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Voynich manuscript | |
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University | |
One of the foldout pages in the Voynich manuscript | |
Type | Codex |
Date | Early 15th century[1][2] |
Place of origin | Possibly Northern Italy[1][2] |
Language(s) | Unknown |
Scribe(s) | Unknown |
Author(s) | Unknown |
Compiled by | Unknown |
Illuminated by | Unknown |
Material | Vellum |
Size | 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in) |
Voynich manuscript | |
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University | |
One of the foldout pages in the Voynich manuscript | |
Type | Codex |
Date | Early 15th century[1][2] |
Place of origin | Possibly Northern Italy[1][2] |
Language(s) | Unknown |
Scribe(s) | Unknown |
Author(s) | Unknown |
Compiled by | Unknown |
Illuminated by | Unknown |
Material | Vellum |
Size | 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 cm (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in) |
The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum in the book pages has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.[1][2] The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.[3]
The pages of the codex are vellum. Some of the pages are missing, but about 240 remain. The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams.
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.[4] No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.[5] Many people have speculated that the writing might be nonsense.
The Voynich manuscript was donated by Hans P. Kraus[6] to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969, where it is catalogued under call number MS 408.[7][8] A digitized high-resolution copy is also accessible freely at their website.
The manuscript measures 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 centimetres (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), with hundreds of vellum pages collected into eighteen quires; depending on how some of its unusual fold-out multi-part pages are counted, approximately 240 pages in total.[9] The top righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, probably by one of the manuscript's later owners. From the various numbering gaps, it seems likely that in the past the manuscript had at least 272 pages, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912.[6] There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what it is today.[10][11]
Based on modern analysis, it has been determined that a quill pen and iron gall ink were used for the text and figure outlines; the colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date.[11]
The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with star- or flower-like "bullets" in the left margin.[9] There is no obvious punctuation, and no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. The ductus flows smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered, as there is no delay between characters as would normally be expected in written encoded text.
The text consists of over 170,000 glyphs, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. Various transcription alphabets have been created, to equate the Voynich glyphs with Latin characters in order to help with cryptanalysis, such as the European Voynich Alphabet. The first major one was created by cryptographer William F. Friedman in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine-readable.[12]
Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonological or orthographic laws of some sort, e.g., certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled or tripled but others may not, etc.[citation needed]
Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts.[13] Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations.
On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. There are practically no words with fewer than two letters or more than ten.[14] The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section. While Semitic alphabets have many letters that are written differently depending on whether they occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word, letters of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets are generally written the same way regardless of their position within a word (with the Greek letter sigma and the obsolete long s being notable exceptions).[citation needed]
The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row.[14] Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet decipherings to yield babble-like text. Elizebeth Friedman in 1962 described such attempts as "doomed to utter frustration".[15]
There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines of writing written in rather distorted Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language.[16] Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France, northwest Italy or the Iberian Peninsula.[17] However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later.
The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter.[14] Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names:
The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.[14]
The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed.[18] Few of the plant drawings (such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with reasonable certainty. Those herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.[18]
Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin; unfortunately the identification is only speculative.[14]
The basins and tubes in the "biological" section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy, yet bear little obvious resemblance to the alchemical equipment of the period.[citation needed]
Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, interpretation remains speculative.[14]
A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which, in 1928, antiquarian William Romaine Newbold interpreted as a picture of a galaxy, which could only be obtained with a telescope.[19] Similarly, he interpreted other drawings as cells seen through a microscope. However, Newbold's analysis has since been dismissed as overly speculative.[20]
Much of the early history of the book is unknown,[21] though the text and illustrations are all characteristically European. It was brought to modern attention in 1912 when it was purchased at the Villa Mondragone, near Rome, by antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich. When Voynich first discovered the manuscript, his first impression was that it dated from the 13th century.
