Voynich Manuscript online

[seemslikeadream]

Mexican plants could break code on gibberish manuscript

17:03 03 February 2014 by Lisa Grossman
A mysterious manuscript that appears to be written in gibberish may actually be in an extinct dialect of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Illustrations of plants in the manuscript have been linked to plants native to Central America for the first time, suggesting a new origin for the text. But some still say it could be a hoax.

The Voynich manuscript has puzzled researchers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. Among hundreds of pages of so-far undecipherable text, it includes illustrations of naked nymphs, astrological diagrams and drawings of plants that no one has been able to identify.

An academic war has raged for years between those who think the manuscript contains a real language that could eventually be decoded, and those who think it was a clever forgery designed to dupe book collectors. "It's a battle with two sides," says Alain Touwaide, a historian of botany at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

Mexican look

Previously, many researchers assumed that the manuscript must have originated in Europe, where it was found. But botanist Arthur Tucker of Delaware State University in Dover noticed similarities between certain plants in the manuscript and illustrations of plants in 16th century records from Mexico.

Tucker began collecting copies of Mexican botanical books out of curiosity about the history of herbs there. "Quite by accident, I ran across the Voynich and it was a Homer Simpson moment of D'oh! Of course –this matches my other codices and the artwork of 16th century Mexico."

The most striking example was an illustration of a soap plant (xiuhamolli) in a Mexican book dated 1552. Tucker and Rexford Talbert, a retired information technology researcher at the US Department of Defense and NASA, connected a total of 37 of the 303 plants, six animals and one mineral illustrated in the Voynich manuscript to 16th century species in the region that lies between Texas, California and Nicaragua. They think many of the plants could have come from what is now central Mexico.

On the basis of these similarities, the pair suggests that the manuscript came from the New World, and that it might be written in an extinct form of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Deciphering the names of these plants could therefore help crack the Voynich code.

Plant forgery

Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK remains sceptical. He thinks a careful forger could have made up plausible-looking plants.

"It's pretty good odds that you'll find plants in the world that happen to look like the Voynich manuscript just by chance," he says. "If I sat down with a random plant generator software and got it to generate 50 completely fictitious plants, I'm pretty sure I could find 20 real plants that happen to look like 20 of the made up plants."

Touwaide says the findings are intriguing, but agrees that they form just one of many hypotheses. "I believe that it doesn't prove anything. If it's a forgery, someone could very well have had the idea of creating the forgery on the basis of New World flora. At the most, it shows a possible source of the forgery."

Tucker admits that there is work to be done before they can throw out the hoax hypothesis entirely. But one of the Voynich plants makes him wonder: it looks strikingly similar to Viola bicolor, the American field pansy, which only grows in North America. The distinction between this plant and its European relative, Viola tricolor, was not known until after the Voynich was discovered. Ruling out time travel, says Tucker, how would this have been possible? "If this is a hoax, they did a dang good job and had help from a competent botanist who had knowledge only available after 1912 in some crucial cases."

[seemslikeadream]

600 year old mystery manuscript decoded by University of Bedfordshire professor

Fri 14th February, 2014

AN award-winning professor from the University has followed in the footsteps of Indiana Jones by cracking the code of a 600 year old manuscript, deemed as ‘the most mysterious’ document in the world.
Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics, has just become the first professional linguist to crack the code of the Voynich manuscript using an analytical approach.

The world-renowned manuscript is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures, as well as many pages written in an unknown text.

Up until now the 15th century cryptic work has baffled scholars, cryptographers and codebreakers who have failed to read a single letter of the script or any word of the text.

Over time it has attained an infamous reputation, even featuring in the latest hit computer game Assassin’s Creed, as well as in the Indiana Jones novels, when Indiana decoded the Voynich and used it to find the ‘Philosopher's Stone’.

However in reality no one has come close to revealing the Voynich’s true messages.

Many grand theories have been proposed. Some suggest it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci as a boy, or secret Cathars, or the lost tribe of Israel, or most recently Aztecs … some have even proclaimed it was done by aliens!

Professor Bax however has begun to unlock the mystery meanings of the Voynich manuscript using his wide knowledge of mediaeval manuscripts and his familiarity with Semitic languages such as Arabic. Using careful linguistic analysis he is working on the script letter by letter.

