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What is a Linguistic Mystery?
What is a Linguistic Mystery?
A linguistic mystery is a piece of information that is unable to be understood because it is encoded in a dead or unknown language. While there are a variety of linguistic mysteries that have existed throughout history, there are only a few that have remained consistently undeciphered and notable. Examples of mysteries that fit these criteria are the Voynich Manuscript, the Rongorongo language, and the Indus Script - which are also the mysteries that this research focuses on.
The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript is characterized as “the world’s most mysterious book” (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, para. 1, 2024). It contains over 200 folios of writing accompanied by colorful illustrations, with some contents speculated to be related to botany and anatomy. The work was written by an unknown author around the turn of the fifteenth century and has passed through the hands of many owners, remaining philologically impossible to understand the entire time. In 1912, it was rediscovered and thrust into a scholarly limelight by “rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich” — for whom it is named (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, para. 1, 2024). A few decades thereafter, it was donated to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, where it still resides (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, para. 1, 2024).
Since its rediscovery, many individuals — both in and out of academia — have attempted to decipher it in a variety of ways. This includes employing cryptography, philology, and using statistical algorithms to study the patterns of language in the document. All have been unsuccessful in terms of widespread agreement among the research community. Due to this history, and its subsequent fame, it remains extremely interesting to the scholars in the field of linguistics. The attempts to crack its code over the past century have yielded a rich understanding of the methods involved in solving linguistic mysteries and the ways in which language can be defined.
Figure 4: f. 3r of the manuscript.
Rongorongo
Rongorongo
Rongorongo is a language once spoken by the Rapa Nui people that has now been lost to history. There are a few surviving examples of the written form — immortalized in glyphs that have been excavated by archaeologists at the former site of their inhabitants — but, like the Voynich Manuscript, no universally accepted opinions about the contents of the work exist. The nature of the language’s disappearance is one that remains relevant to the efforts to decode it. In the mid-nineteenth century, the largest class of Rongorongo speakers and readers were priests known as “tangata rongorongo” that were “taken away to South America, along with the bulk of their texts” (Lee, para. 4, 2023). This forced migration, coupled with a catastrophic tuberculosis outbreak, left around “200 Rapa Nui” people living and “almost no one” with a “passing familiarity” of the scripts (Lee, para. 4, 2023).
In the attempts to revitalize this cultural loss, researchers have been “looking for patterns in the glyphs” to attempt to understand them (Lee, para. 13, 2023). Some significant breakthroughs along this route include the early studies of Nikolai Butinov, Yuri Knorozov, and Thomas Barthel. However, more recent endeavors have also come to fruition from both practiced researchers and amateur codebreakers. Ultimately, the history of this language mystery, from its disappearance to the recovery efforts, emulates the same value as others: that linguistic methods have remained a relevant part of decoding unknown texts.
Figure 5: A tablet with inscriptions of Rongorongo.
The Indus Script
The Indus Script
The Indus Script can be understood as a “short series of symbols that appear on a variety of small artifacts” originating from the ancient Indus civilization of South Asia (Patel, para. 1, 2010). Like its aforementioned mysterious counterparts, not much is known about the contents of these symbols. They have been “unearthed” by archaeologists “since the 1780s” and studied closely ever since, but have not yet yielded any meaningful translations (Patel, para. 4, 2010). Despite this, the bulk of research completed has shed light on the many ways in which decoding efforts can come about.
Figure 6: Inscriptions of the Script and illustrations.
A brief overview of these efforts include: computational linguistics employed by Eastern European researchers, comparative historians debating whether the script is a language at all, and a global effort entitled the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP), which has gone underway since the late twentieth century. Controversy has marked the field and left some questions unanswered simply due to irreconcilable differences between the variety of approaches that researchers have taken. This adds a new dimension to the study of linguistic mysteries: intersecting beliefs and cultures can lead to the antithesis of the original goals of exploration. Understanding this complexity is helpful when applying similar values to other, similar research in linguistics.
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