The Voynich Manuscript May Have Been Decoded

MBCook sends word on a possible solution to the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, which we last visited nearly 6 years ago. "The Voynich Manuscript has confounded attempts to decode it for nearly 100 years. A person named Edith Sherwood, who has previously suggested a possible link to DaVinci, has a new idea: perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words. There are three pages of examples from the herb section of the book, showing the original text, the plaintext Italian words, and the English equivalents. Has someone cracked the code?"

Comments

Debunked almost a year ago

[Weedhopper]

http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram-cipher

Re:It Hurts

[vegiVamp]

I generally agree with your rant, but I'd like to point out that the Allium family has more than just regular garlic. A wild plant that's called 'daslook' here (look is garlic) of that family, does look a lot more similar to the drawing: http://www.waterwereld.nu/images/daslook2.JPG .

Ah, wikipedia is helpful again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_ursinum

The leaves are quite nice in a salad, too :-)

Re:It Hurts

[eldavojohn]

Since you're not a botanist (nor am I) how do you know what garlic looked like 600 years ago?

Well, here's an illustration from the 15th century. Notice any bulbous feature that is lacking in the Voynich sketch? Notice they don't even bother to depict the root system in the 15th century sketch unlike the Voynich. My point was, not a single one of those plants relayed the distinguishing features you would obvious take care to note on the plant--all she offers is the leaf of stachys that has a hilarious tuber below it in the Voynich sketch but nothing in her botanical book! An obvious stretch of the imagination is the rose bush with no roses.

When corn was first cultivated, it looked like what we call "baby corn" today. It wasn't until centuries of selection and cross-breeding that we got the much larger corn that everyone knows.

I'm not sure where you found information that plants have changed dramatically in a few hundred years. While it's true that they have changed dramatically over thousands of years and since the advent of agriculture, 600 years is not the same as 6,000 years. While you're kind of right that thousands of years changed plants, I assure you that most if not all of today's plants look the same as they did 600 years ago.