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Post #1 :  ASSIGNMENT 2 - VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT 

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Post #1 :  ASSIGNMENT 2 - VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT 

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Prepared by HUU-MINH DANG
Student ID : 100600979

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In this website,  a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England informed that he can decode 10 words in the Vonich Manuscript - the book with 250 vellum pages are filled with writings in an unknown alphabet and elaborate drawings depicting a range of subjects from female nudes to medicinal herbs to Zodiac symbols. This could be the proof of Appeal to Authority red flag.

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The Voynich manuscript's unintelligible writings and strange illustrations have defied every attempt at understanding their meaning.

Credit: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

A researcher claims he's decoded 10 possible words in the famously unreadable Voynich manuscript, which has eluded interpretation for a century.

The book's 250 vellum pages are filled with writings in an unknown alphabet and elaborate drawings depicting a range of subjects from female nudes to medicinal herbs to Zodiac symbols. The medieval text was discovered by an antique book dealer in 1912, and it has been rather stingy in giving up its secrets ever since.

Now Stephen Bax, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, says he's deciphered 14 characters of the script and can read a handful of items in the Voynich text, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants. He says he's also picked out the word for Taurus written beside an illustration of the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. [ Voynich Manuscript: Images of the Unreadable Medieval Book]

"I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script," Bax said in a statement.

"The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants," Bax added. "I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at mediaeval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results."

The Voynich manuscipt now sits in a rare books library at Yale University. Carbon dating proved that it dates back to the 15th century, and researchers believe it was written in Central Europe. While some scholars have written it off as a Renaissance-era hoax full of nonsense text, others say the pattern of the letters and words suggest the book was written in a real language or at least an invented cipher. A recent statistical study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that " Voynichese" adheres to linguistic rules.

Bax notes that the manuscript is still a long way from being understood, and that he is coming forward with what he's found thus far in the hopes that other linguists will work with him to crack the code. For now, he thinks the book is "probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language."

Bax has explained his ideas in a manuscript and in a YouTube video on his website.

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10 Words in Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Decoded

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A researcher claims he's decoded 10 possible words in the famously unreadable Voynich manuscript, which has eluded interpretation for a century. The book's 250 vellum pages are filled with writings in an unknown alphabet and elaborate drawings depicting a range of subjects from female nudes to medicinal herbs to Zodiac symbols.

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In this video, the professor Stephen Bax from University of Bedfordshire will talk about his work as well as the method he used in decoding of Voynich manuscript

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wilfrid michael voynich (deceased person)

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Professor Stephen Bax Voynich Manuscript Decoded

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http://wilfridvoynich.com/ Professor Bax talks about his decoding of the Voynich manuscript and what got him interested in the Voynich book in the first place.

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The article gives the theory that the Voynich Manuscript is just an elaborate hoax. Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK argues that the elaborate 'language' in the text would have been easy to fake.

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For hundreds of years, the world's best cryptographers have dedicated their lives to solving the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript - a 15th century book written in a mysterious coded language that no one has ever managed to crack.

With an unknown author - and rumours that a young Leonardo da Vinci or even aliens could be behind it - the Voynich Manuscript has become the stuff of legend. But now new research suggests that the whole thing could just be one elaborate hoax.

Often referred to as the world's most mysterious book, the Voynich Manuscript is filled with what appears to be an unfamiliar language or a coded text, and is illustrated with grotesque human figures and the tendrils of other-worldly plants blooming from the borders.

As the text could not be attributed to an author, it's been named after Lithuanian antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, who reportedly purchased it in 1912 from a collection of rare books in Italy, and was responsible for bringing it out of obscurity and into the public consciousness.

Since then, the book has never been replicated, and has been locked away in the vault of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Because of its age and incredible rarity, very few researchers have actually seen it in person.

"Touching the Voynich is an experience," Juan Jose Garcia, director of the Spanish publishing house Siloe, told Agence France-Presse. "It's a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe."

As we reported last month, Garcia has finally been given permission to produce the first ever replicas of the Voynich Manuscript.

The hope is that when 898 exact copies of the manuscript are made available to the public in libraries and academic institutions around the world, someone - anyone - will finally crack the code.

But are we wasting our time trying?

Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK has spent more than a decade studying the Voynich Manuscript, and argues in a new paper that the elaborate 'language' in the text would have been easy to fake, if the author was familiar with a few simple coding techniques.

"We have known for years that the syllables are not random. What I'm saying is there are ways of producing gibberish which are not random in a statistical sense," he told Rebecca Boyle from New Scientist.

