VOL-5 Test 1 Passage 3 — IELTS Reading Practice

The starkly modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is home to some of the most valuable books in the world: first folios of Shakespeare, Gutenberg Bibles and manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Yet the library's most controversial possession is an unprepossessing vellum manuscript about the size of a hardback book, containing 240-odd pages of drawings and text of unknown age and authorship. Catalogued as MS408, the manuscript would attract little attention were it not for the fact that the drawings hint at esoteric knowledge, while the text seems to be some sort of code - one that no-one has been able to break. It's known to scholars as the Voynich manuscript, after the American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who bought the manuscript from a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912.

The starkly modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is home to some of the most valuable books in the world: first folios of Shakespeare, Gutenberg Bibles and manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Yet the library's most controversial possession is an unprepossessing vellum manuscript about the size of a hardback book, containing 240-odd pages of drawings and text of unknown age and authorship. Catalogued as MS408, the manuscript would attract little attention were it not for the fact that the drawings hint at esoteric knowledge, while the text seems to be some sort of code - one that no-one has been able to break. It's known to scholars as the Voynich manuscript, after the American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who bought the manuscript from a Jesuit college in Italy in 1912.

Over the years, the manuscript has attracted the attention of everyone from amateur dabblers to top codebreakers, all determined to succeed where countless others have failed. Academic research papers, books and websites are devoted to making sense of the contents of the manuscript, which are freely available to all. 'Most other mysteries involve secondhand reports,' says Dr Gordon Rugg of Keele University, a leading Voynich expert. 'But this is one that you can see for yourself.'

It is certainly strange: page after page of drawings of weird plants, astrological symbolism and human figures, accompanied by a script that looks like some form of shorthand. What does it say and what are the drawings about? Voynich himself believed that the manuscript was the work of the 13th century English monk Roger Bacon, famed for his knowledge of alchemy, philosophy and science. In 1921 Voynich's view that Bacon was the writer appeared to win support from the work of William Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, who claimed to have found the key to the cipher system used by Bacon. According to Newbold, the manuscript proved that Bacon had access to a microscope centuries before they were supposedly first invented. The claim that this mediaeval monk had observed living cells created a sensation. It soon became clear, however, that Newbold had fallen victim to wishful thinking. Other scholars showed that his 'decoding' methods produced a host of possible interpretations. The Voynich manuscript has continued to defy the efforts of world-class experts. In 1944, a team was assembled to tackle the mystery, led by William Friedman, the renowned American codebreaker. They began with the most basic code breaking task: analysing the relative frequencies of the characters making up the text, looking for signs of an underlying structure.

Yet Friedman's team soon found themselves in deep water. The precise size of the 'alphabet' of the Voynich manuscript was unclear: it's possible to make out more than 70 distinct symbols among the 170,000-character text. Furthermore, Friedman discovered that some words and phrases appeared more often than expected in a standard language, casting doubt on claims that the manuscript concealed a real language, as encryption typically reduces word frequencies.

Friedman concluded that the most plausible resolution of this paradox was that 'Voynichese' is some sort of specially created artificial language, whose words are devised from concepts, rather than linguistics. So, could the Voynich manuscript be the earliest known example of an artificial language? Friedman's hypothesis commands respect because of the lifetime of crypt analytical expertise he brought to bear,' says Rob Churchill, co-author of The Voynich Manuscript, that still leaves a host of

questions unanswered, however, such as the identity of the author and the meaning of the bizarre drawings. 'It does little to advance our understanding of the manuscript as a whole,' says Churchill. Even though Friedman was working more than 60 years ago, he suspected that major insights would come from using the device that had already transformed codebreaking: the computer. In this he was right - it is now the key tool for uncovering clues about the pleasure from manuscript's language.