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The Voynich Manuscript |
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The Voynich Manuscript |
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The Voynich ManuscriptThe Most Mysterious Manuscript in the WorldFrom: http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/voynich.html
"From a piece of paper which was once attached to the Voynich
manuscript, and which is now stored in one of the boxes belonging
with the Voynich manuscript holdings of the Beinecke library, it
is known that the manuscript once formed part of the private library
of Petrus Beckx S.J., 22nd general of the Society of Jesus." "The manuscript counted at least 116 folios, of which 104
remain. The folio size is 6 by 9 inches, but some folios are two
or three times that size and are folded. There is one large composite
of six times this size (18 by 18 inches). Both the illustrations
and the script of the manuscript are unique. As long as the script
cannot be read, the illustrations are the only clue about the nature
of the book. According to these illustrations, the manuscript would
appear to be a scientific book, mostly an illustrated herbal with
some additional sections." Folio 78r (detail) "Wilfrid Voynich judged it [the Voynich Manuscript] to date
from the late 13th century, on the evidence of the calligraphy,
the drawings, the vellum, and the pigments. It is some 200 pages
long, written in an unknown script of which there is no known other
instance in the world. It is abundantly illustrated with awkward
coloured drawings. Drawings of unidentified plants; of what seems
to be herbal recipes; of tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs
connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts
than hydraulic contraptions; of mysterious charts in which some
have seem astronomical objects seen through a telescope, some live
cells seen through a microscope; of charts into which you may see
a strange calendar of zodiacal signs, populated by tiny naked people
in rubbish bins." "Prof. Sergio Toresella wrote a paper on 'alchemical herbals'
that resemble the VMs in having pictures of fantasy plants and written
spells, enchantments, and incantations (although in easily understood
plaintext)." "Dating at least to 1586, the manuscript is written in a language
of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic
script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen
to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to
any English or European letter system. The manuscript is small,
seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 170 pages. It is closely
written in a free-running hand and copiously illustrated with bizarre
line drawings that have been water-colored: drawings of plants,
drawings of little naked ladies appearing to take showers in a strange
system of plumbing (variously identified as organs of the body or
a primitive set of fountains), and astrological drawings - or what
have been interpreted as astrological drawings. Since the Voynich
Manuscript is at the Beinecke Rare Book Room at Yale [catalogue
number MS 408], it is accessible to any serious scholar." "Nobody knows, but the many illustrations suggest some kind of alchemy book, that somebody may have wanted to keep secret. The manuscript has several parts identified from the illustrations (although there is no guarantee that these are the subject matter of the sections): · a Herbal section (mostly unidentified and fantastic plants),
· an Astronomical section (with most zodiac symbols), ·
a Biological section (with some 'anatomical' drawings and human
figures), · a Cosmological section (with circles, stars and
celestial spheres), · a Pharmaceutical section (with vases
and parts of plants) and · a Recipes section (with many short
paragraphs). "...At the time when the Voynich manuscript was thought to
have originated - the late medieval or early Renaissance period-the
craft of cryptography was still relatively unsophisticated. Many
medieval ciphers were just exercises by idle monks in the margins
of otherwise straightforward manuscripts: words written backward,
or with the vowels replaced by dots." "In a well-known text on medieval paleography, list members
[of the Voynich list server] have found embellishments of letters
in a note that are dead ringers for the VMs' 'gallows letters'.
The date of the VMs is most likely the late 1400's because of the
script's similarity to a "humanist hand" style that only
saw use during several decades of the 1400's, and because the nymphs'
hairstyles point to 1480-1520." (2) Ruldoph's Collection
Folio 67r (detail) A number of years later, according to Sir Thomas Browne, Dee's son, Arthur, spoke of a mysterious book that his father owned - a "booke containing nothing butt Hieroglyphicks, which booke his father bestowed much time upon: but I could not heare that hee could make it out". "The manuscript somehow passed to Jacobus de Tepenecz, the
director of Rudolph's botanical gardens (his signature is present
in folio 1r) and it is speculated that this must have happened after
1608, when Jacobus Horcicki received his title 'de Tepenecz'. Thus
1608 is the earliest definite date for the Manuscript." "Codes from the early sixteenth century onward in Europe were
all derived from The Stenographica of Johannes Trethemius, Bishop
of Sponheim, an alchemist who wrote on the encripherment of secret
messages. He had a limited number of methods, and no military, alchemical,
religious, or political code was composed by any other means throughout
a period that lasted well into the seventeenth century. Yet the
Voynich Manuscript does not appear to have any relationship to the
codes derivative of Johannes Trethemius, Bishop of Sponheim." (3) Recent Attempts at Decipherment (1944-1986) "There have been many more attempts [at decipherment] that
did not result in publication because the would-be solvers honestly
admitted to defeat...In 1944, from among specialists in languages,
documents, mathematics, botany, and astronomy then doing war work
in Washington, William F. Friedman [a cryptologist famous for breaking
the ultrasecret Japanese PURPLE cipher] organized a group to work
on the problem."
"Unfortunately, by the time they [the Washington team] had,
working after hours, completed the task of transcribing the text
into symbols that tabulating machines could process, the war was
over and the group disbanded...." "In 1976 Captain Prescott Currier gave a paper in which he
showed that, judging from the handwriting, the Voynich Manuscript
must have been written by at least two different people, and that
the two texts differed markedly in the frequency distribution of
their letters and combinations." "The discovery of the two 'languages' in the Herbal Section
was the principal reason for transcribing and indexing this material.
It was hoped that by application of comparative techniques to the
Herbal A and B texts, ostensibly dealing with identical subject
matter, some clue to the nature of the two 'systems of writing'
might be forthcoming. The results were completely negative; there
was no sign of parallel constructions or any other evidence that
was useful in this regard. It was impossible not to conclude that
(a) we were not dealing with a 'linguistic' recording of data and
(b) the illustrations had little to do with the accompanying text.
Study of other sections of the Manuscript where 'A' and 'B' texts
are found has produced nothing to alter this conclusion. Further,
it has so far proved impossible to categorize or to classify grammatically
any series of 'words' or to discern any use patterns that that would
suggest any recognizable syntactic arrangement of the underlying
text. Perhaps even more important, I have been unable to identify
'words' or individual symbols in either language' to which I could
assign even tentative numerical values. It seems quite incredible
to me that any systems of writing (or a simple substitution thereof)
would not betray one or both of the above features." "Captain Currier received an A.B. in Romance Languages at
George Washington University, and a Diploma in Comparative Philology
at the University of London. He began his cryptologic career in
1935, and was called to active duty with the Navy in 1940. He has
served in many distinguished capacities in the field, and from 1948
to 1950, was Director of Research, Naval Security Group. Since his
retirement in 1962, he has continued to serve as a consultant. His
interest in the Voynich manuscript has been of very long standing,
and he has devoted an impressive amount of rigorously scientific
analytic effort to the problem in recent years." "There have been several purported breaks, including one rather
recent one, but none has been widely accepted....Mary D'Imperio,
author of The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma (1978), [is]
the most detailed and scholarly study to date of this document (reprint
available from Aegean Park Press). It uses Prescott Currier's notation,
which is described in her monograph." "Due to the lack of success in the decipherment, a number
of people have proposed that the manuscript is a 'hoax'. The manuscript
could either be a 16th century forgery, to be sold for a hefty sum
to emperor Rudolf II, who was interested in rare and unusual items
(Brumbaugh, 1977, deriving from earlier unpublished theories), or
a more recent one by W. Voynich himself (Barlow, 1986). The latter
is effectively excluded both by expert dating of the manuscript,
and by the evidence of its existence prior to 1887." (4) A Cathar Manuscript? Levitov's Decipherment Folio 82r (detail)
"There is fortunately one fragmentary record of Albigensian
belief which has survived....I refer to the Cathar Ritual of Lyons
which is now well know having been published in 1898 by Mr. F. C.
Conybeare." "The excerpt is the ritual of consolamentum, which is...the
baptism with the Holy Spirit by laying on of hands that made one
a full Cathar." Criticism of the Cathar Theory "There is no resemblance here to Levitov's claim that Catharism
was the antique cult of Isis - and certainly no truth to the picture
of the Voynich nymphs' opening their veins to bleed to death in
the hot tubs!" "Waite goes on to mention that part of the Lyons Codex contains
'certain prayers for the dying'. The codex is in the langue d'oc.
Does it resemble the Voynich material? We are not told." "I could never secure a copy of Levitov's book, and had to
rely entirely on pp.21-31, of which Michael Barlow, who had reviewed
Levitov's book in Cryptologia, had sent me photocopies. Levitov's
understanding of the Cathar religion and its rites, from what I
could piece together from the review in Cryptologia, and which are
central to his decipherment of the Voynich manuscript which he claims
is a Cathar prayer book, is, to say the least, rather at odds with
what Fernand Niel wrote in his Albigeois et Cathares (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1955)." "The language was very much standardized. It was an application
of a polyglot oral tongue into a literary language which would be
understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom
this language could be read." "At first reading, I would be tempted to dismiss it all as
nonsense: 'polyglot oral tongue' is meaningless babble to the linguist
in me. But Levitov is a medical doctor, so allowances must be made.
