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

It Hurts

[eldavojohn]

perhaps the text is simply anagrams of Italian words.

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

More importantly, why does the Voynich Manuscript flip between things derived from plants like gallic acid, oil and then return to naming the plants? Furthermore, I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on! Did Edith Sherwood ever stop to think that maybe -- similar to numerology in The Bible -- she'd be able to make words out of any strange text regardless of its true origin?

Here's a real gem:

This brief sentence indicated that the use of anagrams should be investigated. This was further supported by reading Wikipedia’s report that anagrams were popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and that some 17th century astronomers, while engaged in verification of their discoveries, used anagrams to hide their ideas.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me.

This is the game that will be played with the Voynich Manuscript. Every so often people will claim to have 'decoded it' by offering up a small part of the manuscript which very imaginative minds have pulled together 10+ very very flimsy clues that point to some individual. The fact that there are so many coincidences will add weight to it being the real explanation. But it oddly won't work for 99% of the manuscript. Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense.

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work. Someone lost in a period of time where autism was misunderstood and they are forever lost to anonymity except they'll get the last laugh because we'll never understand what message they were trying to get to us. And some of us might go mad spending hours and hours and hours trying to figure this out with no luck.

Re:It Hurts

[ianare]

Well, she does say she doesn't speak Italian ... If this is true then I'm sure someone familiar with medieval Italian will come along and decode the whole thing. As for the labeling, yes of course it's 'bullshit', the manuscript is recognized as being fiction for a long time now.

Re:It Hurts

[Yvanhoe]

Then why does she only offer up a single page of plants as decoded anagrams? What about the other ~199 pages? What about the pages of block text?

She calls for help from people knowing medieval Italian. Apparently she used a reference book on the medieval Italian name of certain plants ot get these hints. She makes the interesting suggestion that this was written by a child, maybe mimicking scientists he knows be drawing "obvious" stuff, i.e. the plants in the garden and in the kitchen, and "hiding" his discoveries using a code used by scientists of the time.

You found that on Wikipedia? Call Yale University, you've decoded it. Citing Wikipedia for a fact while analyzing centuries old manuscripts? Why you bother to put PhD after you name bewilders me.

She referred to Wikipedia as an inspiration to explore an anagram-based lead. Not such a bad thing to do.

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.

That was the theory that sounded the most plausible to me too, but these new leads and discoveries call for more investigation, I would say.

Re:It Hurts

[radtea]

If you want my theory, we're dealing with an unknown autistic artist's work.

That's an interesting idea, with the key word being "artist". The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message. Considered as a weird kind of autistic art, that might be kind of cool, although by far the more likely solution is that John Dee or one of his associates created the thing as a fraud to bilk gullible aristocrats or royalty (Charles V gets mentioned as a possible target, if I recall correctly.)

Seriously: an error-free exotic MS with bizarre and suggestive (in the broadest sense) drawings that we are pretty sure passed through the hands of known "magicians" at least some of whom almost certainly accepted in their own minds that much of what they sold was fraudulent (many probably at least half-believed in what they were doing, but still...)

Never assume intelligence when venality will do, or something like that.

Re:It Hurts

[JasterBobaMereel]

So she has apparently decoded a manuscript written in a language she does not read (medieval Italian) does not know what a medieval herbal looks like, is not a botanist, a linguist or anything else that would be helpful to decoding a medieval manuscript of any kind .....

For her next trick she will disprove Einstein, and prove the world is flat .....

Re:It Hurts

[thisnamestoolong]

Umm... really? The manuscript has still yet to be decoded at all -- how would we go about determining that it is fiction?

Re:It Hurts

[divisionbyzero]

It seems like you're being a bit harsh. She seems like an amateur doing amatuerish work that has found something suggestive. It's not like she tried to get it published in a journal or claims to be a some sort of professional. Sure she has a phD after her name but that doesn't mean she is trying to claim he phD applies to Voynich Manuscript. Maybe I'm being naive.

Re:It Hurts

[reg106]

Personally, I like

This picture also depicts the union of a sperm with an ova, indicating an extraordinary insight into human reproduction.

and then

I postulate that Leonardo da Vinci wrote the Voynich Manuscript circa 1460 when he was about 8 years old.

Meanwhile,

An early microscope was made in 1590 in Middelburg, The Netherlands.

