The Voynich manuscript is one of those marvels that, even in these times of boundless knowledge and incredible technology, eludes continual efforts to understand it.<\/p>\n
Not heard of the thing? Welcome to the show. There has been a vigorous little dance of press coverage over the past couple years. It goes something like this:<\/p>\n
Step to your left.<\/em>\u00a0 \u201cAn eternal mystery.\u201d The manuscript is a hand-written, illustrated codex that\u2019s been shown through carbon dating to have originated in the early fifteenth century (1404\u20131438). The writing system used throughout its approximately 240 pages has yet to be identified.[1]<\/a> Cryptographers, historians, computer scientists and others have proposed numerous hypotheses over the decades, including that it\u2019s a hoax. Based on the illustrations, scholars divide the manuscript into five thematic sections: Herbal, Astrological, Biological, Pharmacological, and Recipes.<\/p>\n Below I list links to the (more recent) rhythmic pulse of \u201cdiscoveries\u201d and rejections, in chronological order. Under each link I\u2019ve pulled out quotes of the more intriguing tidbits.<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n November 30, 2016:<\/strong> https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-unsolvable-mysteries-of-the-voynich-manuscript<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n “The first half of the book is filled with drawings of plants; scholars call this the \u201cherbal\u201d section. None of the plants appear to be real, although they are made from the usual stuff (green leaves, roots, and so on […]). The next section contains circular diagrams of the kind often found in medieval zodiacal texts; scholars call this part \u201castrological,\u201d which is generous. Next, the so-called \u201cbalneological\u201d section shows \u201cnude ladies,\u201d in Clemens\u2019s words, in pools of liquid, which are connected to one another via a strange system of tubular plumbing that often snakes around whole pages of text. [\u2026] Then we get what appear to be instructions in the practical use of those plants from the beginning of the book, followed by pages that look roughly like recipes.”<\/p>\n “The Voynich MS was an early attempt to construct an artificial or universal language of the a priori type.\u00a0 \u00a0–Friedman.”<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n September 8, 2017<\/strong>:<\/strong> https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2017\/09\/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-has-finally-been-decoded\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n “Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women’s health that’s mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.”<\/p>\n “Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. \u2018From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry,\u2019 he wrote. \u2018The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus \u2013 aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque \/ decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis \/ radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc.\u2019 So this wasn’t a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.”<\/p>\n “Gibbs concluded that it’s likely the Voynich Manuscript was a customized book, possibly created for one person, devoted mostly to women’s medicine.”<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n September 10, 2017<\/strong>: <\/strong>https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/science\/archive\/2017\/09\/has-the-voynich-manuscript-really-been-solved\/539310\/<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n “This week, the venerable Times Literary Supplement published as its cover story a \u2018solution\u2019 for the Voynich manuscript. The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women\u2019s-health manual copied from several older sources. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes.”<\/p>\n “\u2019Frankly I\u2019m a little surprised the TLS published it,\u2019 says Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America. When she was a doctoral student at Yale\u2014whose Beinecke Library holds the Voynich manuscript\u2014Davis read dozens of theories as part of her job. \u2018If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat,\u2019 she says.”<\/p>\n “In the second part\u2014only two paragraphs long\u2014Gibbs gets into the meat of his solution: Each character in the manuscript is an abbreviated word, not a letter. This could be a breakthrough, but the TLS presents only two lines decoded using Gibbs\u2019s method. Davis did not find those two lines convincing either. \u2018They\u2019re not grammatically correct. It doesn\u2019t result in Latin that makes sense,\u2019 she says.”<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n February 1, 2018<\/strong>:<\/strong> https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/voynich-manuscript-artificial-intelligence-solved<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n “There are two problems with this notoriously difficult puzzle\u2014it\u2019s written in code, and no one knows what language that code enciphers.”<\/p>\n “\u2019That was surprising,\u2019 Kondrak said, in a statement. \u2018And just saying \u201cthis is Hebrew\u201d is the first step. The next step is how do we decipher it.\u2019 The scientists think the code used in the manuscript might have been created using alphagrams. (In standard alphagrams, the letters in a word are placed in alphabetical order\u2014the alphagram of \u2018alphagram,\u2019 for example, is \u2018aaaghlpmr.\u2019) Vowels also seemed to have been dropped. These assumptions made, they tried to come up with an algorithm to decipher this scrambled Hebrew text, to striking effect. \u2018It turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary,\u2019 said Kondrak.”<\/p>\n “Hebrew-speaking data scientist Shlomo Argamon offered some excoriating feedback. \u2018They are saying it looks more like Hebrew than other languages,\u2019 he said. \u2018In my opinion, that\u2019s not necessarily saying all that much.\u2019 The use of Google Translate, too, struck him as somewhat unscientific. [\u2026] Other scholars have raised doubts about the scientists\u2019 use of modern, rather than medieval, Hebrew.”<\/p>\n * * * * *<\/p>\n Certain researchers have made a compelling case against the \u201choax\u201d hypothesis, in any event. In 2013, an interesting paper analyzed the Voynich manuscript from an information theory<\/strong> perspective. They looked at organizational structure resulting from word distribution over the entire text, and concluded that there was \u201cpresence of a genuine linguistic structure\u201d.[2]<\/a> You can read the full paper here<\/a>.<\/p>\n A couple information theory takeaways:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Who will claim to have cracked the code next? My personal opinion, of course, is that they should throw some linguists on it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Voynich_manuscript<\/p>\n
\nStep to your right.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u201cI\u2019ve cracked the code!\u201d – some dude
\nStep back.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u201cNope, you\u2019re full of shit.\u201d
\nStep forward.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u201cWe\u2019ve solved it this time for sure.\u201d – some other dudes
\nRepeat<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n