The Voynich manuscript has flummoxed cryptographers since its discovery in an Italian villa in 1912. Is it an elaborate cipher, an alchemical sourcebook, a treatise on extinct civilizations or a document in ancient Ukrainian with the vowels omitted? The 234-page tract is laced with watercolors of plants, astronomical drawings and naked sylphs, but it is the language that truly confounds scholars. Voynichese symbols resemble no known alphabet, but the word and sentence structure is highly regular: Certain syllables and words occur together frequently.
Too frequently, according to Gordon Rugg, who suspected a hoax in part because words appear multiple times in one sentence -- a degree of repetition not found in any language. Rugg demonstrated that a simple 16th-century device, a card with slots cut into it, could have been used to perpetrate a hoax. Known as the Cardan Grille, the device is applied to a table of text, from which one selects among prefixes, infixes and suffixes. The syllables can be endlessly combined, Scrabble-like, to form new words. At the same time, a degree of linguistic regularity is guaranteed because the syllables are selected from a finite amount of text.
