You want to establish whether the script is an alphabet (in an alphabetical script, each speech sound is assigned, in principle, one letter symbol, as in English, German or Spanish, and both vowels and consonants are written, and always separately), an abugida(each symbol denotes a consonant-vowel combination, like ka or si) or an abjad, a writing system with only consonants ( srprsngl, wth nl cnsnnts, nglsh s nt tht dffclt t rd), or a writing system where each symbol denotes a meaning. There are only few languages that put such elements in the middle of a word.įirst, one has to find out what kind of script it is. One would therefore expect that such parts of words in the end and perhaps also the beginning would be repeated throughout the text, as in any natural text. One could also try to identify recurring noun class markers as in Bantu languages, verbal inflections such as English -ed or Spanish -mos, or plural suffixes like English – s. We know that most languages of the world have them.
In the beginning, there could be derivational prefixes as we find them in English, such as un- and re. One can hypothesize that there should be recurrent parts of words that would be, for instance, case endings on nouns, as one founds them in Russian, Latin and Greek. The “words” (let us assume they are in fact words) are separated by spaces (which is, by the way, not the case in all old texts). How does one go about deciphering a script and text like the one in the Voynich manuscript? One can use the number of signs (letters) in the text, the length of the different words, the combination of the signs and recurrence of patterns as clues. By comparison, Linear B, a syllabic script which predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries, was deciphered mainly on the basis of short inscriptions on clay tablets, not a book-length manuscript. As the manuscript contains 288 pages, it is certainly not the lack of material that has hindered the interpretation of the text. Who wrote the manuscript? In which language? What is it about? What is the meaning or reference of these strange drawings of dragons, bathing naked ladies and maps of known and unknown places? Why are there no corrections in the manuscript? Naked lady in Voynich manuscript: What is she doing? And with what?Īs a linguist, one is of course curious about the text, and one wants to know whether it is written in a known or unknown language. But other than that, only mysteries remain. The text and illustrations could be newer, but could be from the same time as well. The Voynich manuscript is written on parchment that is dated to the first half of the 15 thcentury. The first known owner of the manuscript, Voynich My friend, Eric, became a car mechanic and I became a linguist. We have not managed to decipher the Voynich manuscript. In this contribution I will argue that the manuscript is in fact not interesting at all for language nerds.Īs a teenager, a friend and I challenged each other in writing short texts in secret scripts, and we became better and better in deciphering them, while we also improved our skills in making our codes more complicated. Linguists have tried as well, but all in vain. Cryptographers-specialists in secret writing-have broken their brains on it. People have claimed it could be written in a form of Hebrew, in a Romance language, in an earlier form of Romani, an Indic language, or even in a language from another planet. Nobody has been able to translate the manuscript there have been many proposals, but all have been rejected. It has been publicly available for a century, and now it is also available online. The manuscript is more than 500 years old. It is written in a totally unknown script in an unidentified language. No one has yet been able to decipher it, and many have tried. This manuscript is one of the big enigmas of medieval history and, for that matter, linguistics. Last year I was contacted by someone who claimed to have deciphered the Voynich manuscript.