"It's a bit like rolling loaded dice. If you roll dice that are subtly loaded, they would come up with a six more often than you would expect, but not every time."

The method Rugg proposes for coming up with a language based on gibberish that at least looks genuine is coming up with a whole range of gibberish symbols, and arranging them on a table like so:

On his table, he included symbols that appear to be the roots, prefixes, and suffixes of Voynichese words.

You'll then have different 'grilles' - a piece of cardboard with holes cut in it - and the holes in these grilles will reveal a set of three gibberish symbols to produce a word.

If you move across the table, using grilles with different hole positions as you go, you'll soon come up with many different combinations of syllables to produce whole Voynichese words.

Once Rugg had his results, he wanted to see if the text followed Zipf's law, which describes the relative frequencies of words within a real written language.

As you can see in the graphs below, which compare his Voynichese selection to the Vulgate Latin translation of the Book of Esther and Caesar's De Bello Gallico, he appears to have gotten his answer:

"If the words within a text are ranked from most common to least common, and their frequencies are then plotted on a histogram, then natural language texts typically show a nonlinear curve with a steep initial descent followed by leveling off to a long tail of words that only occur a few times within the text," he writes in his paper.

"The text in the Voynich Manuscript shows this pattern and has a very similar curve to some real natural language texts."

So is the legend dead after all this time? Well, not everyone is convinced by Rugg's evidence.

Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester in the UK, who wasn't involved in the study, argues that the manuscript does contain meaningful text, based on his own statistical analysis comparing Voynichese words to several classic texts written in various languages.

He told New Scientist that the Voynich Manuscript text has far too many layers of complexity for a simple hoaxer to produce, and says he's found statistical similarities between the botanical and pharmaceutical sections of the manuscript, and has been able to link the art to corresponding, indecipherable words.

"That means whoever made the hoax was aware of these subtle layers of structure that are very difficult to find just by looking at the text," he says.

"We cannot say for certain whether it is a hoax, or hides a message. But we can say, whoever wants to propose that it is a hoax needs to explain how all of this can arise spontaneously without the author planning all these things."

At this stage, the researchers will have to agree to disagree, because Rugg maintains that he's demonstrated how simple it would be for the Voynich's author to make gibberish look genuine, and the burden of proof now lies on the 'true believers' to demonstrate the veracity of this language.

But he admits, "I don't think there will ever be a resolution that everybody will be happy with."

As the replica publisher Garcia told the AFP last month, the mysterious author might have been a genius, but "could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery".

Rugg's research has been published in Cryptologia.

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Researcher Finds Evidence That The 'World's Most Mysterious Book' Is an Elaborate Hoax

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For hundreds of years, the world's best cryptographers have dedicated their lives to solving the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript - a 15th century book written in a mysterious coded language that no one has ever managed to crack.

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In this video, you can learn the foundation of how to solve the language in the Vonich Manuscript by using a proven linguistic method.

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how to solve the Voynich Manuscript, part 1: phonetics & alphabet

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recent progress on the Voynich Manuscript using a proven linguistic method

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This video compares the similarity and connection between the plants listed in the Voynich Manuscript book to plants in real life.

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Plants of the Voynich Manuscript 1v thru 10v

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The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book, dubbed "the book that can't be read" because of the cryptic and unidentified language it's written in. All that's really known about it is that it's 600 years old, written with gall-ink and once belonged to the court of Rudolph II.

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In this website, they think that Voynich Manuscript is a message from aliens. There is no language that is the same like the language in Voynich Manuscrip so some people think that during the 1400s crash-landed on Earth, aliens created the manuscript documenting life on Earth in order to chronicle there remaining life on our planet inside the manuscript.

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It's one of the rarest, most mysterious books in existence, and now the curators of the fabled Voynich manuscript are allowing copies to be made for the first time in the hope of cracking its secrets.

But if you do fancy your chances at decoding this 400-year-old tome, be warned that up to now no one's been able to read a single word of it - not even the Second World War cryptographers who smashed the Nazis' most difficult cyphers.

The manuscript came to light in 1912 and is named after the Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, who bought it among a job lot of books from the Collegio Romano in Italy at a fundraising clear-out. Among its 240 pages are illustrations of plants and stars in the night sky, as well as a closely handwritten text that, if it is in a genuine language, isn't one of which any other record in the entire world remains.

The book is currently under lock and key at Yale University in the US, but Raymond Clemens, curator of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library there, says an agreement has been reached with the small Spanish publishing house Siloe to produce 898 facsimile copies. And Siloe - which likes palindromic numbers - is wasting no hyperbole (or translation costs) in publicising the deal.