“I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script,” explained Professor Bax, who is to give his inaugural lecture as a professor at the University later this month.

“The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants. I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at mediaeval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results.”



Among the words he has identified is the term for Taurus, alongside a picture of seven stars which seem to be the Pleiades, and also the word KANTAIRON alongside a picture of the plant Centaury, a known mediaeval herb, as well as a number of other plants.

Although Professor Bax’s decoding is still only partial, it has generated a lot of excitement in the world of codebreaking and linguistics because it could prove a crucial breakthrough for an eventual full decipherment.

“My aim in reporting on my findings at this stage is to encourage other linguists to work with me to decode the whole script using the same approach, though it still won’t be easy. That way we can finally understand what the mysterious authors were trying to tell us,” he added.

“But already my research shows conclusively that the manuscript is not a hoax, as some have claimed, and is probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language.”

Find out more about his work at the University's Centre for Research in English Language Learning and Assessment (CRELLA) and also on his personal website www.stephenbax.net

Professor Bax, who was recently awarded the 2014 TESOL International Distinguished Researcher Award for his work on eye-tracking and reading, will discuss this and other research at his inaugural professional lecture at the University’s Luton campus on Tuesday 25 February at 6pm.

[seemslikeadream]

Decrypting the most mysterious book in the world
After 600 years, the secret language of the Voynich manuscript may finally be understood
By Rich McCormick on February 28, 2014 01:00 pm Email

Around two-thirds of the way into the aged vellum pages of the Voynich manuscript, you'll find a line drawing of a bath. A pipe leads into it, another pipe leads away. Inside the bath, knee-deep in a green liquid, squat 16 naked women. Over the page, more naked women stand in the openings of ornate horns, seemingly suspended by jets of water and using their hands to support pipes, or archways, or rainbows.

All around these pictures — above, below, to the left and right, sometimes in gaps where the pictures connect with each other — you'll find text. It seems to be there to annotate the pictures, to explain their purpose, but there's a problem: the text in the 600-year-old book doesn't make any sense.

Since the manuscript was brought to the public's attention in 1912 — when antique book collector Wilfrid Voynich bought it in Italy — experts from a range of fields have tried their hardest to make sense of it. Cryptographers have tried to crack its code; linguists have tried to decipher its base language. Botanists have identified the plants sketched within its aged pages and attempted to cross-reference their ancient and modern names.

None have come up with a full cipher for the Voynich manuscript's strange text. Few claim to even understand any of its words. Of them, Professor Stephen Bax is perhaps the closest to having a claim to making some progress. Bax, a professor in applied linguistics at the University of Bedford, announced last week that he has provisionally decoded 10 words and identified the approximate sound values for 14 symbols included in the manuscript. If his deductions are correct, they'd be the first words to be deciphered in the manuscript since Voynich rediscovered the book last century. Bax says they are a "springboard for the full decoding and eventual decipherment of the manuscript as a whole."


Almost everything we believe we know about the Voynich manuscript we don't really know for sure. It's a codex illustrated with strange figures and sketched plants that has been carbon-dated to between 1404 and 1438, and it could've come from Renaissance Italy. But there are discrepancies with this origin theory: the sunflowers shown in the manuscript's pages, for example, didn't grow in Europe during the 15th century.

There is no default, accepted theory to explain the manuscript's provenance, and any theory that gains traction is usually disproven or disregarded by the huge community of amateur and professional Voynich scholars. Ten years ago news reports appeared suggesting the document was a hoax, written 100 years after its carbon-dated vellum suggests. It might've come from Mexico. Or it could've been a philosophical experiment, or a work of art or, according to theoretical physicist Andreas Schinner, put together by an "an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange mathematical algorithm in his head." Or aliens wrote it.

Beinecke_dl_2002046-148
Professor Bax believes the manuscript — which is available online to read at the Yale Beinecke Library's website — is as old as its carbon-dating suggests. Speaking informally in a question and answer session on Reddit, he said he thought it was probably written in an "invented script, probably by a small group trying to study and pass on knowledge." That group, he said, was based "maybe in a region not far from Europe" such as Turkey, Iran, or the Caucasus. He speculated that they may have died out, possibly as a result of war. There's a huge history of Voynich manuscript scholarship, speculation, and contention — and Bax's take on the origins of the manuscript is just the latest in a centuries-old debate.