In 2009, University of Arizona researchers performed C14 dating on the manuscript's vellum. The result of that test put the date the manuscript was made between 1404 and 1438.[2][22][23] In addition, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago found that the paints in the manuscript were of materials to be expected from that period of European history. It has also been suggested that the McCrone Research Institute found that much of the ink was added not long after the creation of the parchment, but the official report contains no statement to this effect.[11]
Based on a 1666 letter that accompanied the manuscript when it was being sent from Johannes Marcus (rector of Charles University in Prague) to Athanasius Kircher, the book once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), who paid 600 gold ducats (~2.07 kg gold) for it.[6] The book was then given or lent to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (died 1622), the head of Rudolf's botanical gardens in Prague.[6]
The next confirmed owner is Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist also in Prague. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as modern scientists about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years.[24] On learning that Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic (Egyptian) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Baresch sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher is the earliest confirmed mention of the manuscript that has been found so far.[25]
It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently, he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (1595–1667) (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague, who a few years later sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent.[25] Marci's 1666 cover letter (written in Latin) was still with the manuscript when Voynich purchased it:[19]
"Reverend and Distinguished Sir, Father in Christ: This book, bequeathed to me by an intimate friend, I destined for you, my very dear Athanasius, as soon as it came into my possession, for I was convinced that it could be read by no one except yourself. The former owner of this book asked your opinion by letter, copying and sending you a portion of the book from which he believed you would be able to read the remainder, but he at that time refused to send the book itself. To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil, as is apparent from attempts of his which I send you herewith, and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as these obey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long overdue though it be, of my affection for you, and burst through its bars, if there are any, with your wonted success. Dr. Raphael, a tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III, then King of Bohemia, told me the said book belonged to the Emperor Rudolph and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats. He believed the author was Roger Bacon, the Englishman. On this point I suspend judgement; it is your place to define for us what view we should take thereon, to whose favor and kindness I unreservedly commit myself and remain,
There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University).[25] It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio.[25] According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before this happened, many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt from confiscation.[25] Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's Rector at the time.[9][25]
Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College.[25]
Around 1912, the Collegio Romano was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name.[25] In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich (known as the author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of famous mathematician George Boole).[6] She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer, Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969, where it was catalogued as "MS 408".[26] In discussions, it is sometimes also referred to as "Beinecke MS 408".[9]
Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript.
Marci's 1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend, the late Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1552–1612), for 600 ducats (66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, or 2.07 kg). (Mnishovsky had died 22 years earlier, in 1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.) According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was the Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (1214–94).[27] Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgment" about this claim, it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best to confirm it.[25]
The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf could only have been John Dee (1527–1608), a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts. This theory is also conveyed by Voynich manuscript scholar Gordon Rugg. Dee and his scrier (mediumic assistant) Edward Kelley lived in Bohemia for several years, where they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, this seems quite unlikely, because Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention that sale.[25] If the Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, a supposed connection to Dee is much weakened. It is possible that Dee himself may have written it and spread the rumor that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.[citation needed]
Dee's companion in Prague, Edward Kelley, was a self-styled alchemist who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold by means of a secret powder that he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales. As Dee's scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a shewstone and had long conversations with them, which Dee dutifully noted down. The angels' language was called Enochian, after Enoch, the Biblical father of Methuselah; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour of heaven by angels and had later written a book about what he saw there. Several people have suggested[citation needed] that Kelley could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript to swindle the emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed alchemical expertise).[citation needed]
Some suspected Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself.[28] As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter (and Marci's as well) only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one spoken of there. In other words, these letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript (assuming he was aware of them), rather than as proofs authenticating it. However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the recent discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.[25][28]
Voynich was able, sometime before 1921, to read a name faintly written at the foot of the manuscript's first page: "Jacobj à Tepenece". This is taken to be a reference to Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec (1575–1622), also known by his Latin name Jacobus Sinapius. Rudolph II had ennobled him in 1607; appointed him his Imperial Distiller; and had made him both curator of his botanical gardens as well as one of his personal physicians. (In the Jesuit history books that were available to Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who has a full-page entry while, for example, Tycho Brahe is barely mentioned.) Voynich, and many other people after him, concluded from this that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript prior to Baresch, and drew a link to Rudolf's court from that, in confirmation of Mnishovsky's story. While it is possible that Hořčický fabricated the manuscript, there is no evidence to support this notion.
