World’s most mysterious text is finally cracked: Bristol academic finally deciphers lost language of 600-year-old Voynich manuscript to reveal astrological sex tips, herbal remedies and other pagan beliefs
- An academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers have failed
- One of the world’s most mysterious texts has been de-coded Dr Gerard Cheshire
- The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten, illustrated text from the 15th century
- The manuscript uses a language that arose from spoken Latin, or Vulgar Latin
- Among those who have famously attempted to crack the code are Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park
An academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed.
Doctor Gerard Cheshire, a linguistics expert from Bristol University, has cracked the code of one of the world’s most mysterious texts, the Voynich manuscript.
Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars, including Alan Turing, for over a century, it took only two weeks to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document.
The Voynich manuscript is a medieval, handwritten and illustrated text, which has been carbon-dated to the around mid-15th century.
Dr Cheshire has successfully deciphered the manuscript’s codex and revealed the only known example of a proto-Romance language.
The manuscript was written in an extinct and until this point unrecorded language as well as using an unknown writing system and with no punctuation marks.
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An academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed. Pictured here is a foldout pictorial map that provides the necessary information to date and locate the origin of the manuscript
This thereby makes the 200 page manuscript, currently housed at Yale Universoty, triply difficult to solve.
It reveals fascinating information, for example, the manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, who is the great aunt to Catherine of Aragon.
Furthermore, some of the manuscript text uses standard Latin phrasing and abbreviations, only adding more difficulty in deciphering it.
It was written by an unknown figure from the past with a language and writing system that were in normal and everyday use for their time and place.
Yet the linguistic and historic information it holds are of unparalleled importance.
The translations reveal that the manuscript is a collection of information on herbal remedies, therapeutic bathing and astrological readings.
These are thought to concern matters of the female mind, of the body, of reproduction, of parenting and of the heart in accordance with the Catholic and Roman pagan religious beliefs of Mediterranean Europeans during the late Medieval period.
More specifically, the manuscript was compiled by a Dominican nun as a source of reference for the female royal court to which her monastery was affiliated.
The Voynich manuscript, named after Wilfrid M Voynich, a Polish book dealer who bought the manuscript in 1912, was written in Central Europe in around the 15th century, according to academics.
Its date, origin and language have been debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text featuring botanical and scientific drawings.
Among those who have famously attempted to crack the code are Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park and the FBI during the Cold War.
The peer-reviewed study now claims Dr Cheshire has revealed the its proto-Romance language, or vulgar latin, an extinct language a ‘combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols’ in its alphabet.
The text was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, the great aunt to Catherine of Aragon. Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars, including Alan Turing, for over a century, it took only two weeks to identify the language and writing system
It took Research Associate Dr. Gerard Cheshire, pictured here, two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document.
This figure shows three variants of the letter ‘e’ used in the manuscript. They are used to denote phonetic differences that roughly correspond with the use of the single and double ‘e’ in modern language, and with the accented form ‘é’ in modern language
Proto- Romance is ancestral to today’s ‘Romance’ languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician.
Some symbols are unfamiliar because they have different graphic origins or because they are variants which indicate particular uses and phonetic accents.
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.
‘I experienced a series of ‘eureka’ moments whilst deciphering the code, said Dr Cheshire.
This, he said, was followed by a sense of ‘disbelief and excitement’ when he realised the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript.
The Voynich manuscript is named after Wilfrid M Voynich, a Polish book dealer and antiquarian, who purchased the manuscript in 1912. This figure shows two women dealing with five children in a bath. The words describe different temperaments: tozosr (buzzing: too noisy), orla la (on the edge: losing patience), tolora (silly/foolish), noror (cloudy: dull/sad), or aus (golden bird: well behaved), oleios (oiled: slippery)
Among those who have famously attempted to crack the code are Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park. The FBI also had a go during the Cold War, apparently thinking it may have been Communist propaganda
Borage. Manuscript Folio 19. A substance that causes abortion. The text words can still be found in various Romance languages and Latin
Yellow Melancholy Thistle (Cirsium erisithales). The first line of the accompanying text reads: ‘masas naus anais, eme ea nort, æ e la as aus et’ (dough food-vessels, annually harvested from the north [top], and from the south [bottom])
‘What it reveals is even more amazing than the myths and fantasies it has generated.
‘For example, the manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, who happens to have been great-aunt to Catherine of Aragon.
‘It is also no exaggeration to say this work represents one of the most important developments to date in Romance linguistics.
‘The 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.’
Dr Cheshire also explained in linguistic terms what made the manuscript so unusual.
‘It uses an extinct language. Its alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols,’ he said.
‘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.
This figure shows an illustration of a bearded monk in his washtub, from the monastery where the manuscript was created. The words read: opat a sa (it is abbot). His is one of very few male faces seen in the manuscript.
The eruption of Vulcanello, in Figure 39, is seen in both plan-elevation and in side-elevation cross-section, with a surprising level of detail and annotation that must have come from firsthand observation. In addition, there is the diagram of a nautical inclinometer over the water
‘It includes diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components.
‘It also includes some words and abbreviations in Latin.’
The next step is to use this knowledge to translate the entire manuscript and compile a lexicon, which Dr Cheshire acknowledged will take some time and funding, as it comprises more than 200 pages.
‘Now the language and writing system have been explained, the pages of the manuscript have been laid open for scholars to explore and reveal, for the first time, its true linguistic and informative content,’ he added.
The peer-reviewed paper, The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained, is published in the journal Romance Studies.
WHAT IS THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT?
Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich.
He acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling drawings and undeciphered text.
Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.
Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the contents of the manuscript falls into six sections: 1) botanicals containing drawings of 113 unidentified plant species;
2) astronomical and astrological drawings including astral charts with radiating circles, suns and moons, Zodiac symbols such as fish (Pisces), a bull (Taurus), and an archer (Sagittarius), nude females emerging from pipes or chimneys, and courtly figures;
3) a biological section containing a myriad of drawings of miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules;
4) an elaborate array of nine cosmological medallions, many drawn across several folded folios and depicting possible geographical forms;
5) pharmaceutical drawings of over 100 different species of medicinal herbs and roots portrayed with jars or vessels in red, blue, or green, and 6) continuous pages of text, possibly recipes, with star-like flowers marking each entry in the margins.
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