The Voynich Manuscript

Over this past weekend I became privy to one of the great intellectual mysteries of our age: The Voynich Manuscript. Also, to see every page individually in photograph form, check this out.

The Voynich Manuscript is named for a Polish-American book seller named Wilifred Voynich who came into possession of said manuscript in 1912. It has baffled every scientific mind that's tried to decipher it. The language is unknown, the drawings are fairly accurate, and theories abound. Nazi-busting encryption geniuses were stumped. Super computers crashed...no one's been able to work it out.

The pages and ink have been carbon-dated, so the scientific community knows about when the book was produced (sometime in the sixteenth century). You can read all about this sucker at Wikipedia and the site I furnished (there's less info there), but I'm going to run through some of the theories.

The written language doesn't look that difficult--well, maybe to plenty of people, but not to me, and I'm by no means an expert in linguistics or encryption. One theory is that it is a very elaborate hoax. That theory's detractors usually say that there was far too much time spent on this for it to be a hoax, far too much thought and planning put into the roughly 30 distinct letters and thousands upon thousands of constructed "words". But, a hoax would explain why computer programs consider the text gibberish.

But, those same computer programs are not programmed to be able to understand tonal variations in script (I'm told from an article that opened my eyes tothe VM). South-east Asia has many tonal languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai to name three that are actually all in different language families). One theory is that someone from east Asia, living in Europe, most likely finishing up education there, was trying to construct a written language of their particular tonal language that would be easier for Europeans to understand.

While looking through the images, one of the circular deals, I found what to me looks like simplified Kanji characters. Kanji, specifically, is Japanese, but Kanji is based on simplified Chinese characters (both Korean and Japanese used Chinese symbols as a basis of their written language once you go far enough back in time). So, it almost looked like a translation wheel, with some Kanji looking characters on one side of the circle, and on the other side, the strange characters, either solitary or in small clusters.

I make no claim as to the master problem solver, I just try to look for what reasonably makes the most sense. It does look like too much work for a hoax. How can we be sure this isn't the last stitch of knowledge (there are many herb and plant pictures in the VM) from a dying people and language? Well, there almost certainly would be other things written in the language floating around Europe.

The constructed-translator theory made the most sense to me...but it still almost seems like too much work...

Take a moment and bask in the mystery...check the script out...