Jacobus's signature is still clearly visible under UV light: however, it does not match the copy of his signature in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003.[29] As a result, it has been suggested that the signature was added later, possibly even fraudulently by Voynich himself. Yet because the writing on page f1r might well have been an ownership mark added by a librarian at the time, the difference between the two signatures does not necessarily disprove Horczicky's ownership.
It has been noted that Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller sent some unintelligible text to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt, and asking Kircher for a translation: which Kircher, reportedly, produced at once. It has been speculated that these were both cryptographic tricks played on Kircher to make him look foolish: but the Voynich manuscript is on such a vastly different scale to a few signs in a letter that this seems somewhat out of scale for such an endeavor.
For a while, it was speculated that even the existence of "Georg Baresch" might have been a fabrication: yet three letters sent to Kircher - one by Baresch (1639), and two by Marci (about a year later) - and, more recently, other documents found and reported by Rafal Prinke in 2012 all point to his having been a real person.
Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things) and apparently invented a cipher that he claimed was uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the speculation that Mnishovsky might have produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made Baresch his unwitting test subject. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected some kind of deception was at play. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory.[citation needed]
Jan Marek Marci met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University to Rome in 1638, and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist side of the university to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, falling under Jesuit control. Though Marci was a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to become a Jesuit, and, shortly before his death in 1667, was granted honorary membership in that Order. The speculation that Marci fabricated the manuscript for some reason connected with this currently has no evidence to support it.
Leonell C. Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, believed that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. The main argument against this theory is that its claimed offsetting cryptography runs counter to all the complex internal structures presented by the text.[citation needed]
In his 2006 book,[10] Nick Pelling proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by the 15th century North Italian architect Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), a theory broadly consistent with the radiocarbon dating.
Richard SantaColoma has speculated that the Voynich Manuscript may be connected to Cornelis Drebbel, initially suggesting it was Drebbel's cipher notebook on microscopy and alchemy, and then later hypothesising it is a fictional "tie-in" to Francis Bacon's utopian novel New Atlantis in which some Drebbel-related items (submarine, perpetual clock) are said to appear.[30]
The bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its illustrations (such as the chimeric plants) and its lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, then perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place.
Between 1976 and 1978,[31] Italian artist Luigi Serafini proved that, with enough determination, such a text can be created. His Codex Seraphinianus also contains pictures of imaginary plants, and a language that has been studied by linguists for decades.[32][33][34]
The argument for authenticity, on the other hand, is that the manuscript appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. While hoaxes of the period tended to be quite crude, the Voynich manuscript exhibits many subtle characteristics which show up only after careful statistical analysis. The question then arises of why the author would employ such a complex and laborious forging algorithm in the creation of a simplistic hoax, if no one in the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries) could tell the difference. Marcelo Montemurro, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester who spent years analysing the linguistic patterns in the Voynich manuscript, found semantic networks such as content-bearing words occurring in a clustered pattern, and new words being used when there was a shift in topic.[35] With this evidence, he believes it unlikely that these features were simply "incorporated" into the text to make a hoax more realistic, as most of the required academic knowledge of these structures did not exist at the time the Voynich manuscript was created. These fine touches require much more work than would have been necessary for a simple forgery, and some of the complexities are only visible with modern tools.[36]
Various hoax theories have been proposed over time:
In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay.[37][38] The latter device, known as a Cardan grille, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.[39]
In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia supported the hoax hypothesis.[40] Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts.[41]
However, in 2013 an article by Amancio et al. published online in PlosOne [42] argued precisely the opposite, namely that the Voynich manuscript "is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts" (Abstract).
