The world is full of mysteries, and some of these mysteries are even more mysterious because no one can decipher them. One of these secrets is Voynich's manuscript, an illustrated book that was written in an unknown language that no one understands. The University of Bristol has now announced the withdrawal of its press release stating that one of its scientists has successfully “broken” the code of Voynich's manuscript. The researcher's controversial work is not even associated with the university itself.

The researcher's story

Voynich's manuscript is a famous medieval text written in a language that no one understands. Gerard Cheshire, an academic from the University of Bristol, recently announced the magazine Romance Studies their alleged solution to the whole puzzle. He described the language as a "calligraphic proto-Romanesque" language, with the manuscript being created by a Dominican nun as a reference source in the name of Mary of Castile - the Aragonese and Neapolitan queens.

Apparently it took him only two weeks to reach the peak of knowledge, a knowledge that escaped the greatest scholars for at least a century. The case is closed and the media is already blowing into the world with glorious fanfare that Voynich's manuscript has been broken. If we realize how many similar scientists actually exist to claim great mysteries, but they are not convincing and just want to take credit, the joy of miraculous revelation of the truth will pass us quickly. Cheshire is more scientist with caution and a skeptical look.

Alien illustration

But what really is a mysterious manuscript from which every scientist is enthusiastic? The text was written in 15. century between 1404 to 1438. In 1912 it was bought by Polish bookseller and antique Wilfrid M. Voynich. Hence the name of the manuscript.

Voynich's manuscript

In addition to the unknown script, which in itself is difficult to crack, the manuscript is adorned with strange illustrations of alien plants, naked women, strange objects and zodiacs. Currently, the manuscript is home to Yale University, where the book is stored in a library with rare books and Beinecke manuscripts. The author is also unknown. Possible authors include the philosopher Roger Bacon, the Elizabethan astrologer and alchemist John Dee, or Voynich himself, which would mean that I am writing here and you are reading about the hoax.

The author is not known

There are so many theories about what Voynich's manuscript is. Most likely this is a handbook with herbal remedies and astrological readings. Reporting this breach of this manuscript so quickly is inappropriate, as many amateur and professional cryptographs have tried to solve it.

In 2017 reported researcher and television writer Nicholas Gibbs reported breaking the code. According to him, it was a female medical handbook and her language was supposed to be only a summary of Latin abbreviations describing medicinal recipes. To prove his point of view, he provided two lines of his translation. His analysis was, according to the scientific community, a mixture of what we already knew and what could not support the evidence.

The manuscript remains unknown

Ahmet Ardiç, a Turkish electrical engineer and a passionate student of the Turkish language, came to realize that the text is in fact a phonetic form of the old Turkish language. But this attempt, if nothing else, has won the respect of the Medieval Studies scientist at Yale University, Fagin Davis, who called his endeavor as one of the few that is comprehensible, consistent, repeatable and results in meaningful text.

But Cheshire laments that it is indeed a proto-Romance language that is the forerunner of modern languages ​​such as Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. The language is said to be extinct because it was rarely used in official documents. If that were true, Voynich's text would be the only surviving proof of that language.

But Fagin Davis commented on his Twitter saying it was nonsense. Greg Kondrak - a professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, who specializes in research on natural language processing, tried to decode the text using artificial intelligence. According to him, the part with the zodiac makes the most sense. It is well known that manuscript names are of Roman origin. However, it was added to the text after it was completed. And deciphering individual symbols? More people have come up with mapping based on Latin letters. But this mapping didn't match.

The next time someone comes up claiming to have deciphered Voynich's manuscript, and it will be coming soon, check the information about that expert and his research before looking forward to the results. Here is just another shallow assertion about the decoding of Voynich's manuscript, which cannot be taken too seriously.