Gender & language...

Over lunch at Camden Wagamamas, Goth Richard commented that Ancient Greeks had three classes of people - men, women, and slaves - and that the three genders in their language (male, female, neuter) presumably developed as a reflection of their society. IIRC, Fernand Braudel (among many others) noted that society often acts as a key metaphor in the construction of our language, so this can't be too radical an proposition.

However, it strikes me that, in these days of rampant political correctness, we're rapidly losing male and female. If language does mirror society, does that mean that we're now all slaves?

Hoax!

I wish I properly understood why so many people - or rather, so many otherwise rational people - seem to take such visceral delight in proclaiming "The Voynich is a hoax!". Well... hurrah for you.

Isn't it completely obvious that that's just a gigantic cop-out? The truth is simply that the VMs is hard to understand, and contains lots of hidden symmetries and patterns (like Neal keys, sun/moon diagrams, misbindings, etc).

Perhaps these people secretly don't want to admit the possibility that some obscure person in history could be cleverer than them... perhaps they're jealous. Hmmm...