Languedoc Topics
Mysteries of the Languedoc
The Voynich Manuscript
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The Voynich manuscript is a manuscript written in an otherwise unknown alphabet. Various scientific tests to date have tended to authenticate it - for example statistical analysis reveals it to match real languages which have a different profile to made up ones or cyphers. It has defied all efforts by linguists and cryptographers to decode it. One popular theory is that it is a Cathar text.
All cipher texts of this length and of this period have yielded easily to modern cryptanalysis techniques, but this one has defied experts for 100 years, including the expert code breakers at Blechly Park in the UK and their wartime counterparts in the US. The manuscript is thought to have been written between 1450 and 1520. Its author, script and language remain a mystery. The Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers. Their failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply an elaborate hoax, but statistical comparisons suggest that it is not a sequence of arbitrary symbols.
According to Levitov, the text concerned the rite of Endura - an assisted suicide ritual for people near death. The Endura is most famously associated with the Cathar faith. Levitov explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. Women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis' mantle. Cathars were certainly active in what is now northern Italy, but Levitov's theory is questionable on several grounds. The Cathar faith a form of Christian Gnosticism and not associated with Isis. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is older than modern dating suggests. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Most, but not quite all, of the Voynich MS is written in a script that is not known from any other surviving document. Some pages also feature curious illustrations. It consists of characters - shown on the right - which are arranged into what appear to be words, as in the example on the left. Most of the text has been written from left to right and from top to bottom. Especially on the so-called herbal pages it appears that the illustration (or at least an outline of it) was on the page before the text was added, as the text invariably avoids the illustrations.
There are a few lines or words in the MS which are not written in the Voynich script. This 'extraneous writing' is in the normal Roman alphabet, but is almost unintelligible.
Similarities with other scriptsVarious attempts have been made to identify the script and it has variously been interpreted as composed of Latin abbreviations, alchemical symbols, a form of cypher, and Etruscan. The following figure was created using the "Voynich EVA Hand 1" font created by Gabriel Landini It is a sample transcription of the start of folio 1r of the manuscript.
Content
The "biological" section of the manuscript has dense text and illustrations showing nude women bathing. The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with "bullets" on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, suggesting that the scribe understood what he was writing; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being inked onto the page. The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs (or characters), usually separated from each other by small gaps. Most glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20-30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text - exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonetic or orthographic laws of some sort; e.g. certain characters must appear in each word (like the vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled but others may not. Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages. For instance, word frequencies obey Zipf's law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page, and may be the name of the plant. The Voynich manuscript's "language" is unlike European languages in some aspects. There are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, and there are few one-letter or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within the word is also odd: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section - an arrangement found in Semitic languages, but not in the Latin, Greek or Cyrillic alphabets. However, there are various ways of writing the same letter in European languages: (eg Greek s, German ss and Q/q English )
There are a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines which are written in distorted Latin letters, and two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the 15th century, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. A series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France or the Iberian Peninsula. These bits of Latin script may have been part of the original text, or may have been added at a later time.
Illustrations
History
The earliest confirmed owner of the manuscript was Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as modern cryptologists about this "Sphinx" that had been in his library for many years. On learning that Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and "deciphered" Egyptian hieroglyphs, he sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher, recently located by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known mention of the manuscript. It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch apparently refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague; who promptly forwarded the book to Kircher, his long-time friend and correspondent. Marci's cover letter dated 1666 is still attached to the manuscript.
Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Jesuits in 1866 and became the headquarters of the Jesuits' Collegio Ghisleri.
In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (daughter of the mathematician George Boole). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Anne Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969. The Voynich manuscript is now item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. A facsimile edition was published in 2005.
Theories about authorship
Marci's 1665 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor of Bohemia (1552-1612) for 600 ducats. According to the letter, Rudolf believed the author to be the Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (1214-1294). Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgement" about this claim, it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most deciphering attempts for the next 80 years. However, scholars who have looked at the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with Bacon's works have flatly denied that possibility. Mnishovsky died in 1644, and that the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611 - at least 55 years before Marci's letter.
