No, Someone Hasn't Cracked the Code of the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript (arstechnica.com) 155
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: The Voynich manuscript is a famous medieval text written in a mysterious language that so far has proven to be undecipherable. Now, Gerard Cheshire, a University of Bristol academic, has announced his own solution to the conundrum in a new paper in the journal Romance Studies. Cheshire identifies the mysterious writing as a "calligraphic proto-Romance" language, and he thinks the manuscript was put together by a Dominican nun as a reference source on behalf of Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon. Apparently it took him all of two weeks to accomplish a feat that has eluded our most brilliant scholars for at least a century. So case closed, right? After all, headlines are already trumpeting that the "Voynich manuscript is solved," decoded by a "UK genius." Not so fast. There's a long, checkered history of people making similar claims. None of them have proved convincing to date, and medievalists are justly skeptical of Cheshire's conclusions as well.
What is this mysterious manuscript that has everyone so excited? It's a 15th century medieval handwritten text dated between 1404 and 1438, purchased in 1912 by a Polish book dealer and antiquarian named Wilfrid M. Voynich (hence its moniker). Along with the strange handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with bizarre pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. It's currently kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library of rare books and manuscripts. Possible authors include Roger Bacon, Elizabethan astrologer/alchemist John Dee, or even Voynich himself, possibly as a hoax. "Cheshire argues that the text is a kind of proto-Romance language, a precursor to modern languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and Galician that he claims is now extinct because it was seldom written in official documents," the report adds. "If true, that would make the Voynich manuscript the only known surviving example of such a proto-Romance language."
Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, is dubious of Cheshire's claim, tweeting: "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense."
What is this mysterious manuscript that has everyone so excited? It's a 15th century medieval handwritten text dated between 1404 and 1438, purchased in 1912 by a Polish book dealer and antiquarian named Wilfrid M. Voynich (hence its moniker). Along with the strange handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with bizarre pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. It's currently kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library of rare books and manuscripts. Possible authors include Roger Bacon, Elizabethan astrologer/alchemist John Dee, or even Voynich himself, possibly as a hoax. "Cheshire argues that the text is a kind of proto-Romance language, a precursor to modern languages like Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and Galician that he claims is now extinct because it was seldom written in official documents," the report adds. "If true, that would make the Voynich manuscript the only known surviving example of such a proto-Romance language."
Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, is dubious of Cheshire's claim, tweeting: "Sorry, folks, 'proto-Romance language' is not a thing. This is just more aspirational, circular, self-fulfilling nonsense."
Corrected paper link (Score:5, Informative)
The link in the abstract here on slasdhot does not go to the paper; this link does.
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I realize that there is a lot of opposition to this work being an understanding of the Voynich manuscript. However, having read this entirely plus a couple of other papers on the background by the same author, I find it to be convincing.
Re: All of two weeks? (Score:5, Funny)
They all stop at the Naked Woman pages
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By everyone in the academic world, are you talking about a small portion of people looking at the text.
Now there is a possibility this book is just some guys doodles that doesn't mean anything. But for the small group of people interested in this, are going on the assumption that it isn't a doodle, and the methods used to try to decipher it, can bring a better knowledge of culture, and language, even if it isn't deciphered, it has opened up new ways of looking at thing.
Often translating to a modern language
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So yes a document could only translate to proto-English and not to Modern English, just because the ideas are not compatible.
You mean "proto-spanish" or "proto-portuguise".
Re:All of two weeks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now there is a possibility this book is just some guys doodles that doesn't mean anything.
Seems likely. I remember some cryptographers looked at it some years ago, and found the writing just didn't have enough entropy to be language. Wish I had a link, but there were too many patterns in the "letters" for it to contain much actual information.
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I've read the same, the "it's random nonsense" theory is the most convincing so far.
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but there were too many patterns in the "letters" for it to contain much actual information.
So it's some medieval song like "Twelve Days of Christmas?"
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Seems likely. I remember some cryptographers looked at it some years ago, and found the writing just didn't have enough entropy to be language. Wish I had a link, but there were too many patterns in the "letters" for it to contain much actual information.
