A researcher at the University of Bristol has finally claimed to decode the Voynich manuscript whose contents would go on to mystify cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programmes for more than a century.
About:
Features: It is an illustrated codex written in an extinct language. It is written on vellum (240 pages intact, others missing) with text and illustrations.
Timeline:
The Voynich Manuscript was carbon-dated to the 15th century (1404-38).
The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-Samogitian book dealer who purchased it in 1912.
It has been with Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library since 1969.
Decoding:
Gerard Cheshire, a researcher at the University of Bristol, has decoded it to identify the language and writing system.
Reporting his findings in the journal Romance Studies, Cheshire called it the only known example of proto-Romance language (The language used was in use in the Mediterranean during the Mediaeval period). All of the letters are in lower case and there are no double consonants.
Cheshire found the manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon — an autonomous community in Spain.
Way ahead: The next step is to use this knowledge to translate the entire manuscript and compile a lexicon.
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