The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.
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PLoS One
February 2022
Department of Psychology, Palacký University in Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic.
In this article, we employ simple descriptive methods in order to explore the peculiar behavior of the symbols in the Voynich Manuscript. Such an analysis reveals a group of symbols which are further analyzed for the possibility of being compounds (or ligatures), using a specifically developed method. The results suggest the possibility that the alphabet of the manuscript is a lot smaller, and steganographic type of encoding is proposed to explain the newly revealed properties.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEncephale
December 2018
Section of Medical Anthropology (UVSQ, EA4498, Dante Laboratory), UFR of Health Sciences, 2, avenue de la Source-de-la-Bièvre, 78180 Montigny-Le-Bretonneux, France.
It is difficult to know precisely the history of a functional disease, unlike the natural history of infectious agents, tumour processes or poly-malformative syndromes. In the case of psychiatry, and especially schizophrenia and psychotic disorders, a retrospective look at artistic productions (writings and drawings) makes it possible to reconstitute a whole section of this pathological context. Through four medieval and modern examples, we will see how it is possible to do a paleo-psychiatry: Opicinus de Canistris (14 c.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2014
Institute of Physics of São Carlos, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil.
While the use of statistical physics methods to analyze large corpora has been useful to unveil many patterns in texts, no comprehensive investigation has been performed on the interdependence between syntactic and semantic factors. In this study we propose a framework for determining whether a text (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
October 2017
Faculty of Life Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Am
July 2004
School of Computing and Mathematics, Keele University, England.
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