On 02/12/2011 12:45 PM, Jones Beene wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: Mauro Lacy > >> The language is a mystery. Encryption seems unlikely. A hoax seems very > unlikely to me too. Probably an ancient, lost, secret language? > > Now that you mention it - there is one group from that time and general > geographic area which did use codes for secret writings, and to avoid the > taint of "heresy" against you-know-who. That would be the Cathars or similar > Gnostic cults. > > OTOH - They may have already been wiped-out by the time the manuscript was > written.
Yes. My take is that the Voynich is not encrypted, but written in an exotic natural language, that is, it's written in plain text with an invented alphabet and vocabulary. By example, every time they want to mean "horse", the monks would write "ajhd". After some time, they'll learn the coded words and write and read comfortably in their secret language. This reminds me of Swedenborg translation table to read the Bible (/Vera Christiana Religio/). It reminds me also of one of Jorge Luis Borges short stories about a conjectural encyclopedia of a conjectural world, written in a conjectural language, /Tlön, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius/. Indeed, I'm starting to conjecture now that Borges could have been inspired by the Voynich when writing that short story. Reading and elaborating about it, the Voynich seems to be the work of one or various medieval monks, some of them with strong eastern influences. Maybe translating or elaborating on some eastern (probably Chinese) texts on herbal medicine and treatments. To decode it, a translation table must be constructed for each *word*, not letter, based on word frequency, placement on the manuscript, use in a sentence, relation to the drawings, etc. etc. Probably the words and the language have some method or general rule to form declinations, and that explains some striking similarities between words. Or they are just a caprice of the vocabulary makers. That would also explain the rarity of some of the glyphs, probably used only for particularly secret, rare, or valuable concepts. A similar encoding could have been used to obscure the drawings, i.e. to conceal the real identity of the herbs and plants. That would explain the alien nature of many of the plants and of other drawings in the manuscript. When decoded, my take is that it will not look very different from other alchemical texts of the time. That is, almost totally meaningless and mostly alien to modern eyes. Time (and the associated change of mentality) can be the best cyphers of them all :-) > Or else - perhaps only the best coders survived, and this is the proof :) > > The prototype mentality for the computer geeks of today ? :) Yeah. Maybe the translation tables are kept in a vault at the Vatican library. Or they were only in the minds of the coders, and slowly died with them. I would tend to think the latter, that is, in the work of a small, jealous, hermetic brotherhood which used its own language to preserve their knowledge. Mauro
