It has long been thought the text, which is full of illustrations of exotic plants, stars and mysterious human figures, could contain a prophecy or even the key to eternal life.
The impenetrable text uses ‘alien’ characters which have baffled historians and code-breakers for years.
But Professor Greg Kondrak of the University of Alberta has been able to decipher the language by using artificial intelligence.
Professor Kondrak used translation software previously tested on the UN Declaration of Human Rights to make the finding.
He said: “It came up with a sentence that is grammatical, and you can interpret it. It’s a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript but it definitely makes sense.”
According to his research, the first sentence of the manuscript says: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people”.
The research team believes the code involves shuffling the order of letters in each word and dropping the vowels.
And researchers have used a series of algorithms to translate the manuscript, which has featured in various Indiana Jones films.
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War One and World War Two.
The Bletchley Park team who deciphered the Nazi Enigma code also tried and failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript.
A language recognition system has found that 80 percent of the words in the manuscript were also found in a Hebrew dictionary.
Now scientists hope to work with historians to make more sense from the jumbled Hebrew.
The text, which has 240 pages, is now held in the Reinecke Library at Yale University.
Last year the history researcher Nicholas Gibbs claimed to have cracked the code and said it was written in a version of Latin.