The best meaning I can read into 'polyglot oral tongue' is 'a language
that had never been written before and which had taken words from
many different languages'. That is perfectly reasonable: English
for one, has done that. Half its vocabulary is Norman French, and
some of the commonest words have non-Anglo-Saxon origins. 'Sky',
for instance, is a Danish word. So far, so good." "...We are here in the presence of a Germanic language which behaves very, very strangely in the way of the meanings of its compound words. For instance, viden (to be with death) is made up of the words for 'with', 'die' and the infinitive suffix. I am sure that Levitov here was thinking of a construction like German mitkommen which means 'to come along' ('to with-come'). I suppose I could say Bitte, sterben Sie mit on the same model as Bitte, kommen Sie mit ('Come with me/us, please'), thereby making up a verb mitsterben, but that would mean 'to die together with someone else', not 'to be with death' . Next, the word order in many 'apostrophized' groups of words (but note that a word often consists of just one single letter), is the reverse of that of Germanic. For instance VIAN 'one way' literally 'way one' is the reverse of Dutch een weg, German ein Weg, and of course, of English 'one way'. Ditto for WIA 'one who', VA 'one will', KER 'she understands' etc. Admittedly the inversion of the subject is quite common in German (Ploetzlish dacht ich: 'Suddenly thought I') but it is governed by strict, clear-cut grammatical rules, conspicuously absent in the two sentences translated on p.31 of the except from his book upon which I am drawing for these comments." Applying Levitov's rules for translation: thanvieth = the one way (th = the (?), an = one, vi = way, eth
= it) (Literally: "one does [one] who does it". The first "do"
is translated as "treat", the second "one" is
again added by Levitov: he inserts an A, which gives him ATAWITETH)
aneth = ones (an = one, -eth = the plural ending) "A complete translation of the more than 200 pages waits in
the wings - a long, arduous and possibly unrewarding task."
"In 1991 a loose international collective of researchers drawn largely from outside the academy coalesced around an email list devoted to the manuscript. 'It's very orderly,' says Jim Reeds, a list member and statistics Ph.D. who works in an AT&T laboratory. 'Everyone is listened to politely, even the crackpots.' Together the members maintain a massive archive of Voynich-related information; the network is spread out over dozens of interlinked Web sites that offer images of the manuscript, large chunks of transcribed text, a concordance, and even Voynich fonts. Recently, discussion has focused on the cipher's repetitiveness; several members have argued that it can be explained by a 'verbose' cipher, one that substitutes several cipher letters for each letter in the plaintext." Folio 88r (detail) "The collective has also renewed the effort to produce a valid
machine-readable transcription of the Voynich manuscript. Gabriel
Landini, who lectures at the University of Birmingham's School of
Dentistry, and René Zandbergen, a systems analyst in the
German aerospace industry, are now working to consolidate and reconcile
all the existing transcriptions into one single version; they will
then transcribe the rest of the Voynich text to produce one definitive
computer file from which conclusive statistical results can be obtained." "Computer analysis of the Voynich Manuscript has only deepened
the mystery. One finding has been that there are two 'languages'
or 'dialects' of Voynichese, which are called Voynich A and Voynich
B. The repetitiousness of the text is obvious to casual inspection.
Entropy is a numerical measure of the randomness of text. The lower
the entropy, the less random and the more repetitious it is [i.e.,
aaaaaa]. The entropy of samples of Voynich text is lower than that
of most human languages; only some Polynesian languages are as low." (See "Understanding the Second-Order Entropies of Voynich
Text" for details.) For example, taking a Latin phrase (from the Vulgate Bible): A comparison of the amount of information contained in each 'word'
of the Stars section of the Voynich MS (using the Curva alphabet)
with the words in Genesis chapters 1-25 (Vulgate) and De Bello Gallico
(Latin) revealed: ·"The apparent words in the Voynich
Ms appear to be really words. They are as varied as the words in
Latin texts of a similar length. ·"The first and second
character of Voynich words (using the Curva alphabet) have lower
entropy than in Latin. The Voynich words contain more information
from the third character onwards (in the conditional sense). ·"The
word-initial statistics of Voynichese are matched by one example
of an artificial language (which postdates the VMs by at least one
and a half centuries). ·"The statistics of Voynichese
and a Mandarin text written in the Pinyin script (using a trailing
numerical character to indicate tone) are very different. ·"A
word game to translate Latin to Voynichese must: |
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