Voynich Manuscript in Nahual

Please note that recent reports state that this document has just become partially deciphered - arclein.

This is a very promising insight.  The manuscript is certainly a compendium on plants and from all appearances an excellent one as well.  That the underlying language is indecipherable is certainly attributable to a clear non-European base.  We can in fact take that as proven.  We are then left with the question of just what else was possible.

There we have a prospective scholar working during the early half of the sixteenth century.  At that time, the Aztec world was overthrown, but the totality of the collapse took much longer.  Plenty of living Aztec scholars were available and able to work as informants.  It made perfect sense to write their descriptions in Nahuatl.  Thus we are dealing with an immediate translation of the indigenous oral language into an European based alphabet.

This is a pretty good code so long as no one knows the underlying language. 

Has the Voynich manuscript been decoded? Mysterious 15th century text may be written in a lost AZTEC language

The Voynich manuscript was discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912

Due to its location, historians think the manuscript was written in Europe

It is full of illustrations, diagrams and a mysterious text written left to right

Cryptographers have been trying to decipher this text for decades

Botanist now claims the plants in the book come from Mexico 

This suggests the book may be written in an Aztec language called Nahuatl

By VICTORIA WOOLLASTON

PUBLISHED: 12:46 GMT, 4 February 2014 | UPDATED: 14:03 GMT, 4 February 2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2551512/Has-Voynich-manuscript-DECODED-Mysterious-15th-century-text-written-lost-Aztec-language.html

For decades, researchers have been trying in vain to decipher ancient texts written on the Voynich manuscript - yet they may have been looking for inspiration in the wrong place.

A U.S. botanist studied illustrations of the plants throughout the 15th century book and pinpointed a number of them to the Central American region now known as Mexico.

Dr. Arthur Tucker claims at least 37 of the 303 plants would have grown in the region during the 15th and 16th century and believes the text is, therefore, written in the Aztec language of Nahuatl.

Nahuatl originated in Central Mexico during the 7th century. It was the spoken predominantly by the Aztecs.

Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century, the alphabet was replaced with Latin. 

Nahuatl became a literary language, used in poetry and passages, similar to the Voynich manuscript. 

Varieties of Nahuatl are still spoken by approximately 1.5 million Nahua people in Central Mexico.

The writing is so bizarre, sceptics have stated the book is a hoax or that the writing is nonsense.

The Voynich manuscript was discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912 by book dealer Wilfred Voynich.

Carbon dating suggests the manuscript was created between approximately 1404 and 1438, during the Italian Renaissance.

The 240 pages of the book are made from a type of parchment produced using calf skin, known as vellum, and are decorated with illustrations, diagrams and a mysterious text written from left to right.

Examples include the illustration of the Ipomoea murucoides, top left, taken from the Mexican Codex Cruz-Badianus which has an identical style to the Ipomoea arborescens in the manuscript, bottom left. A Voynich illustration of a cactus pad or fruit, right, is shown near the name ‘nashtli’, which Dr. Tucker and Talbert claim is a variant of the word ‘nochtil’ - the Nahuatl name for the fruit of the prickly pear

If the text, pictured far left, is written in the language of Nahuatl, the botanists claim they can find the name of the plants in the manuscript. From this, cryptographers may be able to form a basic code from which to crack the rest of the text in the 15th century book

The Voynich manuscript, pictured, was discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912 by book dealer Wilfred Voynich. Carbon dating suggests it was created between 1404 and 1438. The 240 pages of the book are made from a type of parchment produced using calf skin, known as vellum

Due to its mysterious nature, the text has been studied by cryptographers around the world, yet no-one has succeeded in deciphering the reams of written passages.

Dr. Arthur Tucker from Delaware University took a different approach, and instead, studied the plants depicted throughout the book.

He discovered similarities between specific plants in the manuscript and illustrations of plants he had spotted in his collection of 16th century Mexican records.

THE MYSTERY AND SCEPTICISM SURROUNDING THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT

The Voynich manuscript was discovered in an Italian monastery in 1912 by book dealer Wilfred Voynich. 

Carbon dating suggests the manuscript was created in the early 15th century, between approximately 1404 and 1438, during the Italian Renaissance. 

The 240 pages of the book are made from a type of parchment produced using calf skin, known as vellum. 

Each page is decorated with illustrations, diagrams and a mysterious text written from left to right.

Due to its mysterious nature, the text has been studied by cryptographers around the world, yet no-one has succeeded in deciphering the reams of written passages. 

