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posted by
LaminatorX
on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:25AM
from the somebody-call-in-Enoch-Root dept.
from the somebody-call-in-Enoch-Root dept.
Thexalon writes:
"University of Bedfordshire professor and applied linguist Stephen Bax has decoded 10 words of the baffling Voynich Manuscript. He focused on proper names that would match the accompanying drawings, which allowed him to find similar drawings in other books of the period."
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Voynich Manuscript Partially Decoded
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(Score: 5, Informative) by girlwhowaspluggedout on Thursday February 20 2014, @09:39AM
I haven't seen Bax's alleged decipherment, so I can't comment on it. But, generally speaking, making educated guesses about the contents of undeciphered texts, silly as it may sound, is actually one of the first steps in the decipherment of languages and writing systems. Champollion, for example, began deciphering ancient Egyptian using the two proper names that appear in the Philae Obelisk [wikipedia.org]. The Rosetta Stone came later.
Even so, decipherment is a long and arduous process. This is easily illustrated using the decipherment of Old Persian. Although we know that Grotefend's partial decipherment of the language and its script [wikipedia.org] was correct in its assumptions, he was nevertheless way off base when it came to phonetic reconstruction. The words that he read as Khscharscha, Goschtasp, and Darheusch (=the Old Persian names that are known in the West by their Greek forms Xerxes [wikipedia.org], Hystaspes [wikipedia.org] and Darius [wikipedia.org]) are now read as shown here [pastebin.com] (damn you, UTF-8!). Grotefend's breakthrough also allowed him to identify the name Cyrus [wikipedia.org] and the Old Persian words for "king" and "great". But, again, out of the 22 signs in the two texts that he was working with, he only got 8 right.
Perhaps Bax has indeed solved part of the Voynich mystery. The real problem is in proving that his readings are accurate. For that, he will need to extend his decipherment to the rest of the manuscript. As the repeated attempts to decipher the Byblos Syllabary [wikipedia.org] show, this is no mean feat.
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(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Thursday February 20 2014, @01:36PM
The golden guess is the full round of truth.
---Tennyson
That was on an epigraph page for the print versions of _Military Cryptanalysis: Part 1 --- Monoalphabetic Substitution Systems_:
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/military_cr yptanalysis.shtml [nsa.gov]
Seems to be missing from the scans though, probably 'cause it was the usual page for stamping the classification on it.