Going through the blogs I follow, I found that Paleobabble had a link to some new information about the Voynich Manuscript. For those of you who are interested in esoteric texts or making props for movies or RPGs, this manuscript should be an inspiration. I know the unraveling of a centuries old mystery certainly piques my interest.
The Voynich Manuscript has been known to the public for only a century although it appears much older. This book contains fantastic drawings of people and animals and more tantalizing, a text in an unknown language and/or a secret code. The Voynich Manuscript has been labeled as an outright modern fraud, a secret book of magic, a scholarly or artistic hoax and many other things in the popular press, the most specious link the Voynich Manuscript to Atlantis or space aliens.
Lately some scholars and amateurs have been taking a fresh
look at the Voynich Manuscript by attempting to identify the fabulous plants
illustrated. Previously, experts
insisted they did not resemble any plant seen by man on this planet. The new investigators were not so sure. They threw out all previous presumptions and
returned to investigative bedrock, having botanists look at the drawings of the
plants, often in historical artistic context of the 1500s.
What they found was that some of the plants could in fact be
identified and were not alien species or fantasy items. They were plants found in Central America
about the time of the Conquistadors.
This new approach is exciting because it breaks new ground in attempting
to decipher the Voynich Manuscript.
Once you had identified some of the plants, it was logical that the
accompanying text would be a reference to the plant itself, thus linking a
known object to a work group.
This is not a new technique because by using comparison and
association, linguists managed to translate languages that were previously unreadable
to modern people. The same thing happened when Coptic was used
to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The
plants function as a visual Rosetta stone.
If you identify the plant pictured in the Voynich Manuscript, match it
up to an Amerind language, then you have a lever to open up the text. Previously the Mayan glyph written language
could be read by using similar techniques.
This is not a full decipherment by any means and the
tentative identification of plant/word associations in the Voynich Manuscript,
while exciting will have to be followed up by years of scholarship and peer
validation. See the following articles:
http://m.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-botanical-council-publishes-revolutionary-analysis-unlocking-mysteries-of-500-year-old-manuscript-241140041.html and http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1689897#ixzz2sH68WeEh
Botanist Arthur Tucker and information technologist Rexford
Talbert have managed to identify 37 plants depicted as plants from the
Americas, notably in Mexico. They similarly identified six animals and one mineral.
They also have identified several plant names in the text as being written in
Nahuatl, a Native-American language from modern day Mexico. The calligraphy of
the manuscript bears resemblance to the calligraphy of another 16th century
Mexican Codex, the Codex Cruz-Badianus from 1552.
The original article in The Herbal Gram is Preliminary
Analysis of the Botany, Zoology, and Mineralogy of the Voynich Manuscript by Dr Arthur Tucker and Rex Talbert which is about their findings in their
botanical attack on unlocking the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript. The original article can be found in full
here: http://cms.herbalgram.org/herbalgram/issue100/hg100-feat-voynich.html
The Voynich Manuscript is now safely housed at the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. You can view images of the Voynich Manuscript here: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/esp_ciencia_manuscrito07a.htm
I've always loved unusual and old manuscripts and seeing The Voynich Manuscript beginning to give up its secrets is exciting. I hope you will follow some of the links and explore the articles.
CoastConFan
CoastConFan