- The Text
The text appears as a series of glyphs, apparently made up of
combinations of different basic symbols. The glyphs are probably
of Roman or Arabian origin, pointing to an early date, possibly
during the Roman Empire. There are from 22 or 36 basic symbols
(depending on which alphabet you use) making up over 5000 distinct
glyph sequences. Some researchers have thought that each glyph
sequence corresponds to a word. There are also a number of special
(or rare) symbols that occur only once or twice in the text.
The meaning of these is unclear, although they may be either
uncorrected transcription errors or context specific pictographs
(like the little telephones you get in front of phone numbers).
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- Analysis of the 'words' has revealed that they follow the
normal distributions for natural languages, although the word
length is, on average, shorter than for English and Latin. These
points to a language that does not use vowels.
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- From textual analysis, the document appears to be in two
sections. The document starts with a section where the word '8AM'
is the most frequent. In the last the word distribution is different
and '8AM' is no longer the most common word.
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- Researchers have long puzzled over what the original language
might have been. They have feared that it is written in a language
that we have no record of. Or they have wondered if it a private
phonetic alphabet for a language that was used long ago. Others
have wondered if it was ciphered (encoded) Latin, Greek, Italian,
German, or English. However if this was the case then the words
would have to be longer than they are. Grammar experts have struggled
with the makeup of the language. It is not clear if there is
any sense of grammar in the language. They have wondered which
words can follow which others, and which words never occur in
sequence. We know that '8AM' can appear twice in succession,
so its role is unlikely to be that of a conjunction.
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- The Language
It is known that the average word length is shorter than English
and Latin. This means its also shorter than French, Italian and
German. Semitic languages are a distinct possibility, as they
did not write vowels into the text making the word length about
20-30% shorter, but still giving the same amount of phonetic
space.
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- Analysis of the text has revealed a lack of any consistent
set of characters that seem to be playing the role of vowels,
but other researchers argue that the text might be a partially
devoweled version of Latin, Italian, French of English (and several
others). German is unlikely because its words tend to be 30%
or so longer than English ones, with the excess mainly being
consonants.
- The work has the appearance of being an encyclopedia or research
document of some sorts. If this is the case, then ambiguity in
the written meaning would not be good. If you fully devowel a
European language you get something that is very ambiguous -
some words (a and I) disappear, while others shrink to just a
single letter (at, it, to, on, no, in, an) from which the original
cannot be derived. Semitic languages usually have the propositions
and pronouns built into the actual word or verb so that the meaning
is not lost.
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- There are some features in the text (mainly the usage of
dots as word separators, and the lack of a sentence structure)
which would indicate that the original document is probably quite
a bit older than the date of about 1600 that is gained from the
signature.
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- One researcher has put forth the theory that it is the work
of Francs Bacon, which would place its origin in England around
1350. This would serve to limit the choice of source languages
to Latin, Old English, French, Greek, Hebrew, Norse, or an artificial
one.
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- The Herbs
The herbal section constitutes about the half of the manuscript
with 130 pages. These pages usually consist of single plants,
occasionally two plants, with short descriptions beside it. Most
of the plants illustrated have not been identified. However,
the larger leaf depicted on 42r is Rumex acetosa, called "green
sorrel" and the smaller leaf alongside it is identified
to be an Oxalis, of the other genus commonly called "sorrel".
Both produce large quantities of oxalic acid in their leaves,
giving them the same sour taste. As another example, the identification
by O'Neill for the plant illustration on 100v may be given for
its resemblance to "Botrychium lunaria" Some researchers
have felt that the herbal section contains instructions for grafting
plants, or shaping them, similar to styles that existed in ancient
China. Some of the pages seem to give instructions for drying
or processing parts of the plants, and are accompanied by pictures
of what appear to be oriental drying devices. More information
can be found here.
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- The Charts
Astronomical section consists of the drawings of the sun, the
moon and the stars and some pages include zodiac
figures.
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- The Biological section?
- For many years, researchers have labeled a section of the
manuscript as a Biological section. This section contains many
illustrations of groups of naked women, usually immersed in large
pools of liquid connected by pipes
and tubes which they imagined represented the blood vessels,
reproductive organs, and intestinal track. Others, looking at
the pictures, recognized women crushing grapes in large vats.
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- Other similar manuscripts
Researchers looked for clues in ancient texts which give somewhat
the similar look and feel of the symbols and illustrations of
the text in order to associate a date to the manuscript. Alchemy
texts (http://levity.com/alchemy/index.html)
contain resembling symbols, enchantments, incantations, and illustrations
which were quite popular in medieval era. Employment of nymphs
(http://www.voynich.nu/vatg1291.html#1)
in a circular design with embedded zodiac signs in a 9th century
Byzantine manuscript though made with completely different tools
and technique from those in Voynich MS, are speculated to be
similar with VMS's nymph posture and arrangement. [http://www.voynich.nu/vatg1291.html].
There is no solid evidence to attach the manuscript to any location
or date. Some experts propose that it is European, based on the
hair and clothing styles, and some guess that it has Chinese
origin with an original phonetic or semi-phonetic alphabet based
on the prefix-suffix decomposition of the language. In short,
everyone is still guessing, and nothing has been firmly established
as to the manuscript's contents or origin.
- Download It Now
- It is possible to view the Voynich Manuscript by
visiting this web page: http://www.voynichinfo.com/
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