This section needs additional citations for verification. (October 2011) |
There are many theories about the Voynich manuscript's "language":
The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" led William F. Friedman to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language. In 1950, Friedman asked the British army officer John Tiltman to analyze a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, Brigadier Tiltman said, "After reading my report, Mr. Friedman disclosed to me his belief that the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language such as was developed in the form of a philosophical classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later. It was clear that the productions of these two men were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution."[19]
The concept of an artificial language is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins's Philosophical Language (1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffixes; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.[43]
According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipher of some sort—an algorithm that operated on individual letters. This has been the working hypothesis for most twentieth-century deciphering attempts, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman in the early 1950s.[citation needed]
The main argument for this theory is that the use of a strange alphabet by a European author is awkward to explain except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, even Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography in Europe as a relatively systematic discipline.[citation needed]
The counterargument is that almost all cipher systems consistent with that era fail to match what we see in the Voynich manuscript. For example, simple monoalphabetic ciphers can be excluded because the distribution of letter frequencies does not resemble that of any common language; while the small number of different letter-shapes used implies that we can rule out nomenclator ciphers and homophonic ciphers, because these typically employ larger cipher alphabets. Similarly, polyalphabetic ciphers, first invented by Alberti in the 1460s and including the later Vigenère cipher, usually yield ciphertexts where all cipher shapes occur with roughly equal probability, quite unlike the language-like letter distribution the Voynich Manuscript appears to have.[citation needed]
However, the presence of many tightly grouped shapes in the Voynich manuscript (such as 'or', 'ar', 'ol', 'al', 'an', 'ain', 'aiin', 'air', 'aiir', 'am', 'ee', 'eee', etc.) does suggest that its cipher system may make use of a verbose cipher, where single letters in a plaintext get enciphered into groups of fake letters. For example, the first two lines of page f15v (the image on the right here) contain 'or or or' and 'or or oro r', which strongly resemble how Roman numbers such as 'CCC' or 'XXXX' would look if verbosely enciphered. Yet, even though verbose encipherment is arguably the best match, it still falls well short of being able to explain all of the Voynich manuscript's odd textual properties.[citation needed]
It is also entirely possible that the encryption system started from a fundamentally simple cipher and then augmented it by adding nulls (meaningless symbols), homophones (duplicate symbols), transposition cipher (letter rearrangement), false word breaks, and so on.[citation needed]
According to the "codebook cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be codes to be looked up in a "dictionary" or codebook. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of many words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.[citation needed]
Following its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before van Leeuwenhoek. However, John Matthews Manly of the University of Chicago pointed out serious flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic markings. Although evidence of micrography using the Hebrew language can be traced as far back as the ninth century,[44] it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be artifacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artifacts can be attributed to pareidolia. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded.[45]
This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g. the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganography, is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Though it has been suggested[by whom?] that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan grille of some sort, this seems somewhat unlikely because the words and letters are not arranged on anything like a regular grid. Still, steganographic claims are hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to find. An argument against steganography is that having a cipher-like cover text highlights the very existence of the secret message, which would be self-defeating: yet because the cover text no less resembles an unknown natural language, this argument is not hugely persuasive.[citation needed]
It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes.[46][unreliable source?] There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.[citation needed]
The linguist Jacques Guy once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some little-known natural language, written in the plain with an invented alphabet. The word structure is similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.) and possibly Tai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, the words have only one syllable; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns.[citation needed]
This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors. This difficulty motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo's thirteenth century journey, but especially after Vasco da Gama sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native of East Asia who lived in Europe, or who was educated at a European mission.[citation needed]
The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint is two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (jie qi, 節氣). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing) has been able to find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.[citation needed]
In 1976, James Child of the National Security Agency proposed that the manuscript was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect".[47]
Jim Child, a linguist of Indo-European languages, asserts that he has identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content itself is expressed using "a great deal of obscurity".[48]
In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language and gave a proposed piecemeal translation of the first page of the manuscript.[49][unreliable source?]
In February 2014, Professor Stephen Bax of the University of Bedfordshire made public his research into using "bottom up" methodology to understand the manuscript. His method involves looking for and translating proper nouns, in association with relevant illustrations, in the context of other languages of the same time period. A paper he posted online offers tentative translation of 14 characters and 10 words.[50][51][52][53] He suggests the text is a treatise on nature written in a natural language, rather than a code.
