

It also includes some words and abbreviations in Latin.” “It includes diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components. All of the letters are in lower case and there are no double consonants.” It includes no dedicated punctuation marks, although some letters have symbol variants to indicate punctuation or phonetic accents. “The manuscript’s alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols. As a result, proto-Romance was lost from the record, until now.” The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government.

“The Voynich manuscript is written in proto-Romance - ancestral to today’s Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician.
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“I experienced a series of ‘ Eureka!’ moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realized the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript,” Dr. Cheshire two weeks to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document. The vellum used in the book was carbon dated to 1404-1438.Īlthough the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for decades, it took Dr. Nearly every page of the manuscript contains scientific and botanical drawings in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912, is a small book 23.5 x 16.2 cm of about 240 pages. The Voynich manuscript, named after the Polish-American antiquarian book dealer Wilfrid M. Image credit: Beinecke Library, Yale University.
