The cryptical , 15th C Voynich Manuscript is full of codes and flakey illustrations . Most experts believe it ’s a hoax , a nonsense book created to fire our imaginations . But now there ’s new evidence that it may be written in a recede Aztec spoken language , Nahuatl .
Do n’t get too excited — people have been saying they ’ve unlocked the code to the Voynich Manuscript for decades . It ’s such a common thought that it ’s plough up in fantasy tales from Codex , by Lev Grossman , to Assassin ’s Creed . But now , account Lisa Grossman in New Scientist , there ’s a new wrinkle . A botanist named Arthur Tucker has discovered that several of the plant life example in the Voynich Manuscript look like plant incur only in the New World .
She indite :
BotanistArthur Tuckerof Delaware State University in Dover noticed similarity between sure plants in the manuscript and illustrations of plants in sixteenth C records from Mexico . . . On the basis of these similarity , [ he and colleague Rexford Talbert suggest ] that the manuscript came from the New World , and that it might be written in an extinct form of the Mexican language Nahuatl . Deciphering the names of these plants could therefore help oneself crack the Voynich code .
The great Aztec civilization , located part in the region now holler Mexico , was make love to have grow many bang-up works of literature and philosophical system . Most of these were lost in the wars and plagues of the 16th and seventeenth centuries . So this mind is intriguing .
Of course , the similarities to illustrations of Mexican plants could also be part of a hundred - old fraud . If the hoaxer had lived during the fifteenth C , he or she might have interpret illustrated Book about the New World and copied images of plant from there . Another possibility is that the hoaxer last long after the fifteenth one C , which would have made access to such books even easier .
As linguist Gordon Rugg put it to Grossman :
It ’s pretty safe odds that you ’ll find plants in the man that encounter to look like the Voynich ms just by chance . If I sat down with a random flora generator software and have it to generate 50 completely fabricated plants , I ’m pretty sure I could find 20 real plant that happen to calculate like 20 of the made up plant .
Nicely put .
Read moreat New Scientist
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