I was impressed by that too. But the new paper claims that many symbols are abbreviations for common combinations. That's a standard way to increase entropy.
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Or stress makes the ulcers bad enough to be noticable by increasing stomach acid production. It could be that people without stress get infected just as often but the ulcers don't bother them nearly as much before they heal because they have less stomach acid in their system.
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Doctor Marshall said that some ulcers are caused by other things, and that stress can make them worse.
However, he proved - quite definitively - that a large proportion of ulcers (and chronic gastritis) are caused directly by H. pylori. The medical establishment at the time was up in arms over this, since "everyone knew" that ulcers were only caused by stress, and that you should do things like drink milk to make them better. Of course, drinking milk actually feeds H. pylori...
I'd bet that, whenever (and if)
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The manuscript, according to older /. articles, got "cracked" 10 - 20 years ago.
It is a manual about central american plants, their healing properties etc. written in a central american script, written by a christian monk/priest ...
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written in a central american script,
What is a central american script?
Gerard (Score:2)
I predict the academic in question will posit a riddle, grin, then disappear.
Have to go further down the rabbit hole to solve this one, perhaps.
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Old unused parchment is not rare. They needed blank stuff to write on back then, like we do even today. Blank books to be written in (think "diary" or "ledger") were common. Forgeries purporting to be Medieval or Renaissance, written on old parchment are common in the rare books trade.
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Her cheap boyfriend had brought her some Chateau 1437.
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The manuscript based on tests is dated between 1404 and 1438; however, the first known date is when it was purchased in 1912. It could have existed long before then but not known to scholars. This is the same of artwork. For example a famous painter may have created a work but no one knew about it until decades or centuries later. There are always claims of previously unknown works by the famous painters all the time. Unless the painter kept detailed records of everything he or she painted, it is always po
Last year (Score:1)
Wasn't it supposed to be some old turkish dialect ?
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Latin? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't "proto-Romance" be "Latin"?
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Wouldn't "proto-Romance" be "Latin"?
It could be, but it's all Greek to me!
Re:Latin? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Proto-Romance" already has a name: Vulgar Latin. It is NOT the same language as Classical Latin. Unlike the latter, Vulgar Latin was virtually never written, so it can only be inferred from its descendents. (There were, in fact, a few cases of it being written down. In Roman courts of law, scribes would typically translate on the fly (if necessary) into Latin. But apparently there were a few instances of scribes writing down the testimony in the language in which it was given, untranslated, and in a few of these cases that language was Vulgar Latin. Apparently it hasn't provided enough material to allow reconstruction of the full language.)
Never written? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
We do have one very significant text in Vulgar Latin: Jerome's translation of the Christian Bible known as the "Vulgate". He translated it into Vulgar Latin so the masses could understand it. Ironically, the Roman Catholic Church continued to use the Vulgate long after the masses could no longer understand Latin, vulgar or otherwise, and outlawed translations in contemporary languages. The original purpose of the Vulgate had been completely subverted.
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We do have one very significant text in Vulgar Latin: Jerome's translation of the Christian Bible known as the "Vulgate". He translated it into Vulgar Latin so the masses could understand it.
The Vulgate was not written in vulgar Latin. The word "vulgar" just means common or colloquial. It was a translation into Latin from Greek texts, and incorporated some previous Latin texts. It's called the Vulgate because it became the version of the bible most commonly used, not because it was written in vulgar Latin.
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Jerome's translation of the Christian Bible known as the "Vulgate"
Clearly he missed the obvious opportunity to call it Biblegate.
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Considering that it was a vulgate, and the way different languages developed in different areas, I would venture to guess that it also wasn't a single language. Of course, then we could get into arguing about the difference between a dialect and a language, and....
