‘Voynich Manuscript’ category posts - « Cipher Mysteries »



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Esther Molen’s Voynich Manuscript f116v theory…

Posted by nickpelling on Feb 3rd, 2012 - 8 comments.
I recently received a note from independent Dutch researcher Esther Molen describing her Voynich theory: she was happy to see it given a post of its own, so... here it is! * * * * * * Here is my [Esther Molen's] translation and ideas. The Voynich Manuscript is mainly written in medieval Latin in combination with medieval French and medieval ...

An obfuscation of Voynich novels…

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 31st, 2012 - 14 comments.
A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn't a 'crowd', but (rather delightfully) a 'murder' of crows. What, I ...

London Rare Books School 2012 – including a session on historical ciphers…

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 30th, 2012 - 9 comments.
Just so you know, I'll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants' exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted ...

First Voynich theory of 2012…

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 28th, 2012 - 14 comments.
To get 2012 rolling, I thought you might like to know that Walter Grosse has just started an English-language blog about his Voynich Manuscript theory. Briefly, he proposes that each Voynichese 'word' super-verbosely enciphers a digit, based purely on the number of letters it contains. So, the first six words of page f1r (in EVA: "fachys ykal ar ytaiin ...

Does the ‘Voynich = migraine’ theory make your head hurt too?

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 19th, 2012 - 30 comments.
In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two "dry migraine" attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps ...

Happy Voynich New Year 2012!

Posted by nickpelling on Jan 10th, 2012 - 9 comments.
A Happy New Year to all Cipher Mysteries readers, for it might well be a good year for historical cipher mystery research! As doubtless most of you know, 1912 was the year when Wilfrid Voynich [very probably] bought the "ugly duckling" artefact now named after him from the Villa Mondragone in ...

Voynich colour inference, a sure path to madness…

Posted by nickpelling on Dec 20th, 2011 - 19 comments.
Here are a couple of items for you that turned up this week. In my (thoroughly unexalted) opinion, I think both demonstrate something I've been arguing for years: that trying to infer things about the Voynich Manuscript based in its colours is, sadly, a sure path to madness. Why? Well, ever since Jorge Stolfi pointed out the disparity between the Voynich's ...

Amirdovlat Amasiatsi & the Voynich Manuscript…?

Posted by nickpelling on Dec 18th, 2011 - 16 comments.
Over the last few months, I've had some interesting correspondence with Thomas Spande, whose starting point was observing that the 'Voynichese' script seemed to have similarities with the medieval Armenian aybuben ('alphabet' - its first two letters are 'ayb' and 'ben'). Several other people have proposed this, most recently 'amandajm' and 'Lgh' on the discussion page for the ...

Voynich Manuscript decrypted by Finnish ‘prophet of god’ via Fox News…

Posted by nickpelling on Dec 3rd, 2011 - 16 comments.
Apparently, today's big cipher mystery news story is the announcement that Finnish businessman "Veikko Latvala, a self described 'prophet of god'" has allegedly "decoded the book and unlocked the secrets of the world's most mysterious manuscript.". Voynich researchers will no doubt be amazed to learn that "The sound syllables are a mixture of Spanish and Italian, also mixed with the ...

The Voynich Translation, Chapter 5…

Posted by nickpelling on Nov 28th, 2011.
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!] * * * * * * * The crew were spending the rest of the day on those interminable fly-past shots of the Voynich Manuscript all modern documentary editors demand, their rostrum camera a microlight buzzing across a lightly-inked vellum landscape. But Marina ...