Bax's method of deciphering the 10 words and 14 sounds was similar to that used by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young, who were the first to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. Champollion searched for the known names of pharaohs to put symbols against sounds; Bax took words in the manuscript that appeared to annotate specific drawings — seven plants and one constellation — and connected them to the names of things that seemed similar in other languages. Bax connected a word that appeared to label a picture of a juniper plant with an annotation that appeared to read "oror" and noted the similarity between the word and the Arabic and Hebrew word for the same plant, "arar." He moved on in a similar manner, finding connections between known languages and the mystifying manuscript text that seemingly allowed him to decode words such as "taurus" and "coriander" in the 600-year-old document.

Beinecke_dl_2002046-148-_1_
The professor is convinced the manuscript is not a hoax. It is, he suggests in his findings, "probably an exploratory treatise on nature," but others have taken issue with his diagnosis. Nick Pelling, whose Cipher Mysteries site is home to research and opinions on coded historical documents, blasted Bax's methodology and findings in a seven-part publication. As one of the internet's most prolific writers on the subject of the Voynich manuscript, Pelling called Bax's readings "subjective," "basically unworkable," and "just ridiculous."

Bax replied in a similarly detailed post, saying that Pelling had "failed to read [Bax's] paper carefully" and jumped to "the wrong conclusions." Pelling's issues are primarily with very specific points in Bax's hypothesis —the coded reference to "coriander," he argues, is believed by some to be a copying error on behalf of the author — but they show just how varied the approaches to decoding the mysterious manuscript have been. He also accuses Bax of using "hopeful" plant identifications that he says are likely incorrect. Arthur Tucker, from the Delaware State University Department of Agriculture, agrees, saying that Bax's plant identifications were "naïve and mostly wrong."

This kind of contention isn't new for the Voynich manuscript. Since its discovery, researchers have taken vastly different approaches to decoding the document and decried other methods. After rediscovering the book at the beginning of the 20th century, Wilfrid Voynich —who added to its mystery by saying he discovered the book in "an ancient castle in southern Europe" — gave the document to William Newbold, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to decode. Newbold became convinced that "tiny squiggles" in the manuscript's text were the key to unlocking its secrets, and asThe New Yorker describes, spent his final years and his fading eyesight with magnifying glass in hand, trying to decode apparent patterns in the random way the centuries-old ink had dried.


Newbold was followed in his research by William Friedman. Friedman, who helped decode Japanese transmissions during World War II and would go on to help found the National Security Agency and become its first chief cryptologist, debunked Newbold's theories but was unable to come up with his own translation. He gave up on the manuscript after three decades of work, calling it impossible to decipher even after he collected a group of codebreaking experts just before the end of World War II and convinced them to work on the manuscript. The 1970s brought further research, as professors such as William Ralph Bennett started to use computers in an attempt to crack the manuscript's code. In the same decade, Voynich researcher John Stojko proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written in a modified version of the Ukrainian language.

But research into the document didn't begin with Voynich's rediscovery in the 20th century. Historians say Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) became interested in the book and paid 600 ducats — $90,000 in modern money, according to The New Yorker — in order to get his hands on it. From Rudolf II, it made its way through a succession of Renaissance thinkers who were obsessed with deciphering it.

Beinecke_dl_2002046-148-_1_
The methods these early scholars used to decipher the manuscript — which was already two centuries old in the 1600s — aren't totally clear, but modern Voynich researcher René Zandbergen mentions one way in which the document was first studied. Zandbergen describes an erased cipher table in the margin of the manuscript's first folio that is reportedly partially visible under ultraviolet light. The table — displaying the Latin alphabet placed alongside the manuscript's text — hasn't been dated, but Zandbergen suggests it was drawn by some of the first scholars who attempted to decrypt the manuscript.

It's perhaps because nobody has been able to agree on how best to study the document, let alone what it says, that the Voynich manuscript exerts such a pull over both academics and hobbyists. Linguists, codebreakers, cryptographers, astronomers, historians, those convinced that aliens landed in the 15th century and wrote a weird book: all can throw their intellectual efforts at a document that has resisted translation for 600 years. Pelling called its study "academic suicide," a near-impossible case that bested emperors, codebreakers, and some of history's strongest minds without anything to show for it.