Self-authorshipOthers suspected Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means; and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. However, by expert internal dating of the manuscript, and the recent discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher, many consider that possibility to have been eliminated. Still, internal dating is often highly speculative and depends on many assumptions which may, themselves, be lacking in hard factual support. There has also been debate over what date the internal evidence suggests, with some scholars perceiving a more modern date. Further, Baresch's letter (and Marci's as well) only establish the existence of a manuscript; not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one spoken of there. In fact, their letters might even be taken as the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript (assuming he was aware of them), rather than as proofs authenticating it. But if a fabrication, the question arises as to why neither Voynich nor his widow ever attempted to sell it. To fabricate a document for profit but never attempt to sell it would be highly unusual. Fame rather than fortune might be speculated as a motive, but that would not explain why Voynich's widow never attempted to sell the manuscript after his death. All things considered, most who have studied the history of the manuscript do not believe that Voynich fabricated the document. Other theories
Jan Marci met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University to Rome in 1638; and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist side of the University to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the Voynich manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher. Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this task; and Kircher was an easy target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced one at once. It is worth noting that the only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch (1639), and two by Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marci and Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the Voynich manuscript "cover letter". However, Marci's secret grudge against the Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to become a Jesuit, and shortly before his death in 1667 he was granted honorary membership in their Order. Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things), and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher - and made poor Baresch his unwitting "guinea pig". After Kircher published his book on Coptic, Mnishovsky (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him would be a much better trophy than stumping Baresch, and convinced the alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger Bacon story to motivate Baresch. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory. Dr Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling a herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge. Nick Pelling has developed a theory in his book that the Voynich manuscript was written by Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), an Italian renaissance architect. According to Pelling's theory, Averlino tried to reach Istanbul around 1465, and enciphered in the Voynich manuscript some of his own works about various engineering topics to be able to export his knowledge to the Ottoman Turks past Venetian border guards. The theory is based mainly on circumstantial evidence. Pelling examines several characteristics of the cipher text and suggests means of encryption Averlino might have employed, but does not claim to have deciphered the contents. If Pelling is right, then the manuscript is enciphered with an extremely convoluted cascade of methods, including "fake" artefacts (odd characteristics of the cipher text which hint to an enciphering method which was actually not used.) He claims most of the marginalia are also fake, and were deliberately introduced to mislead code-breakers. Renaissance Magazine published a theory (issue #53, March 2007) by H.R. SantaColoma which points out the similarity of several objects in the Voynich manuscript to early microscopes. Cornelius Drebbel is closely associated with the very earliest developments in microscopy. This led the author to notice similarities between the artistic style of Drebbel and various illustrations in the Voynich. In addition, Drebbel became the head alchemist to Rudolf II at about the time the Voynich is known to have been in Rudolf's court. The theory concludes that the Voynich may be Drebbel's notebook of observations and alchemy experiments, which he left in Prague after the coup of 1611. Prescott Currier, a US Navy cryptographer who worked with the manuscript in the 1970s, observed that the pages of the "herbal" section could be separated into two sets with distinctive statistical properties and apparently different handwritings. He concluded that the Voynich manuscript was the work of two or more authors who used different dialects or spelling conventions, but who shared the same script. Recent studies have questioned his conclusion. When all sections are examined, one sees a more gradual transition, with Currier's two parts at opposite ends. Thus, Currier's observations could simply be the result of the herbal sections being written by one author over a long period of time.
Theories about contents and purpose
The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylised drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal" pictures that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third. Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family - which includes the common daisy, chamomile, and many other species from all over the world. The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds. However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by specific images (such as eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed) or standard textual symbols (such as circle with cross); and none of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript. Sergio Toresella, an expert on ancient herbals, pointed out that the Voynich manuscript could be an alchemical herbal - which actually had nothing to do with alchemy, but was a bogus herbal with invented pictures, that a quack doctor would carry around just to impress his clients. Apparently there was a small cottage industry of such books somewhere in northern Italy, just at the right epoch. However, those books are quite different from the Voynich manuscript in style and format; and they were all written in plain language. Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript (see, for instance, Nicholas Culpeper's books). However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise). A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which some have interpreted as a picture of a galaxy that could only be obtained with a telescope. Other drawings were interpreted as cells seen through a microscope. This would suggest an early modern, rather than a medieval, date for the manuscript's origin. However, the resemblance is rather questionable: on close inspection, the central part of the "galaxy" looks rather like a pool of water. Some of the images also look quite like sea urchins.
