Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed "television network." Given that Gibbs' main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. Essentially, Gibbs rolled together a bunch of already-existing scholarship and did a highly speculative translation, without even consulting the librarians at the institute where the book resides. Many scholars and amateur sleuths had already reached that conclusion, using the same evidence that Gibbs did. The idea that the book is a medical treatise on women's health, however, might turn out to be correct. Unfortunately, he has no evidence for such an index, other than the fact that the book does have a few missing pages. Davis noted that a big part of Gibbs' claim rests on the idea that the Voynich Manuscript once had an index that would provide a key to the abbreviations. It doesn’t result in Latin that makes sense." She added, "Frankly I’m a little surprised the TLS published it.If they had simply sent to it to the Beinecke Library, they would have rebutted it in a heartbeat." The Beinecke Library at Yale is where the Voynich Manuscript is currently kept. Medieval Academy of America director Lisa Fagin Davis told The Atlantic's Sarah Zhang, "They’re not grammatically correct. However, this isn't sitting well with people who actually read medieval Latin. He provided two lines of translation from the text to "prove" his point. In his article, Gibbs claimed that he'd figured out the Voynich Manuscript was a women's health manual whose odd script was actually just a bunch of Latin abbreviations. The weirdly-illustrated 15 th century book has been the subject of speculation and conspiracy theories since its discovery in 1912. Personally I object to his interpretation of abbreviations." As Harvard's Houghton Library curator of early modern books John Overholt put it on Twitter, "We're not buying this Voynich thing, right?" Medievalist Kate Wiles, an editor at History Today, replied, "I've yet to see a medievalist who does. "Now the language and writing system have been explained, the pages of the manuscript have been laid open for scholars to explore and reveal, for the first time, its true linguistic and informative content," he said.Further Reading The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded As soon as Gibbs' article hit the Internet, news about it spread rapidly through social media ( we covered it at Ars too), arousing the skepticism of cipher geeks and scholars alike. The next step is to use this knowledge to translate the entire manuscript and compile a lexicon, which Cheshire acknowledges will take some time as it comprises more than 200 pages. It also includes some words and abbreviations in Latin. It includes diphthong, triphthongs, quadriphthongs and even quintiphthongs for the abbreviation of phonetic components. It includes no dedicated punctuation marks, although some letters have symbol variants to indicate punctuation or phonetic accents.Īll of the letters are in lower case and there are no double consonants. Its alphabet is a combination of unfamiliar and more familiar symbols. "As a result, proto-Romance was lost from the record, until now," Cheshire said. The text uses an extinct language. "The language used was ubiquitous in the Mediterranean during the Medieval period, but it was seldom written in official or important documents because Latin was the language of royalty, church and government. The manuscript is written in proto-Romance - ancestral to today's Romance languages including Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Galician. "It is also no exaggeration to say this work represents one of the most important developments to date in Romance linguistics. He said "what it reveals is even more amazing than the myths and fantasies it has generated." For example, the manuscript was compiled by Dominican nuns as a source of reference for Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon - an autonomous community in Spain, said Cheshire.' World Book Day 2019: Some of The Greatest English Books Ever Written, How Many Have You Read? "I experienced a series of 'eureka' moments whilst deciphering the code, followed by a sense of disbelief and excitement when I realised the magnitude of the achievement, both in terms of its linguistic importance and the revelations about the origin and content of the manuscript," Cheshire said.
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