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'.