The manuscript is written in a natlang, perhaps an exotic one, but using a conscript.There are basically four kinds of hypotheses about the language of the manuscript: This creates the impression of a general handbook of science or (more likely) magic. The subject matters of the illustrations allow to divide the manuscript into sections which seem to discuss different subjects: Almost every page is illustrated, but the illustrations are mostly very mysterious and do not shed much light on the text. The about 170,000 "letters" are grouped into about 35,000 "words" they seem to obey rules similar to phonotactic rules of natural languages (for instance, it is possible to distinguish "consonants" from "vowels"). The manuscript is written in an unknown script which has about 30 different characters, many of them similar to Latin or Greek letters, and is thus most likely alphabetic in nature. Kraus for $25,000, who, failing to find a buyer, donated it to Yale University in 1969. His heirs sold the manuscript to the book dealer Hans P. It is not known which way the manuscript wound up at the Mondragone Jesuit college where Voynich discovered it in 1912. The next owner was Johannes Marcus Marci, who wrote to the famous Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, hoping that Kircher, a renowned cryptography expert who claimed to have deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, could decipher it - he could not. According to a letter found with the manuscript, it was later owned by the Prague alchemist Georg Baresch. On one page, the name Jacobj ’a Tepenece is written, which, if genuine, would indicate that the manuscript once belonged to Jakub Horcicky de Tepenec, court pharmacist of Emperor Rudolph II at Prague. One illustration shows a castle built in a style characteristic of northern Italy, so it is assumed that the manuscript originates from that area. A radiocarbon dating has revealed that it is from the early 15th century (between 14).
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