People tend to want to build sharp distinctions where they don't actually exist. At some point, in some dialects, the "-us" endings of Latin words began to be pronounced "-o", and I would wager that there were places where either both pronunciat
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Proto-Romance Language with American Plants? (Score:5, Interesting)
The best guesstimate that I've seen so far is that the language is Nahuatl, the primary Aztec language. Several of the plants depicted were only found in the Americas at the time it was written, and Nahuatl did not have a written language until much later. Only the vellum has been dated to 1404-1438, the ink and paints used were common well into the 16th century, and vellum and parchment inventories were laid up to last for decades.
The Spanish brought over many young boys of the upper class to be trained as monks. One of them working as a copyist could have invented his own writing system for his native language and gone on to depict the things he remembers from his boyhood. Some of the names for things have been tentatively attributed to Nahuatl, but I haven't kept up on the work in this for years so don't know what the standing of that claim is currently.
Was the Voynich manuscript written in Nahuatl? (Score:3, Informative)
Reading this now:
Was the Voynich manuscript written in Nahuatl?
http://nahuatlstudies.blogspot... [blogspot.com]
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The best guesstimate that I've seen so far is that the language is Nahuatl, the primary Aztec language.
That is an interesting theory.
It seems that ethnographers/anthropologists or other experts on Pre-Columbian Mexican history, etc could tell pretty quickly whether that was the case though.
I would be interested in their view on this.
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The Spanish brought over many young boys of the upper class to be trained as monks.
But then how do you explain all the pictures of naked women?!
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The reputation of monks at the time was anything but chaste and celibate, especially in Iberia and the Americas. Monks are the primary reason why almost no native communities in Latin America are pure aboriginal blood, as the direct representative of god, the pope and the king they were pretty much untouchable. Of course it didn't help that the Church has always had the custom of shuffling their worst staff out to regions where they wouldn't be as much of an obvious embarrassment, keeping their more contr
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Young boys turn into teens, and teens throughout the ages thought mostly of naked women.
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I'm not a scholar on this, but the church didn't officially consider natives of the Americas to have souls, and so to be 'human'. In that context, you could argue that looking at (or drawing) a naked native woman to be technically the same as looking at an undressed monkey. It was certainly the logic that they used to excuse acts of genocide.
That would also make raping a (unconverted) native the equivalent of bestiality (which may or may not have been illegal). Things start to get very strange when you
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Bartolome de las Casas established that the American peoples had souls by 1542. That was part of the reason for the initiation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the other being that the Spanish had worked most of the local Caribbean people to death in the gold mines and needed more labor. Since Africans were expensive they had to treat them better so they mostly survived..
There was very little hesitation about depicting the naked female form in the Middle Ages of Europe. It wasn't until centuries later
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You are close. /. every year once or twice, we already know the language *and the writing* is a south american script, and we also know it was a european/christian monk/priest who wrote it, I wonder why it makes "false news" all the time.
As that manuscript pops up on
I would expect one who likes to decipher it to be much more up to date on it, than I am.
Conversion factor (Score:4, Funny)
Every few years, there's a new claimed solution to the Voynich Manuscript. Roughly speaking, you can estimate when one will be coming around, since there are typically 2 to 3 claimed identifications of D.B. Cooper for every claimed solution to the manuscript. I'm not sure what the conversion factor is between these and someone claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine, but if anyone has that info, I'd be eager to hear it.
Hoax (Score:2)
The document itself is a hoax. What a waste of time.
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Perhaps, but it's virtually impossible to prove that it can't be translated. Between whatever code might have been used and not knowing what language the code translates to, it's very hard to determine that it isn't meaningful.
Examining the statistic properties of the text can give indications about whether it is meaningful. Statistical properties of many languages have been determined and can be compared to this text to see if it looks plausible as a natural language. An example of just such a study is this one [voynich.nu]. His conclusion -- is that the Voynich manuscript differs quite significantly in conditional character entropy (a measure of the likelihood of one symbol being followed by another) of most or all natural languages that ha
Re:Hoax (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is, then the hoaxer had to dig up 500 year old unused vellum pages from somewhere, replicate 15th century inks and paints, and then create the entire thing, binding it in 500 year old materials as well. They would have to be enough of a linguist to create a script that actually looks like a language as well, rather than random letter groupings. If they were going to go to that much trouble it would have been far more worthwhile to create something much more valuable, like the Q Document or the pilots' logs for the journey of Magellen's crew. An unreadable document with atypical illustrations? That only has value as a curiosity.
