphic) or Michael Ventris (the Linear B guy) didn't do it alone. In *two weeks*.