In 2015, Gibbs did an interview where he said that in five years, "I would like to think I could have a returnable series up and running." Considering the dubious accuracy of many History Channel "documentaries," he might just get his wish. Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed "television network." Given that Gibbs' main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women's health, however, might turn out to be correct. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages. The summary in the TLS is really too short to provide any serious analysis, René. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs' claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. For one, the rather long-winded article features only two decoded lines of the Voynich manuscript. 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." The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. ![]() They take this decoded sentence, squint at it through thick. In a study published in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics, computing scientists from the University of Alberta used an algorithm to try to decode parts of the. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang, "They’re not grammatically correct. The 600-year-old Voynich manuscript has baffled cryptographers for centuries, but claims that AI cracked the case are overblown. However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point. The intriguing 15th century Voynich manuscript has often been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world. 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. The weirdly-illustrated 15 th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations." As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. Original article on Live Science.Further Reading The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media ( we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. For now, he thinks the book is "probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language."īax has explained his ideas in a manuscript and in a YouTube video on his website.įollow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. A recent statistical study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that " Voynichese" adheres to linguistic rules.īax notes that the manuscript is still a long way from being understood, and that he is coming forward with what he's found thus far in the hopes that other linguists will work with him to crack the code. While some scholars have written it off as a Renaissance-era hoax full of nonsense text, others say the pattern of the letters and words suggest the book was written in a real language or at least an invented cipher. ![]() Carbon dating proved that it dates back to the 15th century, and researchers believe it was written in Central Europe. Artificial Intelligence Takes a Crack at Decoding the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript But medieval scholars are skeptical about this latest attempt to decipher the world’s most mysterious book. It first became known to the world public in 1912, when a Polish book dealer by the name of Wilfrid Voynich purchased the book. A coded book, the manuscript is hand written in vellum pages in the 15th century. The Voynich manuscipt now sits in a rare books library at Yale University. Articles, History, Strange One of the most mysterious books in history is the Voynich manuscript.
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