The Writing System of the Cryptic Voynich Manuscript Explained: British Researcher May Have Finally Cracked the Code

Human­i­ty will remem­ber the name of James Joyce for gen­er­a­tions to come, not least because, as he once wrote about his best-known nov­el Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enig­mas and puz­zles that it will keep the pro­fes­sors busy for cen­turies argu­ing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insur­ing one’s immor­tal­i­ty.” If Joyce was right, then the author of the mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich man­u­script (about which you can see an ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion here) has set a kind of stan­dard for immor­tal­i­ty. Filled with odd, not espe­cial­ly explana­to­ry illus­tra­tions and writ­ten in a script not seen any­where else, the ear­ly 15th-cen­tu­ry text has per­plexed schol­ars for at least 400 or so years of its exis­tence.

But recent years have seen a few claims of hav­ing cracked the Voyn­ich man­u­scrip­t’s code: one effort made use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, anoth­er con­cludes that the text was writ­ten in pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish, and the lat­est declares the Voyn­ich man­u­script to have been com­posed in “the only known exam­ple of pro­to-Romance lan­guage.” Uni­ver­si­ty of Bris­tol Research Asso­ciate Ger­ard Cheshire, the man behind this new decod­ing, describes that lan­guage as “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.”

And what, pray tell, is the Voyn­ich man­u­script actu­al­ly about? Cheshire has revealed lit­tle about its con­tent thus far, though he has described the text as “com­piled by Domini­can nuns as a source of ref­er­ence for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon.” Though he has claimed to deter­mine the nature of its unusu­al lan­guage — one with­out punc­tu­a­tion but with “diph­thong, triph­thongs, quad­riph­thongs and even quin­tiph­thongs for the abbre­vi­a­tion of pho­net­ic com­po­nents” — deci­pher­ing its more than 200 pages of con­tent stands as anoth­er task alto­geth­er. In the mean­time, you can read his paper “The Lan­guage and Writ­ing Sys­tem of MS408 (Voyn­ich) Explained,” orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the jour­nal Romance Stud­ies.

Although Cheshire’s dis­cov­ery has pro­duced head­lines like the Express’ “Voyn­ich Man­u­script SOLVED: World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book Deci­phered After 600 Years,” oth­ers include Ars Techh­ni­ca’s “No, Some­one Has­n’t Cracked the Code of the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script.” That arti­cle quotes Lisa Fagin Davis, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Medieval Acad­e­my of Amer­i­ca (and vocal Voyn­ich-trans­la­tion skep­tic), crit­i­ciz­ing the foun­da­tion of Cheshire’s claim: “He starts with a the­o­ry about what a par­tic­u­lar series of glyphs might mean, usu­al­ly because of the word’s prox­im­i­ty to an image that he believes he can inter­pret. He then inves­ti­gates any num­ber of medieval Romance-lan­guage dic­tio­nar­ies until he finds a word that seems to suit his the­o­ry. Then he argues that because he has found a Romance-lan­guage word that fits his hypoth­e­sis, his hypoth­e­sis must be right.”

Fagin Davis adds that Cheshire’s “ ‘trans­la­tions’ from what is essen­tial­ly gib­ber­ish, an amal­gam of mul­ti­ple lan­guages, are them­selves aspi­ra­tional rather than being actu­al trans­la­tions,” and that “the fun­da­men­tal under­ly­ing argu­ment — that there is such a thing as one ‘pro­to-Romance lan­guage’ — is com­plete­ly unsub­stan­ti­at­ed and at odds with pale­olin­guis­tics.” Fagin Davis’ crit­i­cism does­n’t even stop there, and if she’s right, Cheshire’s approach will be unlike­ly to pro­duce a coher­ent trans­la­tion of the entire text. And so, at least for the moment, the Voyn­ich man­u­scrip­t’s life as a mys­tery con­tin­ues, keep­ing busy not just pro­fes­sors but enthu­si­asts, tech­nol­o­gists, Research Asso­ciates, and many oth­ers besides.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

An Intro­duc­tion to the Codex Seraphini­anus, the Strangest Book Ever Pub­lished

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.