Voynich Manuscript

I recently stumbled across an interesting documentary on Amazon Prime called The Voynich Code:  The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript.  No one has been able to crack its code — is it shorthand?  Encrypted text?  Gibberish?  Even the illustrations are other-worldly.  Some wonder if the author was the young Leonardo DaVinci, but no one really knows for sure (it was written from left to right, like he did).  It seems to date from Renaissance times.  Wikipedia has some good introductory info about it if you’d like to know more.

A .pdf copy is available here. 

Better hi-res scans of its pages are available to see here, though, which you can zoom in on for a closer look.

eta:  here it is mentioned in current events.

Voynich Manuscript (175).jpg


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6 comments Add yours
  1. Would love to know the purpose too.  They still have much to translate.  When they mentioned it was "phonetic," I immediately thought, "Shorthand"!  But perhaps not.  Can't wait to see what they come up with.

  2. Hmm… It's a year since this video was uploaded. The paper that Mr. Ardiç submitted has yet to be published, and the linguistic community, as far as I can tell, is silent on the matter. Turkish is a language with a well understood history over the last several hundred years, so the hypothesis that the manuscript is in phonemic old Turkish should be easy to test. You'd expect that a positive outcome of such a test would lead people to consider Mr. Ardiç's work an important linguistic coup. That his work hasn't made waves seems to me to suggest a cautionary view. Others have also claimed to decode the Voynich manuscript, but their claims haven't panned out. Maybe Mr. Ardiç's won't either. Still, his alleged translation of some parts seems to make sense. I'll wait for the outcome of the submission of his research before I make a judgment.

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