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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
...this quote:
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Wow. They have been working on Perl 6 for a long time.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
It's that strange books in dead languages with lots of Astronomy illustrations are best left UNDECIPHERED!
I can see it, three weeks from now, a new article:
Well Meaning Hackers Awaken The Great Cthulhu
best web host ever
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.
"It is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system."
/th/ sound, although I may be confusing that with the eth and thorn characters (other archaic northern European characters which still survive in Icelandic and a few other places).
The alphabet looks rather obviously European-based. First off, much of what I can make out, looks vaguely reminiscent of letters like g, d, m, n, w, and a.
Secondly, that 3-like character near the end of the first line that sticks out like a sore thumb. Around the time this book was written, that character was a part of many northern European languages, including old English. I believe it stood for a
The very first character (which you can see in several places throughout) also caught my eye. It looks like a slightly-modified version of the "feature key" you see on Apple keyboards, which is a symbol of Viking origin.
Liberty in your lifetime
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?
In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.