Voynich Manuscript has been deciphered?
ling.auf.net
ling.auf.net
https://www.voynich.ninja/archive/index.php/thread-2175.html
https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulga...
Headline is lacking a [2017], and also appears to be entirely untrue.
Some of you may be interested to know that Manuscript MS408 (Voynich) has been deciphered. A peer-reviewed article will be formally published in 2019. In the meantime, three pre-print papers are available to freely download from the linguistics website LingBuzz:
The first paper explains the writing system and language: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003737
The second paper translates a pictorial map from the manuscript: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003808
The thirds paper focuses on volcanic details from the map: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004381
Please disseminate this information to other scholars who may find it interesting and useful. Regards, Dr. Gerard Cheshire. University of Bristol.
This blog post from 2017 looks at a draft of the document: https://ciphermysteries.com/2017/11/10/gerard-cheshire-vulga...
It's not really a favorable review.
In it, way down at the bottom, the author drops a fairly concise argument for what I think is the most compelling hypothesis of all: That it's a covertext for a cipher. The idea that it's a message written in the clear is hard to reconcile with how the text doesn't behave at all like a natural language. The idea that it was a prank or an art project is hard to reconcile with just how much time and money was clearly spent in producing it. The idea that it's a legitimate book, but one where only a relatively small fraction of the text contains any semantic content, is relatively easy to reconcile with both.
Why is it hard to imagine someone pouring a lot of work into art?
"In the realms of the Unreal," for the curious.
That's not to say that it's impossible, per se, just that, if that's the conclusion we are to draw, then it would perhaps cast the Voynich as being even more singular than it already is.
All I’m saying is that a bored noble would have the time and resources to create an expensive work purely for their own entertainment. Humans have done far weirder things over the centuries than that.
Henry Darger (who was, IIRC, a janitor) was mentioned elsewhere in the thread. I think that you might get a more culturally comparable example out of the idea of Sarah Winchester whiling her time away in a manner more akin to how Edward Leedskalnin did.
In fact the entirety of my knowledge of this document is as a result of reading the claims of people online who've claimed to have deciphered it.
Edit just to add: Personally I think it was created as a work of art and has no hidden meaning.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.html?doc=5301815-National-Sec...
http://www.openculture.com/2019/02/has-the-voynich-manuscrip...
"Maybe that’s because everyone’s got the basic approach all wrong, seeing the Voynich’s script as a written language rather than a phonetic transliteration of speech. So says the Ardiç family, a father and sons team of Turkish researchers who call themselves Ata Team Alberta (ATA) and claim in the video above to have “deciphered and translated over 30% of the manuscript.” Father Ahmet Ardiç, an electrical engineer by trade and scholar of Turkish language by passionate calling, claims the Voynich script is a kind of Old Turkic, “written in a ‘poetic’ style,” notes Nick Pelling at the site Cipher Mysteries, “that often displays ‘phonemic orthography,’” meaning the author spelled out words the way he, or she, heard them.
Ahmet noticed that the words often began with the same characters, then had different endings, a pattern that corresponds with the linguistic structure of Turkish. Furthermore, Ozan Ardiç informs us, the language of the Voynich has a “rhythmic structure,” a formal, poetic regularity. As for why scholars, and computers, have seen so many other ancient languages in the Voynich, Ahmet explains, “some of the Voynich characters are also used in several proto-European and early Semitic languages.” The Ardiç family will have their research vetted by professionals. They’ve submitted a formal paper to an academic journal at Johns Hopkins University."
And tons of other languages...
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unsolvable-m...
Is a full translation of the manuscript available yet?
There were a lot of charlatans at the court of that particular period and the Czechs just love to make fun out of Rudolf II. I highly suggest this (socialist-era) movie -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_and_the_Golem -- to join in on the joke.