Journal Interrobang's Journal: Cryptolinguistics
The other day I was catching up on "back issues" here at Slashdot, and ran across the article on the Voynich Manuscript, which looks like it's a puzzle that could amuse me for just...minutes...at a time, for years on end, possibly for the rest of my life. After all, people have been working on this thing for 500 years or so, and STILL nobody knows what it means.
The contents and/or meaning of the Voynich Manuscript, believed to date from between 1350 and 1450, are still unknown. Why? Because it's written in a strange script that appears to be a mixture of "standard" (inasmuch as any medieval ms hand/orthography/graphemes were "standard") Roman letters (for instance, 'a', 'o', 'n', and 'd' seem to jump out at me), and a variety of strange curly characters which may be specialized symbols, letters in a hitherto-undiscovered script (of which this ms may be the only surviving example), or extremely deviant letter forms of one character set or another (Roman letters, Greek letters, Cyrillic letters, etc.). No one knows what the thing says, nor its complete provenance (although some fragmentary record is known), nor its time and place of origin. In other words, it literally is an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
It resembles a medieval scientific compendium of some sort, having sections roughly equivalent to a medieval herbal (only featuring bizarre, nonexistent plants), an astronomy/astrology/cosmology section (featuring a deviant albeit Western-style zodiac that isn't...quite...right), and a section experts call the "biological" or anatomical section, which has numerous illustrations of naked women frolicking in strange, nonexistent, organic-looking plumbing filled with green and blue water(?), something which looks to be a diagram of plant cells, and various other weirdnesses.
Also, codebreakers of the professional stripe have been after it for years, and haven't gotten anywhere. Does that suggest anything to you? (Does to me -- either it's not a cypher, or it's a cypher written in a really, really obscure language.)
<mode="tongue in cheek"> Uncle William of Occam sez that it's written in Basque using an adapted phonetic alphabet, and fair-copied by someone who didn't read Basque.</mode>
Some Intriguing Points of Analysis and Speculation: Numerous theories about the Voynich Manuscript abound, many scholarly, and equally many totally crankish, including that
it's a cyphertext (based on entropy analyses and other evidence)
it's a text written in a non-Indo-European language and translated into a hybrid Roman/specialized character alphabet, where the specialized characters represent language features present in the source language, but not in the destination character set (see http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/02-01-18-chinese-redux/)
it's a "lost" Cathar prayer book (debunked)
it's an eschatological prophetic book (debunked and/or ignored by serious scholars)
Questions With (No) Answers: What I would like to know about the Voynich Manuscript is,
1) Has anyone done a thorough physical analysis of the manuscript, including spectrographic analyses of its various pigments, inks, and the vellum; brushings and analysis for particles, pollen, and micro-organisms, and carbon-dating? Such direct physical analysis might be able to place the thing more firmly in time and space.
2) Has anyone done a comparative analysis of the art style? Emily has seen Arabic herbals translated from Greek herbals where the plants in the Arabic herbals look nothing like the plants in the Greek herbals, let alone real plants, because of the constraints of the Arabic period art style. Find something that looks similar with a known text, and Voynich students might be a little closer to deciphering the thing.
3) Has anyone done a comparative analysis of letter forms using other extant, known medieval manuscripts as sources? If Voynich scholars could find the 4e character here, and the 9 character there (speculation has that it's a Latin shorthand mark) and some of the other curly marks elsewhere, they might be able to fill in the gaps.
Speculation and Suggestions:
The Bare Minim-um: As someone who's done calligraphy in a medieval style, I have to take issue with some of the transcription methods that produce words like "chtaiin" and other similar constructions, often with 2 or 3 'i's in a row. The basic unit of medieval calligraphy, crypto non-calligrapher guys, is the minim, which is that sort of dotless 'i'-shaped stroke (very easy to make with a quill/straight pen), a short upstroke like a serif, then a downstroke, then another short upstroke at the bottom which can act as a ligature to the next (stroke of the) character. See this page for illustrations and diagrams. (Also, take a look at the illustration "sample of Luxeuil Minuscule," and notice how illegible it is compared to the VMS.)
Anyway, minims. Since minims form the basis for most Roman calligraphic letters in just about any scribal hand -- for instance, the letters
c i l m n r t u v w x y
it's possible to confuse a lot of letters. For instance, if you read the set of strokes often transcribed by Voynich scholars as 'iin' or 'iin' as a series of minims (read 'em off the manuscript scans), you can suddenly see the possibility for 'un' or 'w' or any of a much wider range of letters (such as the ones written above). Actually, I own a book in which, by way of example, the word minim is written in calligraphy so it looks sort of like 'iiiiiiiiii'. (Sorry, Voynich scholars; I either just made your job harder or easier.)
Some of the other letter forms look just like mine, too. I write my d's in cursive almost exactly the way the Voynich writer wrote his loopy backwards-6 character. In fact, I hate to say it, but there's a cranky Voynich page that, sadly, seems to have one of the more practical "decodings" of the Voynich alphabet out there (scroll down to the middle of the page), even though I don't agree with all their choices, we seem to have arrived at similar conclusions (such as that the loopy # character could be a 'th', and that the loopy P- character could be a 'ph') independently.
Still, even assuming my pathetic skills in this case are somewhat justified, that doesn't mean I (or anyone else) can get any meaning out of it. The only thing I'm certain of is that the VMS is not written in Modern English (or, likely, English of any stripe). (Best guesses? To me, try Basque, medieval Catalan, Flemish, Holstein, Magyar, and a bunch of those other obscure -- and possibly orphan -- languages. It's too late to be Etruscan.
I've also done some calligraphy using medieval methods, and, while I'm not good at it, I can sort of see possible derivations for some of those letter forms. Where are the medievalists when you need 'em.
Hmm, give me a Beowulf cluster of fanatical SCAdians, and I'll crack the thing in two years...
Afternoon update: Emily suggested that I look at some Byzantine, Arabic-language herbals (usually translated from the Greek). The Greek plant illustrations are very naturalistic, the Arabic plant illustrations are extremely stylized, and don't even resemble plants, real or otherwise, for the most part. The most striking feature of the Byzantine herbals which is salient to the VMS is their mirror-image lateral symmetry: Most plants in both the Arabic herbals and the VMS mirror themselves side-to-side with leaves etc. sprouting from a central stalk, and a "crown" (flowers, fruit) in the centre top.
See for yourself here and here.
Clews, or just more false hope? Enjoy!
