The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded

[n2doc]

Since its discovery in 1912, the 15th century Voynich Manuscript has been a mystery and a cult phenomenon. Full of handwriting in an unknown language or code, the book is heavily illustrated with weird pictures of alien plants, naked women, strange objects, and zodiac symbols. Now, history researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs appears to have cracked the code, discovering that the book is actually a guide to women's health that's mostly plagiarized from other guides of the era.

Gibbs writes in the Times Literary Supplement that he was commissioned by a television network to analyze the Voynich Manuscript three years ago. Because the manuscript has been entirely digitized by Yale's Beinecke Library, he could see tiny details in each page and pore over them at his leisure. His experience with medieval Latin and familiarity with ancient medical guides allowed him to uncover the first clues.

After looking at the so-called code for a while, Gibbs realized he was seeing a common form of medieval Latin abbreviations, often used in medical treatises about herbs. "From the herbarium incorporated into the Voynich manuscript, a standard pattern of abbreviations and ligatures emerged from each plant entry," he wrote. "The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc." So this wasn't a code at all; it was just shorthand. The text would have been very familiar to anyone at the time who was interested in medicine.

more
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-has-finally-been-decoded/

[raven mad]

1. It still would have been more fun if had been alien...............

but I'm a space nut, raised by a NASA daddy!

[Thor_MN]

2. Awww, the ancient aliens folks iz gonna haz a sad...

[Wounded Bear]

5. I don't recall when facts ever shaded their opinions...

[Thor_MN]

6. They love when they can't be proven wrong...

They come to the conclusion that humans couldn't possibly have done that, so it MUST be aliens.

But yeah, otherwise, facts never seem to concern them too much.

[Wounded Bear]

7. They survive on the old conclusion...you can't prove a negative.

[ProfessorPlum]

3. so cool

way to go, Gibbs.

Thanks for posting!

[AnotherDreamWeaver]

4. Thanks for the post

I have had a long interest in this.

[Binkie The Clown]

8. I'm skeptical.

I want to see more than an abbreviation here and there. I want to see a complete interlinear gloss, generally accepted by other qualified linguists before I'll believe it's been "decoded". I've seen too many fanciful and sensationalist claims made by others regarding this manuscript, the Rongorongo script, the Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, Linear-A, the Cypro-Minoan syllabary, and even code systems like Chaocipher (which was finally solved in 2013).

I have a keen interest in cryptography and linguistics so I follow these developments closely. I look forward to reading more about this claimed Voynich solution, so I can check it against my own (digital) copy of the Voynich manuscript.

[struggle4progress]

10. ... Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd

script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point. However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang, "They’re not grammatically correct. It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense." She added, "Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it...If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat." The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs' claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages ...

So much for that Voynich manuscript “solution”
Librarians would have "rebutted it in a heartbeat," says medieval scholar.
ANNALEE NEWITZ - 9/10/2017, 2:35 PM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/experts-are-extremely-dubious-about-the-voynich-solution/

[struggle4progress]

11. Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved? Experts say no.

SARAH ZHANG
7:00 AM ET

... This week, the venerable Times Literary Supplement published as its cover story a “solution” for the Voynich manuscript. The article by Nicholas Gibbs suggests the manuscript is a medieval women’s-health manual copied from several older sources. And the cipher is no cipher at all, but simply abbreviations that, once decoded, turn out to be medicinal recipes.

The solution should be seismic news in the Voynich world—for medieval scholars and amateur sleuths alike—but the reaction to Gibbs’s theory has been decidedly underwhelming. Medievalists, used to seeing purported solutions every few months, panned it on Twitter. Blogs and forums started picking at its problems ...

Gibbs’s article broadly consists of two parts. The first part details various old illustrations and writings from which the Voynich manuscript appear to be derived. In this section, Gibbs weaves in an impressive amount of autobiography, noting at various points that he is: a professional history researcher, muralist, war artist, former employee of Christie’s in the 1970s, and descendent of the great English herbalist Thomas Fromond—all of which are notable because they had some role in helping him find and interpret sources to solve the Voynich manuscript ...

In the second part — only two paragraphs long — Gibbs gets into the meat of his solution: Each character in the manuscript is an abbreviated word, not a letter. This could be a breakthrough, but the TLS presents only two lines decoded using Gibbs’s method. Davis did not find those two lines convincing either. “They’re not grammatically correct. It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense,” she says ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/has-the-voynich-manuscript-really-been-solved/539310/