Jules Janick

The authors, actual academic botanists, believe that the plants (and some of the animals) depicted in the enigmatic Voynich manuscript (which they persist in calling the Voynich codex) are from the Americas. Thus it must be post-1492. They think it was made in New Spain, was a manual/herbal for New World plants, and it is written in a language related to Nahuatl, the lingua franca of the old Aztec Empire. That, in a nutshell, is their thesis. I admit that some of their plant identifications are stellar, and look more like it than some other suppositions that state it is a European manuscript from the early 1400s. But, some of their animal identifications are sketchy, like the coatimundi. The "jellyfish" is a drain. Look it up. And while some of the Nahuatl identifications seem to fit, many others do not. Why would what looks like tl be tl, but what looks like ll be tl too? And the o is an a and the a is an o? It's odd. And, they readily admit that they can translate NONE of the text beside some labels, so they say it is some sort of Nahuatl that has disappeared, or was constructed, or a "lingua franca" that the Spanish did not record. Their identification of author and illustrator seem far-fetched, but not more so than any other Voynich theorist. They are really mean to Nick Pelling, and they shouldn't be. I've seen Nahuatl linguists question their theory. Food for thought, interesting, and they make a decent case. But, until it is fully translated, there will never be any proof for any Voynich theory.… (mais)