I'm not holding my breath, since claims about decoding this book get made every few years, but this one looks *very* promising indeed.

The Voynich MS is a mysterious book, whose origins are much debated. It also contains some very curious artwork, often of unidentified plants. We may soon see this riddle solved.

http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/linguistics/voynich-manuscript-07190.html

Voynich Manuscript Finally Decoded: Mysterious Book is Written in Proto-Romance Language...

..."The Voynich manuscript is written in proto-Romance — ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government. As a result, proto-Romance was lost from the record, until now.”

“The manuscript’s alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols. It includes no dedicated punctuation marks, although some letters have symbol variants to indicate punctuation or phonetic accents. All of the letters are in lower case and there are no double consonants.”

“It includes diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components. It also includes some words and abbreviations in Latin.”

in b 4 ~ try jesus OPie ~


https://youtu.be/GdFuGaP9ZMM?list=PLMdRLqaXxozoRDu47nzyO_wJeqOh7ihSj

No rock in hat used in translation?

All this time, the world’s best cryptographers couldn’t decipher it. Because it wasn’t coded. It only needed the right set of eyeballs on it.

Yeah, where's the Urim and Thummim when you need it?

I hope he has decoded it - would be cool. Some people have claimed it is a forgery or the script is gibberish. I don't think it is gibberish. However, it is handwritten so it is possible that a) there are mistakes in it and b) some of it may be barely legible, and some of the letter forms may vary through the MS. Abbreviations in the text are highly likely. Medieval MSS are full of them

His work will be peer reviewed and we'll go from there.

This is indeed interesting--and I have never (to my knowledge) heard of proto-Romance before (although it makes logical historic sense, of course).

The news story is dated April 29, 2019, and evidently, the Wikipedia article has not yet been updated:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Thank you, Jordan!

Some people are moaning there is no such thing as proto-Romance - I disagree, there would obviously br some kind of transitional language(s) between Latin and Spanish/Italian etc (leaving Romanian aside, that's complicated). I don't have an issue with that notion.

Fingers crossed this is the real deal. If you haven't seen pictures of rhe Voynich MS, I rec looking some up... It's an amazing looking book.

Here's at least one who doesn't buy it.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749

Quadriphthongs and quintiphthongs? Couldn't find mention or existence of those anywhere outside of this paper.

logged out today Wrote:
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> Here's at least one who doesn't buy it.
>
> https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749


Thank you for this article too, logged out today!


> Quadriphthongs and quintiphthongs? Couldn't find
> mention or existence of those anywhere outside of
> this paper.

I am in no way an academic linguist, so I thought it was my ignorance!

logged out today Wrote:
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> Here's at least one who doesn't buy it.
>
> https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=42749
>
> Quadriphthongs and quintiphthongs? Couldn't find
> mention or existence of those anywhere outside of
> this paper.

Yes those are some vowel combinations - worse than Finnish or Hawaiian!

I do put a kind of disclaimer at the top, because we've been here before. The Voynich MS is easily one of the coolest artefacts out there - it's outfoxed so many people, and it has some amazing looking illustrations in it. I believe if it is cracked, it will contain some information of historical worth - probably about medieval European medicine.

It looks like this may be one in a long line of such attempts. This attempt looked more respectable and appeared in a journal. I suspect one day, someone will crack it. I don't buy into the theory it's all gibberish - it looks like a real script to me.

Or a vast archive of mystical alchemy. Harry Potter fans wait in suspense.

This claim immediately struck me as improbable, as I didn't see how any 'proto' Romance language would have stumped the likes of Alan Turing and William Friedman, both of whom investigated the Voynich manuscript, not to mention scores of lesser luminaries in computer science, cryptanalysis, etc for 60 (?) years or more.

Then I saw the BBC article:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-48309665



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2019 11:32PM by 3X.