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Voynich manuscript decoded?

In a wonderful example of "check multiple sources", I should note that several other articles I've found make no mention of Bax saying "it's not a hoax", (one clearly states that it still could be a hoax) & they don't have quite the breathless quality of the first article I posted.

Still, if he has decoded it, its pretty cool.
 
The first link opened all right a minute ago. Not much different from the second, except for the question of whether the manuscript could still be a hoax.

Interesting anyway.
 
Redtail said:
In a wonderful example of "check multiple sources", I should note that several other articles I've found make no mention of Bax saying "it's not a hoax", (one clearly states that it still could be a hoax) & they don't have quite the breathless quality of the first article I posted.

Still, if he has decoded it, its pretty cool.
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Doesn't tell us much. Has he cracked the phonetic values of any of the characters? If he has, why doesn't he insert them in other words and tell us if anything coherent emerges, and if so, in what language? That's what Champollion did with the Rosetta Stone.
 
Now Stephen Bax, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, says he's deciphered 14 characters of the script and can read a handful of items in the Voynich text, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants.
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Linky.

I'm not sure he has really "decoded" anything, has he? It sounds like he just identified what looks like proper names near to a handful of identifiable(?) images.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
Linky.

I'm not sure he has really "decoded" anything, has he? It sounds like he just identified what looks like proper names near to a handful of identifiable(?) images.
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Yeah, but if he's even made a dent its a start.

Granted this could be a hoax of his own, or he's simply mistaken. I'm just hoping he's gotten it right to be honest.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
Linky.

I'm not sure he has really "decoded" anything, has he? It sounds like he just identified what looks like proper names near to a handful of identifiable(?) images.
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No, according to your link, he seems to have the phonetic values of the characters comprising these proper names.
Now Stephen Bax ... says he's deciphered 14 characters of the script and can read a handful of items in the Voynich text, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants.
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If he has identified 14 characters, he'll have no trouble cracking the whole thing, if the report is correct (which I doubt) and if the text is in a known language.

Interestingly, "coriander" was one of the first words of the Linear B Cretan script to be deciphered by Michael Ventris in the 1950s if I remember correctly.

ETA Here's the ancient coriander. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/464222674061024422/
 
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Craig B said:
No, according to your link, he seems to have the phonetic values of the characters comprising these proper names. If he has identified 14 characters, he'll have no trouble cracking the whole thing, if the report is correct (which I doubt) and if the text is in a known language.

Interestingly, "coriander" was one of the first words of the Linear B Cretan script to be deciphered by Michael Ventris in the 1950s if I remember correctly.

ETA Here's the ancient coriander. http://www.pinterest.com/pin/464222674061024422/
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Ah, I misread "character" as "word" when I read that sentence.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
Ah, I misread "character" as "word" when I read that sentence.
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Wiki tells us that
While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.
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So the 14 characters should amply suffice to crack the whole thing. That's why I find the report rather hard to believe.

ETA Previous attempts at decipherment of this enigma have not produced felicitous results. According to David Kahn (The Codebreakers)
In 1943, however, a Rochester, New York, lawyer, James Martin Feely, recklessly exposed to the world and to its ridicule a solution that 'makes little sense in Latin and not much more in English: "The feminated, having been feminated, press on the forebound; those pressing on are moistened; they are vein-laden; they will be broken up; they are lessened."
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