Ruth Graham - Why scholars can’t resist the uncrackable Voynich manuscript // Has the Voynich manuscript been decoded?

Studying it has been called ‘academic suicide,’ but an astonishing range of researchers have fallen under a mysterious document’s spell

HERE IS WHAT is known about the Voynich manuscript, a mysterious document that has bedeviled scholars and top cryptographers for more than a century: It consists of 246 pages of handwritten script and illustrations. It was discovered in an Italian monastery by a Lithuanian bookseller named Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Here is what is not known: Just about everything else. The greatest code breakers of the last 100 years have failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript’s ornate script, or even agree on whether it says anything at all. Experts have theorized that it was written in Europe, Asia, or South America; they have speculated that it was created by Leonardo da Vinci, by 13th-century philosopher Roger Bacon, or Wilfrid Voynich himself. When it comes to code breaking, “The Voynich is the Mount Everest of the genre and the K2 at the same time,” said Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer who wrote a 2006 book about the manuscript and maintains a website about historical cyphers.

Today, the manuscript is kept at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where, according to staff, it is one of the library’s most frequently requested objects. Now that the library has put high-resolution scans of the pages online, the Internet turns up almost limitless chatter about the manuscript, much of it crackpot. What is perhaps most striking about this unscalable peak, however, is how many different serious academic specialists have brought all the resources of their disciplines to try to climb it. Linguists have puzzled over the script, physicists have used computerized models to analyze its patterns, chemists have analyzed its parchment, and historians have traced its ownership through the centuries. Last month the Voynich landed in the news when a retired botanist and a retired Department of Defense information technologist proposed a new theory based in botany: Arthur Tucker and Rexford Talbert identified 37 of the manuscript’s 303 botanical illustrations as plants that could be found in a 16th-century botanical garden in central Mexico, and argued that the manuscript was written primarily in an extinct dialect of the Aztec language Nahuatl. Last week came another claim: Stephen Bax, a British applied linguist, announced he had translated 10 of its words.

Both of the new theories have been greeted with skepticism by longtime Voynich observers. “The temptation is always to fragment it, to look at a piece in isolation and say, ‘Ta da!’” Pelling said. “They get heavily invested in one tiny detail, and their enthusiasm for that detail wants them to shut their eyes to everything else.” The fact that a botanist, an information technologist, and a linguist have published new theories on the manuscript within just a few weeks attests to the Voynich’s remarkable intellectual pull—and offers a fascinating illustration of what happens when you try to solve a puzzle with very different sets of tools.

That’s true even if the puzzle turns out to have no real answer at all—if the Voynich manuscript is, as some suspect, a hoax or a pure curiosity, perhaps even created to build this kind of feverish interest without giving up its secrets. Either way, whether the Voynich’s ability to draw disparate scholars to a common mystery came about accidentally or deliberately, it’s hard to deny that it is devilishly good at its job.

THE VOYNICH OFFERS more than just an uncrackable written code: Colorful illustrations depict fantastical plants, astronomical diagrams, and groups of naked women in bathtubs. You could embrace the book as a linguistic brainteaser, an antiquarian book novelty, a guide to a lost theory of the natural world, or a portfolio of outsider art. Extraordinary as it is, the manuscript had largely disappeared from public record before Wilfrid Voynich’s discovery, though a rough history of its ownership can now be tracked back to the 17th century. (This history is contested, naturally.) A letter Voynich said he found with the manuscript traces the book’s ownership to Johannes Marcus Marci, a 17th-century scientist. Marci addressed the letter to Father Kircher, a Jesuit language expert, and pleaded for help deciphering it: “Such Sphinxes as these obey no-one but their master, Kircher.”

Based on information in the letter, Voynich suspected Roger Bacon was the author, which would have placed its origins in the 13th century. In 2009, however, scientists performed radiocarbon dating on scraps of the manuscript at the behest of a documentary film crew, and found that the bound collection of vellum pages dates back to the first half of the 15th century. This satisfied most so-called Voynichologists that it was not a later forgery—though not all of them, of course. Some say a 16th-century trickster could have bought a sheaf of old vellum in order to make his forgery look old.

The most important contemporary question about the manuscript is whether its text is “real” or not. Broadly speaking, there are three possibilities: It was written in a so-far undiscovered language; it was written in a code corresponding to a known language; or it’s a hoax written in a gibberish fake language. Few serious Voynichologists these days believe the script is written in an undiscovered “real” language, because it does not obey the rules of any other known languages: For example, one particular character appears only in the first lines of paragraphs. Most attention has focused on the notion that the manuscript is a cypher for a known language. Pelling, for example, believes it’s most likely a 15th-century “encyphered book of secrets,” similar to the handbooks of magic and medicine that would become popular in Italy in the 16th century. Over the years, people have guessed that the manuscript is written in coded Chinese, Welsh, Hebrew, or German.

This is one place that quantitatively minded scholars come in... read more:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/02/23/why-scholars-can-resist-uncrackable-voynich-manuscript/FWGMJjrqolrQ50L86SpkQP/story.html

Has the Voynich manuscript been decoded? First words of mysterious 15th century text revealed 

For decades, researchers have been trying in vain to decipher ancient texts written on the Voynich manuscript - and a British researcher claims he has cracked it. The world-renowned 600 year old manuscript is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars, and mysterious human figures, as well as many pages written in an unknown text. Now Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire, say he has decoded words in it for the first time. '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,' he said. '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 medieval 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.

Altogether Bax says he has worked out: Juniper, Taurus, Coriander, Centaurea, Chiron, Hellebore Nigella Sativa, Kesar and Cotton. Although Professor Bax admits his 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.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2564325/Has-Voynich-manuscript-decoded-First-words-mysterious-15th-century-text-revealed.html