Abstract
The decoding of the Voynichese symbols based on plant names has led to the hypothesis that they might represent a phonetic alphabet and the language appears to be based on a combination of Nahuatl, Spanish, Taino, and Arabic (in the case of stars). There has been some success in deciphering the names of plants, an animal, a mineral, a few Mexican cities, and the labels on a few of the apothecary jars. However, despite these successes, the basic text remains undeciphered and is clearly not Classical Nahuatl, despite the fact that many Nahuatl cognates were found. One conclusion is that Voynichese is a mixed synthetic language (as proposed by William Friedman), and it also is possible that a lost dialect is involved. We believe that the labels associated with various images provide the key to decipherment.
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Janick, J., Tucker, A.O. (2018). Progress and Problems in Decipherment. In: Unraveling the Voynich Codex. Fascinating Life Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77294-3_13
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