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Not necessarily a new hoax. One possibility is that it's the tool of a medieval con artist. One who claims to have a book of powerful knowledge, which only he can read - and will, for a price. Perhaps he said it contained the secret of making gold, or elixir of eternal life.
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Not necessarily a new hoax.
Exactly. Forgeries and hoaxes are as old as writing.
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Why not a 15th century hoaxer? It's not like forgery is a new art, never seen before the advent of fake news.
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Just because it's a hoax doesn't mean it's modern. If it's a 15th-century hoax, then of course it would be all 15th-century materials.
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It would have to be a very early hoax then, and yet done by someone with knowledge of New World horticulture. Not beyond the realm of possibility, but even then there were more profitable frauds to commit such as alchemical works, a communication from Prester John, and the like.
Suppose he did crack it... (Score:2)
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If I may make up the language as well, I can make it mean whatever I please.
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Weeeellllllll.... no. You'll either have to have the same word mean the same thing wherever it's used, or some small set of meanings. And the words will need to either relate to the illustrations, or at minimum make the illustrations reasonable.
So you'll need a reasonable amount of consistency. And just making up a language is, in and of itself, not a small job, even when you model it on existing languages. Look up Interlingua, Esperanto, Ido, Loglan, etc. And those were designed to be easy to understa
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There quite a few statistical anomalies that do not look like a text in any natural language, The common theme among them is higher degrees of order (more repetition) in several ways that natural language texts, regardless of language. This type of deviation from natural language statistics (more repetition, less variation, less entropy) is the rule when someone tries to conjure up a fake. People aren't good at faking this.
Easy (Score:3, Funny)
I've seen it. It's obviously written in perl!
Okay, I'm gone.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:1)
https://xkcd.com/593/
Seriously, how has no one posted this yet?
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That's not the worst explanation of what it's about that I've seen.
Sound like the usual cherry picking (Score:3)
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Then again (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a troll... (Score:2)
The manuscript is actually complete nonsense, and just a huge multi-century troll.
Some bored medieval monks got together and decided to see who could befuddle future academics the most. The descendants of their orders are probably still out there somewhere tallying up the score ("ha! they spent 5 years on THIS study! 1826 more points for us!").
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If so they picked extremely expensive materials to work with. IIRC it's written with the highest quality inks and paints, including ultramarine (which could only be made with crushed lapis lazuli from Afghanistan), on donkey-skin vellum. Parchment was expensive, calf-skin vellum was far more expensive, and donkey-skin was out of almost everyone's price range. The only more expensive vellum was from wild animals like red deer.
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I've never cared what was done with my leftovers after my demise...
Until now.
I wonder how much it would cost to get a couple-three tons of Egyptian stonework brought over....
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I'm surprised someone hasn't thought of this too. It might be nothing more than a troll from the past. Some monks are probably burning in hell laughing their asses off.
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The counter argument is that a substantial amount of work went into it, and it was likely pretty expensive too.
Both of those are toxic to a 'scam artist'; especially for a support prop; where a lot less effort could yield just as a good a result.
Medieval times are full of ciphers, and symbols and it would have much simpler to produce something like that.
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Unless you accept the "bigger fool" theory. I mean, it worked for reliquaries, why not for spooky, strange "alchemy" stuff? 1500s was the time for such bullshittery, you'd have someone create a document, claim it's from far, far away from times immemorial, written by some wise men that hold old knowledge... hell that shit works today, why do you think it didn't work in a much more gullible time?
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Why do you think that was a more gullible time? Is it just because the news we get from that period has been winnowed over the centuries until only the "important" and "really interesting" were left?
To say that they had less knowledge in some particular areas is definitely correct, but that's a lot different from "more gullible".