Theories about the language
CiphersAccording to the letter-based cipher theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort - an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This has been the working hypothesis for most deciphering attempts in the twentieth century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s. Simple substitution ciphers can be excluded, because they are very easy to crack; so deciphering efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic ciphers, invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the popular Vigenère cipher, which could have been strengthened by the use of nulls and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks and so on. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted before encryption. There have been several claims of deciphering along these lines, but none has been widely accepted - chiefly because the proposed deciphering algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that they could extract a meaningful text from any random string of symbols. The main argument for this theory is that the use of a strange alphabet by a European author can hardly be explained except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography as a systematic discipline. Against this theory is the observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the "natural" statistical features that are seen in the Voynich manuscript, such as Zipf's law. Also, although polyalphabetic ciphers were invented about 1467, variants only became popular in the 16th century, somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich manuscript. According to the codebook cipher theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be codes to be looked up in a dictionary or codebook. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals - which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read. James Finn proposed in his book Pandora's Hope (2004)that the Voynich manuscript is in fact visually encoded Hebrew. Once the Voynich letters have been correctly transcribed, using the European Voynich Alphabet (EVA) as a guide, many of the Voynich words can be seen as Hebrew words that repeat with different distortions to confuse the reader. For example, the word AIN from the manuscript is the Hebrew word for "eye", and it also appears in different distorted versions as "aiin" or "aiiin", to make it appear as though the words are different when in fact they are the same word. Other methods of visual encryption are used as well. The main argument for this view is that it would explain the lack of success that most other researchers have had in decoding the manuscript, because they are based on more mathematical approaches to the decryption. The main argument against it is that such a qualitative encoding places a heavy burden on the talents of the individual decoder, given the multiplicity of possible alternate visual interpretations of the same text. It would be hard to separate how much interpretation is of the genuine text, and how much simply reflects the bias of the original interpreter.
MicrographyFollowing its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of, indeed, many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification. These markings, based on ancient Greek shorthand, were supposed to form a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Using this knowledge, Newbold claimed to have worked out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before Leeuwenhoek. However, John Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be "read" in the microscopic markings, which in any case are themselves illusory. Although there is a tradition of Hebrew micrography, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Upon close study, these turn out to be mere artefacts of the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum, and an example of pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now disregarded.
SteganographyThis theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details - e.g. the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography, is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Some people suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan grille of some sort. This theory is hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to crack. An argument against it is that using a cipher-looking cover text defeats the main purpose of steganography, which is to hide the very existence of the secret message. Some people have suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum. Recently, a new theory has been put forward, suggesting elements and substructures, rather than whole characters, might be the key to deciphering the Voynich Manuscript.
Exotic natural languageThe linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is indeed similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the "words" have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns. This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors; which motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it - even before Marco Polo's thirteenth century voyage, but especially after Vasco da Gama sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native from East Asia living in Europe, or educated at a European mission. The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint are two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (jie qi). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations. In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language and gave a proposed incomplete translation of the first page of the manuscript. Jim Child, a linguist of Indo-European languages, has proposed that the manuscript is written in an early German language. His paper describes the plausibility of this idea.
GlossolaliaIn their book, Kennedy and Churchill hint to the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia, channelling or outsider art. If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness, either due to voices heard, or due to his own urge. While in glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the illustrations she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine, which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia, and the Voynich manuscript. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the biological section. The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. One of the drawbacks of this theory is that it fails to explain the deliberate structure of the manuscript and the carefully crafted astrological and botanical sections.
