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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
Yes, it almost certainly was written by someone in their own private language. The alternative is to assume that it was written by aliens, or something like that.
The analyses of the text show that it seem to indicate that it is a real language, not just gibberish, since there is a detectable grammar (just not one we know) and vocabulary. There are more different words than one might expect from the languages of the time.
I'd be surprised if there weren't at least a few spelling mistakes, since it was after all handwritten. The writing isn't always very readable either, but other than the language being unknown, it isn't deliberately encrypted.
It seems unlikely to be a hoax, there's far too much work gone into it. It's probably the work of some unknown genius (or idiot savant).
If we could translate it, it might have fascinating insights into the world of the time, novel mathematical and scientific ideas, or it might just contain his/her daily record of bowel movements.
New Scientist had a feature on it a few months ago.
This book has some interesting implications. If we can't decipher an annotated manuscript that is but a few hundred years removed from our time, how could we ever possibly hope to decipher a message form an alien race?