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Quite so. But that is a rather different scenario than it simply being a support prop for a snake-oil gig as was originally proposed in the post i replied to.
But as a work created to fool a prince... it seems weird to say the least to show up with something that nobody would recognize as desirable.
Most counterfeits are for a thing people want. Fashion bags brand X owned by actress Y, the Porsche seen famous movie Y driven by Z, Vases from the ming dynasty, the first edition of a famous book by a famous auth
Of course he's wrong... (Score:2)
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But where do the Nazi's come into play....wait, that is the History Channel....
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No, the History Channel is all aliens now, isn't it?
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C'mon, at least be accurate. It was the *ancient* aliens, the ones who conveniently are no longer around.
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I'm offering, for sale, this obscure ... (Score:2)
... photo-pre-romantic-blockchainized obscure cloud-based text artificially ionized by intelligence in a deep learning state of darkness:
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Yours for 1.4142135623730950488016887242097 bitcoin.
My wallet: OU812.
Many thanks.
Richard Sheeger is still at it... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've had serious interest in the Voynich for over a decade. I've made my attempts at analyzing it using custom software, and have made some very interesting statistical observations.
Having said that, "Gerard Cheshire", aka Richard Sheeger, aka Rick Sheeger, has been pushing his "translations" since well before 2007. (Note that Richard Sheeger is an anagram of Gerard Cheshire). You will see Rick Sheeger pushing Chesire's paper, in places such as this: https://groups.google.com/foru... [google.com]
His solution is not universal to the manuscript, nor is it reproducible, nor has he managed to translate any significant contiguous portion. The Voynich contains over 37,000 words - it is trivial to pick any number of random words and assign them some meaning or translation that seems to match some context of the manuscript (such as a nearby drawing). It is the typical folly to then claim it has been "deciphered" or "decoded" - but only if only more time / money / expertise could be applied to the rest of the work to somehow make more than just those handful of words make sense.
I'm very happy to see this Slashdot story portraying this in the light it deserves.
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Additionally, it appears the University of Bristol is attempting to absolve themselves of this quickly. They have already removed the news article from their own website where they announced his "translation":
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news... [bristol.ac.uk]
A page listing Cheshire as a student now links to a 404 as well:
http://www.bris.ac.uk/neurosci... [bris.ac.uk] -> http://www.bris.ac.uk/neurosci... [bris.ac.uk]
The internet archive does not have his page archived either.
And the handwashing has taken place... (Score:2)
After pulling the news item leaving a 404, the University of Bristol has now updated the page as follows:
Yesterday the University of Bristol published a story about research on the Voynich manuscript by an honorary research associate. This research was entirely the author's own work and is not affiliated with the University of Bristol, the School of Arts nor the Centre for Medieval Studies.
The paper was published in ‘The Journal of Popular Romance Studies’ following a double blind peer review process by two external academic referees, a process used to validate the research quality of a study.
When a member of our academic community has a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, the University’s Media Team will determine whether the findings are of public interest. If they are, the team will communicate the research to the media and on our University website.
Following media coverage, concerns have been raised about the validity of this research from academics in the fields of linguistics and medieval studies. We take such concerns very seriously and have therefore removed the story regarding this research from our website to seek further validation and allow further discussions both internally and with the journal concerned.
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news... [bristol.ac.uk]
Solved! Now go home. (Score:2)
It's simple: the author partook of most of the plants illustrated in the manuscript, and was high as a kite, and thus wrote hallucinatory gibberish.
Voynich manuscript solved (Score:1)
Paul Revere Wrote It, It's In Dialect From Okinawa (Score:1)
He died in Seattle trying to find out what had happened to his shipment of Okumidori tea. Boston was at that time defined as Boston College High School located in Erbil Iraq it has nothing to do with the story.
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Cost-effective fusion, AI, blockchain, nanotech, bitcoin theft, fans angry at something they didn't like, new programming language will solve all of our problems.
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They stemmed from Latin. The proto-Romance language is Vulgar Latin.