Search query: Ancient manuscript deciphering
Video title:  particularly if you want to read in detail what I'm going to talk about there has a full academic article there are 50 pages long if you want to explore it in a bit more depth this video only goes through it rather superficially to give you a general idea of the kind of direction that I'm trying to propose now here are some more examples from manuscript it's got hundreds of pages lots of beautiful pictures including some rather European looking castles on the left hand side there and the curious pictures of nymphs thought to be something biological but again we don't really understand what that's all about and the manuscript itself is in Yale University Library in the United States and it's been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world because despite having hundreds of pages of script and wonderful diagrams and pictures we understand not a single word of it we don't know where it was written we don't know who wrote it we know nothing about it except that it was discovered in Italy as I'll say in a minute and we've got some other pictures here we've got what some people used to think was a picture of a sunflower but after the carbon dating of the the manuscript to the 15th century that people realize it couldn't be a sunflower because that only came to Europe much later on the right hand side is well you've got some nice pictures there of a plant and also some examples of the script which we'll talk about in most detail just a bit of background to explain where I come from I'm professor of applied linguistics at karela at the university of Bedfordshire in britain i mainly research into reading and discourse and i've studied a number of languages which helped me to understand a little bit more about the Voynich manuscript particularly arabic spanish some hebrew and a bit of Akkadian which is the ancient language of Iraq and you can see more about that at the website at the bottom of the page some useful sources about the manuscript you've got the Yale library website you've got Jason Davies wonderful site