Mystery solved: they managed to decipher the Voynich manuscript – ElSol.com.ar – Diario de Mendoza, Argentina

An academic from Bristol University has finally managed to decipher the code of "the world's most mysterious text," the Voynich manuscript, a challenge for linguists and cryptographers.

This enigmatic, anonymous text of the 15th century has puzzled historians and cryptographers since its discovery in the 19th century. Thea succession of failures in its translation had turned the manuscript into a holy grail of historical cryptography.

Although the object and meaning of the manuscript have been out of the picture for over a century, Dr. Gerard Cheshire, Associate Researcher, it took two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, identifying the language and writing system of the famous and impenetrable document.

"I experienced a series of" eureka "moments when I deciphered the code, which was followed by a feeling of disbelief and excitement when I realized the Extent of achievement, as much by its linguistic importance as by the revelations on the origin and the contents of the manuscript"Declared Cheshire.

As regards language, according to Cheshire, "the manuscript it is written in protorromance, an ancestor of modern Romance languages ​​such as Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician ".

In searching through the linguistic features of the Voynich manuscript, Cheshire pointed out that "uses an extinct language"and that" their alphabet is a combination of unknown and more familiar symbols. "In addition, the document does not use specific punctuation", although some letters contain variant symbols that indicate punctuation or phonetic accents. "

The academic said that all the letters are in lower caseand that in the text are present diphthongs, triptongos, quadriptongos "for the abbreviation of phonetic components". "It also includes words and abbreviations in Latin," he added.

The next step is to use this knowledge to translate the entire manuscript and compile a lexicon. Cheshire recognizes that it will take time and funding because it has more than 200 pages.

Now that the language and the writing system have been explained, the pages of the manuscript have been made available to specialists to explore and reveal, for the first time, their true linguistic and informative content.