Mysterious Voynich manuscript has 'genuine message'

[Jazzy]

The message inside "the world's most mysterious medieval manuscript" has eluded cryptographers, mathematicians and linguists for over a century.

And for many, the so-called Voynich book is assumed to be a hoax.

But a new study, published in the journal Plos One, suggests the manuscript may, after all, hold a genuine message.

Scientists say they found linguistic patterns they believe to be meaningful words within the text.

Whether or not it really does have any meaningful information, though, is much debated by amateurs and professionals alike.

It was even investigated by a team of prominent code breakers during WWII who successfully cracked complex encrypted enemy messages, but they failed to find meaning in the text.

The book has been dated to the early 1400s, but it largely disappeared from public record until 1912 when an antique book dealer called Wilfrid Voynich bought it amongst a number of second-hand publications in Italy.

Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, UK, has spent many years analysing its linguistic patterns and says he hopes to unravel the manuscript's mystery, which he believes his new research is one step closer to doing.

"The text is unique, there are no similar works and all attempts to decode any possible message in the text have failed. It's not easy to dismiss the manuscript as simple nonsensical gibberish, as it shows a significant [linguistic] structure," he told BBC News.

Full article with more pictures

Interesting article.

Have any of you ever heard of this Voynich manuscript?

 

[DrLeftover]

hhhhmmmm

maybe:

What we KNOW for Sure about it.

So far, the volume called the Voynich Manuscript is one of a kind. No other examples of the language are known to exist.
It is known to be about four hundred years old through a fairly well documented chain of possession. It is thought to be somewhat older than that but the exact age is unknown.
Everybody from Vatican researchers to ATT/Bell Labs as well as investigators at MIT and Yale University worked on translating the text. It was even gone over by a top team of British and American code breakers from World War 2. And all of them, so far, have failed.
Botanists and biologists have tried to identify the plants in it and have been disappointed.
The book is currently in the Rare Books Collections in the library at Yale. Its catalog number is MS408.

http://themediadesk.com/newfiles3/ms408.htm

 

[Jazzy]

And for many, the so-called Voynich book is assumed to be a hoax.

Very elaborate hoax and who is responsible for it?

 

[DrLeftover]

If it is a hoax, it is one of the longest running ones ever.

There is a known chain of ownership that runs across four hundred years, so whoever did it in the fifteenth or sixteenth century was able to produce the 'language' in the thing that under analysis has been shown to behave as a natural language.

Which, if you are perpetuating a hoax, is a remarkable feat.

 

[Jazzy]

If it is a hoax, it is one of the longest running ones ever.

There is a known chain of ownership that runs across four hundred years, so whoever did it in the fifteenth or sixteenth century was able to produce the 'language' in the thing that under analysis has been shown to behave as a natural language.

Which, if you are perpetuating a hoax, is a remarkable feat.

Thank you for this information. It is a very fascinating manuscript. I've never heard of it before today.

 

[DrLeftover]

As part of the Desk's non-fiction series I also looked at three other Ancient Books.


The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Nag Hammadi

And the most picturesque of the three:

The Book of Kells

More about them, and other images at:
http://themediadesk.com/newfiles3/scrolls.htm

 

[Evil Eye]

Yeah, I've heard of it.

I found this to be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

http://xkcd.com/593/

 

[DrLeftover]

I finally got to watch the "decoded" video.

Of the entire book, he's identified perhaps a dozen words and a few more symbols and subjects.

Wonderful piece of work that. Yes indeed.

If it IS a recipe book, we now have a list of a few herbs. OK, I'm going to run right out to the green grocer and pick up some hellebore and coriander.

Now.

What do I do with them?

 

[DrLeftover]

The BBC took a look at it:

6 April 2014

The puzzling - and thus far indecipherable - nature of an old manuscript has confounded some of the world's greatest cryptologists. Is there truly a code to break, or is it all an elaborate hoax?

I have come to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, at Yale University, to solve a mystery that makes The Da Vinci Code seem tame - a book no-one can read, in a language that doesn't exist, illustrated with plants and creatures that have never been seen on Earth.

It is known as The Voynich Manuscript, after the second-hand book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, who claimed to have discovered it in Italy, in 1912. Since then, it has obsessed countless experts and generated numerous theories, both scientific and crackpot. "My favourite is that it is the illustrated diary of a teenage space alien who left it behind on earth," jokes the Beinecke's curator, Ray Clemens.

What surprises me is how small it is. I had expected an album-sized manuscript. But the book resting on a reading stand in front of me is about the size of a Penguin Classics edition.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26881734