You knew it was coming
And six people have probably posted it already:
http://xkcd.com/593/
A mysterious book written in a language or code that no cryptographer has ever managed to crack has been verified as being written in the early 15th century, which has upset some of the theories on its origin. Text from the 'Voynich manuscript' People were making up garble-languages well before J R R Tolkien came along The …
That's a good question made more complex by the problem that no one can agree on the number of characters in the Voynich alphabet, whether some are distinct characters, whether they are accented or ligands. Using the most commonly agreed number of characters, then the entropy comes in lower than most languages and certainly lower than any European languages. The text is very repetitive. If it is plaintext of prose then the only known language that comes close is Polynesian.
So those naked women gambolling across the vellum might just be beautiful sun-kissed, long-limbed, raven-haired, bronzed...[going for a lie down now]
During the zealous religious periods of the medieval periods studying of occult (or 'pagan' religions in general) on that subject it is speculated many ancient manuscripts still existed could cost you your life. Most of the literate class of people were monks and religious types.
They often studied these forbidden subjects in secret and would write their observations or compilations in code so they could not be read by political enemies or zealots. After looking at just a few pictures this immediately strikes me as an ancient grimoire.
Without knowing what language it was encoded from it would seem to be impossible to crack, but some unlikely people solved the Mayan hieroglyphs with little to go on- after almost 2 centuries.
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I have seen this manuscript many times in the past and read many theories about what, why, and who.
But having become aware of migraine aura, the abundance of stars and zigzag lines suggest a person suffering from aura or outright schizophrenia. A version of Hildegard of Bingen
In case you don't know old Hilda......
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Hildegard+of+Bingen&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=i0RXTf2rCcrQtwfezf3mDA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=3&ved=0CD8QsAQwAg&biw=1280&bih=592
Religion and lunacy.
I dont know about you but that looks like the sort of thing i used to doodle in the margins of my class books during Mr Pratt's abysmal English lessons. Is it just slightly possible that all this is in fact, is some school boys book where he was supposed to be practicing writing his letters but was in fact fantasising about Mrs Miggins, and her lovely daughters?
I saw this on TV which offered possible explaination how it looks like fake and made up rubbish in old age.
But after some consideration, let's assume it has meaning. It is very possible that this is a double coded "language" with totally different grammar and coded spelling.
It could be using single replace "letter" for a number of normal letter, or a number of letters to replace single letter, and the same "letter" may mean completely different thing in different places. This will explain the lack of very short words.
Eg. If I encode English, I may replace A, E, I, O, U with VL, FI, ON, QI, NI. and some other single letter with a double or triple letters, plus some normal letter combo to single letter. So a simple I am fine, will become something like ON VLNNN TLLONIVFI. That's if I keep the same grammar. If I further change the grammar to FINE I AM, the simple English 7 letter sentence will become TLLONIVFI ON VLNNN. Not only this coded sentence will be longer, but also have seemingly repeated N, L, I.
If it is coded, without knowing the original language, the coded grammar and spelling, it will be next to impossible to decode it. We may never know if it was coded language, or just made up rubbish with no meaning at all.
I'm pretty sure without any reference, it will be impossible for further generation to understand anything we produced today in klingon.