He determined that the text was written in a pro-Romance language, about which modern linguistics knows very little.
Gerard Cheshire, an academic from the University of Bristol (UK), claims to have deciphered the Voynich manuscript, which has remained a mystery to cryptanalysts and linguists for over 100 years. He published his findings in the journal Romance Studies.
The Voynich manuscript is named after the Polish antiquarian Wilfred Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 from the Order of St. Ignatius, a male spiritual order of the Roman Catholic Church. They tried to decipher the contents of the manuscript even before that: back in the 17th century, one of the first attempts was made by Georg Baresch, a Prague alchemist. Most of all, they became interested in the manuscript in the 20th century. It was analyzed by the cryptanalysts of the First and Second World Wars, but no one was able to find the "key".
Frequency analysis carried out by the American physicist William Bennett in 1976 revealed that the structure of the text is characteristic of natural languages. In 2009, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted radiocarbon dating, which showed that the parchment was produced between 1404 and 1438. However, no one could understand the content of the document.
Gerard Cheshire says he deciphered the text. According to him, the work lasted two weeks. During this time, he defined the language and writing system. This is how he himself describes the process:
“Several times I have experienced eureka moments, followed by doubts and feelings of disbelief. When I realized the scale of the achievement - both historical and linguistic - excitement set in. What the text says is even more amazing than all the myths and fantasies that it has spawned. It was compiled by Dominican nuns as a reference source for Mary of Castile, Queen of Aragon, who happened to be the aunt of Catherine of Aragon. It is also no exaggeration to say that this manuscript is one of the most important events in Romanesque linguistics today. It is written in Pro-Romance, the forerunner of modern Romance languages such as Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and Galician. During the Middle Ages, it was distributed within the Mediterranean,but it was rarely used to record official documents, since Latin remained the language of the Church and royalty. The pro-Thoromaniac language has been lost to this day."
According to Cheshire, the pro-Romance alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and familiar characters. There are no special punctuation marks in this language, although some letters have symbolic variants that indicate punctuation or phonetic accents. All letters are in lower case. Words include diphthongs, triphthongs, quadriphthongs, and even quintiphongs (compound vowels made up of several elements and forming a single syllable). Now the academician plans to concentrate on the entire manuscript and completely decipher it.
The Voynich manuscript itself in pdf format can be viewed here.
Alexey Evglevsky
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