How exactly did a youthful da Vinci figure out what an ova and sperm look like? If Leonardo da Vinci (as a child) could sketch sperm and ova over 100 years before a crude microscope was invented and almost 200 years before Hooke and Leeuwenhoek, then that alone would be an astonishingly significant discovery. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Leonardo would build a microscope, discover cell biology, and not bother to write something up about it as an adult. He was, after all, interested in pretty much everything. The more reasonable conclusion is that Edith Sherwood is willing to interpret images very "liberally" (meaning here, without much evidence), without making even simple checks for logical consistency. This is a single example, but the carelessness calls the rest into question. (As you have already indicated)

Re:It Hurts

[ConceptJunkie]

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

That said, I agree with your premise that this is a shaky "solution", but I wouldn't rule it out based on that evidence.

Re:It Hurts

[Linker3000]

There's an Italian song about the manuscript - maybe it holds some clues...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcUi6UEQh00&feature=player_embedded

(not a Rickroll)

Re:It Hurts

[Mindcontrolled]

Seriously, also on page 4, "mushroom"? OK, you could argue that's like the stem of a mushroom. So why are the very similar figures on previous pages marked "forget" (eh? unless in some medieval italian slang that apparently both dante and da vinci spoke a "forget" was a mushroom of some sort), "waste" (eh? this is the bit of the mushroom, or forget, that you're meant to waste? seriously?), "rapid" (evidently if you eat this particular mushroom, or forget, you rapidly produce waste) or two question marks

Makes totally sense. Magic mushrooms. Like, dude, if you eat them shrooms, you'll get rapidly wasted and forget about all that shit'n'stuff, like totally, man.

Re:It Hurts

[sennyk]

The world is flat; it only appears to be round, because it is periodic. :)

Re:It Hurts

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

there are known cases of cyphers being broken by someone who does not speak the language in with the original message was written. some classical cypers can be decoded using frequency tables for the language. this requires the breaker to know (or guess) the original language, but it can be done.

now, do you really think _ALL_ workers of bletchley park were fluent in german ?

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.

Re:It Hurts

[Rarzipace]

On this note, it may not hurt to point out that the Voynich/Sherwood drawing (as previously linked) does more closely resemble these pictures (1, 2) of wild garlic I found with a quick Google Image search. Still not a perfect likeness, but the Voynich drawing might imperfectly depict something more closely related to that wild garlic than the grandparent post's modern cultivated garlic.

Re:It Hurts

[Lars T.]

The almost complete lack of errors and corrections in the text strongly suggest that it's nonsense rather than any kind of encoded message.

You mean just like those funny "Hieroglyphics" that are supposed to be the written ancient Egyptian language. What a hoot.

Re:It Hurts

[IorDMUX]

What I find very telling and most undermining to this hypothesis is the simple fact that soybeans were not introduced to Europe and the United States until the 18th century, and did not become a significant crop until the 20th. Given that the Voyinch manuscript is thought to be from the 15th - 16th century, the supposed translation--which claims to identify a soia = soybean plant--has quite a bit of explaining to do.

... along the same lines, do you notice any resemblance between the "soybean" illustration in the manuscript and these actual soybean roots?

I don't.

Re:It Hurts

[thisnamestoolong]

The illustrations are clearly not a literal representation of reality, but they could certainly be a figurative representation of reality used to elucidate the accompanying non-fiction text. If you looked through any modern science text book, the often bizarre figures and illustrations used to clarify the point could very easily be construed as fiction to one who was not familiar with the format.

Re:It Hurts

[AnonGCB]

How about the flood? I don't recall hearing anything about a worldwide flood in my history books, or geology class. What about the creation story? We know we evolved -- seems to me to be completely wrong.

If anything, I'd think you're the troll.

Re:It Hurts

[Scrameustache]

I call the labeling of the plants to be absolute complete bullshit. Yes, I said it. I'm not a botanist but I grew up on a farm and I know many of these plants very well and I can't tell any distinguishing characteristics apart from the drawings. This is what a garlic plant looks like. Not like this. I mean, come on!

http://vegetablesofinterest.typepad.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2007/08/28/rare_ripe_garlic_shoots.jpg

http://ballardfarmersmarket.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/green-garlic/

http://inpraiseofsardines.typepad.com/blogs/2006/02/spring_is_just_.html

Re:It Hurts

[Beelzebud]

Someone is about to get their ass kicked for saying that!