Constructed languageThe peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" has led William F. Friedman and John Tiltman to arrive independently at the conjecture that the text could be a constructed language in the plain - specifically, a philosophical or a priori language. In languages of this class, the vocabulary is organised according to a category system, so that the general meaning of a word can be deduced from its sequence of letters. For example, in the modern constructed language Ro, bofo- is the category of colours, and any word beginning with those letters would name a colour: so red is bofoc, and yellow is bofof. (This is an extreme version of the book classification scheme used by many libraries - in which, say, P stands for language and literature, PA for Greek and Latin, PC for Romance languages, etc.) This concept is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the VM by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes - for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.
HoaxThe bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its illustrations (such as the chimeric plants) and its lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is really a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place. The argument for authenticity, on the other hand, is that the manuscript appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. While hoaxes of the period tended to be quite crude, the Voynich manuscript exhibits many subtle characteristics which only show up after careful statistical analysis. These fine touches require much more work than would have been necessary for a simple forgery, and some of the complexities are only visible with modern tools (like the prose's obedience to Zipf's law). The question then arises: why would the author employ such a complex and laborious forging algorithm in the creation of a simplistic hoax, if no one in the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries) could tell the difference? Various hoax theories have been proposed over time: In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, slightly after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Drug's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree. In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schemer published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis. Schemer showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. However, this comparison is valid only for plain text in European languages, or text enciphered with a simple substitution cipher, while analysis suggests a much more complex enciphering method for the Voynich manuscript (see "Letter-based cipher" and "Exotic natural language" above). In late 2007, Claude Martin claimed that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax based on a convoluted anagramming algorithm for numbers. For example, the sequence 345678 would be retranscribed into 643875. While such a method would produce text somewhat similar to that of the Voynich manuscript, it's hard to explain why such a difficult and time-consuming procedure would be used for a hoax.
Transcription AlphabetsVarious transcription alphabets for the Voynich MS script have been devised in the past. The First Study Group (FSG) of Friedman defined an alphabet agreed by all members of the team. Using this alphabet, they transcribed almost the entire MS in the 1940's. Because of the desire for secrecy by Friedman, nobody outside his team was aware of this transcription exercise or the alphabet they used. Prof. Bennett of Yale University was one of the first to use the computer to analyse parts of the Voynich MS text, and he therefore needed a transcription alphabet. Currier, working on his own, also devised a transcription alphabet. When he presented his findings at the 1976 symposium, Mary D'Imperio suggested that it would be important that all researchers use a unified alphabet, and announced that she would abandon here own in favour of Currier's. Later, D'Imperio showed that many characters in the Voynich MS cannot be represented exactly by any of the existing alphabets. There are some 'rare' characters, and there are what appear to be ligatures of several characters. This was reflected in a new generation of transcription alphabets. The first exponent of this was the 'Frogguy' alphabet by Jacques Guy, first presented in 1991. This alphabet uses characters which represents common 'strokes', and thus allows the representation of the many ligatured characters using these strokes. The second example of this is the EVA alphabet which will be used throughout this site.
Overview of the alphabet
FSG Currier Frogguy EVA Labels'Labels' is the term used for the appearance of single words or short phrases near drawings. The suggestion is very strong that the label gives the name of the item shown. The following types of labels may be found in the Voynich Ms:
TitlesThe term 'titles' was introduced by John Grove. It is a term used for the occurrence of words appearing at the end of a paragraph of text, written somewhat away from the main text (usually at the right margin or centred).
Character or word sequencesIn some circular designs and in the margins of some pages, sequences of single characters or short words may be found. These are usually referred to as key-like sequences. These are:
Extraneous writingOnly very few barely legible phrases in the normal (non-Voynich) alphabet may be observed in the Voynich MS. These are:
If you are more interested in the Cathars of the Languedoc, you might be more interested in Cathar Country Tours.
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The
Voynich manuscript appears to be a late mediaeval scientific compendium
written in an unknown cipher script. It has been dated to the fifteenth
or sixteenth centuries by Andrew Watson, an authority on the dating
of manuscripts. It is now MS 408 of the Beinecke library at Yale
University
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