🎃 Happy Halloween, Word Lovers!
Some mysteries are stranger than fiction, and this one has puzzled readers for centuries.
Nobody has managed to read the Voynich manuscript, and two researchers say why: its pages were bound in the wrong order.
A study in the journal Digital Medievalist argues the sheets were probably never meant to be gathered into a single bound book. Would you notice if the pages of a favorite novel came shuffled?
🌀 Weekly Word Wonder: QUIRE
Pronunciation: KWY-er
Part of speech: Noun
Definition: A gathering of folded sheets of paper or parchment, the unit from which a traditional book is sewn.
Origin: English quire comes from Middle English quayer, borrowed from Old French quaer and Anglo-Norman quaier, from Latin quaternus, "fourfold," itself from quater, "four times." The word is a doublet of the French cahier, a notebook.
Usage:
1. Each quire of the medieval book was carefully stitched together by hand.
2. In the bindery, a quire of cream paper waited to be folded and stitched into the next notebook.
📜 What's Special?
The researchers are Lisa Fagin Davis, executive director of the Medieval Academy of America, and Colin Layfield of the University of Malta. Davis noticed that the handwriting changes across the manuscript in ways that do not match a normal book, and that some drawings run off the middle of a page and reappear several pages later. Using a text-comparison method called latent semantic analysis, the pair found that some pages read as a close group and others did not. Their conclusion is that the manuscript began as a stack of loose folded sheets, later sewn in the wrong order. Davis said you "can't make sense out of a book where all the pages are mixed up."
More about the manuscript...
Its early ownership is documented. The first confirmed owner was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who bought it for 600 gold ducats and believed it was Roger Bacon's work. Its parchment has been carbon-dated to between 1404 and 1438. Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer, bought the manuscript in 1912 from the Jesuit College at Frascati near Rome. Yale's Beinecke Library has held it since 1969, and it has left the building only once since, for a 2014-15 exhibition.
🧩 Community Puzzle
Jumbled Letters: Unscramble these words.
LUVMEL (Fine prepared animal skin, traditionally used for writing.) →
CHEPIR (A secret system of writing, or a text written in one.) →
TURGET (The inner margin between two facing pages in a book.) →
OFILO (A sheet of paper folded once, or a leaf so formed.) →
DINBIGN (The sewn structure holding a book's pages together.) →
Last Week's Answers (Edition #49)
Jumbled Letters
DENGLE — LEGEND
BLAFE — FABLE
DALLAB — BALLAD
EODTACEN — ANECDOTE
HOCERCLIN — CHRONICLE
Until next week, keep playing.
— The Lexulous Team