If the latter, prime suspect is the eponymous Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer, but this seems farfetched in the light of the radiocarbon dating. Skeptical readers will surely be asking by now if the whole thing is a hoax, either created several hundred years ago as a money-making scam (Emperor Rudolf II, 1552-1612, supposedly bought it for 600 ducats, or 73 ounces of gold) or forged more recently. The fluid nature of the script seems to be telling us that the book's architect wrote in a natural script in his or her natural language. And, even more curious, the unknown author corrected not a single character out of the total 170,000 letters. However, there's no indication of any delay or hesitation between characters, which would be expected if the scribe were encoding while writing. Written in an unknown language in an unknown script, the manuscript is generally assumed to be in code. Words are between two and 10 letters long, with no punctuation. Whatever the curious symbols mean, they appear to be letters comprising a 25-character (more or less) alphabet. And nymphs, lots of nymphs (see the accompanying illustration). Although attempts at deciphering have so far failed, the colored illustrations tell us that the book includes sections on herbs and botany, astronomy and cosmology, and pharmaceutical cures.
#Decoded voynich manuscript skin#
This skin was recently radiocarbon-dated to between 14, thus establishing the earliest date for the writing. The manuscript is a vellum codex, or bound book, of 240 pages (out of an estimated 272 original pages) made from calfskin.
I expect the same fate awaits Kondrak's AI effort. (No one else could see them.) Since then, claims for a Greek/Latin/Egyptian/Ukrainian/Arabic/Hebrew/Flemish/English basis for the manuscript have regularly appeared - and shown to be false. Kondrak joins a long list of would-be decoders, starting in 1921 with a University of Pennsylvania researcher who ignored the actual visible text he proposed that the real message was in "Greek shorthand" buried within individual letters and only visible through a microscope. Here it is: "She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people." Kondrak says, "It's a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense." If you say so. This time around it's Greg Kondrak, professor of computer science at the University of Alberta in Canada, who used artificial intelligence techniques to translate, well, not the entire book, actually, despite the headline.
#Decoded voynich manuscript professional#
Every two or three years, ever since the so-called Voynich Manuscript resurfaced from obscurity in 1912, professional researchers and amateur decipherers announce they've decoded this 15th century book. "The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded." - Ars Technica headline Sept.
0 kommentar(er)
