Linguistics prof claims breakthrough on Voynich manuscript

[Recursion]

http://www.beds.ac.uk/news/2014/february/600-year-old-mystery-manuscript-decoded-by-university-of-bedfordshire-professor

Professor Bax however has begun to unlock the mystery meanings of the Voynich manuscript using his wide knowledge of mediaeval manuscripts and his familiarity with Semitic languages such as Arabic. Using careful linguistic analysis he is working on the script letter by letter.

“I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script,” explained Professor Bax, who is to give his inaugural lecture as a professor at the University later this month.

“The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants. I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at mediaeval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results.”

Among the words he has identified is the term for Taurus, alongside a picture of seven stars which seem to be the Pleiades, and also the word KANTAIRON alongside a picture of the plant Centaury, a known mediaeval herb, as well as a number of other plants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

I love this book...

[Scootaloo]

1. There was another guy who thought it might be tied to the Central American codices

Mayan hieroglyphs and the like - also on the basis of some of hte plants depicted.

What puzzles me is the repetitiveness of the characters. if it IS a code - and not decorative filler - then my guess would be that it's at least double-encrypted, with each character representing a number, and each number grouping thus forming a word.

I have no idea what it says, but I'm pretty certain as to what it is - an alchemist's grimoire. These guys were well-educated, trained in symbolism, and highly competitive, leading to codes, personal scripts and languages, the use of images and references as entire phrases, and so on. Since pretty much every alchemist had their own style, these sort of texts would be pretty much entirely useless to anyone who stole the thing. And of course, since they really imagined that the dross of man's impurity could be cleansed through the processes of chemistry leaving behind only the Pure Bring, they all believed their research was infinitely valuable.

Yeah, "lead to gold" is another metaphor... I kinda... studied this stuff along with ritual magick back in the day

[Recursion]

2. But then the characters follow Zipf's law, which a multi-round cipher wouldn't

Part of me hopes he's wrong, just because I like having some uncharted territory still out there...

[Scootaloo]

3. Well, given I had to google "Zipf's Law" I guess i can't say I'm an expert here

But would that law apply to unidentified and possibly invented languages? Would it, for instance, hold up for Klingon, in addition to being an invented language, is an invented language with no spelling rules, only pronunciation?