MikeLigalig.com

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious book thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages of handwritten text, the majority having illustrations. The text of the manuscript has not yet been deciphered, and the author, script, and language remain unknown.

Since its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been intensively studied by many cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame, but all of them failed to decrypt at least a part of the text. The Voynich manuscript has become a famous subject of historical cryptology, but it has also given weight to the theory that the book is simply a well conceived hoax having a meaningless sequence of arbitrary symbols.

The book is named after the Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Currently the Voynich manuscript is stored in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University as item “MS 408″. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005.

The book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing when Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that at one point in time, the pages of the book were arranged in a different order.

The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with “bullets” in the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation. The ductus flows smoothly, suggesting that the scribe understood the words as he wrote. The manuscript therefore gives the impression that the symbols were not enciphered, otherwise the individual characters would have had to be calculated before being written. However, it is possible to write somewhat fluently in other codes.


More at: http://aenigmaunveiled.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/undeciphered-language-voynich-manuscript/



Linkback: https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/index.php?topic=40507.0