Will Bax succeed at cracking the text where dozens before him have failed, or is it destined to confound another six centuries' worth of scholars and conspiracy theorists? That's an open question — but if the professor is doubting his work, he isn't tipping his hand. As he writes, "Why on earth would anyone waste their time on creating a hoax of this kind? It's just not credible, is it?"

[seemslikeadream]

New Scans of the Voynich Manuscript, a Medieval Book No One Can Read
by Allison Meier on November 5, 2014


Voynich Manuscript (courtesy Yale University Library, all images via Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most obsessed-over historical enigmas. A medieval book dating from the late 15th or 16th century, its strange, flowing script has never been deciphered, its origins never determined. The 113 plant illustrations it contains seem to depict no flora found on Earth, and throughout its vellum pages are visuals of the cosmos, a small army of naked women cavorting through pools of water, and the arcane alphabet that has so frustrated linguists and cryptographers.

Voynich Manuscript (courtesy Yale University Library)
Voynich Manuscript (courtesy Yale University Library) (click to enlarge)
As the Yale Daily News reported last week and aficionados discovered online, new high-resolution scans of the manuscript were recently posted at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library site. Digital versions were previously available to the curious through the Beinecke, but the new scans are even sharper, and in sequential order you can closely examine each page. As the library explained to Hyperallergic, recent conservation work addressed folds and curls that had previously blocked some pages, and new scanning equipment made the color more accurate and didn’t require so much securing with straps on the delicate pages.

In 1912, the manuscript started to make its way into contemporary conscious when it was acquired by antique book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who for the rest of his life tried and failed to derive meaning from the manuscript apparently about the natural world. Believed to have been created in Central Europe, its path over the centuries is unclear — at one point in the 17th century it was reportedly sent to Athanasius Kircher, scholar of the scientific and the strange. It arrived at Yale in 1969 impressively intact, housed now in the Beinecke as the star obscurity among an incredible trove of rare texts. There its curvy writing in brownish-black ink, flowers sometimes sprouting animal parts like something from a deranged herbal, and zodiac charts beckon code breakers.

Some still speculate it is all a hoax, but carbon dating at least confirms its age, and even this year researchers are attempting to puzzle out the meaning from this book no one can be read. A linguist at the University of Bedfordshire in the UK proposed sounds to match the symbols, declaring he had decoded 14 of them. Meanwhile, researchers at Delaware State University argued the manuscript may have its origins in central Mexico after analyzing the nature of the bizarre plant illustrations.

You can find a full description at Yale’s Voynich catalog record, and perhaps form your own theory of how a book that seems so fluidly written, so packed with intended meaning, can become a complete mystery.

[seemslikeadream]

Will the Voynich manuscript finally be cracked? Publisher to create clones of 'the world's most mysterious book' to help experts break its code
The Voynich manuscript was discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912
Cryptographers have been trying to decipher the text for decades
A small Spanish company will make 898 exact replicas of the manuscript
Publisher plans to sell the clones for 7,000 to 8,000 (£6,030 to £6,891)
By AFP and ABIGAIL BEALL FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 05:31 EST, 22 August 2016 | UPDATED: 05:37 EST, 22 August 2016

It is a centuries-old manuscript written in an coded language that no one - not even the best cryptographers - has cracked.
Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.
Now after a ten-year quest for access, Siloe, a small publishing house nestled deep in northern Spain, has secured the right to clone the document.