This has led to many people claim the book is hoax, or that the writing is nonsense.  

Due to the manuscript’s discovery in Italy, many researchers believe the book to have originated in Europe, however, the latest research from Dr. Tucker suggests it may have been written by the Aztecs in what is now modern-day Mexico.  

For example, Dr. Tucker and fellow researcher Rexford Talbert said one plant in the book bears a resemblance to the picture of a soap plant (xiuhamolli) seen in a Mexican codex from 1552. 

While another example includes the illustration of the Ipomoea murucoides, taken from the Mexican Codex Cruz-Badianus, which has an identical style to the Ipomoea arborescens in the manuscript.

In total, the researchers linked 37 of the 303 plants in the manuscript to illustrations in ancient Mexican books covering botany across Texas, California and Nicaragua.

If the text is written in the language of Nahuatl, the botanists claim they can find the name of the plants in the manuscript and may be able to use these to form a basic code from which to crack the rest of the text.

For example, a Voynich illustration of a cactus pad or fruit is shown near the name ‘nashtli’, which Tucker and Talbert claim is a variant of the word ‘nochtil’ - the Nahuatl name for the fruit of the prickly pear. 

Nahuatl originated in Central Mexico during the 7th century. It was the spoken predominantly by the Aztecs. 

Following the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 16th century, the alphabet was replaced with Latin. 

Nahuatl became a literary language, used in poetry and passages, similar to the Voynich manuscript. 

Varieties of Nahuatl are still spoken by approximately 1.5 million Nahua people in Central Mexico.

Users can browse a high-resolution version of the Voynich manuscript online at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Mexican plants could break code on gibberish manuscript

17:03 03 February 2014 by Lisa Grossman

A mysterious manuscript that appears to be written in gibberish may actually be in an extinct dialect of the Mexican language Nahuatl. Illustrations of plants in the manuscript have been linked to plants native to Central America for the first time, suggesting a new origin for the text. But some still say it could be a hoax.

The Voynich manuscript has puzzled researchers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. Among hundreds of pages of so-far undecipherable text, it includes illustrations of naked nymphs, astrological diagrams and drawings of plants that no one has been able to identify.

An academic war has raged for years between those who think the manuscript contains a real language that could eventually be decoded, and those who think it was a clever forgery designed to dupe book collectors. "It's a battle with two sides," says Alain Touwaide, a historian of botany at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

Mexican look

Previously, many researchers assumed that the manuscript must have originated in Europe, where it was found. But botanist Arthur Tucker of Delaware State University in Dover noticed similarities between certain plants in the manuscript and illustrations of plants in 16th century records from Mexico.

Tucker began collecting copies of Mexican botanical books out of curiosity about the history of herbs there. "Quite by accident, I ran across the Voynich and it was a Homer Simpson moment of D'oh! Of course –this matches my other codices and the artwork of 16th century Mexico."

The most striking example was an illustration of a soap plant (xiuhamolli) in a Mexican book dated 1552. Tucker and Rexford Talbert, a retired information technology researcher at the US Department of Defense and NASA, connected a total of 37 of the 303 plants, six animals and one mineral illustrated in the Voynich manuscript to 16th century species in the region that lies between Texas, California and Nicaragua. They think many of the plants could have come from what is now central Mexico.

On the basis of these similarities, the pair suggests 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 crack the Voynich code.

Plant forgery

Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK remains sceptical. He thinks a careful forger could have made up plausible-looking plants.

"It's pretty good odds that you'll find plants in the world that happen to look like the Voynich manuscript just by chance," he says. "If I sat down with a random plant generator software and got it to generate 50 completely fictitious plants, I'm pretty sure I could find 20 real plants that happen to look like 20 of the made up plants."

Touwaide says the findings are intriguing, but agrees that they form just one of many hypotheses. "I believe that it doesn't prove anything. If it's a forgery, someone could very well have had the idea of creating the forgery on the basis of New World flora. At the most, it shows a possible source of the forgery."

Tucker admits that there is work to be done before they can throw out the hoax hypothesis entirely. But one of the Voynich plants makes him wonder: it looks strikingly similar to Viola bicolor, the American field pansy, which only grows in North America. The distinction between this plant and its European relative, Viola tricolor, was not known until after the Voynich was discovered. Ruling out time travel, says Tucker, how would this have been possible? "If this is a hoax, they did a dang good job and had help from a competent botanist who had knowledge only available after 1912 in some crucial cases."

Journal reference: HerbalGram