However,despite bold claims that breaking the code was just a
matter of time,the best code-breakers failed to crack even a part of the text convincingly,and opinion became divided into two camps: one believing the book represents a meaningful underlying text,the other insisting it is just a remarkably clever hoax.
Supporters of the first,and prevailing,“meaning''theory have
speculated that Vloynichese,the name given to the text's script,could be ancient Tibetan,Manchu,or even an artificial language created for some as-yet-unknown secret purpose.They argue that the text is too complex and regular in word and syllable distribution to be nonsense. Gaps between clusters of characters in the text reveal about35,000 “words”of varying length that seem to follow some sort of phonetic 1aw.Moreover,the care and style with which the characters of the text were written give the distinct impression that the scribe knew what he was writing,and that the characters