Over the years, the language of the Voynich Manuscript has been claimed confidently to be seventh-century Welsh/Old Cornish an early German language the Manchu language of the Qing dynasty (1636–1911) of China and Hebrew enciphered by Roger Bacon, describing alien technology of the future for generating DNA with sound. Of course, this is assuming it’s not a sophisticated hoax, which is an entirely possible explanation. And this, really, is its eternal attraction, the sense that the key to unlocking its secrets is within reach that with enough patience and the right approach anyone, linguist or layman, can break it. It doesn’t follow the structural rules of the contemporary Renaissance polyalphabetic ciphers, yet it does show clear signs of having its own internal structure. Perhaps this is because it exhibits characteristics of both a complete, natural language and a complicated designed cipher, with letter-shapes tantalisingly similar to known shorthand symbols. The cryptic text now known as the Voynich Manuscript has since been the obsessive focus of study around the world, and as yet none of the professional and amateur cryptographers-including American and British codebreakers of both World War I and World War II-has been able to crack it. (During more than thirty years Voynich sold the British Museum more than 3,800 books, many of which were so unusual that they were given their own ‘Voynich’ shelf mark.) Voynich was immediately captivated by its unknown language and the strange illustrations of mostly non-existent plants and groups of nude bathers, and purchased it along with twenty-nine other items. It was found in 1912 by a Polish rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, hidden among a pile of manuscripts in the Villa Mondragone, Italy. The most famous cryptic manuscript of the medieval period is-as far as we know-written in a unique language that to this day remains understood only by its author.
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