The British scientist assures that he figured out "the most mysterious manuscript on Earth."
Handbook of the Queen of Aragon
Gerard Cheshire, an academic at the University of Bristol, believes he has solved the mystery of the Voynich manuscrip, understood what this mysterious handwritten picture book is about, the meaning of which remained incomprehensible. According to the academician, he determined the main thing - the language of the cipher text and the system of its recording.
At one time, the Voynich Manuscript had 262 pages measuring 22.5 by 16 centimeters. To date, 14 of them have been lost. The pages are numbered - not in an encrypted way, but in Arabic numerals. The text is written with a quill pen and ink. Paints of five colors are used for illustrations.
The manuscript is divided into several sections - botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological, pharmaceutical and prescription. At least the accompanying drawings give that impression.
There are about 250 thousand words in the manuscript, of which about 40 thousand are different. Strange-looking letters - at least 23, but not more than 30. At the end of many words there is a squiggle similar to the number 9.
In 1912, the American second-hand bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, the husband of Ethel Lilian Voynich, who wrote the legendary novel The Gadfly, discovered the manuscript in the Italian city of Frascat from the monks of the Jesuit school of Mondragon. And I bought it. Between the pages was a letter dated 1666 from the rector of the University of Prague. It followed from the letter that the Roman emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia, who ruled from 1576 to 1612, bought the manuscript for 600 ducats, which is about three and a half kilograms of gold.
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In 2009, American scientists from the University of Arizona cut several pieces from the manuscript. A radiocarbon analysis was carried out, which showed: it was created between 1404 and 1438.
The manuscript is now in the repository of Yale University. And officially it bears the title of "the most mysterious manuscript in the world."
EurekAlert reports that Cheshire only worked on the manuscript for two weeks. And thanks to a series of consecutive insights, I realized that the Voynich Manuscript is based on an ancient language - the so-called pro-Romance. The one from which later appeared Italian, French, Spanish and other Romance languages.
In an article titled Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained, published in the journal Romance Studies, the academician argues that the authors of the manuscript were Dominican nuns. She herself was a collection of some background information, which was intended for Mary of Castile - Queen of Aragon.
It is believed that the manuscript was intended for the weaker sex.
Gerard Cheshire intends to decipher the entire manuscript. Which, he said, will take some time.
However, it is not a fact that the academician will succeed. And before him, many promised - they also assured that they had found both the language of the text and the key to the cipher. But there is still no translation of the Voynich Manuscript into "human" language.
Abracadabra from the Andromeda Nebula
Last year, the Canadian news agency CBC reported that a computer program compiled by scientists at the University of Alberta's Artificial Intelligence Lab had decoded the first sentence of the Voynich Manuscript.
The Canadians have determined that the language of the manuscript is Hebrew. And the text is encrypted very simply - its author just rearranged the letters in words and removed the vowels.
According to the decoders, the manuscript begins with the words “She gave recommendations to the priest, the owner of the house, me and the people.”
However, it is strange: no messages that after the first sentence of the manuscript, at least the second was deciphered, did not appear.
According to one of the hypotheses, aliens attached their claws to the manuscript. This is indicated by an image on one of the pages of a neighboring galaxy - the Andromeda Nebula.
Some pages of the manuscript depict constellations.
According to the diametrically opposite hypothesis, the Voynich manuscript is someone's medieval joke, an artificial nonsense. To fool the descendants.
Of the rational assumptions, the following is the most popular: for some reason someone encrypted recipes for preparing preparations from medicinal plants and methods of medical procedures. The recipes and treatments are mostly for women. The pages of the manuscript abound with them, naked.
The pages are replete with depictions of naked women who are not the most attractive looking.
The accompanying text is written in strange characters.
A few years ago, it would seem that significant success was achieved by botanist Arthur O. Tucker of the University of Delaware (Delaware State University in Dover) and IT specialist Rexford H. Talbert. They found that the Voynich manuscript was remarkably similar to the “Cruz-Badianus,” or “Aztec Herbarium,” as it is called, which was created in 1552 in the New World in the Aztec language of Nahuatle. The codex contained a description of medicinal plants. They are depicted in illustrations made in exactly the same style as in "the most mysterious manuscript in the world."
Scientists have identified on the pages of the manuscript a cactus, bindweed, wild cabbage … 37 plants in total. Everything seems to be from the American continent. Therefore, the Voynich manuscript was created in the New World. It is based on the Aztec language - Nahuatl. But Tucker and Talbert did not go beyond this conclusion.
British scholar Stephen Bax, an applied linguist at the University of Bedfordshire, recently brought the manuscript back to the Old World. I found 14 of its letters analogs in the Latin alphabet, suggesting that the basis of the manuscript is a text written in one of the languages of the Middle East.
Hebrew, identified by Canadians as the language of the manuscript, is consistent with Bucks' conclusion.
Bottom line: there are a lot of victorious declarations, but there has never been a decisive victory - the Voynich Manuscript is still "the most mysterious manuscript on Earth." Maybe decryptors of all countries should join forces and tackle the text together - not only lone geniuses, but developers of artificial intelligence systems, specialists in cryptography, historians, linguists, and most importantly, doctors who are well versed in physiotherapy and medicinal plants.
Several plants from the manuscript have been identified.
BTW
It makes sense
The Voynich manuscript is by no means nonsense. There are numerous confirmations of this. For example, Gabriel Landini of the University of Birmingham applied a kind of spectral analysis to the manuscript. This is used to detect information in its implicit carriers - DNA bases, musical works. The scientist demonstrated that some information is definitely available.
The manuscript also obeyed the "law of Zipf". George Zipf of Harvard University, having studied at one time texts in many languages, including extinct ones, built for them a distribution of the frequency of occurrence of words in descending order. The curves were hyperbolic, which is a characteristic feature of real languages. The Voynich manuscript also gave hyperbole. And if so, then it must be decipherable. We wait. I wonder what this manuscript is really about.
The original Voynich manuscript can be viewed at this link.
Author: VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY