Breakthrough over 600-year-old mystery manuscript [Voynich]

BBC ^ | February 18, 2014 | Nic Rigby

[SunkenCiv]

The Voynich Manuscript, carbon-dated to the 1400s, was rediscovered in 1912, but has defied codebreakers since.

Now, Bedfordshire University's Stephen Bax says he has deciphered 10 words, which could lead to more discoveries.

The manuscript, which some think is a hoax, is full of illustrations of plants and stars, as well as text...

It largely disappeared from public record until 1912 when Wilfrid Voynich, an antique book dealer, bought it amongst a number of second-hand publications in Italy.

Since then, scholars and cryptographers have studied the document but have failed to find meaning in the text.

It was investigated by a team of code breakers during WWII, but they also failed to find meaning in the words.

Academics across the world have been trying to decode the manuscript.

In June last year, Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester, UK, published a study which he believes shows that the manuscript was unlikely to be a hoax.

Dr Montemurro and a colleague, using a computerised statistical method to analyse the text, found that it followed the structure of "real languages".

In February this year, a paper published in the journal of the American Botanical Council said one of the plant drawings suggested a possible Mexican origin for the manuscript.

Prof Bax, an expert in applied linguistics, said he had been working on the Voynich Manuscript for about two years.

He said he had managed to find the word for Taurus, alongside a picture of seven stars (seen as part of the zodiac constellation of Taurus) and the word Kantairon alongside a picture of the herb Centaury.

Prof Bax said he had been trying to crack the manuscript using his knowledge of medieval texts and his familiarity with Semitic languages like Arabic.

[Little Bill]

The Indus Valley script is probably Proto Dravidian there are still Dravidian holdouts in Afghanistan.

If I were going after the Phaistos Disk I would look at SE Anatolian scripts there seems to be some similarity.

[SunkenCiv]

:’)

[Texan5]

It is hard to explain-it is a matter of spelling phonetically in a different language because my first language-the one I speak at least 90% of the time-is English...

[SunkenCiv]

There are other agglutinative languages, and many of them appear to be isolates; Sumerian, for one example, was spoken by a people who, by their own account, came into Mesopotamia by sea, then proceeded to invent a writing system (cuneiform) which was in use until sometime in late antiquity or the early Middle Ages (and then its secrets were lost for over a thousand years), in use longer than any writing system including the Chinese script. As a people they just vanished in a demographic tide, leaving behind some of their legends, and practically no geographic placenames (they used the existing names for their cities and the rivers etc). Sumerian has been suggested as the language of the Indus scripts, but I think that has been shown to be impossible. It’s possible that it hides an ancient version of Dravidian, but it’s at least as likely that it will prove to be an otherwise unknown language that is an isolate.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2238530/posts?page=3#3

[SunkenCiv]

That’s what Barry Fell’s approach was.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.equinox-project.com/v047902.htm

[Texan5]

Thanks-fascinating subject, any way you look at it. A couple of nights ago I watched a rerun of a program about long-lost cities that have been found on H2, and the fact that nearly nothing is known about them-who the people were, where they came from/went, whether they spoke/wrote a language that is known, etc. I’d seen the program before, but it is still very interesting to me.

I’m always delighted when objects found among ruins prove to be from other areas, likely trade goods. It seems that no matter how far back you look, people always liked and wanted stuff from other places. And in order to trade, there must have been at least some common words in everyone’s language that was used in the marketplaces for such goods.