Yet Another Voynich Decoding Claim

So, yet another claim to have decoded the Voynich manuscript. This one seems on the surface to be more likely than most, but is still lacking in hard facts.

Bristol academic cracks Voynich code, solving century-old mystery of medieval text

Excerpt:

Quote:

A University of Bristol academic has succeeded where countless cryptographers, linguistics scholars and computer programs have failed—by cracking the code of the 'world's most mysterious text', the Voynich manuscript. Although the purpose and meaning of the manuscript had eluded scholars for over a century, it took Research Associate Dr. Gerard Cheshire two weeks, using a combination of lateral thinking and ingenuity, to identify the language and writing system of the famously inscrutable document. In his peer-reviewed paper, The Language and Writing System of MS408 (Voynich) Explained, published in the journal Romance Studies, Cheshire describes how he successfully deciphered the manuscript's codex and, at the same time, revealed the only known example of proto-Romance language.

And that appears to be the big difference between this and all other claims of having solved the mystery. The others generally assumed it was written in Latin, a manufactured language or cipher, or some combination of languages.

If this is actually proto-Romance, aka pre-Romance language late Vulgar Latin, its importance would go well beyond it's contents.

But that's a big If.

ETA: A link to the actual published paper. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full...4.2019.1599566

via International Skeptics Forum http://bit.ly/2EdEHpQ