But the Voynich Manuscript – which has thwarted all attempts to decode its content for more than a century – has at last yielded up some sense of cogent revelation.
Dr Gerard Cheshire apparently took two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, to decipher the Voynich Manuscript.
The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten and illustrated text, which has been carbon-dated to the mid-15th century, thus it is definitely of the medieval era.
The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich , a Polish-Samogitian antiquarian book dealer who purchased it in 1912.
Dr Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol, described how he successfully deciphered the manuscript’s codex and, at the same time, revealed the only known example of proto-Romance language.
“I experienced a series of ‘eureka’ moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realised the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript,’ he said.
“What it reveals is even more amazing than the myths and fantasies it has generated.
“For example, the manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon, who happens to have been great-aunt to Catherine of Aragon.
“It is also no exaggeration to say this work represents one of the most important developments to date in Romance
linguistics.
“The manuscript is written in proto-Romance – ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese,
Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician.
”The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in
official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government.
”As a result, proto-Romance was lost from the record, until now.”
Dr Cheshire also explained in linguistic terms what made the manuscript so remarkable:
“It uses an extinct language. Its alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols,” he began.
“It includes no dedicated punctuation marks, although some letters have symbol variants to indicate punctuation
or phonetic accents.
“All of the letters are in lower case and there are no double consonants.
“It includes diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic
components.
“It also includes some words and abbreviations in Latin,” Cheshire concluded.
The next step is to use this knowledge to translate the entire manuscript and compile a lexicon, which Dr Cheshire acknowledged will take some time and funding, as it comprises more than 200 pages.