In 2014, Arthur O. Tucker and Rexford H. Talbert published a paper claiming a positive identification of 37 plants, 6 animals, and 1 mineral referenced in the manuscript to plant drawings in the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis or Badianus manuscript, a fifteenth century Aztec herbal.[54] They argue that these were from Colonial New Spain and represented the Nahuatl language, and date the manuscript to between 1521 (the date of the Conquest) to ca. 1576, in contradiction of radiocarbon dating evidence of the vellum and many other elements of the manuscript. The analysis has been criticized by other Voynich Manuscript researchers,[55] pointing out that—among other things—a skilled forger could construct plants that have a passing resemblance to existing plants that were heretofore undiscovered.[56]
In their 2004 book, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill hint at the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolalia, channeling or outsider art.[57]
If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness, either because of voices heard, or because of an urge. While in glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the illustrations she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine—which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia—and the Voynich manuscript. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the biological section.[citation needed]
The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery. Churchill acknowledges the possibility that the manuscript is a synthetic forgotten language (as advanced by Friedman), or a forgery, to be preeminent theories. However he concludes that if the manuscript is genuine, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author.[57]
Many books and articles have been written about the manuscript. The first facsimile edition was published in 2005, Le Code Voynich: the whole manuscript published with a short presentation in French.[58]
The manuscript has also inspired several works of fiction, including The Voynich Cypher by Russell Blake, The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman, Time Riders: The Doomsday Code by Alex Scarrow, Codex by Lev Grossman, PopCo by Scarlett Thomas, Prime by Jeremy Robinson with Sean Ellis, The Sword of Moses (2013) by Dominic Selwood, The Return of the Lloigor by Colin Wilson, Datura, or a delusion we all see (Finnish version 2001) by Leena Krohn, and "The Source" by Michael Cordy.
Contemporary classical composer Hanspeter Kyburz's 1995 Chamber work The Voynich Cipher Manuscript, for chorus & ensemble is inspired by the manuscript.[59]
(help)Find more about Voynich manuscript at Wikipedia's sister projects | |
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text:
Intuit Buys ZeroPaper, Its First Acquisition In Brazil
Accounting software giant Intuit is looking to raise its game in international and emerging markets, and it's doing so in part by way of acquisition: the U.S. company has bought ZeroPaper, a startup out of Brazil that offers cloud-based accounting services to small businesses, specifically money management solutions. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. ZeroPaper says in a blog… Read More
Finance Startup Nubank Nabs $14.3M In Sequoia's First Brazil Investment
Nubank, a financial services startup based in Brazil, is today opening for business with two key pieces of news. It is launching its first product: a MasterCard Platinum credit card that you can manage through an Android or iOS app. And it is revealing some of the details of its own finances so that the world knows Nubank means business: the company has raised $14.3 million led by… Read More
GuiaBolso Brings Mint-style Financial Management To Brazil
In August a new, homegrown entry raced onto Brazil's top 10 most downloaded apps. It's a list usually cluttered by American-made social media, music and gaming apps; but GuiaBolso, a Mint-style personal finance app joined the App Store on July 2 when Brazil was mid-way through a month-long World Cup paralysis and passed Tinder, Facebook and even Whatsapp over the last month to… Read More
Brazil Court Issues Injunction Against Secret And Calls For App To Be Remotely Wiped
A court in Brazil has ruled (via UOL) that Apple and Google must remove Secret, the anonymous social networking app, from their mobile software stores – and also from user devices where it's already installed. The court has issued a preliminary injunction in the case, pending the results of a final ruling, as a result of a complaints by users harmed by rumors spread via the app… Read More
CloudFlare's CEO On Expanding In Key Markets Like China And Brazil
As Web security startup CloudFlare grows internationally, it plans to take a slow and steady approach to dealing with the challenges of expanding in key markets like China and Brazil. In a discussion with TechCrunch senior editor Jonathan Shieber this week at TechCrunch Beijing (organized with TechNode), CloudFlare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince talked about dealing with laws and regulations… Read More
Germany's Stunning World Cup Win Over Brazil Is The Most-Tweeted Sports Game Ever
For a long time yesterday, I couldn't see any tweet in my regular feed that wasn't in some way linked to the Germany/Brazil semifinal World Cup match – and apparently, I wasn't alone. The devastating 7-1 victory by Germany was the most activity around a single sports game on Twitter ever (via THR), surpassing the Super Bowl from earlier this year. Read More
What eCommerce Boom? From Amazon Textbooks To New Seed Funds, Education Technology Is Exploding In Brazil