It's one of the world's most mysterious books; a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one has cracked. Now after a ten-year quest for access, Siloe, a small publishing house has secured the right to clone the Voynich manuscript
+12
It's one of the world's most mysterious books; a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one has cracked. Now after a ten-year quest for access, Siloe, a small publishing house has secured the right to clone the Voynich manuscript
THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT
The 15th century cryptic work has baffled scholars, cryptographers and codebreakers.
So far, no one has been able to read a single letter of the script or any word of the text.
Over time it has attained an infamous reputation.
It has even featured in the latest hit computer game Assassin’s Creed, as well as in the Indiana Jones novels, when Indiana decoded the Voynich and used it to find the ‘Philosopher's Stone’.
However in reality no one has come close to revealing the Voynich’s true messages.
Many grand theories have been proposed.
Some suggest it was the work of Leonardo da Vinci as a boy, or secret Cathars, or the lost tribe of Israel, or most recently Aztecs.
Some have even proclaimed it was done by aliens.
The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale University's Beinecke Library, emerging only occasionally.
'Touching the Voynich is an experience,' said Juan Jose Garcia, director of Siloe, which is based in Burgos, in the north of Spain.
'It's a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.'
Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich.
The copies will be so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.
The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones - a number which is a palindrome, or a figure that reads the same backwards or forwards.
The publishing house plans to sell the clones, also known as facsimiles, for 7,000 to 8,000 euros (£6,030 to £6,891 or $7,800 to $8,900) apiece once completed - and close to 300 people have already put in pre-orders.
Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke Library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript.


It will take Siloe around 18 months to make the first clones, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale. The copies will be so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced

It will take Siloe around 18 months to make the first clones, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale. The copies will be so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced
The publishing house plans to sell the clones for 7,000 to 8,000 euros ($7,800 to $8,900) apiece once completed - and close to 300 people have already put in pre-orders. Yale decided to have it done because of the many people who want to consult the manuscript

The publishing house plans to sell the clones for 7,000 to 8,000 euros ($7,800 to $8,900) apiece once completed - and close to 300 people have already put in pre-orders. Yale decided to have it done because of the many people who want to consult the manuscript
Workers at Siloe are currently making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real deal. All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret
+12
Workers at Siloe are currently making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real deal. All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret

HOW IT BE WILL CLONED
Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains over 200 pages including several large fold-outs.
It will take Siloe around 18 months to make the first clones, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale.
Workers at Siloe are currently making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real deal.
The paper they use - made from a paste developed by the company - has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.
Once printed, the pages are put together and made to look older.
All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret by Garcia, who in his spare time has also tried his hand at cryptology.

'We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,' he said.
'It also enables libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and we will use the facsimile ourselves to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested.'
The manuscript is named after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who bought it around 1912 from a collection of books belonging to the Jesuits in Italy, and eventually propelled it into the public eye.
Theories abound about who wrote it and what it means.
For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail.
But that theory was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438.
Others point to a young Leonardo da Vinci, someone who wrote in code to escape the Inquisition, an elaborate joke or even an alien who left the book behind when leaving Earth.

Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke Library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript. The facsimile will provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested


Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke Library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript. The facsimile will provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested
It will also enable libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and the publishers will use it to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested

It will also enable libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and the publishers will use it to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested
The paper they use - made from a paste developed by the company - has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich. Once printed, the pages will be put together and made to look older

The paper they use - made from a paste developed by the company - has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich. Once printed, the pages will be put together and made to look older
THE MYSTERY SURROUNDING THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT

The Voynich manuscript was discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912 by book dealer Wilfred Voynich.
Carbon dating suggests the manuscript was created in the early 15th century, between approximately 1404 and 1438, during the Italian Renaissance.
The 240 pages of the book are made from a type of parchment produced using calf skin, known as vellum.
Each page is decorated with illustrations, diagrams and a mysterious text written from left to right.
Due to its mysterious nature, the text has been studied by cryptographers around the world, yet no-one has succeeded in deciphering the reams of written passages.
This has led to many people claim the book is hoax, or that the writing is nonsense.
Due to the manuscript’s discovery in Italy, many researchers believe the book to have originated in Europe, however, the latest research from Dr. Tucker suggests it may have been written by the Aztecs in what is now modern-day Mexico.