Re:It Hurts

[aix tom]

Well, not so long ago *everyone* familiar with Greek history was absolutely sure that Troy was just a figment of Homers imagination, until a ridiculous (much laughed about in the archaeological circles) nut-case named Heinrich Schliemann came along.

Fresh ideas are good. I guess 99.9% of them will most likely turn out to be bullshit, but the 0.1% that make it are the things that advance science.

This would explain a lot about Ohio politics.

[John Guilt]

Oh, that was Voynich Manuscript...that's different. Never mind.

Really now

[Bluesman]

I know nothing about this manuscript except what is written in this article, but if it's anagrams, a simple analysis of the letter frequency would have revealed that.

Re:Really now

[icebrain]

I don't know how well this would apply to other languages, but imagine if someone took English and wrote it purely phonetically.

Yu myt wynd up with sumthing riten lik this, wich cud ezily thro of a leter frekwense analisis, uspeshule if yu hav vareashinz in pronunseashin for diferent reginz.

Hmm...

[denzacar]

Wasn't Voynich Manuscript already solved by Randall Munroe?

I cracked the code years ago.

[Cornwallis]

It says:

Pound pastrami, can kraut,six bagels--bring home for Emma."

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[Megaweapon]

It also says:

Form eyeball-size pieces from the dough
Roll in the powdered sugar
And say the Magic Words:
"Sim sala bim bamba sala do saladim"

Re:I cracked the code years ago.

[donaggie03]

It says:

Pound pastrami, can kraut,six bagels--bring home for Emma."

NO NO NO! Whoever heard of "A Canticle for Voynich" ?? It just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

Hypothesis testing

[PopeOptimusPrime]

Hypothesis: The manuscript is anagrammatic Italian.
Corollary 1: The manuscript should contain appropriate letter frequencies for said language.
Corollary 2: The manuscript should contain all relevant letters.
Conclusion: Neither Corollary 1 nor 2 are true, thus hypothesis is rejected.
...
???
...
Add to the annals of the internet.

Oh Crap!

[AnotherBrian]

Like we need another lame Dan Brown book+movie.

Also, http://xkcd.com/593/

Debunked almost a year ago

[Weedhopper]

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

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Verdatum]

I said the same thing when this was still in "recent". If there's been genuine cryptanalysis on it, and there has, an anagram cipher would show up immediately. I can't find any information on who this edith sherwood (Ph.D!) is, but a simple google search on her name popped up with that informative link.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[gad_zuki!]

I dont know why people cant accept that this thing is just a fun little hoax from 500 years ago. 16th century people had senses of humor and mystery too. Someone concocted it for shits and giggles or perhaps from a serious mental illness. Its a shame this person isnt around today to hear these tales of connections with da vinci, aliens, etc. Shame, for now it just brings out the "Dan Brown is the realz" crowd and other conspiracy nutters.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Culture20]

now it just brings out the "Dan Brown is the realz" crowd and other conspiracy nutters.

Dan Brown IS real. You Dan Brown deniers are the real conspiracy nuts. "It's a ghost-writer" "It's plagiarized from aliens" "My dog is Dan Brown" Nutters all.

Re:Debunked almost a year ago

[Verdatum]

Yes. Yes it would. If the claim is that it's just a substitution + anagram cipher, then the character frequencies would stay the same as the plaintext of this language. And even for ancient languages, these frequencies are known. Even despite the fact that ancient writing tended to be phonetic, and thus varied greatly on dialect; philologists take all this into account. The conclusion is that the frequencies don't match any of them. And no cryptographer is going to analyze an ancient document and presume it will translate to modern Italian. That'd be about as stupid as postulating that it was penned by an 8 year old Leonardo Da Vinci...oh wait.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[CastrTroy]

But they did go on to prove Fermat's theorem. So maybe he did write down the proof somewhere else. Maybe it was just lost. I'm sure paper's have been lost before, it wouldn't be the first time. The proof took a long time to be proved, and was quite a long one, but that's not to say that it's impossible that Fermat actually had a proof. For sure it wouldn't have fit inside the margin of that text. Maybe the person who the Voynich manuscript was meant for did decode it, and it completed it's point. Maybe it wasn't meant for the entire world to get the message, but just a small group of people who have since passed away.

And it says...

[halcyon1234]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Duis ut nibh et nunc scelerisque vestibulum non ac diam. Sed porttitor mauris a lorem tempus faucibus.