Over the last decade, Brazil has "come online" in a big way. The percentage of people using the Web in Brazil leapt from 9 percent in 2002 to about 50 percent in 2012, according to the ITU. With 60 million Brazilians now using Facebook, thanks to increasing access to the Internet and the rise of social media, the country is undergoing a digital transformation — and with… Read More
Tiger Global Checks In To Brazil's Hotel Urbano With $50M Round
The Brazilian online travel agency Hotel Urbano has gotten a 120 million Reais ($50 million) reservation from the powerhouse hedge fund investor Tiger Global Management and previous backer Insight Venture Partners. Read More
Descomplica Lands $5M From Social+Capital, AngelList's First International Syndicate To Become Brazil's Go-To Online Classroom
Internet penetration and social media usage are on the rise in every corner of the globe, but few can hold a candle to the level of adoption one finds in Brazil. According to the Internet Telecommunication Union, the UN's specialized agency for information and communications technology, the percentage of people using the Internet in Brazil skyrocketed from 9 percent in 2002 to nearly… Read More
Brazilian Antivirus Startup PSafe Raises $30M Series C From China's Qihoo 360 And Redpoint e.ventures
Brazilian antivirus startup PSafe announced a $30 million Series C investment round today. Chinese antivirus company Qihoo 360 led the round with a $25 million investment, and existing investors Redpoint e.ventures and Pinnacle Ventures returned to contribute another $5 million. PSafe is a free antivirus software for the Brazilian market, with 30 million installs to date, and heavy… Read More
Evernote Adds Another Carrier To Its Int'l Buddy List — Telefónica Kicks Off Free Year Of Evernote Premium In Brazil
Evernote has added another carrier partner as it continues its strategy of ramping up its international presence. Today it's announced a global strategic agreement with Telefónica Digital to provide one-year Evernote Premium accounts to customers of participating Telefónica operating businesses worldwide (Telefónica has more than 250 million mobile customers worldwide). Read More
Bebestore Lands $10.2M From W7, Atomico In The Race For Brazil's Kid-Focused eCommerce Market
After nearly being eradicated when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the Brazilian startup community has been slow to come back. However, over the last two years, growth has been accelerating and Brazil's startups seem poised to make a comeback. As Roi pointed out recently, the support ecosystem for young businesses in Brazil is still thin and plenty of friction remains (like high… Read More
Brazilian Tech Blog Startupi Raises $300K From Redpoint eVentures, Initial Capital, And Others
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Apple Will Reportedly Lose The iPhone Trademark In Brazil
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Telefonica Digital Acquires Controlling Stake In Brazil's Axismed, Its First Move Into E-Health Solutions
Telefonica Digital, the tech arm of carrier giant Telefonica, has been making a lot of consumer-focused acquisitions and investments in the last year — and now it's showing that it has an equal interest in enterprise verticals, specifically in e-health: today it announced the acquisition of a controlling stake in Axismed, a chronic care management provider based in Brazil. Read More
Descomplica Nabs ~$2M From Peter Thiel, Social+Capital, 500 Startups & More To Help Brazil Prep For College
Descomplica today added its name to a growing list of startups finding support as they look to harness South America's growing interest in online education. The Brazilian startup, which helps high school students prepare for their university entrance exams, announced this week that it has closed a round of series A financing from Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, Brazil-focused… Read More
Samwer's Rocket Internet Picks Up Its First Luxury Goods Investor: PPR Puts $13M Into Lamoda And Dafiti's Holding Company
Another new chapter is opening up for Rocket Internet, the incubator started and run by the Samwer Brothers in Germany. The company is today announcing that PPR, luxury and sport & lifestyle group, is taking a €10 million investment in Bigfoot I, the Rocket holding company that controls Russian fashion commerce site Lamoda, South American fashion site Dafiti and also has a stake in… Read More
Backed By Palantir, Groupon Brazil Co-founders, Printi Wants To Bring A Web-Based Kinko's To Brazil
American investors and VC firms (like Sequoia and Accel) have begun to turn their attention to Latin America, particularly to one of the region's fastest growing economies: Brazil. Thanks to skyrocketing Internet penetration, the growing number of B2C eCommerce companies that have popped up over the last year and a population of just under 200 million, Brazil has become an appealing… Read More
Following $16.7 Million Series B, Brazil's Baby.com.br Expands With Kid-Focused Flash Sales Site Dinda.com.br
With today's launch of Dinda.com.br, the founding team behind Brazil-based Baby.com.br, is expanding into a new vertical following the success of its original, but more traditional, e-commerce offering targeting new parents. While Baby.com.br is like a Diapers.com for Brazil (and local competitor with Bebestore), with Dinda.com.br, the company is introducing Brazil's first flash… Read More
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Crystal City (Arlington, VA) – After huge success in its inaugural season, the Crystal City Business Improvement District (BID) is happy to announce the start of the second farmers' market in Crystal City and the beginning of a new partnership with FRESHFARM Markets. Beginning May 18 FRESHFARM Markets will bring back local farmers and producers selling fresh produce, baked goods, artisanal cheeses, fresh-cut flowers and more to the heart of Crystal City.
