I missed the Science channel special about it but here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten book thought to have been written in the 15th or 16th century and comprising about 240 vellum pages, most with illustrations. The author, script, and language remain unknown; for these reasons it has been described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript". Pretty interesting, specially that no government codebreaker was able to dechiper it....
I'm leaning invented script in the plain of Manchu or Chinese dialect. Probably most of the herbs are from Asia.
The fact that no codebreaker has been able to decipher it tells us that is almost certainly not a transcription of any known language. This leaves us with three main possibilities: 1. It is an unknown language. 400-500 years ago there were many more languages than there are today, so this could be one of the great many which, sadly, are now lost and forgotten. However, when a person discovers such a language and puts so much effort into studying it that he can write a book in it, he would be expected to have shared this discovery with the academic community. For the discovery to be subsequently lost, while the book remains, is possible, but it's exceedingly bad luck. 2. It's gibberish. The "words" don't mean anything. The "writer" developed a clever set of symbols that appear to be letters and a clever way of scribing them that appears to follow the rules of some language or other, but it's not actually a language. The scholars who have studied the codex appear to discount this possibility. 400-500 years ago it's unlikely that anyone knew enough about the structure of language to be able to mimic one so well that today's scholars can't discount the possiblity. 3. It's a language that the writer invented. People do this all the time. I did it when I was a teenager. However, I soon found real languages to be more interesting and stopped putting very much effort into my own. I could hardly have written anything much longer than the warning on a pillow tag in one them. Nonetheless, everybody's different and someone could have stuck with his secret avocation for years, culminating in the enormous project of writing and illustrating this book. I vote for #3. It's the only one of the three that I can't easily dismiss. The scholars don't seem to consider this very likely, but I think they don't give enough credit to eccentricity as a motivator. Look at some of the colossally weird things people do today as hobbies, that take a substantial amount of their time. All this guy needed was somebody else paying his bills, so he could work full-time on his language and, then, his codex.
The Asian explanation IMO seems to make the most sense (I'd like to see the paragraph that was supposedly translated into Manchu). From Wiki: [A]ll statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as articles and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint is two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar (jie qi). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations. In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language and gave a proposed incomplete translation of the first page of the manuscript.[21]
Close. Here are photographs of every currently surviving page. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
This is not exactly the whole manuscript, but very interesting, the history and some codes: http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/voynich.pdf When you google it, there are plenty of hits, but most of them are torrents, so if you don't mind torrenting it, it is aviable.... I think I have found it: http://www.archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript
