

The Voynich Manuscript Decoded? - lt
http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_decoded/

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pvg
Not really, at least, not this time and not by this person. If it was a set of
anagrams, frequency analysis would have matched medieval Italian. See:

[http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-
an...](http://www.ciphermysteries.com/2009/02/17/edith-sherwoods-anagram-
cipher)

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sp332
Not if the text has an unusual character distribution.

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idlewords
Which is another way of saying, maybe the book is not in Medieval Italian. You
can't write 35k words in a language, jumble the letters, and have it come out
with such aberrant statistical properties.

Citing Wikipedia:

"the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in
several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than
ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution
of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at
the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle
section."

The link pvg pasted mentions other difficulties.

~~~
sp332
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby:_Champion_of_Youth#Lipog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby:_Champion_of_Youth#Lipogrammatic_quality)

If you're _intending_ to be obfuscatory, you might come up with "aberrant
statistical properties".

~~~
pvg
Not over any significant length of text and it's not going to be tremendously
aberrant. The text of Gadsby is easy to google, try tossing a chapter or two
into a letter frequency counter. The resulting histogram still looks a great
deal like what you'd get for plain English.

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muddylemon
I don't have the italian language skills to evaluate the theory, but it seems
plausible. Attributing it to a young da Vinci just seems silly though. Much
like how every interesting quote is attributed to Churchill, Twain and
Einstein.

~~~
lt
The author does elaborate on that theory in a previous article:
<http://www.edithsherwood.com/voynich_author_da_vinci>

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lssndrdn
As an Italian speaker, I do recognize some of the words, and they seem to make
sense. The spelling is in line with my scarce knowledge of 15th century
Italian.

We're used to a very rational way of thinking, whereby one would devise a
system and apply consistently throughout the whole text, but from what little
I have seen and read of this manuscript, it seems that whoever wrote used lots
of artistic license and was intentionally trying to conceal the content. So it
could be possible that the writer(s) decided to do away with all manners of
grammatical rules, and parts of the language, like article, propositions, and
the letters F and Z (if that seems weird, imagine that there was no U in
Latin). All the other missing letters are not in the Italian alphabet.

Though, it would be interesting to see how this theory works with the non-
herbal sections of the manuscript.

Finally, I totally agree with muddylemon that attributing to Da Vinci is
silly. Like he was the only literate Italian alive in 15th century.