"We're thrilled to bring back the farmers' market to the Crystal Farms program," said Angela Fox, President and CEO of Crystal City BID. "And, we're even more excited to have an organization with the depth and experience of FRESHFARM Markets, which currently operates the top farmers' markets in the region, running this program for us."
The Crystal City FRESHFARM Market will setup shop on the sidewalk of Crystal Drive between 18th and 20th Street every Tuesday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. starting May 18th and running through October 26th.
The farmers' market enables area employees and residents to purchase locally produced fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy, specialty foods, and artisan goods. Bringing local farmers and consumers together, Crystal Farms helps ensure the employment of sustainable growing practices and reduces fossil fuel consumption by offering locally grown goods that have a much shorter travel distance.
The Crystal City Green Scene program also includes the community Power Purge and Shred on April 21st and 5k Fridays every Friday in April. Crystal City is green year-round, however, with its "low-to-no waste" policy at all events. Events use eco-friendly products (plates, forks, cups, etc.), compost bins, and active recycling.
Courtesy of Crystal City BID — The Crystal City Business Improvement District (BID) is a public-private partnership established in April 2006 to promote the vibrant Crystal City business, retail, restaurant and residential community. The BID is committed to showcasing the area as a world-class destination for visitors, employees and residents. Crystal City is ACTIVE, ARTFUL, ACCESSIBLE, and GREEN.


text: On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 00:18 -0500, Bruce Dubbs wrote: > Are there any changes to the build instructions between BDB 4.3.x and > 4.4.x? I believe the 4.3 instructions used a couple of flags being passed to fix and issue with building the shared libraries, and 4.4 does not need them. I don't really remember though. > If not, we can possibly put in a note that the user regress to > 4.3.x if they *really* want subversion and BDB. It is unreasonable for us to expect a user to determine before-hand if he needs BDB capability. SVN is used to fetch sources from anywhere, and you don't necessarily know what type of setup is at some remote locations. I don't know, but it may be that with the bum DB issue, there may be problems fetching sources that are stored in a BDB SVN back-end. > I don't know if that breaks other packages though. Exactly. How do we know that changing the versions of DB, especially going backward, won't break things like already existing man db's created by Man_DB, or other packages that use (or already have created) a BDB back end. > Do we have any clues about when svn 1.3.1 will be released? No, I don't. -- Randy rmlinux: [bogomips 3993.32] [GNU ld version 2.16.1] [gcc (GCC) 4.0.2] [GNU C Library stable release version 2.3.6] [Linux 22.214.171.124 i686] 10:45:33 up 13 days, 17:20, 5 users, load average: 0.05, 0.01, 0.00


text:
Autologous Chondrocyte Transplantation For Articular Cartilage Regeneration
The recruitment status of this study is unknown because the information has not been verified recently.
Verified January 2012 by Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion.
Recruitment status was Active, not recruiting
Recruitment status was Active, not recruiting
Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion
National Council of Science and Technology, Mexico
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
Aldo Izaguirre, Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitacion
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
First received: December 1, 2011
Last updated: January 5, 2012
Last verified: January 2012
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
No Study Results Posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for this Study
Study Status: | This study is ongoing, but not recruiting participants. |
Estimated Study Completion Date: | December 2012 |
Primary Completion Date: | December 2011 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure) |