Its content is even more mysterious.
The plants drawn have never been identified, the astronomical charts don't reveal much and neither do the women.
Does the book hold the key to eternal youth? Or is it a mere collection of herbal medicine and recipes?
Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan's 'Purple' cipher during World War II.
But the only person to have made any headway is Indiana Jones, who manages to crack it in a novel featuring the fictitious archaeologist.
For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail. But that was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438

For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail. But that was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438


Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers


The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale University's Beinecke Library, emerging only occasionally. Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich
Fiction aside, the Beinecke Library gets thousands of emails every month from people claiming to have decoded it, says Rene Zandbergen, a space engineer who runs a recognised blog on the manuscript, which he has consulted several times.
'More than 90 per cent of all the access to their digital library is only for the Voynich Manuscript,' he added.
Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains over 200 pages including several large fold-outs.
The 240 pages of the book are made from a type of parchment produced using calf skin, known as vellum, and are decorated with illustrations, diagrams and a mysterious text written from left to right

The 240 pages of the book are made from a type of parchment produced using calf skin, known as vellum, and are decorated with illustrations, diagrams and a mysterious text written from left to right
It will take Siloe around 18 months to make the first clones when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale.
Workers at Siloe are currently making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real deal.
The paper they use - made from a paste developed by the company - has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.
Once printed, the pages are put together and made to look older.
All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret by Garcia, who in his spare time has also tried his hand at cryptology.
'We call it the Voynich Challenge,' he said.
'My business partner... says the author of the Voynich could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery.'
Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains over 200 pages including several large fold-outs. Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan's 'Purple' cipher during World War II

Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains over 200 pages including several large fold-outs. Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan's 'Purple' cipher during World War II


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z4IAPZR95X

[Elvis]

I need closure on this.

These people, Ahmet Ardic & sons, seem to be onto something, i.e., the language is Turkish but the script is...something else; the first video includes some English translation (at around 9:15).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk

Later last year, questions about their work were addressed here:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTTRsrzndTY

According to a comment from the Ardics under the first video, their work apparently was checked and approved by an independent linguist with the appropriate background:

Thanks to Professor Dr. Firudin Celilov. He has examined our work. He devoted some his precious time to our work. After his study, he gave us the following reference letter. Thus, linguists starts to verify that our studies. Which means that alphabet transcriptions (we were make for this manuscript) ensures that the manuscript was written in Turkish.

To those interested in reading of Voynich Manuscript,

I have had chance to investigate the claim that Ahmet Ardic and his sons made about the 600 year old Voynich Manuscript that it is written in Turkic. Upon studying the transcript Ardic family proposed I was able to independently verify that in fact this manuscript is written in a Turkic language.

Ahmet Ardic, during his visit in Baku Azerbaijan on September 23, 2018 has presented me his findings. After Mr Ardic’s presentation I have had the opportunity to evaluate and investigate in detail the Latin alphabet transcription he proposed. Upon investigating the individual words and the grammar structure it became evident that the manuscript is based on Turkish language and the transcript Ardic family proposed successfully translates the manuscript into Turkic language. The words, phrases and sentences that have been used in this manuscript have been read. Words and sentence structures are in harmony with the Turkish language, and while translated into the present Turkish language within the structure of the Turkish language, clear and emerging meanings are reflected.

I am glad to bring my independent expert validation of Ardic families findings to the attention of those who are interested in this subject matter.

Sincerely,

Prof. Dr. Firudin Aghasioghlu Jalilov

The Letter In Azerbaijani Turkish;

Google News coughs up these two stories from this month:

https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/categ ... ious-book/

and

https://www.historyextra.com/period/med ... s-voynich/

Neither story mentions the Ardics.

[dada]

I would suggest the 'Voynich manuscript' bears similarities to certain alchemical texts popular during the period. So, a particularly creative take in that style.

I should probably be clear, when referring to alchemy, I don't mean the branch of new age, pop culture mysticism, but that the manuscript belongs into a centuries-long tradition of writings from Spain to Persia. And points East. Far be it from me to question the experts, though. I'm no expert in anything except qbert.

If it were an alchemical text, translating the language in which the manuscript is written wouldn't guarantee an understanding of it. It may even interfere.

Could be the basic problem when it comes to alchemy. Before finding the stone, or decanting the elixirs or whatever, instruction is desperately needed but you can't understand the texts. Then, making some sense of them may be intellectually gratifying but doesn't get you any closer, only makes the work take longer. And finally, if by some 'stroke of fortune' you find success, the texts make perfect sense but you don't need them anymore.

[stickdog99]

"I can't figure it out, so it must be an elaborate hoax."

Hmmmm.

This line of reasoning seems exceedingly familiar.