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LOST language, or gibberish? Some of the symbols in the 15th-century Voynich manuscript have been matched to sounds in an effort to decode it.

Earlier studies of the 240-page tome looked for patterns typical of a language. Stephen Bax at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK, instead focused on single letters. He selected words that seem to label drawings of recognisable objects and compared them with the names of the items in various languages.

Knowing how these words are pronounced gave possible sounds for the different symbols making up the words. He then applied those to other labels, giving him 14 letters of a possible alphabet. The analysis is at .

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎lphabet to decode medieval text鈥