According to the website of the specialist facsimile publisher, "the Voynich manuscript is the only medieval remains to be decrypted on the planet. What really holds this codex significance, if any? What language, writing system or cryptographic code is written? What led to his mysterious author to write a treatise intended apparently not be read by anyone?"

What, indeed? Naturally, conspiracy theories abound about the manuscript, from those who claim it's all a hoax dating back no further than its discovery in 1912, to others who suggest it holds the key to extraterrestrial life. And Siloe ramps up the enigma with its speculation: "It could be the prescription for a contraceptive potion or a secret alchemical formula for obtaining gold - the famous philosopher's stone, or perhaps an Elvish will. Or it could, as noted by others, hide the secret of immortality. Are we, perhaps, as has also been suggested, before the day of an alien?"

Of course, that they would say that, isn't it? But in plain English, what are the best guesses at what's actually in this mysterious document?
It's just a hoax
The manuscript is written on vellum that has been carbon-dated to the early 15th Century, and it's said to have once passed through the hands of Rudolf II, Emperor of the Habsburg Empire in Prague and collector of occult artefacts. But the BBC's Simon Worrall wasn't convinced when he inspected it for Radio 4 two years ago, and wrote, "I believe the manuscript is a forgery by Wilfrid Voynich himself. One of the most common tropes in the history of forgery is that of a rare book dealer 'discovering' previously unknown manuscripts. Voynich is known to have had just this 'magic' touch. He is also said to have acquired a large supply of vellum and to have used his knowledge of chemistry gained at the University of Moscow to replicate medieval inks and pigments."
It's a message from aliens
Google Voynich + aliens and you'll find any amount of bonkersness. Here's one theory randomly lifted from ancient-code.com: "Because it contains a language that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet, and given the fact that the ancient manuscript depicts star charts that are unknown to us, the Voynich manuscript could have been created by a being not from Earth, who during the 1400s crash-landed on Earth and created the manuscript documenting life on Earth. Knowing that humans did not possess the necessary technology to help the alien visitor return to his planet, it is possible that the alien visitor decided to chronicle his remaining life on our planet inside the manuscript."
It's a nature encyclopaedia
Stephen Bax, professor of modern languages and linguistics at the Open University, writes on his website - with an apology to conspiracy theorists - that he believes it to "probably to be an attempt at an encyclopaedia or 'summa' aiming to encompass contemporary knowledge of plants, astrology/astronomy and related areas. It was probably intended for a specific linguistic community, for which the script was specially devised".
It's a 16th century con trick
There are some suggestions that the aforementioned Rudolf II bought the book for 600 gold ducats from Dr John Dee, a mystic and astrologer from the court of Elizabeth I and his companion, Edward Kelley. Kelley was a noted fraudster (he was the one who passed messages to Dr Dee reputedly from angels) and died after falling from a tower where he'd been imprisoned by Rudolf for singularly failing to produce the gold he claimed he could create through alchemy. Was the Voynich simply another Kelley scam? What's that phrase again about fools and their money?

Speaking of which, you'll doubtless have your own ideas of what the Voynich really is and, thanks to the deal struck with Siloe, you can very soon get your hands on a facsimile copy to formulate your own hypothesis. And that'll just be £6,000 please...

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Aliens, hoaxers or a lost culture: who wrote the Voynich Manuscript?

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It's one of the rarest, most mysterious books in existence, and now the curators of the fabled Voynich manuscript are allowing copies to be made for the first time in the hope of cracking its secrets.

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This is a page taken from the Voynich Manuscript. Astronomical pages feature drawings of the Sun or the Moon, or arrangements of stars. It is sometimes hard to draw a clear line between astronomical and cosmological pages . The twelve astronomical pages that show illustrations of the zodiac cycle are usually called 'astrological', and are discussed separately.

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Almost the entire text of the Voynich MS is written in a script that is not found in any other surviving document. The very few examples of writing in the Latin script are either in the margins, or look as if they have been added by a later owner. Most of the text has been written in a line-by-line manner, undoubtedly from top to bottom and from left to right. There is no sign at all of the application of the usual techniques for creating straight lines in medieval MSs, namely ruling or pricking.

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In some places, single 'words' are written near elements of drawings. These have come to be called 'labels'. There is a clear suggestion that these words provide the name of the object in question. Many of the label words also occur in the running text, though only rarely do they also occur in the immediate vicinity of the label.