If you Google “Voynich Manuscript,” you will find yourself in a corner of the internet full of alien abductions, seances, conspiracy theories, and secrets. You will stumble into heated debates between fellow obsessives who have devoted their lives to this codex. You will also find complex linguistic studies, mathematically sophisticated cryptology, relatively conclusive material analyses, and a surprisingly interesting bit of botany.
With so much information available online, then, what's so mysterious about the Voynich Manuscript? As it turns out, quite a lot.
The writing
The text uses around 25 distinct and wildly unusual letterforms. Some resemble humanistic versions of Latin letters and numbers like [o], [a], [i], and [8]. Others are unique and utterly unfamiliar. Linguistics and computational analyses have identified patterns and a series of what may be orthographic or grammatical rules. By analyzing these patterns, linguists and cryptologists hope to be able to identify what, if any, language is hidden in Voynichese. Is it a code? Is it a transcription of a spoken language?
