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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

So much for that Voynich manuscript "solution" [arstechnica.com]

Last week, a history researcher and television writer named Nicholas Gibbs published a long article [the-tls.co.uk] in the Times Literary Supplement about how he'd cracked the code on the mysterious Voynich Manuscript. Unfortunately, say experts, his analysis was a mix of stuff we already knew and stuff he couldn't possibly prove.

As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media (we covered it [arstechnica.com] at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks [ciphermysteries.com] and scholars alike. As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter [twitter.com], "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied [twitter.com], "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations."

The weirdly-illustrated 15^th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. In his article, Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point.

However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang [theatlantic.com], "They're not grammatically correct. It doesn't result in Latin that makes sense." She added, "Frankly I'm a little surprised the TLS published it...If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat."

Voynich manuscript [wikipedia.org].

Previously: Voynich Manuscript Partially Decoded [soylentnews.org]

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