Why hasn't anybody deciphered The Voynich Manuscript yet?

Would that be the legendary lost book of Teutonic comedy. Many attempts have been made to decipher the manuscript but so far every translator working on the document has died. The last attempt by Edmund Von Boring resulted in him taking his own life by chewing out his own liver.

First I ever heard of it.

Thanks to Mr. Google, though, I can say it's a scientific book about biology, drawings of plants, herbs, and tubes resembling blood vessels and mostly nude females. There is a pharmaceutical section and it has pictures of labelled containers and many small parts of plants, mainly roots and leaves. Finally, the manuscript closes with what has been called the Recipes section, containing 324 short paragraphs.

An example of its writing (which looks like the Rune letters in Lord of the Rings) matching English text is like this:

fachys.ykal.ar.ataiin.shol.shory.cthres.ykor.sholdy

sory.cthar.or.y.kair.chtaiin.shar.are.cthar.cthar.dan

syaiir.sheky.or.ykaiin.shod.cthoary.cthes.daraiin.sa

o'oiin.okeey.oteor.roloty.cth*ar.daiin.otaiin.or.okan

sair.y.chear.cthaiin.cphar.cfhaiin - ydaraishy

According to Zipf's law (has to do with language patterns), the manuscript is no hoax, as it has been accused of being. H.P. Kraus acquired the book in 1961 for $24,500 and later valued it at $160,000, but unable to find a buyer, he donated it to Yale University.

All I can tell you, the reason it hasn't been translated yet is it's f*cking hard, ok? When the manuscript was first shown to expert cryptologists, they thought that solving it would be easy as the text was composed of "words", some of which were more frequent and occurred in certain combinations. This soon turned out to be a mistake; the text could not easily be converted into Latin, English, German or a host of other languages which might possibly be at the base of this document.

Nobody has managed to decipher even a single word of it. Which is (of course) a shame - but there you go. Furthermore, when the recent radiocarbon dating of the Voynich Manuscript's vellum (carried out for an Austrian documentary) put the date it was made at around 1404-1438 (at 95% confidence), this invalidated nearly all hoax theories (which typically assume a 1580-1605 date range). So... is it a hoax? (No) Is it a lost language? (Probably no) Is it a cipher? (Probably yes) Is there some kind of truncating / contracting shorthand going on too? (Probably yes) Does that actually help much? (Probably no)

Whoever drew this picture

http://www.rumorsdaily.com/brd/wp-content/uploads/...

from the Vms was attempting to explain some sort of system. The 8 boarding circles are all powering, and are powered by the unity that occurs in the middle (looks to be a kingdom). This system was drawn by a person, who by the looks of it, was suffering from mass delusion, or was trying to trick an authority into believing some sort of made up plan. It probably has not been deciphered since it makes very little sense, and is academically worthless.

The text is probably an array of made up symbols, that have no definable meaning to them.

I only think this, because it looks like it.

Never heard of it till now.

1) My guess it's a Hoax

2) Or it was written in a time when science wasn't very popular with the religion going on in that period. Therefore, the original author kept it a secret so it couldn't be deciphered. I wonder if the missing pages hold a clue to it.

Say the magic word get a hundred dollars

It's at Yale now. Maybe that's the book GWB got his world view from.