The Voynich Manuscript remains one of the most mysterious codices ever written. Filled with an as-of-yet undecipherable language, bizarre sketches and potentially non-existent plants, there's been a recent resurgence thanks to a professor at the University of Alberta who utilized AI in yet another attempt to reveal what it says.
Using 400 languages as samples, the computing science professor, Greg Kondrak, narrowed it down to just one, Hebrew, as the potential language the codex may be based upon.
"It turned out that over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn't know if they made sense together."
After they couldn't get Hebrew scholars to validate their findings, they relied on Google Translate (the referenced AI). Strange but apparently helpful with some 'tweaks'.
Yet, Wikipedia suggested that their findings weren’t well received at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2017.
Then you have Stephen Bax’s detailed proposal and partial decoding that suggests the Voynich Manuscript is a treatise on nature
“possibly devised to encode a previously unwritten language or dialect, perhaps by a small community which later died out or disappeared.”
An interesting and rather direct insight considering all the botany found within. But is it really shedding much light on the subject?
Currently, click bait titles having been making the rounds suggesting the manuscript has been ‘unlocked’, ‘cracked’ or ‘decoded’ – which clearly isn’t yet the case. And if Kondrak’s ‘deciphering’ of the book’s first words is any indication --
“She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people”
-- I wonder if it’s an esoteric alchemical document that would need yet another translation if it’s ever ‘translated’ into English (odds on that, I know, are low) or if it's simply just lost knowledge from another era.
What remains is an ever-increasing fascination with this mysterious book. Each mention of it seems to expand its presence in the world without, somehow, revealing itself. Has there ever been a book like this in the history of mankind?
Does it contain some answers to the mystery of Man? Does it contain some insight into the past? Or could it end up being some trolling ancient recipe for sugar cookies without eggs?
Anyone out there have a weird, unique or interesting take on the Voynich Manuscript and what it could be?