This is a test of my new pen."

It's a cook book!

[Rhaban]

It's a cook book!

It seems highly repetitive

[srussia]

Hypothesis: Leonardo Da Vinci had a son (perhaps named Bartolomeo). As punishment for Bart's mischief, Leonardo ordered him to write 300 pages' worth of "Non rivelero il segreto di mio padre" using Da Vinci's secret script in mirror image.

Unless...

[jDeepbeep]

Now if the manuscript is ever decoded, a hell of a lot more than two pages is going to make sense. In fact, when someone figures it out, 99% of the manuscript will make sense.

That is, unless the manuscript is using a collection of ciphers (one for each section perhaps?), in which case, one key won't unlock everything.

Just a thought.

Not far in fact

[DrYak]

In fact, the working hypothesis of TFA's Author is that the manuscript may have been written by a young - still child - Leonardo, playing around with anagrams and trying to make an imaginary book out of common plants.
Not that far from children playing "Druids & Dicotyledon 1st Edition"

what

[bistromath007]

How did it not occur to this dipshit that if the "code" were just Italian anagrams, Italians would've figured it out a long time ago?

Leonardo, not daVinci

[Jeremy Erwin]

Let's try to stay well clear of pot boilers. Art historians refer to the renaissance polymath as "Leonardo," not as "Mr. Da Vinci." Sidmilarly, Dante, rather than "Mr Alligheri" wrote the Divine Comedy.

Re:Leonardo, not daVinci

[Anonymous Coward]

Art historians refer to the renaissance polymath as "Leonardo," not as "Mr. Da Vinci."

But what if we need to differentiate him from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

Re:obMST3K

[Culture20]

The link is at least more likely than to Leonardo da Gary Indiana.

or Leonardo da Ninja Turtle

I happen to be a linguistics major

[Naznarreb]

I happen to be a linguistics major, and I don't want the manuscript to ever be decoded. To me, the manuscript is a symbol of the complexity of language and the depth of human ingenuity and creativity. The fact the best minds of the last 100ish years haven't cracked it reminds me that there is always some further mystery waiting to be solved and that we should be leery of anyone who claims to have all the answers.

Re:Important texts are ultimately communicated

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

yes, so by your reasoning, the egyptian hieroglyphs were just an elabore prank on future generations right ? and it remained like that untill the roseta stone was found.

there was a single bi-lingual stone tablet left in the world with the key to understand those symbols, and it remained lost for centuries.

unfortunately, a "rosetta" document for the voynich manuscript, if it was ever written, may never be found.

First two lines decoded (from the article)

[noidentity]

In case you don't want to read the article, here are the first two lines they decoded:

Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down

Da Vinci makes sense

[Pedrito]

I'm no handwriting expert, but doing a quick google image search lead to a number of images of Leonardo's work with handwriting to compare against and frankly, it looks like a dead-on match to me. The little X thing he does in place of "ver" not only looks the same, but has the same little incidental serifs and stuff. The occurrences of "l" look the same, the "i"s that look like alphas, the funky "P". Again, I'm no expert, but either the writer was da Vinci or someone copying his writing style.

The fact that she used tools available on the web to help her out in areas where she's not an expert, ought not be held against her. Personally, I think it shows that she's pretty damn clever.

Re:Da Vinci makes sense

[Verdatum]

Regardless of how much it does or does not look like Da Vinci's hand, I very much agree with your second paragraph. She sounds like a lovely armchair investigator; happily and quietly posting her suppositions on her own website (though the website begs for a CV; it'd be nice to know in what field and from where that Ph.D originates). I find it no different from my enjoyment in tinkering with the Millennium Prize Problems when I have no business doing so.

The problem I have is with the story submitter. Would it have been so difficult to discover that this paper specifically was debunked 10 months ago, and what was written like the first few days of a breakthrough has yet to come to any fruition. I think it's a little mean to force her to stand up to slashdot peer review. Worse and plain irritating for the summary to be so exaggerant of the claim. If it was like "Here's a cute theory, she thinks it was Da Vinci, and believes she has a couple lines translated!" then a fun discussion would be had by all sans the unwarranted excitement.

Distributed Deciphering

[don_carnage]

Is the Voynich Manuscript in its entirety available for public review? I've only seem short page excerpts. Perhaps the right person hasn't seen it yet. (See Mayday Mystery).