Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past

serutan writes: "Today there is a really unusual Astronomy Picture of the Day that talks about a centuries-old book, written in an unknown language that is undeciphered to this date. The 265-page book, with its curly script and weird illustrations, reminds me a lot of a bizarre modern book called the Codex Seraphinus, but for real. Any crypto experts care to take a whack at this?" Update: The image was transitioned and the entry can be found Here - cd

Comments

The Codebreakers

[Ellen Ripley]

The Voynich Manuscript was discussed in David Kahn's 1967 grand history The Codebreakers. IMHO, this is an essential book; it gives historical scope to cryptographic activities in an era in which we must understand these issues.

Ellen

Online scans of the Voynich manuscript

[sl956]

here :
http://voynich.no-ip.com/folios/

Re:IANAL(inguist), but...

[catsidhe]

I have some little knowledge of the Voynich Manuscript, and I must make some points:

• The letters have no relation with any script, from anywhere at any time, let alone any roman or cyrillic hand. Any similarities are the result of it being written with the same sort of pen as was used to write the European scripts, and the constraints a dipped nib pen puts on the pen movements you can make on the writing surface.
  
• The '3' character in roman scripts was a shorthand character, what is sometimes called a Tirolean notation. It has several meanings depending on context. eg., '-b3' == '-bus', '-q3' == '-que'. (ref. Cappelli, Adriano; The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography, Trans. D. Heimann and R. Kay, pp18ff)
  
• The letters for thorn ( ) and eth (ð ) do indeed stand for the /th/ sound in 'cloth' and 'clothe'.
  
• At the time the Voynich Manuscript was written, William Shakespeare was alive and writing plays. Old English had not been spoken for five hundred years.
  
• The first character which you saw is one of several 'flag' characters. They are found in several forms, but are consistent throughout the manuscript, with varying degrees of ornamentation. There does not appear to be any connection with the 'command' or 'propellor' symbol.
  
• The varying number of letters in the Voynich alphabet is a result of not knowing which symbols are graphemes and which are contractions. It is also unknown (but considered unlikely) if there is an 'Upper Case'. The equivalent would be not knowing that there is no meaningful difference between the symbols 'r' and 'R', but that there is a difference between 'R' and 'P'.
  

Permanent link

[wka]

Since the APoD rolls over each day, the link in the story now points to the next day's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This is a permanent link to the APoD highlighting the Voynich Manuscript, for those reading the story after the rollover.

Irish???

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.

Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?

The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry :-)

but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.

However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.

Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were :-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .

Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.

*Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland.